The Lawyer Life Podcast

How to Overcome Fear and Be More Confident

• Autumn Noble • Season 1 • Episode 16

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This episode continues our discussion from the last episode on how to start taking meaningful action toward your goals. As we all know, when we start taking action on a goal the excitement the hopefulness quickly gives way to less rosy feelings. Fear and self-doubt are likely to show up and rain on your Goal Parade. How do we move forward despite the fear and ugly emotions that take the wind out of our sails? Today we discuss four truths about fear and confidence to help you stay the course and achieve your goals.

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You are listening to the Lawyer Life Podcast, episode No. 16: How to Overcome Fear and Be More Confident.

Hello and welcome back to the Lawyer Life podcast. I am your host, Autumn Noble. I am a practicing attorney as well as a life and career coach for lawyers. Throughout my legal career, I have worked at various types of firms all over the country. I've built and shared my own practice group from the ground up. I've taught in a business school as well as a law school, and eventually transitioned my practice in-house with a Fortune 300 company. Now I teach all of my clients how to navigate the same types of career changes.

If you want to learn how to build your practice and client base, establish some independence, find more time, get more done, or just generally find more happiness and fulfillment in your career, you are in the right spot. If you are new here, thank you for joining us. Be sure to check out the historical episodes and the show notes to learn more about our work and get a good foundation for today's topic. If you've been here all along, I appreciate you so much. Welcome back.

In our last episode, we talked about goals and goal setting and why sometimes it's just so damn hard to take action on our goals. I'm hoping that after listening to that episode, you have some clarity around how to better set goals and take action on them. For those of you that are already taking action towards a big goal, you may have run face first into the first obstacle that accompanies taking action on any goal, and that is just generally feeling like garbage the whole way.

When we start taking action on a goal, the excitement and hopefulness quickly gives way to a lot of less rosy feelings. Fear and self-doubt are likely to show up at the dinner table and just start raining on your goal parade. So how do we move forward despite fear and all of the ugly emotions that really take the wind out of our sails? Today, I want to talk about four truths relating to fear and confidence so that you can better stay the course and achieve your goal.

The first truth is that fear standing in the way of your dreams can once again be blamed on our biology. For starters, negativity bias is really a thing. What is negativity bias, you might ask? Well, as any good lawyer, before I start a new project, I first consult the Google Box. And so this is what Google had to tell me about negativity bias:

"Negativity bias, also known as the negativity effect, is the notion that even when of equal intensity, things of more negative nature, like unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or social interactions, or traumatic and harmful events, they have a greater effect on one's psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things."

So, stated again, when you have things of equal intensity that are positive, neutral, or negative, your brain and your physiology is going to focus on those negative items. They're going to have a greater impact on your psychological state and on your processes than the neutral or positive things that might actually have equal weight.

So, when I think about our tendency to focus on the negative while giving lesser attention to equally significant positive data points, I can't help but think about that motivational triad that we've talked about in prior episodes. As you may recall, our brains are designed to keep us alive, and historically, that meant one of three things: we're going to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and spend the least amount of effort to be efficient.

So, what does that have to do with taking action on your goals? Fear, worry, and catastrophizing all fall into the category of avoiding pain and keeping us safe in our head. It might sound like, "What if it doesn't work? People are going to judge me. I'm going to disappoint everyone. I'm going to embarrass myself." Our primitive brain believes that our worried thinking is actually keeping us safe. We are biologically wired to scan the horizon for signs of crouching tigers in danger. We're programmed to look for dangers so that we can avoid them and stay safe.

So, for this reason, our brain reacts more strongly and pays more attention to those negative thought patterns because our brains are wired to avoid those types of dangers and to anticipate them. Hence, negativity bias is simply part of our biology. So, that bias and all the negative thoughts and catastrophizing that come with it are absolutely going to join you on any journey towards your goal, so long as you are a human. That's just part of the deal. But that doesn't mean you've made the wrong decision. It just means that your brain really wants to listen to the shitty radio station and pretend like nothing else is possible. There's nothing else better to look at.

So then, we add to this our brain's tendency towards confirmation bias, and we have a whole new dumpster fire that's going to stand in the way of the path towards our dreams because our brains were not designed to argue with themselves. If we tell our brain to think about our inadequacy or to think about why this is not going to work, we're going to be embarrassed and everyone's going to judge us, your brain is going to get to work coming up with all sorts of evidence to demonstrate that you are, in fact, going to fail and be embarrassed and everyone's going to judge you. It's going to prove those thoughts true. That's how confirmation bias works. Whenever you choose a thought of any kind, you give your brain instructions to invest energy in that thought and to prove it true. And that's how confirmation bias works.

But you can imagine how when you pair that with negativity bias, it creates a lot of chaos and inner strife that makes it really difficult to move forward towards our goals. It's like saying, "Dear brain today, we're going to compile evidence to prove that this isn't going to work, that I'm going to become destitute, that my parents are going to judge me, be angry at me, that my husband's going to divorce me." And your brain is going to say, "Yeah, you know what? You're right," and it's just going to keep going.

Realizing that alone can really transform your life because we can start to see that these thoughts and this spinning, it served a purpose historically, and it doesn't necessarily mean that that's the only possible outcome. That we've just simply got this mercenary in the form of our brain, and we've told it to go down this really terrible path and sabotage our dreams, and our brain just does it. So, we have to think about our thoughts as sort of fuel that could propel us in the direction of our dreams or not. And when we allow that confirmation bias and negativity bias to be the fuel, it's kind of like we slash the tires of the vehicle before we even cruise off down the road towards the dream itself.

So, how do we navigate this hurdle? When you find yourself bogged down in that negativity bias, we just have to simply recognize that biological effort to keep us alive and then consider whether you might be overlooking other possible outcomes. We can examine that worst-case scenario that our brain wants to offer us, but we also have to consider if there's a best possible outcome because they're both potentially true. At this stage of the game, we don't know if this is going to go up in flames or if it's going to be a wild success. The problem is our brain only wants to believe one of those scenarios.

So, we have to ask our brain to turn it to a better radio station and see if there's something else that might propel us in the direction of that goal. If you are able to examine both that best possible outcome as well as the worst possible outcome and accept that reality likely rests somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, we can move forward towards our goal and our actions towards that goal with more perspective because we can come to terms with the best and the worst possible outcomes and know that anything in between those two, I can probably figure out because odds are it's not going to be one of those extremes. So, our work becomes recognizing what your brain is doing and intentionally shifting to that better, more positive potential radio station.

Truth number two: the more we fail, the less we will fear. The most common fear that comes up when we start taking action on our goals is the fear that we're going to fail and that people are going to judge us and we're going to be embarrassed. Think about a goal that you have for yourself right now and ask yourself, have you told anyone about it? And why not? Have you posted it on Facebook? Have you told your partner, your spouse? Did you scream it loud and proud from the rooftops or at the latest family gathering? My guess is that you probably didn't, and here's why.

No one wants their failure to be up for public scrutiny. As humans, we really would just prefer to fail quietly or just fail not at all and just never have it happen. If we succeed, that's wonderful and great, and we'll shout that from the Facebook rooftops. But if we keep our failures private, it's like it never happened. There are no unmet expectations of others, there's no disappointment other than your own. So, it really begs the question, what is so bad about failure?

After all, we avoid it and we keep our goals secret. The fear of failure, the fear of embarrassment, or the fear of how we will feel if everything falls apart is really at the heart of a lot of this. So, what is fear anyway and where does it come from? So again, as any good lawyer would do, I consulted the Google box for the answer, and here is what Merriam-Webster had to say about fear:

"Fear is an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or is a threat."

When we break this one down, fear is an unpleasant emotion that's caused by a belief. If you've been following along, you know by now that beliefs are thoughts and choices that we make in our brains based upon ideas and notions and stories that we hold to be true. So, fear is an uncomfortable emotion caused by our thinking, thoughts that we choose in our head are what are creating that fear. This is Merriam-Webster's thing, I'm just explaining it, but I fully believe this to be the case. Our thoughts about failure, our thoughts about what it's going to be like with things don't pan out, and those judgments that go with it, that is what creates fear. That's all that's holding you back from taking action, from making that move, from leaving your soloist job or making a change or standing up for yourself. It's just your thoughts that create this weird vibration in your body that doesn't feel good, and that's it. And that's what's keeping us from taking action towards our goals.

If you have a lofty goal that you aren't pursuing, ask yourself why and what is the worst that could happen if you don't get there? Is it just that you don't achieve it? So what? What is it about that failure that's so scary? 99% of the time, it's because of how we think we would feel once failure comes to the door. We're afraid of feeling disappointed in ourselves or knowing that others are disappointed in us. What we make that mean and how we feel from that thinking, we're afraid of feeling disappointed in ourselves.

So here's a wild thing: instead of taking action, we put our little dream on the shelf and we just feel disappointed in ourselves for not trying. Isn't that crazy? Like, we're already feeling those feelings that we're trying to avoid. So instead of trying and failing and feeling disappointed and letting other people feel disappointed and feeling disappointed from that, that feels terrible. But instead of doing that, we're not trying, we're not failing, and we're feeling disappointed all the same. We're disappointed because we don't have the life that we want. We're disappointed because we don't have the boundaries we want. And at some level, we're disappointed because we're not asking for what we really want and doing what we really want in life. You're going to feel shitty either way. The question is whether or not you want to actually take some action and feel crappy about it or if you just want to not take action and feel crappy. Ultimately, the choice is yours.

And remember, those crappy feelings are just energetic vibrations in our body that's caused by our thinking, which means that how we feel after a failure is driven 100% by what we make the failure mean. And we all do it, right? You set off the goal and then you miss your mark, and we tell ourselves like, "This is never going to work. I'm never going to get what I want. I'm never going to get the balance. Why am I even trying?" Those thoughts are complete dream killers. And unless we forget that confirmation bias, that old goat is going to show up and just pile on top of those thoughts.

So, in the end, we're choosing that initial line of thinking that causes this avalanche of terrible self-doubt and fear and makes it really difficult for us to take authentic action towards our goal. So, the challenge is simply to try and fail despite the fear, despite that vibration, to try and fail and feel those feelings, having known that you actually tried something. If you're going to feel crappy, you might as well do something first to feel crappy about. Don't feel crappy about your inaction. You don't deserve to feel crappy about your situation unless you've actually tried and failed. But let me challenge you even more: I submit that if you try and fail and continue to try and fail despite those recurring crappy feelings that come with it, you will win every single time because every single time you try and fail, you will develop yourself. Obviously, you're going to learn how to not achieve the goal, and you're going to learn alternate paths to try and actually get there the next time. We all know that. But you're also going to learn how to manage those feelings that come up every time an experiment doesn't work out. You're going to learn how to process embarrassment and fear and shame that come up every time the path doesn't work out. You might not even have the same goal on the other side of all that trying and failing, but I don't believe that someone can try and fail to achieve a goal repeatedly and get nothing from the process. I truly believe that it's impossible.

In sum, if you are not trying and failing on a regular basis, my guess is that you're already feeling pretty crappy. You're already sitting with and experiencing those negative emotions that you're trying to avoid by steering clear of failure and not taking action because we want to avoid those feelings. If you're not trying and failing at something all the time, I really urge you to examine what's holding you back. Is it really fear of failure and embarrassment? Are those feelings that different than how you feel if you don't do something? And do you have the power to choose something different? Would you be willing to think something different about your "failure" if that's what came from your attempted action? Would you be willing to choose to believe this is just one more cobblestone in the path and I'm going to keep going?

This is really the beauty of pushing through that fear because we challenge ourselves more, we learn more about ourselves and more about our brain and more about the patterns that we have. Ultimately, it's a question of whether or not your dreams are really worth ignoring because you don't have what it takes to experience negative emotions. So, ask yourself, what's the worst that could happen? When I talk about this in particular, this truth, it makes me think about when I was planning on leaving my last formal legal job before I started my own firm.

I was in-house with a Fortune 300 company, and I had taken the job knowing that it was sort of the last stop for me. I knew it would give me enough time and space to plan an exit from formally practicing law, and it would allow me more time and space to do this. So, I developed a plan and got really clear about okay, this is how long I want to be there and this is how much money I want to have saved away so I have a cushion to support this new endeavor. And as I moved forward towards that goal and I started telling people, you know, I got a lot of pushback and I got a lot of judgment, and my brain really started to agree with them. Like, who do you think you are leaving a job like this in a position like that? Are you insane? You're walking away from how much money to do what? What does that even mean? And I really started to see my brain agreeing with those things, and I started telling myself, well maybe a little longer and maybe it's not that bad and maybe it's not that big of a deal and maybe I'll just keep doing both. And then I saw my schedule, my timeline for leaving continually getting pushed back from those thoughts, and ultimately it really was that fear. I'm not ready, I don't have enough money saved, maybe they're right. All those thoughts kept me from executing sooner, and eventually I got to the point where I had been there at my maximum amount of time and I had saved the money that I thought I needed, and I kept pushing back even more. Just one more year, just one more incentive, so on and so forth.

And I had a friend say to me at some point, "Life is going to throw you off of the cliff if you're not willing to jump off of it yourself." And it was at that moment that that's exactly what happened. My work changed in such a way that I just wasn't willing to do it anymore. It was such a deviation from my specialty and expertise that I just didn't want to continue. And that's the moment that I said, "I'm done." And even though I've given it the time I thought I needed and I had saved what I thought I needed, I didn't feel ready and I was totally freaked out. And then I quickly met the next truth about taking action towards your goals, and that is there are going to be bad days.

Bad days are okay and, in fact, a sign that you are an emotionally balanced and normal human being. But let me be perfectly candid today for me was not one of my top 5 days. This is the second time I am recording this podcast. I recorded it yesterday and had all sorts of snafus and technical issues that I've been fiddling with all day, and it's completely pushed my schedule for today, which if you know me, you know that I hate that and just totally changed my energy for the day. But that is just part of what I signed up for. Part of me continuing to move in furtherance of this goal is knowing that some days things are going to go well and some days those thoughts like, "What are you doing? How could you have left a job like that? What were you even thinking?" Someday those thoughts win, and that's okay. And it's part of the deal.

The biggest problem, I think, that we can take away from that skewed perception of reality is this idea that if we're not happy all the time and we haven't achieved all of our goals, there's something wrong with us and we're out of the norm. Consider children or even how we interact with each other. If you see someone who is not happy, the thing that we ask them is, "What's wrong?" as if it weren't okay for them to not be happy. And that question alone presumes that you should be happy and being unhappy means that there's something wrong here, something that has to be fixed. In fact, you can probably throw some money at it and fix it.

When we buy into that notion that we're supposed to be happy all the time and that our goals are supposed to come easy to us, it's tempting to freak out anytime that things just don't go as planned. We don't know what to do with those emotions, so we avoid them or we resist them or we react to them. Either way, we get into a mad scramble to get rid of them ASAP.

For some people, when those negative days and negative thinking and negative feelings kind of take over, we shift to reacting and resisting. And what a lot of us in goal setting, what that looks like is we think it was easier for everybody else and we kind of blame everybody else. We lash out at everybody else. We kind of slip into this victim mentality while also lashing out at everybody around us and being really defensive because that feels a lot more productive and important than just feeling like crap.

So, they resist or they react to that negative day, and in turn, it just amplifies their problems because now they've lashed out at their husbands or their kids or whatever, or they've just decided to wipe the slate clean once again, and now we just have all sorts of new problems that come from that type of reaction to the bad day. Others will spend time and energy just avoiding and burying that negative emotion. So, they'll reach for anything they can to self-soothe or to dull it. If you've had a bad day at work or you're feeling like a failure, "Oh, get an extra glass of wine or eat that chocolate cake. You deserve it. You've had a bad day." This is simply us avoiding negative emotions and burying them in substances or actions that create dopamine.

This eventually creates more problems with excess weight, overdrinking, overspending, whatever. But what is really at work is our desire to not feel those emotions, the second-guessing, the self-doubt, the fear. So instead of experiencing them, we just bury them in dopamine that we get from sugar, alcohol, shopping, sex, or whatever. Or we throw that negative emotion and energy back at those around us. So, they're the problem and we're not the problem.

Any of these approaches only work for a really brief period of time because it's like a boomerang or a beach ball that we're holding underwater. Eventually, those negative emotions are going to come back and they're going to gain force and surface even stronger once we're done with our little excursions of avoidance. They are right there waiting for us. It never fixes it, only now they're stronger than ever because we've overconsumed, we've gained weight, we've lashed out at the people that we love, we feel hungover, we've made poor decisions, etc., etc. So now we have those consequences to deal with on top of the negative emotions we were trying to avoid. And around and around we go, only increasing our negative experiences by avoiding, resisting, or reacting.

Bad days and negative thinking and negative feelings, this matters in the context of goal setting because if you intend to take action towards any goal, there's going to be bad days. There are going to be days when you just don't feel like this is going to work. That is part of the deal when you sign up to run a marathon. There are going to be days when your body hurts. When you sign up to launch a podcast, there are going to be days when you have to redo it and clear your schedule to do so. There are going to be days when things don't go right and when your heart or your body just hurts.

So what I offer as a solution is simply to coexist with the negative emotions that will accompany your journey towards your goal. To understand that they're just part of the process, never mind the yin and yang of the human experience. So, if we can stop freaking out every time negative emotions or thoughts bog down our actions and we can simply experience them, let them be part of our journey, it will diminish in power and eventually those thoughts will pass. And if you just sit with them instead of over-thinking or lashing out or going online and shopping, you're going to have less fallout to deal with once they do pass.

So, we can accept those days as just part of the process and not a sign that something's gone wrong, and then we can regroup and just keep going. This brings me to the last core truth: all of this is essential because confidence is only going to come through action, which will require you to move forward despite the fear and despite those bad days.

When you decide to take action and stop preparing to take action, like I was when I was preparing to leave, that action alone is going to set you up to become more self-confident because it forces you to really give fear the middle finger and just say, "Well, I'm doing this. I'm leaping off the cliff and here we go." When we commit to that goal, one of the ways that fear is going to show up to keep us stuck is to tell us that we're not ready to act, just like my brain did. "I'm not ready to go yet. I don't have enough money yet. I need a little bit more time." And then confirmation bias and negativity bias comes along and the whole parade just stops. All action must acquiesce to the truth that there is no such thing as being fully prepared. There's no way to ensure success. We just have to act.

Only through acting will we ever know if our preparations were in vain. We have saved enough or we have learned enough. Only through acting will we know what we overlooked and then be able to remedy that. But many of us get stuck in this faulty belief like, "Well, I'm just not ready yet. Yeah, I have a goal, but I'm not ready to start acting towards it yet." We tell ourselves there's more work to do or more data to analyze, and so we just keep preparing and we never move forward.

And I admit that leaving my last legal job, I definitely did that. There are times I wish I had left years before, but I truly believe that it was a learning experience for me to really watch these principles at work in my own life. My rationale for drawing this out is really simple: if we want to build self-confidence, we have to start acting and stop preparing. We have to start acting even when we're not 100% ready because only through the acting will we force ourselves to experience those pressures that create self-confidence.

When we're stuck in inaction, we never really get to see how we perform under fire. We are so busy believing that we have to do it right that we don't allow ourselves the chance to just try. When we act and fail, we might experience some of those emotions like embarrassment or shame or guilt. But when we commit to continued action despite those setbacks and crappy feelings, that is where we become more self-confident. Being self-confident doesn't mean that we never fail; it just means that we know we can fail and get up and keep going. It means that we can trust that we can experience any emotion that's going to come and meet us on this journey and we're just going to keep trucking along. It means that we're not going to sit and wait and plot and plan until we can do it perfectly because we can trust in our ability to have compassion for ourselves and keep it moving.

So, if self-confidence is something that you're wanting more of, just know that you will only create it when you put a time limit on preparing to take action towards the goal and you just get out there and start doing the damn thing. Self-confidence will come when we start and commit to accumulating failures and learning from them and continuing forward. We become more confident when we stop at the planning and start practicing failure. And once you master that, you will have all of the self-confidence that you could ever imagine.

To wrap all this up in a nice little bow, I hope that I have impressed upon you that when you develop a goal that you want to act upon, it puts you in a position for exponential growth. That growth and evolution is only possible because of the fear and the negative emotions that come along with taking action on the goal. Remember that anytime you color outside the lines and decide to make a change in your life, negativity bias and confirmation bias are going to come to the party uninvited. They're simply part of your biology. Just acknowledge your humanness and turn your radio station to a better channel, one that explores the best possible outcomes as well.

Next, just embrace that this journey won't be a smooth one. If it were, everyone would have already achieved the goal. The challenges and the negative emotions that will join you on your journey, regardless of the goal, are part of the yin and yang that you sign up for when you select a goal. Without those challenges and negative emotions, the goal will lose all meaning and value. So, allow yourself to have bad days, let yourself fully experience them, and know that they will pass and you can just move ahead the next day. It's not a big deal.

Lastly, embracing this rocky road in furtherance of your goal is truly the only way that you can become more self-confident, which is ultimately what a lot of us are wanting. Challenging yourself to take action towards a goal despite your negativity bias, despite confirmation bias, the bad days, the self-doubt, the fear, the worry, the judgment of others is the only way for you to trust that you can endure all of it and stay true to yourself. In order to fully believe in yourself, you have to prove to yourself that you're willing and able to overcome those types of adversities.

And for that reason, fear and all of the garbage that comes with it is really an invitation to evolve and develop a closer relationship with yourself. As part of my work, I help my clients get more confident, learn to roll with the punches, and keep moving towards their goals. If you have a goal that you're struggling to accomplish, sign up for a free coaching consultation so that we can get clear on what is standing in your way and develop a plan to overcome it. You have the opportunity to make this year different and the best year yet. What do you have to lose?

That is all for today, my friends. Thank you so much for joining me the second time on this topic, and remember, if you like this content, be sure to rate the podcast and consider leaving a rave review. I truly, truly appreciate those of you that have. Next week, we start exploring fulfillment: what is it and how do we get more of it? I hope that you'll join me there. In the meantime, be sure to check out the show notes as always for some really good resources on this topic or to grab that free coaching consultation before they are gone. And as always, thanks for listening and thanks for sharing with your friends.