How to Make Fear Your Friend

Character isn’t built by becoming fearless. It’s built by developing the conviction and discipline to move when fear tells you to stay still.

Maybe character does not come from being fearless.

Maybe you cannot even have character without fear.

I have been spending the last several weeks thinking about General Stanley McChrystal’s book On Character and what character actually looks like when you get outside of philosophy and into everyday life.

McChrystal gives us a simple equation:

Conviction is what you believe.

Discipline is whether you live according to those beliefs when doing so becomes difficult, uncomfortable, or inconvenient.

And I keep coming back to fear.

Because fear is what puts both of those things under load.

You can believe all kinds of things while sitting comfortably in a chair.

But when your heart rate goes up…

When your mouth goes dry…

When you might embarrass yourself…

When someone might reject you…

When you might fail publicly…

That is when you find out whether your convictions and your discipline actually show up together.

Fear does not build character by itself.

Plenty of people spend their entire lives afraid without becoming stronger because of it.

What builds character is what you choose to do when you are afraid.

That is where conviction comes in.

That is where discipline comes in.

That is where courage comes in.

And maybe that is why an easy life does not develop much character.

If nothing scares you, challenges you, embarrasses you, knocks you down, or forces you to confront your limitations…

What exactly are you developing?

Character Is Not Built by Becoming Fearless

Comedian Jimmy Carr made an interesting observation when a mother in his audience asked him about her son being bullied.

He first acknowledged how painful that situation is, both for the child and for the parent who has to watch it happen.

Then he said something that stuck with me:

He also made another important point.

As painful as it is to see your child being bullied, it is better for him to be the kid being bullied than to become the bully himself.

But that got me thinking about another bully.

One we don’t talk about nearly enough.

Ourselves.

That voice in your own head saying:

Don’t do that.

You’ll look stupid.

You’re not ready.

What will people think?

Wait until it’s better.

Wait until you know more.

Wait until you’re confident.

Wait until you can guarantee nobody will reject you.

And we listen to that bully.

We call it perfectionism.

We call it preparation.

We call it being realistic.

We call it waiting for the right time.

But very often…

It is just fear wearing nicer clothes.

Courage Does Not Automatically Transfer

I saw this recently with someone I do some business consulting with.

This guy is not somebody you would normally describe as timid.

He grew up in Brazil.

He lives in London.

He is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt.

He has been training for more than a decade and competes at the black-belt level.

He recently traveled to Moscow to compete.

Think about what that means.

He willingly walks onto a mat with highly trained men whose immediate goal is to choke him unconscious or manipulate one of his joints until he submits.

And he does it in competition.

That takes something.

Yet recently we were talking about his business.

There are things he knows he needs to do.

And he isn’t doing them.

As we dug underneath all the explanations and reasons, eventually we reached the real problem.

Fear.

• How will I look?
• What if it isn’t good enough?
• What will people think?
• What if people judge me?
• What if I put something out and it doesn’t work?

The black belt who will willingly fight another black belt was afraid to hit Publish.

I am not making fun of him.

I understand it completely.

Because fear is strange like that.

I had the same issue 5 years ago, before I began The Daily Dojo and now hit Publish every day of the week, 977 issues and counting.

Courage is not one switch that suddenly turns on everywhere in your life.

It is often arena-specific.

You develop courage through repetitions in one arena, and that courage may not automatically transfer into another one.

We all have parts of our lives where we are black belts.

And parts where we are still white belts standing nervously against the wall.

A firefighter can run into a burning building and still be terrified of telling his wife what he really feels.

A business owner can risk his life savings opening a company and still be afraid to make a sales call.

A martial artist can walk onto a competition mat and still be afraid to put a video online.

A guy can deadlift 400 pounds and still be terrified of walking across a room and saying hello to a woman.

Getting Reps

Which brings me to something Leslie Jones joked about on The Daily Show.​

She was talking about young men, loneliness, friendship, and dating.

And part of the joke was that a huge number of young men struggle to approach women at all.

Some have apparently never approached a woman in person.

It is hilarious when Leslie Jones talks about it.​

It is also kind of heartbreaking.

Because I remember being that guy.

Talking to people did not come naturally to me.

Talking to women certainly didn’t.

I struggled with it through my twenties and into my thirties.

The advantage I had was that there wasn’t an internet in my pocket offering me somewhere to hide every time I became uncomfortable.

I had construction buddies.

Hapkido buddies.

Sometimes we would grab a beer after work or training.

One of my Hapkido buddies had a girlfriend, and sometimes I was the third wheel hanging around with the two of them.

That relationship was enormously useful to me.

I got to hear his perspective.

I got to hear her perspective.

And then I had mine.

Nobody called this “social skills training.”

It was just life.

I was getting reps.

Eventually, I began deliberately creating more reps for myself.

I basically developed a progression for learning how to talk to people.

The same way you might break down a martial arts technique instead of expecting a white belt to perform the whole thing perfectly on day one.

First:

Make eye contact.

That’s it.

Then make eye contact and nod.

Then make eye contact and smile.

Then hold the eye contact a little longer.

Then say hello.

Then make some neutral observation about whatever is happening around you.

And eventually…

Say something positive about the person.

Tiny steps.

Tiny increases in difficulty.

One level outside my comfort zone instead of trying to jump from hiding in the corner to becoming the most charismatic guy in the room.

That is the flow channel.

If the challenge is too easy, there is no growth.

If it is far beyond your ability, you become overwhelmed and retreat.

But if the challenge is just slightly beyond your current capacity?

You can work with it.

Fear becomes manageable.

And when fear becomes manageable, you can practice.

That is how martial arts works.

Nobody takes a brand-new white belt and throws him into a black-belt competition expecting things to go well.

You learn the movement.

Then you practice with a cooperative partner.

Then a resisting partner.

Then someone more skilled than you.

You gradually increase the pressure.

That is how I learned social courage too.

Then you repeat.

And repeat.

And repeat.

Your nervous system learns:

I survived that.

Then:

I can handle this.

And eventually:

This really isn’t that big a deal.

That process changed my life.

Literally.

The Watch

In January of 2001, I saw a woman wearing a watch.

And I said:

“Oh wow, nice watch.”

That was it.

No pickup line.

No sophisticated technique.

No confidence trick.

No manipulation.

I saw something I liked and said something.

That started a conversation.

Her name was Amy.

We got married later that same year, on December 2, 2001.

This December, we will have been married for twenty-five years.

All because I was willing to tolerate a few seconds of uncertainty and say:

“Oh wow, nice watch.”

Think about how absurd that is.

One of the most important relationships of my entire life existed on the other side of a tiny moment of fear.

How many things in our lives are sitting behind moments exactly like that?

A conversation we are afraid to start.

A phone call we are afraid to make.

A business we are afraid to launch.

Something we are afraid to publish.

Someone we are afraid to meet.

A boundary we are afraid to set.

An apology we are afraid to make.

A class we are afraid to walk into.

We think courage is supposed to feel heroic.

Most of the time, it probably looks ridiculously ordinary.

Say hello.

Make the call.

Walk through the door.

Post the video.

Ask the question.

Tell the truth.

Try.

Fear Is the Mind-Killer

I first read Frank Herbert’s Dune during the summer of 1980.

For more than forty-five years, I have carried part of the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear around in my head:

That quote lodged itself in me as a teenager and never left.

Not because I somehow learned how to eliminate fear.

I didn’t.

I still get afraid.

The reason the line stayed with me is that fear doesn’t merely make us uncomfortable.

Fear can narrow our thinking.

It can make us reactive instead of deliberate.

It can convince us that the worst possible outcome is the only possible outcome.

Fear can take away our ability to see options.

But eventually I learned something else.

Fear does not necessarily mean stop.

Fear is information.

Sometimes it is warning you about genuine danger.

Pay attention to that.

Sometimes the intelligent thing to do is back away.

But other times fear is simply telling you:

Here is the edge of your current world.

And just beyond that edge may be the person you could become.

That is where character gets built.

Not because you felt no fear.

Because you felt it and developed the conviction to decide what mattered anyway.

Then you developed the discipline to take the next step anyway.

This is the thread running through everything I have been exploring about character these past several weeks.

Character is not something you declare.

It is not a trophy you earn once and put on a shelf.

Character is practice.

It is built through repetition.

Under load.

Over time.

And fear is one of the loads we train under.

After enough repetitions, something interesting happens.

The thing that once terrified you becomes normal.

Then you discover another edge.

That is growth.

That is training.

That is martial arts.

And I think that is character.

Make Fear Your Training Partner

People like to say:

I don’t think that is literally true.

Sometimes there is absolutely nothing useful on the other side.

Sometimes fear is correctly telling you not to do something stupid.

But a surprising amount of what matters in life does require passing through fear.

• Connection
• Love
• Mastery
• Leadership
• Business
• Honesty
• Growth
• Adventure
• Character

So maybe the goal should not be to conquer fear once and for all.

That sounds impossible.

Maybe the goal is to make fear your training partner.

A good training partner does not let you stay comfortable.

They expose weaknesses.

They force you to work.

They make you better.

And then tomorrow?

They show up again.

You do not graduate from that training partner.

You simply get better at working with them.

Fear does the same thing.

Fear shows you where you are still under construction.

It points toward edges you have been avoiding.

And sometimes that is incredibly useful information.

The question is not whether fear shows up.

It will.

The question is:

Do you let fear bully you off the mat?

Or do you bow in and train?

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Today’s training:

The Fear List

Write down 3 fears you’ve been avoiding.

Take one small action toward one today.

📚 Leader’s Library

​On Character by General Stanley McChrystal​

Why?

McChrystal examines character as something built through the choices we repeatedly make and the discipline to live according to the standards we claim to believe in.

That raises a harder question than simply asking whether we have good values:

Do our actions actually match them?

It is easy to meet the standard when the boss is watching, the instructor is standing there, or somebody is keeping score.

Character gets more interesting after they leave.

Eventually the external standard has to become your standard.

That is when you find out who you are becoming.

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck