I often work with college students who fear presenting in class or fear putting their ideas out into the world. The thing they fear, of course, is judgment. One method to decrease this anxiety requires that we take a beat and we get curious, asking:

What is the worst that can happen?

For example, what’s the worst that can happen if you share your brand-new venture idea with the class? Once the students answers, we keep drilling down again after each answer until the student arrives at one of the following dire outcomes: (1) death, (2) being on fire, or (3) living alone in a trash can alone & unloved. Students always end up in one of these three places, catastrophizing the worst possible outcome. By the time they get to the direst (and highly unlikely) outcome, their anxiety has come down a bit, and then, we ask:

1. How likely is it that to actually happen? If you present your idea in class, how likely is that to lead to you living in a trash can alone and unloved?

2. What action will you take if that does happen?

3. What is the BEST thing that can happen? What’s the best outcome from presenting your idea to the class?

4. How likely is that to happen?

5. What action will you take if that does happen?

6. Knowing all that, what can you choose to do right now?

Fear has helped us survive and thrive for millennia. Fear is a good thing until it’s not. Sometimes it becomes too big and overwhelming, preventing us from putting ourselves and our ideas out into the world. We keep ourselves small because it feels safe.

Leaning into courageous curiosity

Leaning into courageous curiosity by asking the questions above can help us dare greatly. When our fears are holding us back or getting in our way, we need to go to battle with them. Thinking about the worst possible outcome helps us quiet that hair-trigger flight, fight, or freeze response.

We can go to battle with our fears by calling upon real facts and data, critically examining the fear stories running on a loop in our mind. Wherein lies the truth? Wherein lies a mishmash of theories and speculation? Armed with actual facts pulled from our lived experiences, we can plan for a brighter, braver future. We can also build our resilience as we design contingency plans to mitigate any problems we might encounter along the way. Doing so equips us to tackle things that seem big and scary. Doing so helps us take our first best step forward.

We can also reach out and talk to trusted friends and family who will help us wrestle with these fears. People who can make space for us without judgement.

Because we are the only species who can project ourselves into the future, we are able to imagine all sorts of future outcomes. It is really quite astounding when you think about our internal ability to time travel. We can travel to the past to the present and to the future all in our own mind.

But we must always remember we are being projected through time by our imagination. That means, what we imagine about the future may or may not come to pass. We have to remind ourselves that this imagined future is a story we are telling ourselves. It might be right. Or it might be very wrong.

We might launch a startup and be wildly successful even though what we imagined was trying, failing, having our entire lives ruined, becoming a laughingstock, and living out our days in a cardboard box (or trash can!) forsaken and unloved. When we let fear get away from us our fear stories grow and grow into foreboding tales of sorrow, destitution, and despair.