The Science of Overcoming Fear

Courage is essential for every investor. Putting your money, time, and energy into a project without a guaranteed payoff is frightening. That fear keeps many people from even starting in the field. Courage emerges from the routine practice of overcoming fear to do the things you know will bring you closer to your goals.

What Are You So Afraid Of?

Fear is uncomfortable. It manifests in all areas of our life – socially, professionally, and intimately – and there is little we can do to control it when it comes up. In real estate investing, overcoming fear is critical to moving from the simple task of finding a deal and underwriting it to closing.

Considérez certaines des craintes liées à l’approvisionnement, à la souscription et à la conclusion d’une transaction :

• Sourcing – fear of looking like an impostor, fear of not finding any good deals, fear of your employer finding out that you’re hustling on the side, fear of spending too much time on sourcing and not enough time with family
• Underwriting – fear of not having enough or the right information, fear of not seeing the most important items on your property tour, fear of overcommitting on the operating pro forma, fear of missing the offer date
• Clôture – peur de négocier un accord de qualité inférieure, peur de rater des étapes importantes de la transition, peur de faire trop de promesses aux investisseurs, peur de ne pas obtenir un prêt à temps, peur de perdre vos dépôts, peur de dépenser trop d’argent en due diligence

Above all else, the greatest fear may be one that you don’t even consider – the fear of success. Success is a double-edged sword. It comes with a lot of benefits, but it also delivers new responsibility. Our instant gratification world trains us to expect results immediately. An immediate reward comes with instant responsibility, which is paralyzing. Your life is comfortable right now.

Even though you’d love to have the benefits of success, it’s natural to feel afraid of the change that comes with it.

La bonne nouvelle, c'est que le succès demande du temps et beaucoup de travail. Vous n'êtes plus la personne que vous étiez il y a cinq ans et vous ne serez plus la même personne dans cinq ans. De nouvelles responsabilités feront partie de votre vie au moment opportun.

Les fondements physiologiques de la peur

La peur a une fonction évolutive très importante. Elle active une variété de réponses physiologiques aux menaces actives qui mettent notre vie en danger, comme une attaque physique potentielle. De même, des menaces plus passives et à plus long terme déclenchent des réponses au stress qui motivent différentes actions, comme travailler pour de l'argent afin de subvenir aux besoins d'une famille. Le réflexe et l'instinct sont les deux réponses à la peur déclenchées par le cerveau reptilien. Le réflexe est l'action instantanée et incontrôlable qui vous protège du danger, comme cligner des yeux ou respirer. L'instinct est une action plus contrôlable qui déclenche une réponse pratiquée ou apprise aux menaces potentielles, comme s'écarter d'une voiture entrant dans votre voie.

We learn to fear most things in our upbringing and socialization. Child development is a terrific case study in learning and overcoming fear. Many of the human functions that we take for granted required years of practice and failure to become proficient. Walking, talking, reading, writing, learning, and many more seem like natural aspects of life. Still, these characteristics evolve as you grow up.

Babies fall a lot when they learn to walk.

The natural parental inclination is to rush over and make a big deal about the fall to protect their child. Most falls are not painful, as the child is low to the ground and well padded. However, parents that overreact risk teaching their children to be afraid of taking developmental risks. Think back to the fears you’ve built up over time. More than likely, you learned them from failing and giving up. The punishment from giving up was not nearly as bad as the expected pain of failure.

Control

La peur est un lien entre la dépression et l'anxiété. L'anxiété résulte d'une peur de l'avenir, tandis que la dépression émerge d'une peur du passé. Le contrôle est une caractéristique commune à ces deux états. Vous n'avez aucun contrôle sur le passé. Ce qui est fait est fait. L'histoire que vous racontez à propos de votre passé a une grande influence sur le type de personne que vous devenez.

One can interpret a personal history in a variety of ways – positively and negatively. Too much weight given to negative interpretations results in a depressed present state. Your present state has a lot to do with your future. A positive outlook will motivate you to take productive steps toward reaching for your dreams. Whereas a negative outlook will keep you stuck in the fears of the past. Therefore, anxiety results from having no idea if your actions will create the results you want.

Cette peur est paralysante pour beaucoup. Pour surmonter la peur de l’avenir, il faut déplacer l’axe de contrôle de l’extérieur vers l’intérieur de soi.

Overcoming Fear

People create comfortable grooves in their daily routine that help avoid scary situations. We have pre-built, well-reasoned excuses to enforce those channels. However, the only way to overcome fear is by reverse engineering the source. Courage comes from comparing your values to your fears and determining that values should dominate. This is difficult, and early forms of courage are strictly and exercise in willpower.

That said, the elemental first step in overcoming fear is identifying your values and deciding that they are more important than anything else in your world.

Beyond that, the only way to eliminate the fear is to make it boring.

Define Your Fears

Pensez à certaines peurs dans votre vie : les araignées, la hauteur, la natation, l’obscurité, etc. Dans la plupart des cas, vous savez que ces peurs ne sont pas fondées. Dans un environnement approprié, il n’y a aucun danger. Pourtant, vous les évitez parce que l’inconfort de la confrontation est plus grand que le bénéfice de l’élimination de la peur.

Your fears hold you back from achieving your dreams. They’re yours to keep until you decide that you don’t want them anymore.

Most fears live within your subconscious mind, and you unconsciously create routines and habits that help you avoid those fears. Therefore, it’s difficult for most people to see for themselves these things that hold them back.

Take some time (after you read this) to make a list of all the fears in your life.

Ask family, friends, colleagues, and mentors for their opinion on the things that are holding you back. More than likely, you can tie these to a fear created without you knowing when you were much younger.

After you identified the fear, tie these fears to the worst-case scenario from acting against them and the benefit from overcoming fear. You’ll probably realize that the worst-case isn’t that bad, and the upside is much greater.

Éliminer la nouveauté

Vous souvenez-vous du premier jour de votre premier vrai travail ?

If you’re like most people, the first day of your first real job was daunting. People that you thought were your buddies started giving you a lot of work to do. You thought they expected that you knew exactly what you were doing. You expected that the deadline was yesterday, and you thought that you couldn’t ask for help.

Boredom and stress come quickly and easily to most people in their first day on the job.

This is a recipe for tremendous anxiety and stress. However, you need the job to pay your bills, so you endure.

Les choses commencent à changer avec le temps. Vous commencez systématiquement à affronter et à éliminer chaque petite peur qui écrase votre âme tout au long de la journée. Il est plus important d'être heureux au travail que d'avoir peur, alors vous affrontez cette peur.

Nothing is easy in the beginning. In fact, your experience is supposed to be terrible when you start out. That’s how you know you’re doing it right.

Vous verrez que le courage devient plus facile à mesure que vous vous exposez à des situations effrayantes. Les conversations deviennent plus faciles à mesure que vous décrochez le téléphone pour appeler quelqu'un que vous ne connaissez pas. Les analyses deviennent plus naturelles à chaque nouvelle feuille Excel que vous ouvrez.

Exposure creates new neural pathways that expose your fears as nothing more than self-manifestation. This, in turn, works to improve your emotional literacy.

Vous ne pouvez pas devenir excellent dans quelque chose si vous ne mettez jamais les pieds sur le terrain.

Entraînez votre réponse

Your response to external stimulus defines you. We all know people that had terrible things happen to them, but they continue in life with a cheery attitude and use those experiences to fuel a great life. Similarly, we know many more people that use their experience as an excuse to explain why they don’t have all the things they want in life.

Les programmes en douze étapes, comme ceux des Alcooliques anonymes, fonctionnent en guidant les personnes à travers un système d’identification et de confrontation de leurs réponses apprises aux stimuli externes. Ils utilisent des affirmations positives, le mentorat et la responsabilisation pour rediriger l’énergie anxieuse vers des moyens productifs. Désapprendre un comportement demande du temps et de la pratique.

Attention is the most powerful tool in overcoming fear. The National Science Foundation published an article in 2005 that suggested that the average human has 60,000 thoughts per day. Further, most of these thoughts are repetitive, which means you’re thinking about the same stuff all the time and don’t really know it. Attention to your mind is essential to controlling your fears. Unfortunately, our increasingly secular world rapidly moved away from internal focus through meditation and prayer. Today, the external, material-focused world of social media, reality TV, and sensationalist news dominates most of our attention.

These latch on to and perpetuate your learned fears. Gain control of your thoughts by practicing mindfulness. A consistent meditation routine will teach your conscious mind to catch your instinctual reactions, which allows you to reposition your thinking on the spot.