‘Fear and Doubt’ are potentially the two words that sum up all suffering by humans on this planet. Although they are two different words, they are in fact the same for me. Doubt indeed can create fear and fear causes doubt. But together they make an interesting couple or are they two different sides of the same coin?

Just think about anything that you have ever encountered in your current life that has been a challenge for you, whether in business, your personal life, in relationships and you will come to realise that ‘Fear and Doubt’ will have featured heavily.

‘Fear and Doubt is used by governments to keep control over their citizens and stop them from creating revolutions against those governments in charge, no matter how badly they are performing. Just consider the dictatorships that exist and have existed around the world through the ages. They have all used ‘Fear and Doubt’ to exert control over their citizens. Only when the people of nations decide to over come the fear and doubt that has been bestowed upon them, are they able to create meaningful change, which has happened for example during the Arab Spring some years ago.

Apart from governments, teachers use the same techniques to exert control over their students to prevent any bad behaviour in school, usually very unsuccessfully.

In all areas of society, the workplace, society, medicine, homelessness, relationships, the already mentioned governments and many other areas, ‘Fear and Doubt’ is used to control us and more importantly even our own attention on these means we exert control over ourselves.

It is all part of what Tony Robbins calls, conditioning. In fact he calls it ‘Neuro Associative Conditioning’ or NAC.

We condition ourselves and we have been conditioned to stay in ‘Fear and Doubt’.

This all adds up to what the Buddhists call ‘suffering’. The human condition and our biggest task on this planet, how to overcome suffering and find happiness.

So I developed this ‘Happiness Formula’, which if you have read the above will make perfect sense, I hope.

Happiness does not equal suffering and suffering is a function of ‘Fear and Doubt’. See image below. 👇

Now knowing that this is true, and you will have to put it to the test to prove it to yourself, is one thing but to reverse it is another. Those years of conditioning are tough to undo.

But have no fear I am giving you something to ponder. My wife, Clair and I were mulling this over one day and we jointly arrived at a beautiful statement to counter ‘Fear and Doubt’.

‘Courage and Clarity’.

So the real answer to happiness is ‘Courage and Clarity’.

Hope you like it, now go and test it out and I would love to hear how you get on.

Be happy!

Michael de Groot