Is your fear stopping you from chasing your dreams?

My train of thought for this write up was started by a call from one of my former colleagues who wanted to start his own business. I usually encourage entrepreneurs but with a heavy dose of caution on the pitfalls of underprepared and overconfident start-ups. But I do certainly hope that I do not end up igniting fears and making people give up on their dreams.

Here I write about why I don’t want to feed fearful thoughts of enthusiastic youngsters who dream of taking roads less travelled – from career change to entrepreneurship. This might be useful for my MBA students and younger colleagues that have been contemplating their future. I have realized that there are times when we let fear overpower us and bury the ideas that could help us grow and conquer greater heights. Fear of uncertainty, failure and hardships. This in spite of evidence that we collect in the course of our decision-making that there is a fair chance that we will succeed and will have better lives. We suffer the consequences of our contemplated steps in our minds more than in reality, that is if we indeed follow through and not kill the idea in the first place. This is the reason our most profound thoughts are buried with us never seeing any efforts to make them materialize.

What is the source of such fear? I recently read a book titled “Chatter” by Prof. Ethan Kross from University of Michigan, a psychologist who has researched the phenomena of inner voice. Our inner voice is an important communicator and we often rely on its guidance to decide. Our inner voice is also a great amplifier. This voice is indeed very persuasive and convincing. It can make us look at ourselves as invincible and make us confident when we turn it positive. And it can often times lead to negative chatter when we allow it to dwell on the uncertainty, failure and hardships, forcing us to live and relive those in our minds. We can thus be incapacitated to make prudent decisions. Behavioural finance does look at manifestation of this in the forms of risk aversion and, more particularly, as disposition effect in which investors sell off a profit-making portfolio too soon while holding on to loss-making one for far too long.

This behaviour is not uncommon. In the book of Genesis, Chapter 21 describes such behaviour by Abraham. Abraham is considered father of faith whose faith was counted by God as his righteousness. He anticipated danger of being murdered by Abimelek, a king whose territory he was living in for some time, for the sake of his wife Sarah and, he, therefore, lied to Abimelek that Sarah was his sister. That was the second time Abraham lied about his wife even when his first attempt at this lie should have taught him about futility of lying when God was with him. When Abimelek enquired Abraham in the morning about his action, after God warned Abimelek to return Sarah to Abraham, Abraham responded by saying “I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.’” It’s noteworthy that Abraham said that to himself! This exhibits how powerful inner voice can be that it could overwhelm faith of a righteous man who had known God for a long time and had trusted in His word. Our struggles with our inner voice that multiply perception of fear and danger are therefore not unique.

I am not here to say that we should shut down these voices altogether, that would make us jump off the cliffs that have no redemption. Inner voice is indeed the voice of a counsellor that helps us weigh our options. But we must be wary of its tendencies to amplify, manyfold and with high intensity, so that we are unable to hear anything else. Path out of snare of our own inner voices is to let the rational being rule our decision-making – that of dispassionate assessment of situation, sometimes even in a role playing mode as if we are advising a friend rather than making a decision for ourselves, keep facts on the table, and also feed faith in what we have been through, our expectations of a future state of life, our expertise and capabilities, and our ability to bounce back after failures.

The book “Chatter” talks about belief shaping up our outcomes, which for the spiritually awakened people is quite familiar. Faith in our healing does manifest in real physical healing, which has been scientifically proven through experiments with placebo. Equally, a deep sense of fear can lead to belief in failure and cause it to happen like a self-fulfilling prophesy. It is therefore important what we feed faith to our mind.

If we let our inner voice amplify fear relentlessly, we will never take first step towards a goal that can set up us for success and significance in life. And, not just at the beginning, but all through our journey, the inner voice can keep telling us that we have made a mistake and there is still time to return to the old normal, and as the journey gets longer these voices can grow louder. Those who succumb to this shrillness would neve reach the Promised Land. As George Adair said – “Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.” Well, reaching the end goal may depend on many more things, and not everyone who tries succeeds, but only those succeed who try. So, we must get out of our comfort zones and move towards a life that we envision for ourselves, harnessing the powerful guidance of the inner voice but never to let its amplification of fear to deter us to an extent that we settle for the known and never aspire for the great. ??