Fear and Confidence

Earlier this week I was thinking about fear and confidence. These are the two ends of the spectrum of our reactions to challenges. To take an extreme example, if someone points a gun at you and is obviously about to shoot, you can collapse in a quivering heap or spring into Bruce Lee style attack mode.. or anything in between.

I suppose some people are always fearful and some are always confident. I imagine that for most of us, our emotions slide with different situations. Yet I don't know a lot about how other people react: I can't recall ever having a serious conversation with anyone about fear and confidence.

I don't mean that I've never mentioned fear or confidence or that no one has ever mentioned these to me. I mean I've never had a deep, serious conversation about what makes us fearful and what doesn't. I suppose part of that is because most people don't want to admit weakness or appear brashly over confident. On the fear side, maybe we'd just as soon leave those things behind us: it's uncomfortable to bring them up for review.

Still, it's important to examine these things, even if it's only internal. Fear can keep you from success, from love, from happiness. Over confidence can destroy you just as effectively. You need to know how fear and confidence play out in your personality.

Of course fear is a useful emotion. It can keep us out of danger and prepare our bodies for attack or flight. It can also tear us up and cripple us. Confidence is useful too: it lets us step forward into the unknown and conquer.

When I look back over my life, I can find many examples of fear. Some of them I regret: opportunities not pursued, chances not taken. With the great benefit of hind-site, I can see that I shouldn't have been so fearful, that I should have done those things or at least tried to, Of course experience is a great teacher - it helps to have 60+ years of living behind me.

When I review the times of confidence, when I would expect that fear should have been pulling at me strongly but it was not, it seems that most of these were simply situations where there was no choice. For example, I nearly drowned as a child. Swimming under rafts, I came up and hit my head, still under the barrels of the raft. I went back down, swam farther and came up only to hit my head again. Obviously I was disoriented and was not where I expected to be and I was now at the limits of holding my breath. If I couldn't get out from under the rafts, I was going to drown.

I wasn't afraid. Intellectually, I knew what the choices were: swim a bit farther and hopefully come up to air, or drown. That was it, and fear served no useful purpose. I swam until air started coming out involuntarily and then I went for the surface and broke through to sunshine.

Oddly enough, I've been in several other situations where I thought death was imminent and I felt no fear. In those, there was nothing I could do, so I just waited for the outcome. Obviously I escaped those..

I think there was no fear then because I had either no choices or very simple choices. My brain was able to understand the situations fully. That contrasts strongly with a time where I was approached by three young men who demanded that I give them money. I was very afraid. Examining this, I felt fear because there were so many possibilities. I could run, I could fight, I could give them the money. Each of those had its own set of possible outcomes: I might not be able to run fast enough, they might hurt me even if I did hand over my wallet, fighting three people is risky at best.. too many choices.

I chose to run. There was a well lit gas station not far away; I ran toward it, yelling loudly for help. The punks didn't follow.

I bring all this up in the context of self employment. When I first started this business, I really had no other choice: I was earning too little money to survive at the job I had. I suppose I could have looked for a better job, but that never crossed my mind: I had wanted to work for myself all my life, here was my opportunity. What was the worst that could happen? I had no money, I was living hand to mouth - if the self employment idea failed, I wouldn't be much worse off. So I did it. That was more than a quarter century ago and here I am.

If you are thinking about working for yourself, you may be lucky and be as desperate and beat down as I was. How can I call that "lucky"? Because you have nothing to be afraid of. If you have nothing or next to it, the only direction from there is up. You've lost your job, your house and everything else? You've been trying to find another job but you are too old or too unskilled or there just are no jobs? Great, because it sure can't get any worse. This is the ideal time to strike out on your own.

Everybody else who wants to work for themselves has fear in their belly. They have to give up a "secure" job. Maybe it really isn't secure, but they still have it - it's hard to throw away a bird in the hand. There are too many possibilities, too much potential for error, too many unknowns. Fear will freeze most of them in place, stuck working at a job they detest. They'll never break free because fear will paralyze them.

Can you conquer fear? Of course, but it's never easy and it's never fun. I think the best way is to try to understand your situation as fully as you can. Unfortunately, there will always be unknowns. The idea of working for yourself is going to carry a lot of frightening baggage and you can only get rid of so much through research and planning. At the end, you are still going to have make a leap of faith.

Or not. You can run back to the gas station. Maybe that's the right choice, after all. You could fail at self employment. It could be a mistake, like tackling three assailants. I can't tell you what's right for you, but I can tell you that I am very glad that I had no other reasonable choice.

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Sun Mar 22 15:34:04 2009: Subject:   BigDumbDinosaur
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To take an extreme example, if someone points a gun at you and is obviously about to shoot, you can collapse in a quivering heap or spring into Bruce Lee style attack mode.. or anything in between.

In my case, I don't think the Bruce Lee approach is possible anymore -- Pac-Man has seen to that. I sure as hell wouldn't collapse in a quivering heap, though.



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