Fear and Doubt — part 2

Fear and Doubt — Michael de Groot

‘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

Vulnerability

When I look inside
It reveals its ugly head

Dare I face it
Dare I chase it

Will it confront me
Or will I confront it

Those thoughts are not my own
They come in from foreign places

They still belong with me
I still have to face them

Is there a message hidden
Something to uncover within

Reveal it to others
With excruciating pain

Never mind, it will go away
To rear it’s ugly head again

It’s time to step up
To believe in myself

To share with the world
My vulnerable self

Michael de Groot

Fortune

And fame, that’s what we’re supposed to be striving for correct? I was reminded about how it could turn out when I watched an interview on Recode’s YouTube channel, during their 2018 Code Conference, with Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg and colleague Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s CTO. You will know what they talked about, it’s been the most talked about technology internet event of 2018, followed closely by GDPR in the EU.

They likely have $$millions in the bank and maybe $$billions in stock options on top of that.

And they didn’t look happy, not in the slightest. They were being interviewed by the very tough interviewer Kara Swisher and being asked some very very tough questions, which actually they avoided mostly to answer completely.

If you wish to fill up 45 minutes of your time, you can watch it below.

[embed]https://youtu.be/i3QBy5T0qxw[/embed]

I have compassion for them, I truly have. Here you are working for the biggest Social Media company on the planet with billions of users and your greed and the greed of your shareholders has gotten the better of everyone involved with creating this monster of a company.

Can you truly be happy when your Uber drives you home after a long day of grilling by the media, accusing you of making too many mistakes, having to constantly apologise and promising that you’re going to do better? That must takes its toll on your human nature. Even when you might believe that it’s not you who is singularly responsible, you’re going to feel like you are, even when you are part of a team. After all you can’t let the side down and point the finger and say, it was his fault, why should I be taking the blame and all the media hassle?

Well, because you decided in a moment of madness that you wanted to work for the most famous social network in the world and you did actually sign up to take the good with the bad. The good has happened, your bank account is overflowing with more money then you know what to do with and now the bad is showing it’s ugly head.

There were a couple of times that both Sheryl and Mike solicited some sympathy from the interviewers and the audience. Mike suggested ‘I’m not trying to be one of the people that’s fired over all of this tonight’, brave thing to say actually with your boss sitting next to you. Sheryl asked if Kara had read her book. Her book is about the death of her husband and how she had to deal with that, it’s called Option B. They were looking for compassion but they didn’t get any. Maybe because we judge them for what they have and not for who they are as human beings?

Fortune is never what it lives up to be, fame is probably even worse. If you want adoration and feeling of wealth, love and respect for who you are and be satisfied with what you have right in this moment then look no further then yourself. If you can realise and see that you’re already happy when suffering is absent then you actually have it all. No fortune or fame will ever achieve that.

Happy trying!

Michael de Groot

Thoughts

‘Unhelpful thoughts that are not True’.

This was my response to a question posed inside a LinkedIn group asking: ‘What’s standing in the way between you and the person you most want to be?’

I’ve realised over my young years that unhelpful thoughts get me into all sorts of trouble with myself. Usually there’s nobody else involved it’s all my own doing. It stops me from moving forward, it stops me from staying in the moment, I overthink stuff and arrive at conclusions that are never reality.

Where does this come from?
How does this manifest?
How can I change it?

It’s as a consequence of years of self-programming that we do to ourselves, repeated thoughts that are not true become truths in your own reality. The more you think of something the more it gets hard-wired in our neural pathways. Tony Robbins has an acronym for it, NAC, Neuro-associative conditioning.

Buddha Statue Black — Michael de Groot

There is also another famous saying, which sums up what happens in your brain when you continuously think the same untruths.

Imagine each thought is a neuron, maybe a new one or likely an old one, because you’ve been thinking this stuff for a while. So when you think that thought a neuron fires with another neuron that then concludes it is the truth. Very likely it’s not, but you’ve just created that connection. Repeat the same thought over and over and those neurons fire over and over too.

‘Neurons that fire together wire together’.

Once wired together it’s very hard to get them apart. The same process that wired them together needs to commence to unwire them. So repeated thoughts of the opposite of the untruth are needed in order to lose the wired connection and create a new neural pathway instead. For example, the untruth of ‘I won’t amount to anything’ could be replaced with ‘I am perfect as I am in this very moment’. Repeat that thought over and over and eventually the other one will one day stop appearing in your thoughts. It sounds great in theory doesn’t it? Doing it is a much harder thing.

Happy thinking!

Michael de Groot

Yours

The only work we ever need to do on this planet is the work on ourselves. However most of us find it easier to focus on others and see what’s wrong with them. We judge them, we get angry with them, we’re jealous of them and sometimes we just want to be like them. We don’t always see the best in others do we?

What if, what you see in others, you realised those traits were merely a reflection of you? Your own failings expressed in others, of course you won’t like what you see. It’s tough to see yourself in others. Might it be that you’re not perfect either? That you have some failings too? Some stuff you need to work on, get better at, be more forgiving of yourself and others, develop better habits, have more compassion?

This is tougher then we realise. Yes we need to start from a place that says we’re not broken and if we start from that place then the others aren’t broken either. If you can start from that place everything else becomes just easier. Because if you stop spending time focussing on others and just on yourself, what else can you learn about you, about your habits, your decisions, your micro-decisions, your thoughts and your addictions?

If we could just work on ourselves and become the best we can be for ourselves, not for anyone else, just for ourselves then we could actually become a more compassionate individual seeing the best in everyone around us, including some of the worst people walking the planet. We all have a dark side, it may not have been expressed in hideous crimes or actions but it will have been expressed in some way towards someone, maybe even someone you love.

Time to go within, time to spend time looking in the mirror before looking at others.

Happy yours!

Michael de Groot

Doubt

Doubt is by far our biggest thought process. We doubt ourselves the most. Will we make it, will we make enough money, will we be loved, will we get the right work? All this doubting gets us further away from our dreams and wishes. We literally attract our doubts.

You must have heard the saying ‘What you focus on grows’, so our focus on our doubts will literally grow out of nowhere. Instead of believing our doubts, what if we believed that the doubts are just lies and fears.

Through listening to a number of podcasts, meditations and examples, I have become to realise that almost anything can be solved by just being curious.

Photo by Niklas Hamann on Unsplash

When a thought comes up and you are lucky to notice it, become curious about it. When you pick up that drink or food, before you consume it, become curious about it. Become more aware about your surroundings and the addictions that are manifesting through you. Curiosity is self-enquiry and self-enquiry allows you to question everything about your own behaviour and actions.

It takes some practise at the start, but once you start you will not be able to stop. Become addicted to curiosity and self-enquiry to rid yourself of behaviours and habits that are not serving you including the habit of self-doubt.

Happy enquiring!

Michael de Groot

Fear

All of our lives are rooted in fear at some level. We wouldn’t be so obsessed and addicted if we weren’t in fear so much.

Fear is a good thing isn’t? We often don’t think it is but actually if we didn’t have fear we would be jumping of a bridge believing we can fly and that wouldn’t get us very far.

As humans we have an operating system already programmed to keep us alive at every single step of the way. If we didn’t have fear as part of that operating system we’d be at death’s door much more often.

But not all fears are equal.

Photo by tertia van rensburg on Unsplash

Sure we have an operating system to keep us alive but we also continue to program that operating system with our thoughts and feelings as soon as we arrive here on planet earth. We also get help from the lovely folks around us. Bless them!

I believe we focus a disproportionate amount of time on just 7 major fears that govern our actions, our emotions and keep our operating system from releasing a new and better version. It’s like being stuck with the first IBM computer and never upgrading the computer chips.

She here they are, fear of;

1. Getting Hurt
2. Not being loved
3. Being abandoned
4. Not being successful
5. What they will think
6. Not having enough money
7. Getting sick

Can you relate to any of those, maybe you can think of a brand new category I missed?

Happy fearing!

Michael de Groot

Injustice

It’s in the eye of the beholder right?

Whether it’s religion, politics, money or status in society we all have a perception of the injustice that’s bestowed upon us.

We rarely think of the injustice that’s been bestowed on others, nations or communities.

We have a saying at home;
‘If you believe that others are thinking about you, think again’.

We do have to only think of ourselves, nobody will spend the time thinking about us. Even if we perform charity work we are meeting a need inside of ourselves. It’s called survival. We do things to survive the hardships we experience, whether physical or emotional, we experience them as some sort of injustice by society.

“Black and white photograph of the back view of street protesters in a rally in Washington.” by Jerry Kiesewetter on Unsplash

And they say we are the creators of our own reality, we create our reality one thought at a time.

If that’s the case why do we believe there’s an injustice being bestowed upon us? It could be your family, your employer or the state and I guarantee you that you believe the injustices that exist around you are directed at you.

That very belief, that directed thinking is what holds us back.

Happy thinking!

Michael de Groot