Visualisation of Fear

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

You will never surpass the level of your greatest expectations. This saying illustrates the power of visualisation. Whenever I take on a new challenge, like learning to play a new instrument, learn a new language or exercise my body, I always aim for something extreme. By aiming low, you are shooting yourself in the foot. Which actually happens to be true literally. The critical aspect is that the extreme goal is aligned with your vision, which consequently has to come first. You can never define goals if you don’t have a vision, a direction. But for the sake of argument, let’s say that you have a vision, a dream of what you want to do with your life. I suspect most of us do, if we just dare to look inside ourselves and find it. So why is it only a tiny minority who take action and pursue their dreams? I suspect it is related to fear, in several ways. First, every change will result in friction. Take a toxic relationship as an example. Let’s say the relationship is 97 % bad. But no relationship is 100 % bad and thus you are going to miss those good 3 % and even leaving a toxic relationship will feel like a sacrifice. This fear of change is one of the reasons that we tend to stick around a bit too long - or sometimes forever.

There is another kind of fear, the fear of failure. If you decide to pursue your dream and get somewhere in life, you need to set goals. The goals you set need to be articulated, communicated and measurable to maximize the probability of success. There is no getting around this fact. Consequently, by setting goals you are simultaneously defining your conditions for failure. And this is scary and uncomfortable! Especially when you communicate your goals with the world, so that everybody will know of your failure. My guess is that’s why most people do not dare to write down their goals and prefer to keep them to themselves. If they should fail, nobody will know about it and it is also easy to negotiate, or break promises with yourself when a deadline is missed. That’s why you need to hold yourself accountable. Personally, I tell everyone about my goals and publish them as often as I can. That is my way of holding myself accountable. If I promise something and do not deliver, after I have boasted about it all over the internet, I will look like a complete jerk. My credibility would vaporize in an instant. The more extreme the goal, and the more accountable you keep yourself, the more embarrassing the failure will become. However, if I commit to my promise, my credibility will grow, and I might even inspire others in the process of my growth. I usually say that inspiration is the best of compliments. Also, when you communicate your goals, it sometimes feels like the universe starts to conspire to aid you.

When thinking and vlogging about fear and goalsetting this past week, I realised something important. Remember the opening phrase in this text? This is valid for fear too. Your fear will never surpass the level of your greatest expectations either. I have tried to come up with examples where I was afraid of something I was about to do – and then did – where it turned out reality was even worse than my imagination. I couldn’t find a single example. This is probably where the expression “to make a hen out of a feather” comes from. The fear is always worse in my head, before I take action. And afterwards it always feels so much better. By looking at fear this way, it makes life a lot easier! The power of visualisation is self-apparent. How are you going to jump over a bar if you don’t believe that you can do it? Prominent examples are when Roger Bannister ran the four-minute mile or when Eddie Hall did a 500 kg deadlift.

To use visualisation to succeed seems to be a technique that requires practice. But to use fear as visualisation, seems to be hard-wired in all of us. We do it all the time unconsciously. Let’s use this little change in mindset the next time we are afraid to do something. You will never surpass the level of your greatest expectations. No matter how much fear that grips you in your imagination, reality will turn out better.