While we all know that gaining knowledge and skills is essential for success in business, some don’t use the tools available to them. Why? More often than not, it comes down to fear. And fear is the biggest barrier to becoming one of the world’s 60 million millionaires or 2,600 or so billionaires.

How minds work

A huge challenge in overcoming fear is not understanding how our brains work. Basically, the person you think of as ‘you’ is, in reality, just your conscious brain, which accounts for around 2-4% of your brain power. The other 96-98% of your brain power is owned by your subconscious mind, which operates beneath the surface of your awareness and is responsible for automatic processes, learned behaviours, and deeply ingrained patterns. It stores memories, emotions, habits, and beliefs that influence your actions without your direct knowledge. Unlike the conscious mind, the subconscious is not bound by logic or time; it processes emotional information quickly and is particularly attuned to survival-based instincts, like fear.

Your conscious and subconscious have different goals; conscious wants things like fame, fortune and success, and your subconscious simply wants you to stay alive – it has a powerful self-preservation instinct, it doesn’t like it when you draw attention to yourself, and it worries a lot about what others think of you.

To see this in action, try making a speech in front of an audience of a few hundred people. I guarantee you’ll be able to make the same speech solo in front of the bathroom mirror without a hitch. But as soon as you even think about taking to the stage where people can see and judge you, your subconscious will start throwing emotions at your conscious mind to try and stop it. The emotion it uses in this scenario is fear. You’ll feel nervous, sweaty, and possibly even nauseous. It’s an entirely unpleasant feeling. And even though your conscious mind knows that public speaking can’t kill you, it dislikes the fear feeling so much that it usually prefers to skip public speaking altogether just to avoid it. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that your subconscious isn’t very discerning about the volume of the fear signals it throws at you.

Expanding comfort zones

I used public speaking as an example because it’s a very common thing for the subconscious to worry about, but the same rule applies to anything that sits outside your comfort zone. In fact, by definition, stuff that your subconscious is okay with is inside your comfort zone, and stuff it’s worried about lies outside. Remember, if you feel fear or any other emotion, it’s your subconscious that’s causing it, so make sure you understand why.

One of the most accurate expressions I’ve encountered is, ‘Success lies outside your comfort zone’. To be successful, you invariably have to do different things, such as take risks or sell yourself and your ideas to people you don’t know. These are all things that your subconscious dislikes, and so it sends your conscious mind fear signals. As a result, many people never leave their comfort zones and so never find success. Successful people—the millionaires and billionaires—on the other hand, recognise that the feelings of fear are just their subconscious minds worrying about things that aren’t actually going to materialise and so appreciate that feeling fear is a good thing – it shows they’re operating outside of their comfort zone and are therefore making progress. The good news is that comfort zones expand based on experience. If your subconscious sees you survive public speaking often enough, it becomes more comfortable with it.

Taking control

If you’re not yet as successful as you want to be, something must be holding you back. Quite often, it’s simply a fear of putting your head above the parapet – or perhaps a touch of imposter syndrome that makes you think that you’re not cut out to be successful. Or a simple case of fearing that people will judge you as you take your first steps on a new path. Either way, it’s your subconscious that’s pulling the strings and preventing your conscious mind from taking action.

So, if you want to be successful, it’s time to give control back to your conscious brain. You won’t stop your unconscious from making you fearful, but now that you know it’s operating on a false premise, you’ve a fighting chance of feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian Child is a former corporate leader, co-founder of the leading property development training company propertyCEO and the author of ‘Your Own Personal Time Machine, a guide to getting your life back’.

www.propertyceo.co.uk