397: How to Be Fearless

[INTRODUCTION]

Hal Elrod: Hello and welcome to the Achieve Your Goals Podcast. This is your host, Hal Elrod, and thank you so much, as always, for being here. I really appreciate you taking the time to listen. And today's episode is invaluable for all of us. It's how to be fearless. Is it even possible to be fearless? And if so, what would life look like to live without fear? Interesting questions that we are going to unpack in today's episode. I'm also going to give you an overview, just a quick kind of follow-up, I should say, on last week's episode, which got some of the best feedback we've had on any episode. It was How Can We Bring Humanity Back Together? So, we'll do a quick follow-up and then dive into the topic of how to be fearless. 

All right. Before we do, I want to take a minute to thank our sponsor of today's podcast that brings you this episode. If you are like me, you know the importance of eating healthy but you don't always have the time or the willpower to cook with all the colors of the rainbow. And our sponsor is Organifi and Organifi Superfood Blends make it easy and enjoyable to add more variety and nutrition to your day. These are delicious organic powders that you tear open, add to water, stirring with a spoon, and enjoy any time for more energy, nutrition, hormone balance, and peace of mind. They are a great way to jump-start your morning, energize your afternoon, or nourish your evening. I throw them in my smoothie every morning. My wife drinks the gold tea in the evening to calm down her nervous system and relax and get a great night's sleep. Head over to Organifi.com/Hal and then if you find something there that you want to try, use the code “HAL” at checkout and you'll get 15% off your entire order. I'm a big fan of Organifi. I hope you find something there that you love. 

And without further ado, let's talk about it. How can you be fearless? 

[EPISODE]

Hal Elrod: Hey, goal achievers and members of the Miracle Morning Community. Welcome to today's podcast. As always, thank you. Thank you for being here. Thanks for listening. I really appreciate your time and attention and your energy and your care and your feedback and you being a member of this Miracle Morning community that is truly elevating the consciousness of humanity one morning and one person at a time. Today, I want to talk about how to be fearless and you could argue that nobody's fearless. There are always fears to deal with. But the other day, I had kind of a breakthrough that took it from how to deal with fear to actually thinking, well, maybe I could literally be fearless and we'll talk about what that looks like. This is a topic that I covered way back in Episode 355 and 356 I think it was which, gosh, we're on what, 397 now? So, it's like 40 episodes ago. Forty weeks ago, that's crazy. I thought it was a lot more recent but I did an episode on Freedom from Fear and turned into a two-part episode. There was part one and then part two. So, if you want to go back to HalElrod.com/355, you can listen to those episodes. That will be part one and then 356 is actually part two to clarify. 

And those were really well-received episodes. I got a lot of feedback on those and we talked about the difference between unconscious fears and conscious fears. We talked about kind of defining what exactly fear is when it serves us and when it doesn't. I talked about why fear is self-created, why it's really an illusion, and how we could literally use self-love and thinking from a place of power to transcendence. So, we really talked about fear from a lot of different angles. And the funny part, the irony is in that episode I talked about why it's not possible to be fearless but only to fear less. And so, today I'm going to go against that and say maybe it is possible. Now, it's only a maybe. I'm not claiming that it's absolutely that you can be fearless but I just want to share a distinction today that I think can be valuable. And again, if today is valuable or if just, in general, you want to dive deeper into this topic of how to be free from fear, again, you could go back to Freedom From Your Fears Part 1, Episode 355, and then Part 2, 356. I wanted to mention this, though. 

Before we dive into this week's topic of how to be fearless, I just want to follow up on last week's podcast. Last week's podcast, the title of it was How Can We Bring Humanity Back Together? And the feedback from that podcast was overwhelmingly positive. In fact, 100% of the comments, literally 100% of the comments on Instagram and Facebook, and my podcast website were positive. And they were very much things along the lines of or the comments were things like, "This is exactly how I've been feeling, Hal. This is so important. People need to be aware of this.” In fact, here, I'll scroll down and read a couple of comments here. From Christie, “Oh, Hal, I'm so feeling you on this one. Things have been particularly salient in my neck of the woods. Ontario, Canada is our province, just introduced the V passport,” on and on and on. It was a really long comment. I don’t want to read the whole thing. Faith said, “I think the Golden Rule would really help us right now.” Kristy Jones said, “I need this podcast today.” Dawn said, “Thank you so much, Hal. To see how people are treating each other when they have different points of view is so disappointing.” So, on and on and on. 

The reason I'm bringing this up is in the last year-and-a-half, I've really been asking myself, how can I best serve? And what has come up for me, which if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, was inner freedom, was I can share with people how we all have the ability to choose how we experience any given moment of our life. So, even though life might be chaotic and there are things going on that are out of our control that causes stress or fear, how can we take complete ownership of our inner world, our inner experience, our mental and emotional well-being? So, for example, although there might be scary things going on in the world, how can we today, this is really the topic, right, how can we become fearless? How can we completely own our ability to live free from the trap of fear, if you will, the harmful effects that fear can cause? So, no matter what's going on outside of us, how can we own our inner freedom and take control? That's been the real focus for the last year-and-a-half of the podcast ever since COVID hit. And basically, there were so many things that were out of our control that the government was doing or that our neighbors were doing, just so much it was out of our control. And so, we had to focus on what was within our control, which is just how we internalize things and how we experience life. So, that's been the focus. 

Well, I asked the question the other day. My wife and kids were out of town. And so, when they go out of town, I've got the whole house to myself. And so, I just spent an entire day, it was like a miracle day where I kind of did the SAVERS but for the entire day. So, I meditated for like hours on end over multiple sessions. I pulled out all my old affirmations. I created new ones. I consolidated affirmations. I pulled out my journal and I scribed. I journaled for long periods of time. I always have a theme when I do that or not always but I usually have a theme and I had a theme this time. And the theme was or it's usually in the form of a question and the question was, what is the next phase of my destiny? That was the general guiding question. What is the next phase of my destiny? In other words, kind of what that meant for me is like, what's the next step in the way that I can best serve humanity? So, that's kind of a more specific what I meant by the next phase of my destiny, meaning what's the next step for me to best serve my audience, my community, the world, maybe a bigger audience? And what came up for me outside of and beyond the inner freedom topic and theme was unity. Unity. That's what inspired last week's podcast. 

Unity is the idea that right now humanity is more divided than at any time that I've ever seen. And based on all of the comments that all of you left last week under the podcast episode or where I posted it on social, almost every single person was sharing the same sentiment that they've seen division in their own families. Maybe you've experienced that where family members now won't talk to you anymore because you have differing political opinions or medical opinions or whatever. And so, last week's episode, How Can We Bring Humanity Back Together, it was a passionate plea from me like, guys, let's remember that we're all human beings, that behind every social media poster or every opinion, it's a human being. It's a mom or a son or daughter or brother or sister or grandparent. It’s a human being. We're all human beings deserving of love and respect and compassion. And I also tried to help shed light on the fact that no matter what decision that we make, we're all just making the best decisions that we can for ourselves that we believe this is the best decision for me and my health. And I think that one thing we could all agree on is that we all want the freedom to do that. 

I would imagine you want the freedom to make the best decision for you based on what you believe is best for you and/or your family, right? I would imagine you would want that freedom and that respect. And so, it would only make sense that we would give that freedom to other people. I would imagine that you want to be treated with love and respect and kindness and dignity. And if that is the case that you want to be treated with those things, then I would ask that we also treat other people with love, respect, dignity, that we allow them the freedom to live their lives even if they don't agree with us. The point I wanted to add on to last week's episode, just to kind of follow up on it, is if you think about it, human beings are always going to have issues that we disagree on. We are always going to have issues we disagree on. Human beings have always had issues they've disagreed on since the beginning of time. There were cavemen arguing over what the best wrong or right way to do things were. So, we've always had issues we disagreed on since the beginning of time, different ways of approaching things, valuing things in order of a different priority. For some people, safety's their highest priority. For others, maybe it's adventure, right? And if safety is your highest priority, you should have the right to live in alignment with that value. It's your value. You're an individual human being. You have that right, that freedom. And for others, again, if their highest value is adventure over safety and they're doing things that put their safety at risk, who's to say that one person's value of safety is more important than another person's value of adventure or freedom or whatever it is? 

So, here's the point. Realizing that we have always had things we disagree on and we always will have things we disagree on, what we need now is not all to agree on everything because that will never happen. So, I'll say that again. What we need now is not to all agree on everything because that will never happen. It is simply to agree on how we're going to treat each other. How are we going to respect each other's perspectives and opinions? How are we going to engage in civil, respectful conversation, and healthy disagreements? So, again, we're never all going to agree on everything but we can agree on how we treat each other. And I think that trumps the individual agreements because those change. The issue at hand changes from day to day or week to week or month to month or year to year. The issues they were discussing ten years ago aren't all the same as today. The issues are going to change that we disagree or agree on but how we treat each other, that's a fundamental underlying value or set of values of compassion and love and understanding and empathy and all of these things, of curiosity. 

I want to live in a curious world where I don't think that I know everything and that my opinions are right, especially just because I saw it on TV and so now I'm curious. If you have a completely different opinion than me, I don't discount it. I don't go, “Well, you're a moron.” No. I'm curious. I go, "Wow.” Even if I disagree, I go, "How do you arrive at that? That's interesting. I wonder how you arrived at that opinion or that belief. I want to learn from you.” So, again, I'll just say it one more time and we're going to dive into this week's episode of How to Be Fearless but again, I want to say it one more time, that what we need now is not all to agree on everything because that will never happen. It's to simply agree on how we're all going to treat each other and like I said last week in the episode, we've got to be the change that we want to see in humanity that we want to see in the world. I hope that you're open to treating people with love and compassion and empathy and understanding and respect, some of the finest human values that allow any society or any family to thrive. And if we lose those values then our society loses its ability to thrive, to live in harmony, to move forward in a healthy, productive way. 

All right. I'm off my saving humanity soapbox. Let's talk about living free from fear. So, here's how to be fearless. Here's where this came from. The other day, it was actually during my long all-day wife and kids are out of town meditation day. During that, I had this kind of breakthrough, if you will, about how I and this was personal. Now, I'm just sharing it with you, how you can apply it, but it was for me personal like I was realizing how I live with subtle fears and I think that I mentioned that in Episode 355, Freedom From Your Fears, I mentioned how I talked about there are unconscious fears and there are conscious fears. So, a conscious fear is like, “I'm afraid of flying. I know I'm afraid of flying.” An unconscious fear might be one that you're not even aware of. So, for example, I have a subtle fear and you could say an unconscious fear and sometimes it becomes conscious. Your unconscious fears can become conscious. They can actually slip in and out of consciousness. So, you can become aware of it and forget about it but then later realize, "Wait. I have this underlying unconscious fear of not being able to pay my bills.” I think that's a fear for me. That's one of my biggest fears. And it's mostly an unconscious fear. Consciously, I'm like, "No, I can figure anything out. I'm a champion. I'm blah, blah, blah. I can handle anything.” But unconsciously, ever since 2008, when I lost my income and I lost my house and the house got foreclosed on and I went deep in debt and my credit score went from 800 to 500 and I moved in with my dad because I couldn't afford to pay for even a house or an apartment. So, my wife and my daughter and I, my newborn daughter, we moved in with my dad. In fact, I think she was born after I moved in with my dad. 

Anyway, point is ever since then, I've had this unconscious fear that it could all come crumbling down again because in 2007, when that year started, I was like the top of my game like success or life was great and I was building a business and writing a new book and all these things. And I thought I was super optimistic. I always say that there is a fine line between optimism and delusion and I crossed that line often. Maybe you relate to that. But it all came, you know, I thought life was going great and it was only going to get better, and then the economic crash happened. I was in denial about it for a while. I was ignoring it. And then it hit me and I couldn't deny it when I lost over half of my clients and half of my income. Ever since then, it's this monkey on my back where I always have this underlying fear that the rug, if you will, is going to get swept out from under me again and I'm going to not be able to pay my house bill and I'm going to suffer the way I suffered back then. I got depressed. I felt hopeless and helpless. I didn't know what to do. Granted, that's why I created the Miracle Morning, if you don't know that, but back then is when I was at my lowest point, I was like, "All right. I got to figure this out,” and it led to me figuring out or deciding I was going to do a morning ritual and then put together the SAVERS and so that that came out of that time. 

Typically, our greatest breakthroughs come in the midst of or as a result of our most difficult times. And if you're going through a difficult time right now, if that can give you a little bit of hope, optimism, a little bit of solace as to go realize that, yeah, your greatest breakthrough is your greatest growth almost always comes as a result of or in the midst of your greatest challenges. Your greatest adversities become your greatest advantages. But the point is that's an unconscious fear that I have lived with and I try to overwrite it with affirmations and that is absolutely helpful and transformative but it does creep up from time to time. So, here's what I realized. This is the breakthrough. This is the crux of today's episode. This is the theme. Consider what causes you to feel fear. When we experience fear, typically, what we are imagining is we're imagining some future event or experience that is difficult or painful. So, you're imagining something coming in the future. So, like my financial, you know, my unconscious fear of money is I experienced this pain in the past when I lost all of my, or a lot of my money, most of my money, most of my income and it was really painful and really scary. And so, I have a fear that if it happens again, I won't be able to handle it. That's what causes the fear is we imagine this difficult or painful event or experience taking place in the future, and we perceive that we won't be able to handle it. Thus, we are afraid of that experience. 

Because think of the flip side of that. If we believed that a difficult or painful experience was coming but that we would be able to handle it, no problem then there wouldn't really be any fear. Think about that. If you were like, yeah, this thing's coming down the pipe and it's going to be tough but I got this. I got it. I've done this before. I can handle it like there's no fear. You might not be excited that the difficulty and the challenge is coming down the pipe. It might be, you know, I'd rather not deal with it but I got it. I got this. I know how to handle it. I've done it before. So, the fear is self-created by our perceiving that we will not be able to handle it or that it'll be too uncomfortable, too painful for us to handle. And so, when I had that realization the other day, I thought, "Huh, every time I think of something in the future that I am afraid of, I'm imagining it as something that is outside my capacity or capabilities, can't handle it, so I'm afraid of it.” And what I realized is here is the solution. Here's the solution to become fearless. The solution is to - sorry, I'm drawing a blank. The solution becoming fearless, oh, is that every time I start to imagine a scenario that I feel like I can't handle, it's going to be too difficult, too painful, too uncomfortable that is a trigger now for me to affirm that I am more capable of handling anything that comes my way than I even realize that I am stronger than I know. That there is nothing that will ever happen to me that I cannot handle. And so, that's all I want you to walk away with today. 

I want you to walk away with the realization that fear is created by imagining a future scenario and imagining that it is too difficult for you to handle, too uncomfortable, too painful. And to realize that you can handle anything and from now on, when you find yourself feeling fear over anything, even if it's an unnamed fear, like it's just general, like I'm afraid of the future, I don't know what's going to happen. The world is such a crazy place right now. I don't know what's going to happen, even if it's just like you can't name the fear but it's a fear of the unknown, which is a really common fear. Even if that's the fear, you've just got to affirm you can handle it. You can handle anything. You can handle anything if you decide that you can. Now, if you decide that you can't, then you can't or you won't because you create your own reality. You create your own reality. If you go, "Oh, my gosh, I couldn't handle that,” well then you're right. I mean, it goes back to the old Henry Ford quote, some of the truest words ever stated, “If you think that you can or you think that you can't, you're right either way.” 

And I would add that because you create your own reality and if you create a reality that says, “I can handle anything, bring it on life,” and then you can add nuances to that, which is like, "You know what, the more difficult it is, the stronger I will have to be to handle it and the stronger I will become as a result of handling it. This challenge that I’ll face or any challenge that I could ever face by facing it and not hiding and not cowering and not telling myself, ‘I can't do it, but by facing it with all of the strength and confidence that I can muster up within me, the unlimited potential that I have within me to handle anything that comes my way, by taking every challenge I face head-on, there is a better version of me on the other side of the challenge and that's exciting.” That's exciting. It's all in how you look at this. But the point being, again, just to reiterate, realize that the fear is created by imagining a difficult circumstance. I know I'm repeating myself but it's important. I want you to remember this. I said a lot during this, whatever, 40 or, oh, it's short, 23 minutes so far. But anyway, I've said a lot. And so, I want to hammer this home over and over and over again. 

Whatever you're afraid of, realize the fear is that you're actually not afraid of the thing. You're afraid of how it's going to impact you. You're afraid that it's going to be too difficult, too painful, too uncomfortable for you to handle. And I'm telling you and I'm inviting you to tell yourself repeatedly, especially when you feel the fear, any fear, that you are stronger than you know, that you can handle anything. And that by taking your challenges head-on, you will learn, you will grow, and you will become better than you've ever been before. And I feel like I've become fearless because now when I feel fear and when I experience fear of anything, I take a deep breath and I affirm that I can handle anything life throws my way. I can handle anything, I will handle anything, and I'll handle it with peace and calm and clarity and leadership. I'll handle it with my values. I'll accept life exactly as it is and be at peace with it exactly as it is. I will put forth extraordinary effort, actually let’s pull the miracle equation out, unwavering faith and extraordinary effort. Whatever comes my way in the future, I will maintain unwavering faith that I will get through it, that I can get through it, and I will put forth extraordinary effort. So, bring it on life. I'm not afraid of anything because fear is made up in the mind. Fear is not real. Think about that for a second. Fear is not real. It doesn't exist inherently. It's not real. It's something that we manufacture in our own mind based on how we look at things, how we perceive things. 

So, if fear isn't real and it is always self-created, then we have the ability to transcend fear and become fearless. And so, this was a breakthrough for me a couple of weeks ago and I hope this is valuable for you because you are just as worthy, deserving, and capable of anything and everything that you want for your life as any other person on this planet. Don't ever hear someone say something that they do or they've done or they think or their way of looking at the world and go, "Oh yeah, they're just different. That’s not me. I can never be that positive. I can never be that happy. I can never be fearless.” Bullsh*t. Pardon my French. No. You are just as worthy, deserving, and capable as any other human being on the planet, and you got to own that and you had to own your responsibility to create your reality. It is your responsibility and your ability to create your own reality. And if you want your reality to be amazing, if you want it to be great, choose. That's your choice. And if you want to be fearless, that's your choice. 

[CLOSING]

Hal Elrod: I think that's what I got for you today. I hope that’s helpful. Trying to think if there's anything to say to put a cap on but I think I did. I appreciate you listening. Thank you so much for today. And let's be fearless because when we are in a fear state, here's the bow I’ll tie on it. When we are in a state of fear, it is detrimental in so many ways. Now, fear is valuable for a moment. It's valuable to go, "Wait. I'm afraid that if I do this thing, this bad thing could happen so I'm going to evaluate that.” But fear is an overwhelming emotional state that takes over your entire being, that is detrimental. And so, we owe it to ourselves and we owe it to those that we love and we owe it to those that we lead to be able to control any fear that comes up for us because it'll come up. I guess when I say fearless, I don't mean that you're not going to have a fear show up. Yeah, you're going to have fear show up all the time. That's part of being a human being. But it's from that point, once the fear comes up, you go, “I'm experiencing fear. It's causing me stress. It's clouding my mental clarity. I'm not quite thinking clearly. I feel overwhelmed. I feel it in my body,” once you acknowledge, once you're aware that there's fear there because, again, a lot of them are unconscious, that's when you get to choose, am I going to stay in fear and perpetuate these feelings, these thoughts, these fearful feelings and thoughts, or am I going to consciously, proactively choose to be fearless? And now you know how. That is your choice. All right. Love you so much. Thank you for listening. And I will talk to you next week.  

[END]