Improving Our “Signals” and “Beings”

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This is a book review of Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway: Dynamic Techniques for Turning Fear, Indecision, and Anger Into Power, Action, and Love.

Forget trying mumbo-jumbo, a psychological trick, or the latest dietary secret to “remove” your fears. Just do the thing you fear. If reading that statement scares you, you’re not alone.

There’s no wonder this book has sold over 2 million copies. With fear being so common in society, Susan Jeffers has provided a solution: a guide that will have you acting in the face of fear.

By taking action in spite of fear you will remove anxiety and come to believe in yourself. You will save yourself a lot of time and worry in failed attempts to deal with your fear. Ironically, you can make your fears disappear, or at least greatly diminish, once you “just do it”. Susan will have you controlling the “chatterbox” within you that limits your success and makes you worry.

Susan’s best-selling book is named after a class she taught on fear. The class quickly became a hit. Her students became able to act in the face of their fears; as a result, they built confidence.

As was common in her classes, the students thought their fears were weird and unique problems. The students in her classes felt as if they were different from the rest of society. Gradually, as students began to share there stories, each class would always warm-up and be filled with a sense of excitement.

We think fear is a psychological problem like there is some weird mental or emotional problem with us. It isn’t some weird problem. The fear we experience is more an educational problem than a psychological problem. An educational problem made clear to you in Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.

The main message in the book is that fear comes from an uncertainty in capability to handle the situation. Our fears come from having a disbelief in being able to handle whatever life gives us. Susan Jeffers says, “All you have to do to diminish your fear is to develop more trust in your ability to handle whatever comes your way.”

Though this may seem contradictory to the book’s main message, the book isn’t focused on removing the fear. As the title goes: Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. Many of your fears can go away, and the book helps you to remove these fears, but as Susan shares with her first truth about fear, “The fear will never go away as long as I continue to grow.” The 5 truths about fear are real eye-openers.

Everybody fears doing, or being, something new because of the uncertainty within unfamiliar situations. If you do not fear, you do not grow. Moreover, if everyone experiences fear in approaching something new in life, the problem itself is not fear. The real problem is how you hold fear.

Those paralyzed by fear feel helpless, indecisive, and angry; while those empowered by fear are powerful, action-oriented, and loving. The difference between the two categories of people is an educational problem solved by Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. Fear, indecision, and anger are transformed into power, action, and love.

As you may have picked up in this review, the book doesn’t just talk about fears. It is about becoming more decisive, powerful, action-oriented, and loving. Many of our personal problems relate to these issues which are often subtle fears out of our conscious awareness. For example, a wife stays in her miserable marriage not realizing that she fears the uncertain life that would be ahead of her if she moved out. She continues to remain in the marriage constantly blaming her husband for what occurs in her life. The wife has anger and indecisiveness originating from her fear. Chances are, so do you.

Chapters are devoted to understanding fear, personal responsibility, blame, self-talk, positiveness, and transformation to name a few. I think the chapter on wholeness is brilliant as having a whole life prevents us from fearing loss in certain areas of our life. Another great chapter was on no-lose decision making. The author will make you realize that no matter which choice you make in any decision, each choice will lead to its own unique and fulfilling rewards. What a great way to remove fear.

The book is well written and simple to read. It doesn’t have the psychological terminology that can throw people off from reading books on the human mind. Its simplicity combined with a concise 209 pages will have you quickly finishing the book. You can be feeling the fear and doing it anyway in no time. Securely grab your copy of Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway now from Amazon by clicking here.

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