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Do you have goals and dreams that you would like to achieve, but something is holding you back? Chances are that you have some big, hairy undefined fears that are holding you back.

How can you work through your fears to start making your life what you really want it to be? In his book the 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferris suggests a process he calls fear-setting. In brief, fear-setting is telling yourself a story where all of the bad things that could possibly happen do happen. Then you figure out what you would do about it. It’s sort of a super pessimistic type of personal scenario planning.

So how do you do this process, and what are the benefits? Follow along with this example.

In this scenario our heroine would like to take a two month sabbatical from her day job to join up with a sailing crew in the Caribbean. Although she has a strong desire to do this, she hasn’t taken any steps toward making it happen. In her head, she tells herself a story that goes something like this:

“I can’t just take two months off from my job. My boss will figure out that I’m not that valuable to the team and replace me with a lower paid worker. My boyfriend will realize that he can be as messy as he wants when I’m not home and will put all of my stuff out on the front lawn. He’ll throw a big keg party to celebrate his newfound freedom. In the meantime, I’ll be on a boat full of crazy drunken sailors. They’ll make me take watch in the worst weather in the dead of night. I’ll end up getting hypothermia and suffer dehydration from spending all night puking my guts out during a blinding squall. The crew will abandon me on a backwater island with no real medical care. I’ll end up hitching a ride on a mail boat and will arrive in Miami three weeks later, broke and completely alone in the world.”

Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it?

Let’s set aside the fact that it’s highly unlikely that all of these terrible things would happen to the same person at the same time (although it might make a great movie!). The point of this exercise is to imagine the worst possible scenario and then plan your victorious comeback - kind of like a Rocky movie. After getting her worst-case scenario out, our heroine then works out the following solutions:

“So, I’m in Miami with no money, no job and no boyfriend. At least it’s warm. I could call my parents and have them send me enough money to get back on my feet. I’ll hang out in the tropical climate for a while and call and email all my network contacts to let them know that I’m looking for opportunities. In the meantime I can earn some money taking freelance jobs and eat tasty Cuban black beans and rice. When summer comes around I can head north again and find a new place to live.”

Now that the star of our film has established a course of action to recover from all of these mishaps, the teeth have been taken out of her fears. That doesn’t make it easy for her to pursue her dream of sailing, but it gives her new confidence in her ability to handle challenges as they arise.

But Life Doesn’t Work Out The Way We Plan
A couple of commenters to How To Do Scenario Planning made the very legitimate point that we can’t ever anticipate everything that will happen. That is correct, but that’s not the point of fear-setting (or of scenario planning, really). The idea behind this exercise is to strengthen your confidence in your own problem solving abilities to the point where you can overcome the self-imposed limitations that are holding you back from achieving your desired life. It’s really about changing your mindset from one of fear to one of possibility.

So, give it a try. Think of one dream that you’ve never bothered to pursue and list all of your fears about the situation. Then brainstorm ways to overcome those fears. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

If you’ve ever used this exercise, or a similar process to overcome fears, please share your story in the comments.

Related posts:

1. My 4-Hour Workweek: A Series