You know it. I know it. You’ve most likely tried it. I know I did.
“Feel the fear and do it anyway”. It comes so neatly packed – courage in a sentence, just like an exquisite gift that amazes by it’s simplicity. You cannot help but feel guilty if you never tried, at least once, to follow this path.
Why does it seem to work for others so well? Does it even work as well as they claim it does?
Yes, it sounds bold, empowering, even heroic at times. But is it the whole story? And if it’s not, what else is worth exploring?
Willpower against fear: the dopamine rush and the crush
You decide. You push. You act. And you enjoy that unique surge of victory. You could almost swear you’ve become unstoppable overnight. You make the call, step on stage, have that difficult conversation, ask her out on a date. That rush is no joke and it’s biologically anchored: a burst of adrenaline, a good spike of dopamine, and the irreplaceable satisfaction ”I did it!” The fear seems to have vanished just like the fizzle when you open a new can of soda and you feel it: relief, satisfaction, anticipation.
But soon you find yourself dealing with the same fear again. And again, you find a way to push through. And, just when you thought you’ve got it, fear shows up again. Stress mounts and blocks appear out of nowhere. You find yourself avoiding, procrastinating, building up tension and frustration. You start questioning yourself and trying on new labels to adopt: weak, incapable, loser, this probably isn’t for me, you might even fancy quitting.
Before you decide on those labels, before you quit, you might want to know that there is a solid explanation for this madness. When your subconscious mind has coded something as “danger”, and you force yourself to “do it anyway”, your nervous system doesn’t suddenly agree with you. It just allows you to override the fear for a while.
But resistance will always show up either in the form of plain fear or in disguise: procrastination, fatigue, any different way of self-sabotage, even health challenges.
Because your nervous system’s job is simple, it’s called survival. And if it coded public speaking , vulnerability, confrontation or simply saying “no” as danger, it will keep redirecting your thoughts, energy and actions to protect you, no matter how much willpower you apply.
It’s like having old, outdated maps on your GPS while trying to navigate a new territory. To your frustration, it will keep rerouting you to the already known roads, even if you keep pushing the buttons or yelling in frustration.
Small steps: gradual re-wiring with the brakes on.
In other words: incremental exposure, slowly building tolerance, tiny habits. You take carefully chosen steps against the fear, and your brain slowly forms new circuits.
Start with a whisper instead of a loud song. Speak in front of a good friend first, then move into a small, curated group. Pots once. Take one customer-facing call. Say “no” in safe situation like “I don’t want a second serving, thank you.”
This approach works great, you find it in different forms of self-help, coaching and therapy. The brain starts to notice that the feared outcome doesn’t always occur. Synapses begin to weaken while new paths progressively strengthen.
Between the first approach and the gradual re-wiring? Always choose the slow, steady, carefully directed one.
But it has a catch. Sometimes the old fear doesn’t vanish. It’s more like you train it to go dormant, shrink, or stay in the background. Like driving 35 mph on a 45 mph road or the proverbial three steps forward, one step back. You move forward, there is progression, but the internal state in not necessarily a state of freedom.
Here is where you find many high-performers operate: they seem fearless, they have incredible achievements, but they experience a chronic undertone of tension, vigilance, drag, stress. Because they intrinsically know that they do very well in familiar environments or if they rehearsed their role, but in new, unexpected, especially high-stakes situations, the old code reasserts itself, most of the time with a surprising intensity.
It happens when the original code – the deep meaning attached – is not fully replaced.
The rare instant rewire – when fear collapses.
Every once in a while, you’ll meet someone who really does feel the fear, but takes the leap in spite of. And fear never returns.
It happens when you unconsciously re-coded the fear in an instant. A crisis that shook you to the core. A lightning-bolt insight. It’s the moment when meaning suddenly, unexpectedly, shifted. What you initially thought to be true gets flipped on it’s head.
Visibility goes from danger to liberation.
Saying “no” goes from fear of rejection into a firm story of self-respect.
Taking a risk goes from a threat or danger to the only option available
From the outside it looks like willpower. But it’s actually happening when the nervous system instantly reorganizes around a new map of meaning, new emotions are coded in patterns and create a new path forward.
Intentionally Re-coding Fear – the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) way.
Or how to re-code the pattern of fear without having to wait for a random, life-altering event.
Let’s start with the detail that changes the conversation: fear is not an inevitable obstacle that needs to be endured. It’s a learned pattern. It’s the subconscious attaching meaning to a memory, an expectation or even a symbol. Once you uncover the pattern and how it has been coded, you can rewrite it: shift the connection or the meaning, change the sequence, and suddenly, just like in an instant, rewire as I described above, your nervous system doesn’t perceive a certain situation as “threat”.
Fear is a three-part code your mind wrote in response to an experience.
- an internal representation
- a meaning attached to that interpretation
- a behavior response that the nervous system executes automatically ( you might have heard of it as the reaction based on a trigger)
Instead of willpower, rehashing the whole story of why, or slowly chipping the pattern away, NLP uses precise tools to re-code the pattern at it’s roots so the nervous system no longer categorizes certain situation under the category of “danger”.
Instead of constantly wrestling with fear or inching your way around it, NLP asks: ”How have you encoded this fear?” and the change isn’t about fight or coping. It’s about carefully transforming the code that writes fear over certain circumstances and the behavioral response automatically shifts from forced to effortless.
A much needed myth buster: NLP sometimes gets a bad reputation, Because it works, and like any other powerful tool in the wrong hands, it can be used for the wrong reasons, But in ethical practice, NLP is not mind tricks or manipulation done to you. It’s a process where you remain in charge, you decide the new code and how you want it to affect your future.
Instead of “feel the fear and do it anyway,” what if the invitation was:
“Don’t just feel the fear and do it anyway. Decode it. Re-pattern it. And then do it with ease.”
Shared with Love,
Gabriela
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Have questions, comments or suggestions? Please never hesitate to reach out. I always reply to messages gabriela@experiencetruewealth.com
