Face These 3 Fears or Stay Stuck Forever

0:00 Fear is the biggest problem in life. There's a wonderful, wonderful book which was one of the most instrumental books that I've ever read in my life. It's called The Denial of Death. It's a Pulitzer Prizewinning book. Ernest Becker wrote it and I can't recommend it enough. It changed my life. And he said that all fears go back to the fear of death. Because if you think about it, why are we afraid of being rejected by other people? for example, you know, why do we get our feelings hurt? Because we're being rejected. And down through history, if you got tomb rejected, then you got thrown out of the village. And if you got thrown out of the village, you starve. And if you starve, you die.

0:40 So no matter how tiny the fear is, if you grab on to it like a piece, like a stray thread on a sweater, you'll find it unravels back to the fear of death. But I find that in every great endeavor, fear is what holds people from doing the things that they would love to be able to do with their lives. And so we tend to play it safe, to play the safe bet in the sure thing and not stick our neck out too far. You know, as they say, the nail that sticks out attracts the hammer. And it's this is true. So I'm the first one in the world to admit that that that fear is not irr always irrational or not even usually irrational.

1:25 There are very good reasons to be to be afraid. But on the spiritual path of you know the very first fear is the what I call the fear of disruption. And I went through this. I had to live through this. I had the world by the butt. I I was a big man on campus in college. I had a girlfriend. All this stuff going for me. You know I meet this guy Richard Rose. this crazy Zen teacher.

1:48 And I realize that he is talking about a whole lifestyle. He's talking about when other people are going to parties, I'm going to library. When other people are are going out with their girlfriends, you know, I'm going to some meeting. When other people are you know, smoking pot, I'm going to be meditating. And in my case, it actually ended up me dropping out of college even and becoming a carpet installer. Why did I become a carpet installer, for example? one was to overcome my fear of working with my hands was one of the big reasons I did it. Anything I was afraid of that was the first thing I wanted to do.

2:22 So we're fear of disrupting our lives. My old guru Lou Mobly the IBM executive who started the IBM executive school I lived with him and was his he was my mentor and I was his protege. Anyway, he used to say about you young people, you want it all and you want it now. You want it all and you want it now. And that's what we want out of our spirituality. We want our cake and eat it, too. So, we want to have all the benefits of of a spiritual life while we're just as normal as everybody else. I remember when I was running a group here in in Raleigh and we used to have our meetings on Friday night to our meeting on Friday nights and and people started grumbling that yeah but that's date night and you know that's when we like to go away from the weekend and and that's you know that and and I said you guys don't get it. It's supposed to be inconvenient.

3:20 It's supposed to come first. Seek first the kingdom of heaven and everything else will take care of itself. It's supposed to be your top priority. It's supposed to be more important than going out to dinner. More important than seeing Star Wars the first night it comes out. That disrupts people's lives. And it is a scary thing because you have other people in your life. And when you give up smoking pot, you know, you you maybe find out you don't have much in common with them anymore.

3:53 And when you stop drinking all the time, you know, I had a girlfriend who was a big drinker and she got really mad at me when I didn't drink with her, you know. So, it can be a very a threat to relationships if one person really starts on a spiritual path and the relationship and the other person doesn't, you know, it can become a real threat. The other person does doesn't want that person to change. They fell in love with with Judy like this, you know, Judy's a pot smoker. Now Judy's not smoking pot, you know. So they put strains on our relationship. So yes, it's disruptive.

4:30 So that's the first thing, you know, we want a normal life and we want spirituality and pretty soon if you're really authentic and you're really honest with yourself, you're going realize you can't have that. You know, it's the same thing as being an athlete or being an entrepreneur. You're not going to have an ordinary life and be an entrepreneur. You know, you can't have the, you know, be a super successful entrepreneur and keep your day job and and and still go out with a with a boys three nights a week and still, you know, race your little sports car on Saturdays.

5:07 No, you're going to be in the office on Saturdays. you're probably going to be boxing up shipping and for ship stuff out on Monday and and and and working till midnight. And you know, I remember these two guys that were going to bh one of my companies and there were two software engineers had started. Now, they were a big company, but they were out of Boston and I was talking to the owners and and and I was talking to them how they got started and they wrote a software package and then they had to sell it and and and and he told me he said, "Me and my partner made up our minds that we are not going to go home at night until we had sold enough of the software to cover our expenses for the next for the next day." He said, and I believe you me, he said there was many a night. He said we were still calling the West Coast at 9 and 10 11:00 at night trying to make that last sale.

5:59 Well, believe you me, it's going to be it's disruptive to normality to live like that. I remember when the stock market collapsed in the early 2000s and all the venture capital d dried up and all this, you know, it was it was a hellish time for entrepreneurs. in the Wall Street Journal did an article about a guy who was still struggling to be a successful entrepreneur. And he was he he said he went to he he was introduced to a maven, a a guru of to help him be an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist. And the guy said, "Okay, you want to be an entrepreneur?" He said, "There's two things you got to absolutely be sure of.

6:42 Number one, you better damn well make sure your wife's on board. and she knows what she's getting into. He said, "Number two, every small business dies a thousand deaths before it's successful. Are you prepared to die a thousand deaths?" I've never forgotten that. I love love love that that that story. Same thing with a spiritual path. It's exactly the same.

7:17 Mr. Rose, my old Zen teacher, used to get in trouble all the time because people want to think somehow that spirituality operates on all these different rules, these cosmic rules. So things like effort and sacrifice and all the things that pay off in ordinary life don't apply over you. I don't have to sacrifice. You know, all you got to do is accept Jesus and I'm done. I did that last Thursday. So now I get back to doing whatever the hell I wanted to, you know, some kind of magical and then they come up with grace or miracles or something, you know, and it's really like almost like a voodoo that allows them to you know, to just kind of not have to not have to worry about. But Mr. Rose used to say all you got to do if you want to be successful spiritually is get Napoleon Hill's book, Think and Grow Rich. And every time he talks about the sacrifices would be that you have to make to get rich, the things you have to do to get rich, he said, cross out the word rich and write in the word spiritual. Do the same damn thing. So yes, you know, being a great athlete is going to be disruptive to your life. You have to hang out with other athletes. You have to you know, you have to really restrict your diet. You got to train all the time, you know, and I know everybody's talking you don't understand why are you doing this to yourself? Why are you spending so much time? Cuz you want to be the greatest croquet player in the world. Oh, you're going to be you're going to spend 16 hours a day trying to Why in the hell would you do that? And I had to put up with that on my spiritual path. Almost every person I met, why in the hell are you living the way you're living? Why the hell are you doing what you're doing? Look at what you're missing out on. Look what you could be doing, you know? And and this so it's disruptive. So that's the very first thing. It's disruptive.

9:05 And the second thing is is what we've been calling silence. The spiritual path is a path into self-nowledge. It forces you to really dig down deep and and encounter yourself. I always think of this talking about silence. I spent a lot of time at this Trappist monastery in the mid 90s. I actually spent a whole summer down there and I was going through a crisis in my own life at the time. And so I was I was down at the monastery for months and and all I did was cut grass all day at 150°ree 150 105 degree heat in South Carolina. I was pushing a a hand mower in that heat. And there was a wonderful monk at the time, Brother William. And he and I got close. I don't know anything else about Brother William.

9:50 just that I loved him and he I think he loved me. And anyway, one day he came looking for me with a picture of ice water because he knew I was out there pushing this mower. And so I turned the mower off and we sat down on a park bench and he tells me that years earlier he had been a hermit. He had become a hermit for a while and he'd gone out in the woods. Meet has thousands of acres of woods around it and he just went out and that they owned and he went out in the woods and he built himself a shack.

10:18 You can still go out there and see some of these shacks as a matter of fact and there are shacks and it was his hermitage. He lived in it for two years by himself. So I was really intrigued by that. I started asking him some questions about what he ate and blah blah just you know how he lived and all that. How did he get to mass or get the blessed sacrament or whatever and he was very patiently and he was sitting like this the whole time just answering my questions staring straight ahead. And finally I worked up the courage because you don't really ask a lot of personal questions to the monks but I felt like I could with brother William and I just worked up my courage and I said brother William did you get anything out of it? And I don't know what I was expecting that one day the Virgin Mary appeared to him or he levitated off the ground or you know and instead he just looked over at me like this and he said had to face myself and then his head swed back and he went right back to sitting like this.

11:21 And we sat then like together for like the next 20 minutes not saying a word. And it was one of the most incredibly moving moments of my life because not only was I blown away by what he had accomplished, but I was so flattered that he obviously thought that I would know without further explanation just what an incredible accomplishment that is and how scary it is. So I was so flattered that he didn't feel like he needed to elaborate on that. But that's the second reason when we sit in silence and silence is part a very big part of of of a spiritual path. We start thinking about a lot of things we'd rather not think about. That's a direct quote from an article in the New York Times that was written about Neptune Abbey and and there were all these people were being interviewed and oh it's so peaceful here. It's so beautiful here. It's so the monks are so kind and it's such a warm and loving place and and they finally get to this one business executive and he says, "That's true. All that's true. Yeah, believe me, it's a wonderful place and it's loving and all that stuff's true." He said, "But let me tell you something. When you've got nothing better to do than sit on a park bench overlooking the Cooper River for hours on end, you end up thinking about a lot of things you might rather not think about.

12:52 And that's what a spiritual path is about. It's about thinking about all those things that you might rather not think about. One more story along those lines. I was at work one day in the egg house cuz they had 40,000 chickens and I used to work in the grading house at the monastery helping them grade the chickens getting ready for the grocery stores and a new monk walked through the door and I knew who he was. Brother Anthony but we had never met but we knew who each other were. So I just said hi and he said hi and so he had only been at the monastery might have been a year I think at that point and I said how's it going brother Anthony since you know joined and he said he just immediately said it's hard it's so hard and so much harder than I thought it was going to be for example he said I'm right here all the time he said I thought I was going to leave my demons behind but I guess they follow me here as well. And then he gave me a big smile, you know. Turned out later I found out he had been an executive at at Columbia University and he come down there to be a monk. It's right here.

14:02 That being on a spiritual path means being right here looking in hard in the mirror all the time. And when you look in that mirror, you start seeing a lot of things you might rather not see about yourself. If you sit down quietly in a chair, and I've done this, so you know, I think I know what I'm talking about. If you sit down quietly in a chair and just say, I'm just going to sit here in this chair quietly, you know, you'll sit there for a while and then the first thing you'll notice is boredom.

14:34 But then if you really take a look at boredom and and feel invite and feel and what is underneath boredom, boredom makes you anxious. Boredom is an anxious feeling. What is anxiousness? It's fear. Is a form of fear bubbling up. You know, it's what Father Christian told me. Deep down inside, we all know something is twisted. And acknowledging that fact and deciding to do something about it is the beginning of the only authentic life there is.

15:11 So the second big fear is this fear that spirituality is going to force me to see things and about myself that I don't want to see. And then this of course leads to the flips back to the very first fear because if you're forced to face the truth then everything might have to change. You know, if your if your whole life is built around your being a businessman and being a pillar of your community and and your wife is, you know, buried you for your money and and all that kind of stuff and your kids are counting on going to these schools and stuff and you're running your business in the wrong kind of way and you're gouging your customers and stuff, but you're but you kid yourself that no, everybody does it. this is just business and d and and somehow or another something happens that makes you forces you to acknowledge the fact that you're not living the right kind of life then you know everything is going to have to change and you may and your wife may walk out on you your kids may turn on you the people at the community at the country club matter of fact I said that to my a good friend of mine who belongs to a very very elite country club in Derianne Connecticut you I went to prep school with this guys and I said Steve I said you know one of the worst things about losing your job I said is then you when you show up at the country club now all of a sudden nobody wants to talk to you anymore they're afraid it's catchy or something like that he said boy have I seen that suddenly you realize your friends aren't your friends I had I'm not going to get into the whole story but I had a really profound spiritual thing happen in a meeting with college kids something that was basically miraculous And it was the very first class of the semester and there was like 25 kids there and it was and it was a class that was basically about spirituality and and unexpectedly this incredible thing happened and and and several years later I'm telling the story to a whole new group of students and I said you know what blew me away is that none of those kids ever came back.

17:24 They were they were unbelievably moved. you know, there was no doubt in my mind it was had to be one of the most amazing things ever happened to them. and yet not one of them came back. And I said, "Why do you think that is?" And this young lady said, "I know why." She said, "When something that profound happens to you in your life, you have two ways of looking at it. One, you can discount it. You can say it was something I ate or or I was hallucinating or the guy who was running the meeting was hypnosis or something.

18:01 He said, "So you either discount or push it out of your mind or she said you take it seriously and if you take it seriously you realize that everything in your life has to change." And those kids didn't want to change. And I said, "Bingo." A++++ that's exactly it. Interestingly, I've seen that over the years some of the most profoundly spiritual miraculous kinds of things actually drive people away rather than pull people in because everything everything's going to have to change.

18:38 And most of us think we can get away with tweaking it, tweaking our our personalities, tweaking our characters, whatever. If we, you know, and we imagine things, if I could just get a girlfriend, if I just get a 10% raise, if I could just get a new car, and when it was really necessary is to tear it down and, you know, to, you know, to really change it to really change. And so this is the this is what comes out. What becomes obvious as you sit in silence and look into that mirror, you realize that you there's you got a lot of work to do and that this thing you call Auggie is really a facade.

19:18 It's a personality and the word personality comes from the Latin persona which means mask. It's a mask and we don't want so we don't want to change it. And that gets to the third thing. We're fear of change itself is the third biggest fear. The reason why we're afraid, you know, everybody runs around change agents thinking, oh, why is everybody afraid of change? Change is good, you know, but change isn't necessarily always good. You put on 40 pounds, you've changed, all right, but you're probably able to change for the better. So, first of all, all change isn't good. And second of all, all authentic change goes through stages.

19:59 The first stage is the preparation, the planning stage. the second stage is the implementation stage. Then the third stage is the regression stage. And this is what really scares people organizationally and in every way because the third stage after when you after you start executing is is the third stage is regression. This is when all hell breaks loose. Guaranteed things are going to get worse before they get better. When you change your golf swing, you're going to be worse before you get better. If you go to the gym, you're going to feel worse before you feel better. Every real change goes through planning, then execution, then regression. But if you stick at it, then finally there'll be a breakthrough. It's the epiphany. This happens organizationally. You'll put in a whole new computer system and for a while none of it works and everybody's unhappy and everybody's in your office bitching and moaning. I can't. And they're just like the Israelites. Why can't we go back to the old computer system? Oh, things weren't so bad back in Egypt. And then suddenly one of the finally one day there's things start to come together and the efficiencies start to happen and all and all of a sudden you know and then all of a sudden everybody wants to take credit for the for the big for the big change and then the final stage of the hero of the not the hero's journey of the change process is consolidation.

21:23 Now you know you take you've done this in one department now you want to put it in all the other departments and the same thing happens in your own life you know maybe you're a selfish person and you want to change that and so you come up with a plan and then you start implementing trying not to be selfish and everything goes wrong for a while and and you know and you you lose all your old selfish friends and and and you know all this kind of stuff and then suddenly there's an epiphany and it and it comes together and then all of a sudden you start applying selflessness to all the areas of your list. This is the consolidation phase.

21:56 But what we're really afraid of is that the regression stage becomes permanent. And this is a very real possibility. You could go to the gym and you could drop the you know, and in the first day you get sore and a couple of days later, you know, you the muscles grow back stronger and and so you get you take a step backwards when you get sore and you take two steps forward when you get stronger. But what if you drop the bar on your chest and you kill yourself on your first day in the gym? Well, what does that mean? That means that you have the regression stage going taking the two steps backwards have become permanent.

22:32 When I became an entrepreneur, I didn't take a paycheck for three years. When I sold my company or both my companies, I was the lowest paid man in the company. So, you make these sacrifices and this is your step backwards. But what if the company goes bankrupt which very likely may do very you know then the regression stage all the sacrifice becomes you're permanent because the job is not that you that you walked away from has been filled by somebody else. So now the you know the regression stage has become permanent and this is what people are afraid of and so then a common strategy to handle this is the old I'll keep my day job and I'll start my company on the side and this is full of a whole other set of risks because if the company still goes bankrupt then you're left laying in bed with the big question hanging over there am I a smart I because I kept my day job or did my company go bankrupt because I kept my day job is the real reason I failed because I was unwilling to put everything into it because I was unwilling to put my back against the wall because that's what it takes. And I believe that is what it takes. That's what it took for me. I had to put my back against the wall. There was no tomorrow. there was no plan B, you know, and that became critical to the success. So, this is what we're afraid of in the change process. So, we're afraid of change. We're afraid that the regression is going to So, let's apply it spiritually. So, you're like me, you know, and I I went through my dark nights of the soul, believe me.

24:15 You know, I dropped out of college. I became a carpet installer. I'm dedicating my I became celibate. I broke up with my girlfriend. I I put everything I could into my spiritual life. and and then five or eight years later, I turn around, I say, you know, now what? You know, what am I really getting anywhere with this? Is this all just a big game? Is this all just am I just an egoomaniac? What makes me think that I'm such a spiritual pear that I just, you know, and meanwhile everybody else is getting on with their lives and they're getting families and they're and they're, you know, and they're having fun and they go on vacation and they they do all this stuff, you know, you know, and so maybe, you know, I took all this regression. I made all these sacrifices in order to take the massive step forward by having a spiritual enlightenment experience or whatever.

25:06 And the enlightenment experience hasn't happened. So it's like the company's going bankrupt. So the regression stage is going to be permanent. And so these are the fears that you're going to face. And I say these fears that are that apply to a spiritual path apply to any great endeavor. During high school, I was good friends with the actor Michael Keaton, the guy that played Batman and Birdman and all these wonderful movies. And Mike, his name is actually named is Mike Douglas. and and we lost track after high school and and we didn't get back in touch years later. But Mike just up and went to Hollywood and decided to become a stand-up comedian. He's just a guy he's just a kid from a from a big Irish family, the youngest kid of a big Irish family in suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And he up and goes to to to Hollywood, you know. Can you imagine, you know, you know, because even in those, it happened with me too, you know, I just imagine his friends, the kids, the guy, the real close friends, the ones that he went to high school. I I knew him in summer as a summer job. He went to a different high school than I did. And so, but the guys that are really close friends, as he's going to he comes and tells them that he's going to Hollywood, he's going to be a star.

26:19 I mean, you know, what do they think? You know, probably the most of us, what are you thinking? Why are you going? what makes you think you can do this? You probably don't get a lot of encouragement. and I the more I thought about it, I thought, you know, it's probably even, you know, cuz I saw it in my own life, I began to doubt even people that were closest to me and some of the people that were closest to me who were telling me I was wasting my time on my spiritual path.

26:45 And I thought, you know what? I can't trust these people because they have a they maybe they're not even aware of it. They probably aren't even aware of it, but they're terrified that I might be successful doing what I'm doing. Because if I am successful doing then they're going to have to look in the mirror and say, "Why didn't I do it?" And this is totally much more true about somebody like Michael Keaton because he goes off and decides he's going to be a movie star.

27:13 Are those friends he left behind really rooting for him or rooting against him or both? Because if what happened happens, which is he becomes a big star, then all of those people can say, "Wait a second. I knew Mike. I knew him when he was Mike Douglas. I knew him when he just put pants on one leg at just like I did." As a matter of fact, I saw Mike one time pulled up in front of he was driving a goodie bar truck selling ice cream to to kids out of the back of a Goodie Bar truck. just an ordinary person. So why didn't I do something big with my life?

27:46 Why didn't I take the risk? Why didn't I try? Why didn't I put it all on the line? The upshot of all this is that, you know, if you want anything meaningful out of your life, you have to deal with these fears. That's what turns you into a hero. That's what that's what it's all about. You don't give in to these fears, you know, because you're much better off, in my opinion, you're much better off to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all. So, you can't allow fear to run your life. And I've seen this in my whole life. People come to me for coaching and consulting and I've run groups and I've done all this stuff and it's always fear.

28:33 Fear is holding them back. fear is warping their judgment or fear is everything. All the stuff that you see that warp people always gets back to fear. You have to face fear. And that's all I got to say about that.