#651： How to Turn Fear Into Fuel
Episode Stats
Summary
Patrick Sweeney is a tech entrepreneur, a university lecturer, a coach, a consultant to CEOs, professional athletes, and Navy SEALs, and the author of Fear is Fuel: The Surprising Power to Help You Find Purpose, Passion, and Performance. In this episode, we begin our conversation with how a diagnosis of leukemia forced Patrick to confront the fact that he had led a life dominated by fear, and inspired him to face those fears.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. We typically
00:00:11.420
think of fear as a negative emotion, something that feels terrible and not only keeps us
00:00:15.300
away from true danger, but also inhibits us from going after our life's goals and passions.
00:00:19.980
Fear can indeed be an unwelcome hindrance, but my guest today argues it can also be a
00:00:23.340
powerful propellant and sighing post towards success. His name is Patrick Sweeney. He's
00:00:27.140
a tech entrepreneur, a university lecturer, a coach, a consultant to CEOs, professional
00:00:31.140
athletes, and Navy SEALs, and the author of Fear is Fuel, the surprising power to help you
00:00:35.320
find purpose, passion, and performance. We begin our conversation with how a diagnosis of
00:00:39.200
leukemia forced Patrick to confront the fact that he had led a life dominated and shrunken
00:00:43.140
by fear and inspired him to face those fears and to spend six years talking to leading
00:00:47.260
neuroscientists about how to live more courageously. He explains how fear should be thought of
00:00:51.120
not only as an early warning system for danger, but as an early warning system for opportunity.
00:00:55.220
We then unpack the three kinds of fears which exist and how you can be fearful in one area,
00:00:58.940
but courageous in another. Patrick then explains how it's possible to train the brain's courage
00:01:02.700
center to control and reprogram its fear center so you can get the best from fear rather than
00:01:06.760
letting it get the best of you. We discuss how uncertainty creates something called free
00:01:10.040
energy, how free energy creates fear, and how to reduce both forces by exposing yourself to a
00:01:14.440
wide range of experiences. And we enter a conversation with how to find the motivation to take the first
00:01:18.240
step into fear and three things you can do to gain the confidence to take action in the face of
00:01:22.020
uncertainty. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash fearsfuel.
00:01:35.080
All right, Patrick Sweeney, welcome to the show.
00:01:37.820
Brett, it is such an honor to be here. I've been a big fan of you guys and AOM for years,
00:01:43.360
and I am just delighted to be on this show. Super, super, super stoked.
00:01:47.700
Well, thank you so much. So you got a book, Fear is Fuel, The Surprising Power to Help You Find
00:01:53.080
Purpose, Passion, and Performance. Before we get to the book, let's talk a bit about your background
00:01:57.380
because I think your background led to the book. Did you have an experience in your life that
00:02:02.320
kick-started you exploring this intersection between fear and how it can be used to, I don't
00:02:08.220
know, used to motivate you and do better things? You know, Brett, it was funny. It was like this
00:02:15.300
snowball experience that I didn't really see coming. I mean, my whole existence leading up to
00:02:22.500
an incredibly, what sounded on the surface as a tragic event, but it became an absolutely
00:02:32.520
transformative event. And so my entire life, I was trying to figure out how to be a man, right?
00:02:38.820
I was searching for manliness and really searching for self-esteem and self-respect and
00:02:45.480
did everything I could to try and find it without finding my authentic self. And when I was 35 years
00:02:54.140
old, I had been running my second startup, had raised about $30 million by that point, should have been
00:03:00.860
as happy as anyone in the world with this, you know, one of the hottest high-tech companies in the U.S.
00:03:07.300
in a great space, incredible employees, wonderful clients. And instead, I was terrified of everything.
00:03:14.820
I was afraid, you know, of board meetings, that I wasn't going to look good as the CEO and I wasn't
00:03:19.720
going to be presenting myself as the perfect CEO. I was afraid of employees leaving, of my clients
00:03:25.800
jumping ship. So I was constantly living in the state of fear. And the way that I dealt with it,
00:03:31.440
because when you're in this fear state, your body releases all these enzymes and hormones.
00:03:35.740
And I had cortisol, the stress hormone, just constantly flooding my body. So the only way
00:03:41.960
I knew how to deal with it then is drinking. And I was having seven or eight beers every day and
00:03:47.800
probably twice that on weekends and getting about four hours of teeth grinding sleep and waking up,
00:03:54.060
you know, feeling guilty, the whole Irish Catholic guilt thing. So I had to go to the gym to sweat it
00:03:58.540
out. And not surprisingly, that led to a lifestyle that almost ended in disaster. I woke up one
00:04:05.780
morning and couldn't move my arm and was too afraid to go to the doctor. So it took two or three days
00:04:11.260
before I finally got to the doctor and he told me I had no immune system. And it was at that point when
00:04:16.960
into that sort of single phone call was what changed my entire life.
00:04:20.380
And what did you do in response to that? Like, what was your, I mean, cause I mean,
00:04:23.620
that's like, I mean, you, you were living your life in fear because of all these things that
00:04:26.940
your business could fall apart, whatever, but like this, yeah, this is, this is real. This is life
00:04:32.640
Well, and I had no idea what it meant. Right. And, and I was afraid, I was terrified to find out
00:04:37.860
what it meant and to face the fear. But in this instance, I had no choice. So I was in living in
00:04:43.380
Northern Virginia and the doctors there said, we have no idea why, but your white blood cells are
00:04:49.540
cannibalizing themselves and you have no white blood cells left. And we're going to send you
00:04:54.300
to Johns Hopkins. Then I went up to Hopkins. My, my daughter was one year old and she went to her
00:04:59.800
grandparents and my wife and I went up to Hopkins and we, we went through this battery of tests and
00:05:05.980
evaluations. And the whole thing culminated in this nightmare scenario of Dr. McDavid coming in and
00:05:12.400
saying, you know, we don't know what it is, but it's a very rare form of leukemia.
00:05:18.660
And it's progressed quite a ways already. So we suggest you get your affairs in order and say
00:05:26.000
your goodbyes. And I was, you know, my, my wife was six months pregnant as well. So we had a one
00:05:33.840
year old, my wife was six months pregnant. She went into shock. And it was at that point when I just,
00:05:39.480
you know, I, I had such, I was just so overwhelmed with this sense of regret and failure that I had
00:05:46.420
missed out on my entire life because I was, I was afraid to, you know, afraid to do things,
00:05:52.260
afraid to be the authentic self. And I was most of all terrified of flying. So I always made excuses
00:05:57.740
not to do things. And I'm lying there in a bed in Hopkins. And I realized this is, you know,
00:06:03.220
this is going to happen. It's going to happen now, or maybe it'll happen six months from now,
00:06:08.560
or maybe it'll happen six years from now, but I'm going to die at some point. And that realization
00:06:13.620
dramatically changed the way that I looked at the world.
00:06:18.160
And when you said you're terrified of flying, you mean like literally flying, not like flying
00:06:23.760
Yeah. Flying on an airplane. I saw a plane crash on TV when I was seven years old and that planted this,
00:06:29.400
this seed of fear that, that grew into an entire tree in my body. And, and the main,
00:06:34.600
the main trunk of that tree was getting it on an airplane and flying. So I, I made up every excuse
00:06:41.600
I possibly could to avoid exchange programs, avoid spring break, avoid family reunions. You know,
00:06:49.360
I, I missed out on a huge part of what could have been a very rich life because I was afraid to get
00:06:55.920
it on an airplane. So how long ago was this? So this is 15 years ago. So I was 35 and I had,
00:07:02.260
you know, and I had been, I had an amazing life up until then that I never really appreciated or had
00:07:09.980
gratitude for, or, or even took advantage of. I was second in the Olympic trials in rowing and I'll
00:07:16.220
never forget the day my coach called me and told me that I could race in the world cup and very few
00:07:22.560
Americans who had ever gotten to, to race the single skull, the one man boat in the world cup.
00:07:26.820
It should have been one of the happiest days of my life, Brett, but instead I had a panic attack
00:07:32.080
because it meant I had to get on a plane and go to Europe. And, and I was, I was just petrified
00:07:39.020
to actually go and do the world cup, even though it's, it's what I had been working,
00:07:44.100
you know, five years of full-time training to get the opportunity to, to do that. And so
00:07:50.900
fear just, just locked me in this prison or, or probably more appropriately because of our,
00:07:57.220
our caveman brain, it locked me away in, uh, in a cave.
00:08:01.960
So your whole life you grappled with fear. You had this basically a moment where you thought you
00:08:07.400
were going to die. You, you faced the ultimate fear. Obviously you're still here. So there was
00:08:16.180
But I mean, so like what changed, like how kind of big idea of your picture? I mean, let's do this.
00:08:21.640
I think you, you start off your book, fear is fuel talking about the story of the race for man
00:08:27.340
flight. And you use it as a metaphor to sort of explain your ideas of fear and courage. Now we all
00:08:32.480
know the Wright brothers. They, they're the winners of that race, Kitty Hawk, and they've gone down
00:08:37.060
in history. The other guy who was really close was this guy named Samuel Langley. Why don't we,
00:08:42.840
like what happened to Samuel, Samuel Langley? Why wasn't he the guy that, that beat, that won the
00:08:48.940
So the big thing and, and the, the point that I was hinting at as, as that as an introduction,
00:08:54.860
Brad is there's two ways we can make decisions in life. We either make decisions out of fear
00:09:00.380
or we make decisions out of opportunity. And at the end of the day, you can distill every decision
00:09:05.280
you've made down to that. And Langley was making these decisions out of fear. He was, he was
00:09:12.240
getting funding from the government. He had funding from Thomas Edison. He had, he had the,
00:09:17.100
you know, great marquee names. He was getting all the publicity. And so he started, he, he originally
00:09:23.340
got into this 15 years before the Wright brothers. And he was doing these amazing, these amazing
00:09:29.540
experiences. He was, he was getting condors, having a taxidermist stuff them. And he put them
00:09:35.080
on basically what came up to a giant record player that he spun around at 60 to 70 revolutions
00:09:41.780
a minute. So he could watch what happened to their wings as they flew. And, and he used that to
00:09:47.240
design his own wing. So he, I mean, the guy was brilliant and he should have been the first one to
00:09:53.340
man flight, but he got so overcome by fear-based decisions. One, because of funding, two, because of
00:10:00.080
publicity, three, because he was afraid to change. He had an unmanned aircraft that did incredibly
00:10:06.120
well. It was the longest flying. It flew for about a mile without a person on it. He didn't want to
00:10:10.740
change the design to put in, to, to make up for the weight and balance of adding a man to the aircraft.
00:10:18.280
So he ended up sticking with it and, and nearly killed the pilot two or three times who tried it.
00:10:24.480
So it boils down to the fact that we need to be able to recognize when our fear centers activated
00:10:31.780
and trying to influence our thinking. And that's obviously the definition of courage is, and you've
00:10:39.020
had a bunch of podcasts that have talked about this, that I've heard over the years. And when you can
00:10:43.700
act rationally and thoughtfully in the face of fear, that means you've got control over your fear
00:10:50.060
center, that area called the amygdala, which is running a piece of 2 million year old software that,
00:10:55.860
that we have to reprogram. Because if we don't reprogram it, then what happened to me for the
00:11:02.240
first 35 years of my life will happen to everyone else. All your decisions will be based on fear
00:11:07.400
instead of based on opportunity. So when you say, you know, the title of the book is Fear is Fuel,
00:11:12.400
we don't want to make decisions based in fear, but you make this case that your fears can actually
00:11:16.840
tell you something and actually be used to, to propel you in your goals. Like what does that look like?
00:11:22.780
I mean, big picture, we might get into some specifics here later on the show.
00:11:25.860
Sure. Two, two big pictures with that, Brett. Number one, that, that amygdala, that center of
00:11:32.160
our brain, the lizard brain, it's often called, that's running that 2 million year old piece of
00:11:36.680
software used to be an early warning system for danger. And we don't have the danger anymore of
00:11:43.080
something rustling in the leaves or moving in the grass. So we can reprogram that number one,
00:11:49.260
to be an early warning system for opportunity. So when we know that amygdala is activating,
00:11:55.240
we can say, Hey, there's a chance to get out of our comfort zone. There's a chance to,
00:11:58.940
to do something and grow. So number one, we can reprogram the fear center to be an opportunity
00:12:04.260
center. And then number two, when the fear center activates, when the amygdala activates,
00:12:11.140
we produce these physiological changes that we basically produce a fear cocktail. So it's,
00:12:17.980
it's DHEA, it's cortisol, it's adrenaline, all these things that make us literally make us stronger
00:12:23.920
and make us smarter. We get more oxygen to the brain, anything unnecessary like digestion stops.
00:12:31.140
And so when we're stronger and when we're smarter and we're thinking better, we can use that
00:12:37.040
opportunity to make better decisions. And so that's, that's how you can use fear as fuel.
00:12:43.140
All right. So to understand how we can turn, use fear and turn it into fuel, you have to be,
00:12:46.820
become fluent in fear. And you've talked a little bit about what goes on whenever we feel fearful,
00:12:50.880
but you also, in the book, you argue that all fears can be categorized basically into three
00:12:55.600
groups. What are those three groups? Yeah, you can distill everything down to
00:13:00.120
what I basically call the terror triangle. And if you imagine a triangle with three sides,
00:13:05.900
on one side is going to be physical fears, on the other side is going to be emotional fears,
00:13:11.200
and then at the bottom is instinctual fears. And if you really want to be a well-balanced,
00:13:17.720
complete, courageous person, then you've got to do the deep work on all three fronts.
00:13:23.600
And a lot of times I've worked with a lot of Navy SEALs and special operations forces. And one thing
00:13:29.720
you found is these guys are the absolute pinnacle of physical courage. So they can, you know, a halo,
00:13:37.440
a high altitude, low opening jump, 30,000 feet in the air, over a raging sea in the dead of the night,
00:13:44.120
their heartbeat isn't even up over a hundred beats per minute, and they're jumping out of the plane.
00:13:48.440
That's a physical courage that's unparalleled in the world. But so many of those guys have been
00:13:54.600
married two or three times. They come home from deployment and they can't face the identity crisis
00:14:00.740
of not being in the teams or not being a commander anymore, not having guys under them, or they don't
00:14:06.980
know how to tell their wife issues about parenting or about wanting to have kids. And so they have
00:14:13.140
emotional fears because they haven't worked on that component. And it's exactly the same as the
00:14:19.460
physical stuff. They train for years on end and the government puts millions of dollars into them
00:14:25.680
to make them amazing at the physical courage. You have to do the same thing with the emotional
00:14:31.880
and instinctual courage as well. You've got to do the work on all three because every fear we've got
00:14:37.300
from fear of flying to fear of speaking to fear of being judged comes down to some combination of
00:14:44.260
those three components. I think that's a good point because people often think if you're fearful in
00:14:49.860
one area, it means you're just sort of a frightful, anxious person. There are people who have general
00:14:53.100
anxiety about everything. But for the most part, we have fears in certain parts of our life,
00:14:58.820
but in other parts of our life, we're just fine. Fear is a very individualized thing.
00:15:03.280
But what's not individualized is the physiological reactions that we have to them and the fact that
00:15:10.640
if we let that 2 million-year-old software run our life, you got to understand that, Brett, our fear
00:15:17.660
center, the amygdala, that little almond-shaped gland at the base of our brain, that was designed so we
00:15:23.680
could survive and procreate. That's all it cared about was passing our genes on to the next generation.
00:15:29.140
It doesn't care about our happiness. It doesn't care about success. It doesn't care about fulfillment.
00:15:34.520
It doesn't care about going on vacation in Fiji. So it is an archaic element to run your life by,
00:15:44.420
this 2 million-year-old programming in our brain. So everybody should be doing the work to reprogram it
00:15:50.400
and to find courage. That's why I love the art of manliness. That's exactly for men. That's exactly
00:15:57.420
what you're promoting, what we used to do in terms of coming-of-age rights, in terms of testing
00:16:04.300
ourselves, in terms of learning courage while we still can. Because the courage center is much newer
00:16:10.800
and much more difficult to program than our fear center. And I'm happy to talk about that as well.
00:16:17.540
Yeah, let's talk about that. Walk us through that idea.
00:16:20.220
So the interesting thing, and for most people, this is really what f***s up your whole life,
00:16:26.180
is we have a subconscious database that is about the equivalent of 500 MacBook Pros. So it's a
00:16:34.380
tremendous amount of information. We make at least 80% of our decisions every single day
00:16:40.420
subconsciously without any conscious thought. And the way we do that is based on something
00:16:46.360
neuroscientists call prior beliefs or priors. So all the experiences we have are put into this
00:16:53.820
subconscious database so we can make these very rapid snap decisions. And the reason that we're
00:17:00.560
designed that way was for survival. We might have to decide very quickly between a friend or a foe.
00:17:05.900
But the part that's messed up, Brett, is all of this population is happening in the database for the
00:17:12.140
most part before we hit puberty. And in that instance, we have no control over it. We don't
00:17:18.200
choose where we're born. We don't choose the color of our skin. We don't choose the language we speak.
00:17:22.780
We don't choose the size of the house we grow up in. Yet all of those things go into making up
00:17:28.080
what we identify as subconsciously as our tribe, as something safe or something that we want to mate with.
00:17:35.180
So we're populating this. Now, when we come out of our mother at birth,
00:17:40.480
we have a nearly fully developed fear center, the amygdala. We come out mean, angry, and ready to
00:17:47.600
do anything to survive. In fact, we're most aggressive as human beings between the ages of
00:17:52.540
four and six years old. So this notion of, you know, you see in paintings and books and everything
00:17:58.600
else, these beautiful angelic children is way off. So the truth of the matter is we come out ready to
00:18:05.160
survive. And because of that, for the first 20 years of our life, our default is to that fear
00:18:13.040
center. So we have three choices basically in the first, you know, 15 to 20 years of our life, fight,
00:18:19.000
flight, or freeze. And that's because the amygdala responds to everything and that's all we've got.
00:18:24.820
So we default to a defense. And all of that information, that defaulting to the defense
00:18:31.900
is all going into our subconscious database that we're going to rely on for the rest of our life.
00:18:37.600
The prefrontal cortex is the newest part of the brain. And it's basically the adult supervision.
00:18:43.980
It's called the executive function. It's where we do rational thoughts, where we do strategic
00:18:48.240
planning. It's where we do relationship and those type of high-end intellectual processing.
00:18:54.820
That doesn't fully develop until we're in our early 20s. And that's where the courage center lies.
00:19:01.200
So the courage center is this thing called the SGACC, the subgenial anterior cingulate cortex.
00:19:07.620
And that is a newer part of our brain and it's much weaker. But the key thing is we can reprogram
00:19:14.460
that. So we can reprogram that part of our brain to access at the time when our fear center starts to
00:19:23.240
activate. And we have what's called an amygdala hijacking. And that's the whole point of the fear
00:19:28.840
is fuel process and learning how to be able to recognize when the fear center is activated and
00:19:34.740
then consciously activate the courage center. Because you can activate that courage center
00:19:39.320
by choice. It just takes a lot of work initially until you get those neurons firing together. And once
00:19:46.160
those neurons start to fire together repeatedly, they'll wire together and it gets easier and easier to
00:19:51.220
be courageous. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:19:56.420
And now back to the show. So fear can give you a performance boosting energy. It can be an early
00:20:01.800
warning system that points you to opportunities. But it sounds like in order to harness it for good,
00:20:07.160
the first step in turning fear into fuel is to recognize the signs that you're feeling fear.
00:20:12.160
So you can use your courage center to control it and I guess direct it.
00:20:15.520
So in the book, I refer to these things as our fear tells. And one of the reasons that the key
00:20:22.120
ask in the book or action item is to scare yourself every day. And the reason you want to scare yourself
00:20:28.980
and do something that you know is going to get you out of your comfort zone is so you start to recognize
00:20:34.680
what that feels like in your body. When you recognize what fear feels like in your body, what's an amygdala
00:20:40.680
activation? It's unique to each one of us, but it's always the same. So you might have a tight jaw,
00:20:46.460
you might get butterflies in your stomach, some people feel a lead balloon in their stomach,
00:20:50.780
people get a shaking leg, whatever it is. If you start to become aware of that and those feelings,
00:20:57.420
this is why with the group Young Presidents Organization, YPO, I've done about 25 chapters
00:21:03.640
around the world. So this is, you know, the world's top CEOs are in this organization.
00:21:08.440
And oftentimes, I just did one out in Los Angeles, and we rappelled off the top of the Marriott.
00:21:15.240
And what I do is I get them out over the edge of the building at the point when it's most scary,
00:21:20.660
and I make them stop and inventory what's going on in their body. And then their assignment is the
00:21:26.920
next week at work or with their partner to try and feel those same feelings again and recognize it.
00:21:33.980
Because then they know that they're about to make a decision based on fear.
00:21:37.760
So the first thing is figuring out when the amygdala is hijacking you, because it takes over
00:21:43.120
our brain. It takes over a part of our brain called the working memory. And it says you either
00:21:48.040
fight, you flee, or just freeze. And that's the response that it puts in there. And that's all
00:21:54.460
we can do and all we can think about. We can't think rationally unless we know we're having an
00:22:00.160
amygdala hijacking. Then we can stop and we can get control of ourselves. The easiest way to do
00:22:05.500
that is breathing. I teach something called a four by four.
00:22:08.420
So the four by four, that's breathing in for four seconds, holding your breath for four seconds,
00:22:12.600
and then breathing out for four seconds. And that's a technique you can use to get control of
00:22:17.220
that visceral fear response. And then to understand the next step in the fear is fuel process, you have
00:22:22.640
to understand something called free energy, which is something really interesting you talk about in
00:22:26.300
the book. Never heard of this concept before. What is free energy and where are you borrowing this idea
00:22:30.720
from? I think it's so first of all, it comes from literally one of the smartest men in the world.
00:22:36.340
And you know, this guy is most likely going to be one of the next people we hear who wins a Nobel
00:22:42.020
Prize. His name's Carl Friston. And he's at University College London. He does these Monday lunches with
00:22:49.860
Carl. And he's had literally everyone from the top executives at Google and Apple come over to people who
00:22:57.180
run Airbus and Boeing, because he's got a model that explains how the human brain works. So from a
00:23:05.320
perspective, a lot of people love him because they're basing new artificial intelligence systems.
00:23:10.900
So everything from Siri to Alexa is based on his notion of the brain. And basically what it boils down
00:23:17.940
to, it's super complex. So free energy, I try to explain as best I can in the book, is basically the
00:23:26.260
measurement of what happens when your prior beliefs. So your prior beliefs are all of that information,
00:23:32.080
all your past experiences stored in a database. And basically what he's saying is your brain's a
00:23:37.860
prediction engine. So we're trying to predict the outcome of every single moment. So if we walk into
00:23:44.740
a room and it's dark and we flip a light switch, our brain is going to predict that there's a 95% chance
00:23:51.460
the light will come on and a 5% chance the light won't come on. If it doesn't come on,
00:23:56.340
then our brain further predicts there's an 88% chance the bulbs burnt out and there's a 12% chance
00:24:03.520
that the circuit breaker's blown. And so we're doing all of this prediction based on our past experience.
00:24:09.900
Now, if all of a sudden we go to unscrew the light bulb and all these baby snakes come slithering
00:24:16.040
out and landing up on top of us, we would freak out because that's not in one of our prior beliefs.
00:24:23.700
And if something, if there's a level of uncertainty or surprise in your prediction, that produces free
00:24:30.680
energy. And free energy, basically you can think of as the catalyst for fear. So the more free energy,
00:24:37.380
the more fear you're going to feel. And so he's got this very extensive equation to measure uncertainty
00:24:43.980
and measure the free energy. One of the reasons I think it's so important to understand that
00:24:48.780
your prior beliefs and your expected outcomes, so the priors we talked about, all your past experiences,
00:24:55.980
the expected outcomes, what your diversity in thinking, what your past history has helped you gain
00:25:02.760
can allow you a range of outcomes. And the more prior beliefs you have, the more diverse your expected
00:25:12.000
outcomes, the greater your range of predictions and the less likely you are to have prior belief.
00:25:18.220
So what that means, particularly for parents, is raising kids, if you want to raise courageous kids
00:25:24.440
who are independent and who are confident, then you've got to give them a broad array of experiences
00:25:30.500
and get them to be questioning and curious and experiencing everything, because that's going to
00:25:37.000
increase their priors and that's going to increase their choice of expected outcomes. And so just
00:25:44.040
knowing those levers to pull helps you not only be more courageous yourself, but raise courageous kids
00:25:49.740
as well. All right. So free energy, basically unexpected things happening causes free energy,
00:25:54.040
which causes fear. But also it sounds like too, that you can have something wrong with your
00:25:59.880
calculations in your database, right? For you, like a kid who saw the plane crash, you see a plane crash,
00:26:04.480
and you think, well, I'm never getting on a plane because all planes will crash. Well, that's
00:26:09.400
erroneous thinking. You have to fix that thinking.
00:26:12.940
It's exactly right. And so when we form a memory, Brett, two things happen. First, we form an episodic
00:26:20.300
memory. And for me, that was in a 19, whatever it was, 1977, 1978, a Delta DC-9 flew into the seawall
00:26:29.920
at Logan Airport, 100 people on board died. It was a foggy day. It was a Wednesday. So that episodic
00:26:36.120
memory is just the facts. And that's stored in one part of our brain. At the same time, we create an
00:26:43.000
emotional memory. And that emotional memory is actually stored in the amygdala. And that for me
00:26:48.400
was anything that had to do with an airplane, was terror, was death, was dismemberment, a horrible
00:26:55.140
outcome, no matter what. So we can never change the episodic memory or the semantic memory, the facts.
00:27:02.420
We can change the emotional memory. And this is what everybody needs to know, because at any point
00:27:08.160
in your life, we've got something called neuroplasticity. We have the ability to change
00:27:12.440
our brain at any age. If you want to get more creative, you can. If you want to get more courageous,
00:27:18.340
you can. If you want to get more empathetic, you can, because our brain structure can change at any
00:27:24.540
age because of neuroplasticity. So what's really key and what a big part of my mission is, is helping
00:27:31.240
people realize that if they want to change their brain at any age, they can. And it's all about
00:27:37.020
changing the emotions associated with different events. And that does exactly what you're talking
00:27:42.700
about. So if I had one expected outcome of airplanes, that was death and that was dying.
00:27:49.580
Now, if I got on an airplane or if I sat and watched videos of an airplane after that crash,
00:27:56.300
that would very quickly change my expected outcomes. So that would change what I'd predict
00:28:02.520
outcome of a lot of things. And that's pretty much what happened. So after I got out of Johns Hopkins,
00:28:07.980
I made a commitment and it was more to my daughter who was a year old at the time. I said,
00:28:14.760
you know, the last thing I want to be as a father is have the memory my daughter has. If I die in a
00:28:20.620
year or a couple of years, I don't want her memory being a guy who is too much of a coward to get on a
00:28:25.920
plane and go to Disney. And so when I got out of Hopkins, I made a commitment. I was going to learn
00:28:32.180
how to fly. So I went to Leesburg airport and I started taking flying lessons.
00:28:36.760
And that in itself could have been an entire book, but I was doing exactly what you're talking
00:28:42.540
about. I had a fear and I was trying to change my catalog of expected outcomes of experiencing
00:28:49.880
that situation. And that seems like it's, that's the idea behind, I mean, a lot of therapists use
00:28:54.320
this with patients who have phobias or anxiety, like exposure therapy. You just expose yourself to
00:29:00.160
the fear over and over and over again so that you change that emotional memory. And that's one of
00:29:05.540
the things you encourage, one of the first things you encourage people to do. If they have a fear
00:29:09.640
based on like some sort of emotional memory, just start doing things that, doing that thing that
00:29:14.560
makes you afraid in a safe way so you can change that. That's exactly right. It's populating the
00:29:20.760
database. So what we do, Brett, when we, if we want to consciously change our life, if we want to
00:29:27.160
break these barriers, so if you have a, if you have a roadblock with the amount of wealth you're
00:29:32.060
making, if you have a roadblock with the quality of your relationship, if you have a roadblock with
00:29:37.040
your parenting journey for your kids, it's all because of what was put into your database,
00:29:43.880
into your subconscious mind when you were a kid. So everything you're doing falls back to that
00:29:49.520
because we weren't responsible for populating our, our subconscious. So if we want to change things,
00:29:56.320
we have to change our future past. So I know that sounds, it sounds a little bit like an acid trip,
00:30:04.480
but if you think about it, if we're making 80% of our decisions subconsciously, we're making them
00:30:10.720
based on what happened in the past. So if we want to change our life, then we have to, we have to start
00:30:17.080
experiencing things now in the way that we want to experience it very consciously and with a lot of
00:30:22.540
effort so that in the future, all of our past experiences are going to include these things
00:30:28.160
that we want. So the whole structure of changing your life, of making more wealth, of having better
00:30:34.100
relationships, of being happier, of living wherever you want to live, all has to do with how you populate
00:30:40.740
your past experiences, your prior beliefs, before you get to the point where you're making these key
00:30:46.580
decisions. And that's the thing that people have to understand is we have to start experiencing the
00:30:51.400
world the way we want to, even if it's manufactured, even if it's visualization, because your brain
00:30:57.400
can't tell the difference between a lived memory emotionally and a visualized memory emotionally.
00:31:04.740
You're, you're still firing the same parts of the brain. You're still using the same neurons and
00:31:08.840
synapses, but there's less sensory feedback. So the memory doesn't tend to be quite as strong
00:31:14.840
as if it happens in reality, unless you're really good at visualization. But that's, that's a key
00:31:20.060
component. You have to imagine your future. So you put it in your past memory.
00:31:25.800
So to turn fear into fuel, you're going to take control of that mental database instead of letting
00:31:29.320
it be filled with defaults. So you're going to intentionally populate it with new contexts.
00:31:33.620
You're going to intentionally expose yourself to a fear. So you have experiences and memories
00:31:38.600
where you did something that scared you, but nothing bad happens. And you're also going to visualize
00:31:43.840
doing things that scare you, but visualize good outcomes. And so from there, you're going to start
00:31:48.700
seeing more options. You're going to start seeing that there are opportunities in your fears.
00:31:53.080
And when you do, Brett, when you start living a life of courage, my first act of courage when I got
00:31:59.480
out of Hopkins was to go and get my private pilot's license. And the amazing, this is why I wrote the
00:32:07.200
book. So the first lesson, I mean, I peed probably four times before we even got out to the plane and I
00:32:13.320
was terrified. Everything was in super technicolor. You know, things were moving in slow motion because
00:32:18.640
I was taking in so much more information in fear. Like, you know, if you've ever been in a car
00:32:23.280
accident where things seem to move in slow motion, same thing. The second one was even worse because
00:32:28.680
we went out over the mountains and hit some turbulence and I actually pooped myself just a
00:32:35.060
little bit. And then the third or fourth lesson, something incredible happened. I absolutely fell in
00:32:42.100
love with flying. And it became, I got my private license, my instrument rating, my commercial
00:32:48.060
rating. I got a seaplane license. And now I compete in competitive aerobatics, something that just the
00:32:54.920
thought and talking about would have absolutely scared the hell out of me just 15 years ago. Now is
00:33:02.440
one of my life's, my source of greatest passion and fulfillment and happiness. And it was hidden away
00:33:09.780
from me for 35 years because of fear. And so that, that finding out that my dreams were on the other
00:33:18.500
side of fear made me think I've got to let other people know that just because they're afraid to do
00:33:24.320
something doesn't mean it's not going to end up being their passion. It doesn't mean it's not going
00:33:28.860
to end up making them super successful. So we're trying to turn fear into fuel. And one thing that
00:33:35.460
you can do the breathing, assessing, start reinterpreting things instead of saying like,
00:33:40.800
I got to be afraid of this. Now you're thinking this can be an opportunity. Another sort of tactic
00:33:45.840
you can use to help with that is self-talk. So I mean, what role does self-talk play in this turning
00:33:51.080
fear into fuel? You know, self-talk, I first really became aware of it as a phenomenon when I was at the
00:33:57.600
Olympic Training Center. And we were doing a lot of visualization and they were walking me through it.
00:34:03.240
It is the secret every elite athlete in the world knows. And what you're doing basically is you're
00:34:11.740
framing and some people call it priming. If you're, if you're talking to yourself beforehand, you're
00:34:16.920
either priming the outcome you want, or you're framing a situation to be optimal for what you're
00:34:23.360
trying to accomplish. And the easy way to do it is just be the narrator of your own movie. And one of the
00:34:30.620
things that's so easy to do is, you know, my kids have this, uh, this formula one game on the Xbox and
00:34:38.220
you have two positions. You can either be sitting behind the steering wheel and just see what's in
00:34:43.240
front of you and maybe the car on the side, or you can take the view from the helicopter and see the
00:34:49.420
entire track and all the cars and where the accidents are. And then if you can take that mindset and
00:34:56.720
remove yourself and become a commentator for what you're doing and congratulate yourself,
00:35:02.900
then that's exactly what your brain needs for its reward center to activate. So you've got to get
00:35:09.920
cues for the brain's reward center, which produces this stuff called dopamine. You've got to get cues
00:35:15.300
for that. So as you sit there and talk to yourself, when you do something really good, you, you know,
00:35:20.540
you're saying, Hey, Brett, yeah, good, good job, man. I'm, I'm really proud of you. You nailed that
00:35:24.840
one. Or when I'm on a rock climb and I make a great move, I'm like, Oh man, that was, I was awesome.
00:35:29.760
I can't believe I just pulled that off. And, and the idea of self-talk is you've got to be your own
00:35:35.120
coach. You've got to be the person who looking at the whole scene, narrating it in the outcome that
00:35:42.020
you want, because then your brain and your neurons start to shift to the outcome, to find the outcome
00:35:49.000
that you want. So it's almost like a neurological connecting the dots. When you, when you do self
00:35:54.860
talk, you start to create these dots to form this picture you want. And then your subconscious brain,
00:36:01.040
which again, remember is making 80% of our decisions and taking in 99% of the information
00:36:07.280
we take in from a sensory perspective, it's going to start looking for those dots to connect. So you
00:36:12.880
can literally, but by self-talk, you can start to lay the groundwork and put together the pieces of the
00:36:18.340
puzzle and then let your subconscious fill in the rest. And that's incredibly powerful.
00:36:23.460
So we've been talking about the idea of exposing ourselves to the things we fear in order to become
00:36:27.180
more courageous, but there's almost like a catch 22 here because to overcome a fear, you have to be
00:36:32.560
able to do the thing you're scared of. But if you're scared to do it, I mean, how do you will yourself to
00:36:36.600
take that first step? So the easiest way that I found from a, you know, at least in the neuroscience
00:36:43.140
research. And, and again, I took six years to interview three dozen of the world's top
00:36:49.000
neuroscientists. So all of this information is, is from them. You know, I'm just the guy who put it
00:36:54.780
together and translated it to plain English. So the research is fascinating. It's just, it's some of the
00:37:02.080
most dry, you know, boring, incomprehensible stuff, but it has these nuggets of, of incredible
00:37:07.860
information, obviously. One of the ones is your motivation. So there's a neuroscientist at
00:37:15.160
Georgetown university named Abigail Marsh and Abby did this incredible work on the motivation of mice.
00:37:21.580
And it turns out that the altruistic motivation, so doing something for someone you love.
00:37:29.060
And this, this holds perfectly true for me taking flying lessons because of my daughter, Shannon,
00:37:34.320
right? The, the only thing that got me to the airport was the thought of her. And if you talk to
00:37:40.780
athletes or firemen or first responders, you hear this time and time again, that they're not motivated
00:37:47.880
for personal glory. They're not motivated for money. They're motivated for the love of somebody else.
00:37:53.880
So the key thing, if you really want to change your life and you want to have lasting change,
00:37:58.920
all of these steps you can take in the book, all the neuroscience will help you get the change.
00:38:03.520
But just like you said, taking that first step, Brett is the toughest thing to do. So if you,
00:38:09.320
if you want to be a great dad, if you want to be a great partner, if you want to be a great son,
00:38:15.160
then what you've got to do is use that as your motivation for change. And I've seen this,
00:38:21.120
you know, with everything from alcoholics to special forces warriors, you know, people who
00:38:26.820
wanted to be a great dad and they knew they had to become a man to do it. And they use the idea that
00:38:32.680
their girlfriend was pregnant and now it was time for them to, to step up and do some difficult
00:38:38.360
things. And so when you have an altruistic motivation, you actually get these squirts of
00:38:44.660
almost enzymatic ecstasy. Like your body produces a substance very much like cocaine that when you do
00:38:52.240
something altruistically, you get more of that. So it may seem like you're doing good, but it's
00:38:57.260
actually good for you as well. And it encourages you to do more of that.
00:39:01.000
Well, let's, let's, let's, let's apply this stuff we've been talking about to a scenario.
00:39:04.460
And the one that came up to mind, let's say someone is thinking about quitting their job
00:39:09.080
because they've been moonlighting with something and it's big enough where they can make a living on
00:39:13.300
it, but they haven't been able to pull the trigger on quitting because it just freaks them out.
00:39:17.600
They just, they just, they're too scared. So like, how can we apply this, these things we've been
00:39:21.280
talking about to help them turn that fear into fuel? So that's a great question, Brett, because
00:39:26.920
particularly in this time of COVID, what they're dealing with is uncertainty. And when we're faced
00:39:34.780
with uncertainty, we're going to produce that free energy, right? Cause we don't know the outcome.
00:39:39.080
And more importantly, what happens with that free energy is we start to feel disempowered.
00:39:46.320
And when we're disempowered, we become paralyzed by analysis. So we, we fall into this analysis,
00:39:54.440
paralysis trap. And when you're looking at, at starting something new, you can't possibly know
00:40:01.080
the outcome. So the best thing you can do then is really three things. So if we're looking at doing
00:40:06.980
this, number one, what's your motivation? So if your motivation is, you know, is for your family,
00:40:13.080
is to take care of your mom and dad, is to be able to pay cash for your kids' schools,
00:40:18.420
whatever your motivation is, you got to write down your motivation. You got to understand it.
00:40:23.680
And you've got to use that as the catalyst to take the first step. The second thing you have to look
00:40:30.580
for is all your past successes. So go into your prior beliefs and look at everything you did really
00:40:37.680
well. And then the third point is the most counterintuitive and that is to contemplate
00:40:44.340
the absolute worst case scenario. So if you think about the worst thing that could possibly happen
00:40:50.760
and you think I'm going to spend my savings on this, I'm going to lose my house. And then another
00:40:56.160
round of COVID hits, my wife leaves me, my partner takes off with all our investment. And you look at
00:41:03.780
where you'd be then. You say, okay, well, you know, I've had this great career for 10 years in
00:41:08.700
the same industry. I'm really well-respected. There are five companies I can go work for.
00:41:13.900
Or, you know, I was a carpenter in college. I know how to swing a hammer. So I can always go
00:41:18.240
try and find some houses to work on. And you look at the worst case scenario, it takes away
00:41:24.500
a lot of the uncertainty. It might be terrible and it might be really bad. You might lose your,
00:41:29.620
you know, your, your BMW and, and your kids at private school, but it's not as bad as the
00:41:36.980
disempowerment that you feel from uncertainty. So from a neuroscience perspective, you're creating
00:41:43.640
an expected outcome at the very far range of what it's going to be. And your brain is going to form
00:41:50.380
basically a bell curve. And you know, that's way out at six sigma, one end of the bell curve.
00:41:55.760
And, but in the middle and the most likely area, you're seeing a good outcome. And then you start
00:42:02.360
to justify, then you start connecting those dots again, because you're thinking, well, you know,
00:42:07.280
I'm working by myself. So a $250,000 contract that my company wouldn't even put the resources
00:42:13.160
into responding to hell. If we win that, I've got my first year made. And then if we get a million
00:42:18.520
dollar contract after that, then we're, you know, we're hiring people and we're taking off. And all of a
00:42:23.680
sudden you start to think to yourself, you get back to that self-talk, you start to think, all right,
00:42:27.620
this wouldn't be that tough. And the downside, really the risk isn't really commensurate with
00:42:33.420
the reward. The reward is going to be much better because I'm, I'm really handled. I'm really capable
00:42:39.380
of handling all these challenges. So I think those three things, if you can, you know, if you can look
00:42:45.440
at those, it's a, it's a great way to build enough confidence. The other thing is, and I tell this
00:42:50.520
that I've done, said this at Harvard business school at UVA at MIT's business school, if anybody
00:42:55.940
out there wants to start a company, so I've started three tech companies, I've invested in 35 different
00:43:01.940
startups. And if anyone out there wants to start a company, here's what you do. Write your resignation
00:43:08.800
letter right now and date it six months from now, because there's never a good time to start a company
00:43:15.420
and there's never a bad time to start a company. So take the next six months and plan, get ready,
00:43:21.780
write your resignation letter, put a stamp on it, write your boss's address on it and make two copies.
00:43:29.540
You keep one and you give a copy to me because I'll mail it. So that's the, that's the ultimate
00:43:37.700
motivation and that's burning the ship. Right. Yeah. That's, you're making a commitment there.
00:43:41.600
Well, Patrick, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book
00:43:45.720
and your work? So the book Fear is Fuel and it's available anywhere, Amazon, Barnes and Noble,
00:43:52.900
all the usual places. And the audio version is coming out at the end of the year, which I'm
00:43:57.360
super excited about. We've got some great cast members in that. You can go to pjsweeney.com.
00:44:04.100
That's my website. Got the blog there, a lot of information on there. Facebook, Patrick Sweeney,
00:44:09.800
fear guru. Instagram is the fear guru and Twitter is PJ Sweeney. And if you go to pjsweeney.com,
00:44:18.540
there's a five minute fear test you can take and it rates you on those different elements. We were
00:44:24.880
talking about that combination of those three fears. You can take the test in about five minutes and
00:44:29.620
it'll give you a little insight into areas that you need to work on. So that's kind of a fun thing
00:44:35.120
that people should jump over to. Fantastic. Well, Patrick Sweeney, thanks for your time. It's been a
00:44:39.060
pleasure. Brett McKay, thank you so much. I'm a huge fan of Art of Manliness. I love what you guys
00:44:43.700
are doing and I hope the audience got some value out of this and I appreciate everyone taking the
00:44:48.120
time to listen in. Thank you so much. My guest today was Patrick Sweeney. He's the author of the
00:44:52.420
book Fear is Fuel. Check it out on amazon.com. You can also find out more information about his work
00:44:56.440
at his website, pjsweeney.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash fears fuel where you can find
00:45:02.040
links to resources. We're going to delve deeper into this topic.
00:45:11.280
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at artofmanliness.com
00:45:15.260
where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written over the years.
00:45:18.480
And if you'd like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium.
00:45:22.380
Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code manliness at checkout for a free month trial.
00:45:26.440
Once you're signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android iOS. You can start enjoying ad-free
00:45:30.060
episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one
00:45:33.200
minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Stitcher. It helps out a lot. And if you've
00:45:36.060
done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member
00:45:39.440
who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support.
00:45:42.480
Until next time, it's Brett McKay. Reminding you not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what