Tool 78 · Develop yourself
Some fear is accurate. Most of it is unexamined.
A guided 14 to 18 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
Some fear is accurate. Say which part.
Price the avoidance, not the event.
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
Most people can tell you they're afraid of failing. Very few can tell you what failing would actually look like on a Tuesday.
The general fear is the problem. It can't be tested, so it just sits there making decisions for you.
I look at what somebody doesn't do. That's the real record.
And then I ask what they'd do the day after the thing they dread. Usually the answer is ordinary, and the fear loses some of its authority.
What you'll get
01
The fear
02
The cost
03
The recovery
04
The test
+
Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
What now?
01 · Save it
The fear, named.
02 · Test it
Do the smallest version of the thing you avoid.
What I would do
Write the fear in one specific sentence.
List what you do not do because of it.
Price that list honestly.
Work out the recovery, not just the event.
Test the smallest version of the thing you avoid.
Test it
What do you avoid because of it?
How likely is it, honestly?
What would you do the next day?
The alternative
The usual reading is that fear should be pushed through. Sometimes the fear is reading the situation correctly and the sensible move is to heed it. The reverse also happens. Somebody prices the disaster carefully and never once considers what they would do the next morning, and the recovery turns out to be ordinary.
Think about this
Take this to Ask Mark
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →What helped you?
If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.
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Finished the exercise?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Further thinking
The Happiness Trap
Russ Harris
Steven Hayes on psychological flexibility
Dan Harris with Steven C. Hayes
Stress, Appraisal, and Coping
Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman
Book
Russ Harris
The plainest introduction to acceptance and commitment therapy, where values are treated as directions you keep moving in rather than rules you either obey or break. It also makes the case that rigid rule-following, even about admirable things, is one of the more reliable ways to make yourself miserable.
Podcast
Dan Harris with Steven C. Hayes
Hayes founded the approach behind the previous entry, and the conversation is more useful than the books because he is being pushed on it. The part worth your time is where he separates a value you are moving towards from a rule you are obeying, and explains why holding the second one too tightly damages the first.
Book
Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman
The origin of the distinction between tackling a problem and managing the response to it. The argument is that the right choice depends on whether the situation can actually be changed, which is exactly the judgement most people skip.
Article
Albert Bandura
The paper that broke confidence into pieces. Bandura's argument is that belief in your capability is built for a specific domain, mostly out of things you have already done, and that it transfers far less than people assume. That is why a person can chair a board and dread a party without either being a contradiction. It also names the strongest source of confidence, which is not encouragement but mastery experience.
Book
Annie Duke
The counterweight to almost everything else written about avoidance. Duke argues that we are far better at persisting than at stopping, and that most of the cost of a bad commitment is paid after the point where we already knew. If the thing you keep postponing is something you have quietly decided against, this is the book that gives you permission to say so and a way to test whether you are right.