What Your Subconscious is Doing to Subvert Your Efforts to Overcome Your Fear

Sometimes people try to overcome their fear of public speaking through what I call the brute force method. They decide that as much as they are afraid of public speaking they are just going to force themselves to do it.

The brute force method will work as long as the mind believes that the immediate benefits outweigh the immediate costs. As I’ve mentioned before, every time we make a decision we go through a subconscious cost benefit analysis. The subconscious mind adds up all of the costs (or at least what it believes to be costs) and compares the answer to the sum of the benefits. If it feels that the benefits outweigh the costs then it will decide to go ahead. If it feels that the costs outweigh the benefits then it won’t.

Here’s the trick though – the subconscious is not a very good judge of costs and benefits. After all, how do you measure the cost of being publicly humiliated? Some people would rank this as being worse than death while others would just laugh it off and move on. Neither is correct in their evaluation because there is not a right answer – it’s all about how you interpret it.

I knew an individual who was in Toastmasters because his boss was pushing him to deal with his fear of presentations. There’s a benefit right there – stop the boss from nagging. This individual was forcing himself to speak every couple of months. He got quite a few speeches accomplished, but he was still terrified – almost to the point of being sick.

His subconscious was still convinced that the potential for humiliation was huge. No matter how much brute force he applied his subconscious pushed back with an equal amount of force.

At some point he realized that he didn’t actually need to speak in order to stop his boss from hassling him – he only needed to be a member of the club. He went into a mode were he kept talking about planning to speak (to appease his boss) but really had no plans to. He had found a way of receiving the benefit without having to endure the cost. Eventually he changed jobs and at that point he didn’t even need to be a member to stop the hassling – so he quit.

What can we take away from this? Well:

a) We need to make sure that our goals are our own, not someone else’s. There’s not much point in trying to accomplish something just to appease someone else. If you have to, look for the benefits that your goal will produce for you – not the other person. Don’t try to lose weight because your doctor keeps hassling you - do it because you want the improved quality of life. Don’t try to overcome your fear of public speaking because your boss wants you to – do it because you want the increased self confidence, respect, admiration or whatever other benefits come from it that are important to you. Visualize those benefits and then compare them to the costs.

b) Your subconscious is not logical. It has learned from you constantly telling it that you are afraid of public speaking – it’s now going to do it’s best to protect you from it. You have spent a lifetime training it that you are afraid of public speaking – it’s now time to teach it to realign the costs and the benefits.

Like most things, approaching the fear of public speaking through brute force (or determination and will power) can work for a short time – but our subconscious will do its best to pull us back into line. Instead of fighting with it, realign it by correcting it’s perception of the costs and benefits.

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Copyright © 2007 David Mudie All Rights Reserved

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