Quotes from Susan Jeffers' "Feel the Fear... And Do it Anyway"

Quotes from Susan Jeffers' Feel the Fear... And Do it Anyway

I'm back in action in my new office and giddy to pull the wisdom out of the books I read while traveling (from Tolle's "A New Earth" and Pink's "A Whole New Mind" to Kiyosaki's "Rich Dad Poor Dad" and T. Harv's "Secrets of the Millionaire Mind" + mucho mas). I'll be capturing the top quotes from each to add to the 2,500+ quotes on thinkArete and blogging them as I go. Then writing the Big Ideas. Fun.

The first is Susan Jeffers' absolutely brilliant Feel the Fear... And Do it Anyway. If you haven't read it, enjoy the quotes below and go get it. It rocks.

I'm awed by how cool of a person she must be to write such a great book.

Enjoy the quotes!

-bri

Quotes from Susan Jeffers' Feel the Fear... And Do it Anyway

At the bottom of every one of your fears is simply the fear that you can't handle whatever life may bring you.

The truth is:

If you knew you could handle anything that came your way, what would you have to fear?

The answer is: NOTHING!

Five Truths about Fear
Truth 1. The fear will never go away as long as I continue to grow.
Truth 2. The only way to get rid of the fear of doing something is to go out and do it.
Truth 3. The only way to feel better about myself is to go out… and do it.
Truth 4. Not only am I going to experience fear whenever I’m on unfamiliar territory, but so is everyone else.
Truth 5. Pushing through fear is less frightening than living with the underlying fear that comes from a feeling of helplessness.

All you have to do to diminish fear is to develop more trust in your ability to handle whatever comes your way!

From this moment on, every time you feel afraid, remind yourself that it is simply because you are not feeling good enough about yourself.

In all my life I have never heard a mother call out to her child as she goes off to school, “Take a lot of risks today, darling.” She is more likely to convey to her child, “Be careful, darling.” This “Be careful” carries with it a double message: ”The world is really dangerous out there” … and … “you won’t be able to handle it.”

Fear of particular situations dissolved when I finally confronted them. The “doing it” comes before the fear goes away.

It is fairly predictable, however, that when you’ve finally mastered something and gotten rid of the fear, you will feel so good that you will decide that there is something else out there you want to accomplish, and guess what! The fear begins again as you prepare to meet a new challenge.

I said to myself: “You mean all those people out there that I’ve been envying because they’re not afraid to move ahead with their lives have really been afraid? Why didn’t somebody tell me!?” I guess I never asked.

You may never relate the experiences of others, especially those of celebrities, to your life. You may think they are lucky because they aren’t afraid to put themselves out there. Not so! They had to push through a tremendous amount of fear to get where they are today… and they are still pushing.

All you have to do to find a way out of your self-imposed prison is to retrain your thinking.

People who refuse to take risks live with a feeling of dread that is far more severe than what they would feel if they took the risks necessary to make them less helpless—only they don’t know it!

She knows the answer to her question “what if?” The answer is: “I’ll handle it!”

By now you’ve gotten the picture. We can’t escape fear. We can only transform it into a companion that accompanies us in all our exciting adventures; it is not an anchor holding us transfixed to one spot.

As far as I know, everyone feels fear as he or she moves forward through life. It is absolutely possible that there are some evolved souls in this world who never experience fear, but I have not met them.

If everybody feels fear when approaching something totally new in life, yet so many are out there “doing it” despite the fear, then we must conclude that fear is not the problem.

Obviously, the real issue has nothing to do with fear itself, but, rather, how we hold the fear. For some, the fear is totally irrelevant. For others, it creates a state of paralysis. The former hold their fear from a position of power (choice, energy, and action), and the latter hold it from a position of pain (helplessness, depression, and paralysis).

The secret in handling fear is to move yourself from a position of pain to a position of power. The fact that you have the fear becomes irrelevant.

I am talking about the power within the self. This means power over your perceptions of the world, power over how you react to situations in your life, power to do what is necessary for your own self-growth, power to create joy and satisfaction in your life, power to act, and power to love.

No one is more unloving than a person who can’t own his or her own love.

The kind of power I’m talking about leaves you free, since you don’t expect the rest of the world to fill you up. It’s not the ability to get someone else to do what you want them to do. It’s the ability to get yourself to do what you want to do.

Women have been conditioned to believe that to be powerful is unfeminine and unattractive. It is my experience that nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth is that love and power go together.

As another ancient sage once said, “The pathway is smooth. Why do you throw rocks before you?”

Remember that much of the trick of moving from pain to power is taking action. ACTION IS VERY POWERFUL!
Awareness is half the battle.

You can drop an awful lot of excess baggage if you learn to play with life instead of fight it.

Before you take any action in life, ask yourself: “Is this action moving me to a more powerful place?”

You don’t become powerful without concentrating your power.

When you give your subsconscious the message “I can’t,” your subconscious really believes you and registers on its computer: WEAK… WEAK… WEAK…

“Shoulds” bring on guilt and upset—totally draining emotions. Your power is taken every time you utter the words “I should.”

“I know I’ll handle it. I have nothing to worry about.”

Take a risk a day—one small or bold stroke that will make you feel great once you’ve done it. Even if it doesn’t work out the way you wanted it to, at least you’ve tried. You didn’t sit back…powerless. Watch what starts to happen when you expand your comfort zone…with each risk you take, each time you move out of what feels comfortable, you become more powerful… As your power builds, so does your confidence, so that stretching your comfort zone becomes easier and easier, despite any fear you may experiencing. The magnitude of the risks you take also expands.
So take only those risks each day that build your sense of self-worth. These are the risks that enhance your ability to deal with your fears. EXPAND! EXPAND! EXPAND!   

Whether it feels like it or not, you already have more power than you could ever have imagined. We all have.

You are innately designed to use your personal power. When you don’t, you experience a sense of helplessness, paralysis, and depression—which is your clue that something is not working as it could. You, like all of us, deserve everything that is wonderful and exciting in life. And those feelings emerge only when you get in touch with your powerful self.

Are you a “victim,” or are you taking responsibility for your life?
No wonder you feel fearful—victims are powerless!

THE TRUTH IS THAT YOU REALLY ARE IN CONTROL—IN TOTAL CONTROL.

Taking responsibility means never blaming anyone else for anything you are being, doing, having, or feeling.

The point to remember is that when you blame any outside force for any of your experience of life, you are literally giving away all your power and thus creating pain, paralysis and depression.

Taking responsibility means not blaming yourself… Anything that takes away your power or your pleasure makes you a victim. Don’t make yourself a victim of yourself!

There is never any need to be down on yourself.

Taking responsibility means being aware of where and when you are NOT taking responsibility so that you can eventually change.

Now I know that when I am angry at my husband, I simply have to ask myself, “What am I not doing in my life that I could be doing that I am blaming him for not doing for me?”

As I correct what needs to be handled in my life, all my anger toward others dissipates.

Anger is your clue that you are not taking responsibility.

Most of us do not “sculpt” our lives. We accept what comes our way…then we gripe about it.

When a difficult situation comes into your life, it is possible to tune in to your mind and say, “Okay, choose.” Are you going to make yourself miserable or content? Are you going to visualize scarcity or abundance? Are you going to put yourself down for getting angry with your husband or are you simply going to notice what insecurity you were feeling at the time and discuss it with him? The choice is definitely yours. Pick the one that contributes most to your aliveness and growth.

See if you can go a week without criticizing anyone or complaining about anything.

Determine what you want on your life and act on it.

It is reported that more than 90% of what we worry about never happens. That means that our negative worries have less than a 10% chance of being correct. If this is so, isn’t being positive more realistic than being negative? Think about your own life. I’ll wager that most of what you worry about never happens. So are you being realistic when you worry all the time? No!

Why be miserable when you can be happy?

No one is immune to pain, and it shouldn’t be denied when it exists. The key is to know that you can lead a productive and meaningful life no matter what the external circumstances are. What positive thinking does is offer a power boost to help you handle whatever life throws at you. Your “bad breaks” do not dominate your life; your indomitable  strength does. And when you feel that indomitable strength, you really can handle any of your fears from a position of power—the kind of power that really can make good things happen.

It is amazingly empowering to have the support of a strong, motivated, and inspirational group of people.

When we are concerned with something bigger than ourselves, our fears are greatly diminished.

What we resist, persists.

In a sense, your need to please shows you what you have to work on—and that is: letting go emotionally of the role of child and stepping into the role of adult.

The less you need someone’s approval, the more you are able to love them.

So, instead of wanting to throttle your loved ones when they give you a hard time, it is better to look at them as mirrors of what you still need to work on in terms of our personal growth.
The most important thing is for you to be your own best friend. Whatever you are doing—don’t put yourself down. Slowly begin to discover which, for you, is the path of the heart. Which path in life will make you grow? That is the path to take.

All you have to do to change your world is change the way you think about it.

You can actually shift your thinking in such a way as to make a wrong decision or mistake an impossibility.

Remember that underlying all our fears is a lack of trust in ourselves.

Finding out what you don’t like is, paradoxically, as valuable as finding out what you do like.

Every time you encounter something that forces you to “handle it,” your self-esteem is raised considerably. You learn to trust that you will survive, no matter what happens. And in this way your fears are diminished immeasurably.

The knowledge that you can handle anything that comes your way is the key to allowing yourself to take healthy, life-affirming risks.

They have discovered that security is not having things; it’s handling things. Thus, when you can answer all your “what if”s with “I can handle it,” you can approach all things with a no-lose guarantee, and the fear disappears.

Start thinking about yourself as a lifetime student at a large university. Your curriculum is your total relationship with the world you live in, from the moment you’re born to the moment you die.

If you are focused on he “the way it’s supposed to be,” you might miss the opportunity to enjoy the way it is or to have it be wonderful in a totally different way from what you imagined.

If you’ve truly committed yourself to something, given it all you’ve got, and then concluded that it is not for you—move on to something else.

I know it is hard to accept, but an upset in your life is beneficial, in that it tells you that you are off course in some way and you need to find your way back to your particular path of clarity once again.

I had to shift from being afraid of making a mistake to being afraid of not making a mistake.

Commitment doesn’t mean that it has to last forever, but while you are there, commit yourself 100%. By doing this, the quality of your life improves 100%.

Action is the key to your success.

I’ve created the concept of a holi-hour, a shortened version of a holi-day. I allow myself at least an hour each day to relax totally.

One of the most valuable lessons in learning to diminish fear is embodied in the phrase SAY YES TO YOUR UNIVERSE.   

We can’t control the world, but we can control our reactions to it.

As you start to see the possibilities in the impossible, you will begin to see that the world works “perfectly.” You can find reason and purpose in everything—if you open your mind to it.

Adopt an attitude of “It’s all happening perfectly. Let’s see what good I can create from the situation.”

People who fear can’t genuinely give.

When we give from a place of love, rather than from a place of expectation, more usually comes back to us than we could have ever imagined.

You must become what you want to attract. Be the kind of person you would want to surround yourself with.
For some reason, when you become a support to others, you become bigger than you are.

When we let someone be who they are without trying to change them, that is giving away love. When we trust that someone can handle his or her own life, and act accordingly, that is giving away love.

When you operate from the Higher Self, you feel centered and abundant—in fact, overflowing. When you experience this abundance, your fears automatically disappear.

If you listen to the Chatterbox, your experience of life is fear-producing, and you stop yourself from expanding. If you listen to the Higher Self, your experience of life is joyful and abundant and devoid of fear. You, like everyone else, are an expert at listening to your Chatterbox. Your task is now to become an expert at listening to your Higher Self. Then true choice will be possible.

When you see yourself connected to something bigger than yourself, you no longer feel you must do it all alone. Your sense of power becomes highly magnified, and your fears are greatly diminished.

When you stay centered there is nothing to fear.

If we do not consciously and consistently focus on the spiritual part of ourselves, we will never experience the kind of joy, satisfaction, safety, and connectedness we are all seeking.

When you become involved in a bigger energy motivated by the Group Higher Self, you are infused with power and purpose.

The biggest pitfall as you make your way through your life is impatience.

When we wake up to the potential power within, our impulse is to grab it all “quick.” The more we grab, the more it seems to elude us. There is no quick. There are quick—and wonderful—seminars, workshops, books, and audios that give you tools, but they are not quick tools. They are to be used and mastered throughout a lifetime.

I have come to believe that there are only two kinds of experiences in life: those that stem from our Higher Self and those that have something to teach us. We recognize the first as pure joy and the latter as struggle. But they are both perfect. Each time we confront some intense difficulty, we know there is something we haven’t learned yet, and the universe is now giving us the opportunity to learn.

Don’t be deceived into thinking that by changing the external, the internal will be changed. It works the other way around. The path that needs changing is the one in your mind.

I have learned that there is always more to learn. And experience is our greatest teacher.
Say YES to life. Participate. Move. Act. Write. Read. Sign up. Take a stand. Or do whatever it takes for you. Get involved in the process. As Rollo May wrote in Man’s Search for Himself: “Every organism has one and only one central need in life, to fulfill its own potentialities.”

So commit! Commit yourself to pushing through the fear and becoming more than you are at the present moment. The you that could be is absolutely colossal.