Most people spend their entire lives held back by self-doubt. They actively avoid doing the things they know they need to do to achieve the life they want for one simple reason: they’re afraid.
They spiral in what if thinking:
- What if I fail?
- What if people criticize me?
- What if I make the wrong decision?
- What if I success means losing my identity or outgrowing my friends and family?
What if…what if…what if…
But because they never actually answer these questions, they continue to stay trapped in mediocrity and let their dreams die with them.
Anytime I start to let what if thinking cause me to spiral into self-doubt, I use a technique I call fear inoculation. Here’s how it works…
We inoculate ourselves from viruses using vaccines that have a deconstructed version of the virus inside them. This gives our bodies the ability to “practice” overcoming the virus if we ever encounter the real thing.
We can use this same strategy to inoculate ourselves against fear (especially the Four Horsemen of Fear) by deconstructing the worst-case scenario we’re afraid of and “practicing” ways to overcome it. This way, if we ever come across the “real thing,” we’ll be prepared to deal with it.
Think of it like the art of strategically catastrophizing.
Here’s how you can use fear inoculation to protect yourself against crippling self-doubt:
Step 1: Assume your worst fear comes true. Describe what this actually looks like for you.
Step 2: Now with that assumption in place, how would you deal with this worst-case scenario happening?
Here’s how this can look for each of the Four Horsemen of Fear…
•••
Fear of Failure
You failed. How will you learn from your experience?
- What do you need to do differently next time? In hindsight, what mistakes were avoidable and how will you ensure they don’t happen again?
- Where did you take risks when you shouldn’t have or avoided risks you reasonable could’ve taken?
- What resources did you not take advantage of that could’ve helped you succeed?
- Were you solving the right problem for the right audience? Where was the misalignment between product-market fit?
- Did you hire the wrong people or put good people in the wrong place?
- Were you a control freak when you should’ve delegated more and empowered your team instead of micromanaging them?
Dig into what specifically contributed to your failure. Learn from it now, in the safety of this thought experiment, so you can avoid the avoidable by deconstructing and reverse-engineering what can lead to failure in the real world.
•••
Fear of Ridicule
You did something and now people are criticizing you. What’s your strategy to deal with it?
- If people are criticizing your product, will you build in public and candidly improve based on feedback?
- If sensitive details got leaked, will you control the narrative by getting in front of it?
- If you’re getting all this judgment, are the people criticizing you actually people whose opinions are even worth caring about in the first place?
One of my all-time favorite quotes about this concept is from the late rapper Nipsey Hussle.
You’ll never be able to please everyone. Are you focusing on pleasing the right people? In business, this may mean clarifying who you’re actually trying to serve. In your personal life, it may mean focusing on pleasing yourself and valuing your own opinion, wants, and needs over what your old high school friends—who you haven’t talked to in 15 years—might say about you.
Learn to trust yourself instead of seeking validation from the crowd.
•••
Fear of Uncertainty
Rather than risk making the wrong decision, you made none and stagnated. How will you recover now?
- What information did you need but didn’t get?
- How realistic were your expectations?
- You can never know all the variables, so what was the minimum amount of information you needed to make a viable decision?
- How can you get this information?
One helpful mindset shift is to move from “just in case” learning to “just in time” learning. “Just in case” learning is when you collect random bits of information just in case you need it some day (like endless researching every microphone or camera lens when you’re setting up your YouTube channel). “Just in time” learning is when you start doing the thing, then when you run into a roadblock, you learn the one thing you need just in time to overcome that specific roadblock so you can keep going. For example, you recorded a video and now need to learn how to do a simple jump cut edit for your talking head style video, so you look up how to do this exact thing (what you don’t do is also look up how to color grade, add b-roll, or do fancy transitions).
Focus on making progress over achieving perfection.
•••
Fear of Success
You succeeded. You sold your business, hit your target ARR, published your book—whatever you said you wanted to achieve.
Congratulations!
What’s on the other side of success? Paint a vivid picture of what life post-success looks like. The more concrete, the better you’ll be able to inoculate yourself.
- Do you become complacent and lose ambition? How can you surround yourself with successful people who’ve maintained healthy ambition?
- Do you become niche famous and now you’re afraid all this influence could corrupt you? How will you keep yourself grounded?
- Do you start to lose touch with loved ones because success means outgrowing them? How can you stay connected with them, bring them along for the ride, or make new friends on a similar journey?
Until you scale your first mountain, you can’t see anything beyond it.
But once you reach the peak, your perspective changes. Now, you realize you’re at the beginning of the mountain range. Success isn’t something to be feared because your first success opens your eyes to opportunities you couldn’t imagine before. Your first success is critical, because it teaches you you’re capable of achieving it. If you can scale the first mountain, you can scale the next.
•••
Why Fear Inoculation Works
Fundamentally, we fear the unknown. What if…[unknown thing happens], how will I survive?
Fear inoculation makes the unknown knowable by exposing you to your worst-case scenario happening so you can build up an immunity to it in case it ever actually happens.
Because once you allow yourself to answer the rhetorical what if…you realize even if shit hits the fan, you’ll survive—and more often than not, you realize that the thing you’ve been terrified of happening all along isn’t actually that bad.
And once you realize just how capable you are, and just how survivable your worst-case scenario is, self-doubt won’t hold you back anymore.
Read Next: What If Fear is Trying to Guide You Toward Fulfillment?
