How to have David like courage in a world full of Goliaths!
Of course, most of us know the famous story of David and Goliath, but for the uninitiated, here’s a very short snippet (PS- some of my facts about the story could be off, but that’s not important):
Goliath was a Philistine giant warrior! who was chosen as their champion to fight the Israelites. David was a short sling wielding man, who rose up to become the champion of the Israelites. In the eyes of the world, David was bound to be slaughtered by Goliath, but of course, most of us know, that David, ended killing Goliath with his sling, and becoming King of the Israelites.
David has been used as an example of multiple virtues throughout our lives, courage being one of his most cherished traits.
HOW DOES FEAR AFFECT US: Do an exercise for me. Think of your top one or 2 things that you feel you’re failing at the most. Whatever it is, think of the actions you need to take to be successful at them. I can almost guarantee that you know them by heart, that you’ve thought about them many times over. Ask yourself, “Why do I struggle so much to do this.” You’re going to find many reasons, such as “I’m lazy, I need focus, I’m unmotivated” etc. But the truth of the matter is that those are just symptoms of a larger problem. Dig deep enough and I guarantee you, that underneath it all, you’re going to find a fear connected to it, maybe even multiple fears. We tend to think we know when we’re afraid, but the truth is, we often only notice fear when it becomes loud enough. The truth is pretty much every single one of our failures to take action, or our emotional irrational actions, are the result of fear, and often the fear, is not even fully correlated to the area that we’re failing at.
THE TRUTH ABOUT FEAR: The Reptilian part of our brain is as old as dirt, and it’s meant to keep us safe from harm. Back in the day, we had to worry about being eaten by tigers, and wild beasts, as well as many other dangers. Unfortunately, while we’ve evolved in many wonderful ways, this part of our brain, as well as multiple other parts have not evolved. Our brain is always looking for potential dangers, even if we ourselves know that those are not real dangers, our brain doesn’t, and it will use every means possible to prevent us from taking actions that it deems unsafe, even if those means require lies, deceit, stalling, etc. Our brain will fill us with propaganda to try to stop us from taking the actions that we often know we need to take. Take talking to a stranger for example. Intellectually, we know that the worst that can happen, is they shut us down, or ignore us. This has no life-threatening consequences, but our brain doesn’t know that. If we want to talk to someone that that could mean a better business or social life, our brain will think up the worst case scenarios and play them on our head over and over, to try to deter us. If that doesn’t work, our brain will try to stall us “He/She looks busy right now. I’ll talk to him/her later” and so on and so forth.
THE TRUTH ABOUT COURAGE: The problem with the story of David and Goliath, is that we tend to focus on David’s Character Traits, but we tend to think of Character traits as something inherent in us. Something we come with. The truth about courage is that it’s not a character trait. Courage is a skillset, like riding a bike, or learning to play the piano. It’s no different. Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather, the ability to effectively be able to take action despite the fear. There are many techniques for developing the skill of courage. For example, you can use mental reframing: This is when you dig deep in your mind, and you identify the areas of your life that you most desperately need improvement in, and you identify your predominant limiting beliefs and thoughts, and you write out the correct thought. You then identify your triggers (The moments when you tend to get these thoughts), and you choose to actively correct them out loud, and replace them with the new thoughts over and over as they happen in real time. It’s a fight but eventually, the new thought takes root in your brain, and your emotions change every time that trigger happens, and you defeat that fear. There are many other techniques, but that’s beyond the scope of this blog post. My purpose in this post is to make you aware of these things so that you could go and work on them, so you can defeat your demons. Make something out of this new knowledge :)
Quote Of The Day: “Only those who risk going too far, can possibly find out how far one can go” -Will Smith
