Why Fear Feels Bigger Than Your Dreams (+ 4 NLP Techniques to Change It) [ep. #287]
There is a decision you keep 'almost' making, and the NLP techniques I'm sharing today are built for that exact moment of 'almost'. In the moment, the fear feels enormous: loud, real, sitting heavy on your chest. The payoff, the version of you on the other side, you can see her, but you can't feel her the way you feel the fear.
That gap is the whole problem, and there's a neurological reason your brain makes the fear register roughly twice as painful as the win feels good. So today I'm going into the survival wiring behind overcoming fear in business, the negative bias, and the four NLP techniques that flip it: future pacing, emotional rehearsal, anchoring and the visualisation techniques that make the payoff feel as real as the dread.
The woman on the other side of that decision is already there, you just can't feel her yet. Let's start closing the gap.
Topics covered on NLP Techniques To Make Dreams Bigger Than Fear:
Why does the fear always feel bigger than the payoff?
What does 50,000 years of survival wiring have to do with the fear you feel in business?
How do you get sensory specific with the payoff, and bring it into the same high definition your fear already plays in?
Which NLP techniques can you use when the fear shows up?
Connect with Rebecca Haydon:
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Quote:
"Your subconscious cannot distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a real one. The same neural pathways fire." - Rebecca Haydon
Transcription:
Our AI tried its best, but expect a few quirky typos in the transcript. Embrace the imperfections and enjoy the read!
[00:00:00] There is a decision that you keep almost making, a thing that you keep almost doing, a behaviour that you know will change the freaking game if you were to do it consistently enough. And I know you have probably got something in your mind as an idea, just from clicking on this podcast episode on NLP techniques. You do not even have to think about it, right?
Why The Fear Feels Bigger Than The Payoff
[00:00:23] It has just come to you, hasn't it? So we know that you have journaled on it. We know that you have probably voice noted your business bestie about it at 10 PM on a Tuesday night. You have been right there, right at the edge of it, probably more times than we can count on your hands. And every single time, something is pulling you back.
[00:00:47] And that something in the moment, the thing that pulls you back, it feels fucking enormous in that moment, doesn't it? It feels very loud. It feels really real. It feels like it is sitting heavy on your chest. But somewhere within you, usually at the moment that you are trying to do the thing, it almost feels out of reach, very, very quiet.
[00:01:14] Somewhere within you is the reason you want to do that scary thing, the payoff. The version of you on the other side of that goal being met, that decision being made, that thing being done. You can see her, and you know she is there, and you know you can fucking do it. But you cannot feel her. You cannot feel the payoff the way that you feel the fear right now when you are in it.
[00:01:50] And that gap between how real the fear feels and how real the payoff feels is what we are going to close in today's podcast episode. Oh yes, because today I am going to show you exactly why that gap exists, what is creating it, and what it actually takes to make the payoff of the thing that feels scary right now feel so real and present and felt and exciting.
[00:02:24] It is so much "Oh my God, yes, of course I would do this scary thing to get that payoff" that the fear simply does not have the same authority in this conversation anymore. Are you fucking ready? Let's go. Welcome to The Subconscious Expert. I am Bec, if you do not know, and if you are a regular here, you know that this is the show where we get underneath what is actually going on in your business, the patterns, the programming.
[00:02:51] And today, oh, I am very excited. Like I said, I want this conversation around overcoming fear in business, because business is a very scary place to be, right? We talk about doing it scared. We talk about courage. We talk about pushing through, and all of that is very true, especially in business, and all of that matters a lot.
Your Fear Lives In The Present And Your Payoff Lives In The Future
[00:03:20] But I want to have a look from a subconscious, neurological angle as to why your fear right now, in that moment of you doing the big thing, feels bigger than the payoff. And what I mean by the payoff is the feeling you would feel if you were to get there, if you were to do it, if the thing that you wanted was achieved for you.
[00:03:48] I think until you understand that, we are literally trying to solve a subconscious program with motivation, with conscious pep talks. And look, I love a fucking pep talk. You know me. I get on my Ted Talk, I really do. But a pep talk will only get you so far, and so I do not want this podcast to just be a pep talk either.
[00:04:12] So let's have a look at the fear itself. Fear in the moment of you doing something outside your comfort zone feels bigger than the payoff for one very specific reason. And I am saying fear here, but whatever emotion feels present for you when you are trying to do the thing and there is something holding you back is usually the fear.
[00:04:42] Fear of many, many things. But that fear that you are feeling, it is in the present tense. You are feeling it in the now. And the payoff of you doing it, that feeling that you believe you are going to get if you were to do it, that is currently living in the future tense. So if you think about how the fear shows up for you right now, the first thing that happens is that it says hello in your body.
[00:05:14] It arrives in your body. So you might have a tightening in your chest, or you might have that sick feeling, or a rush of so much redness in your face, or sweating, like the heat in your face when you are trying to put your prices up. That is your body experiencing a threat as literal presence, like it is happening in the present.
[00:05:42] It is happening right now. It is happening at this moment. It is happening in your body. And the payoff, the thing that you believe you are going to get when you achieve the goal that you want, where does that live? It lives right now in your imagination. It lives in a future you, a future you that you can think about but not touch.
[00:06:14] And the business that looks the way that you want it to, and the income that would change everything in your life, and the version of you who does back herself, and does believe in herself, and does do all of the things, she right now is living in your imagination. You know it is there, and you can see it, and sometimes you are able to connect to the feeling of it, but not as strongly as the fear currently feels.
[00:06:45] So your subconscious runs a lot on feeling. Logic is not part of the subconscious vocabulary. It is responding to what you actually experience, and right now the fear that you are going through is an experience, and this payoff that you are going to get, that you think about and dream about, that is a concept.
[00:07:18] So if we have a look at it straight off the bat, of course the fear wins every single time. Of course it does, until we actually change that. And what we want to do, what we are going to talk about, is really collapsing that distance. I want you to really hone in on making the payoff feel as felt and as urgent and as present as the fear is currently feeling.
[00:07:49] That is the work we are going to do today. So the first thing that I wanted to tell you, even though we are now 7 minutes 55 in, is negative bias. You might have heard this before, but I am going to go into it quite deeply, because I think it will help you understand why the fear feels so strong.
Negative Bias Makes Your Brain Weigh Fear TWICE As Heavy
[00:08:09] Your brain has a negative bias. And what I mean by negative bias is that your brain does not treat positive and negative experiences equally. In fact, not even fucking close. It is wired, your brain is neurologically wired, to pay more attention to threats, to remember negative experiences far more vividly and strongly.
[00:08:47] And it weighs the potential loss that you are going to, quote unquote, "have" far heavier than any potential gain you will get. You can look at that weighing scale and you can see the potential loss versus what you are going to gain if you actually were to do this thing, and consciously you are like, "Motherfucker, what I would gain outweighs all of it, money, freedom, happiness, joy, success", whatever you are working towards right now.
[00:09:20] That feels way bigger consciously. But subconsciously they are not equal. So when we look at the research into how humans process risk and reward, it consistently shows that potential loss, and that is loss of whatever your potential loss is right now, registers roughly, they say, twice as painful as an equivalent gain feels good.
[00:10:07] Twice. Twice as painful. So if we put that into your business, the fear of a launch not working feels approximately twice as powerful as the excitement of it working. The fear of losing a client feels twice as heavy as the joy that you would get signing one. And I can imagine you are going, "Yes, that is true. That is true."
[00:10:38] The fear of being judged feels twice as loud as the pride and excitement and confidence of being seen. So already, mathematically and neurologically, I never thought I would say those two words in a sentence, because if you asked me that in secondary school both maths and science were my weakest point, we are fighting uphill.
[00:11:10] So people might tell you that you are dramatic. People might tell you that you are being dramatic, and that you are overthinking, and that you do not want it enough. But you have a brain, we all have a brain, not just you. We all have a brain that is quite literally built to make the fear feel bigger, and it has always been that way.
Why Does It Feel So Hard To Overcome Fear In Your Business
[00:11:35] So if we cast our mind back, way, way back, many centuries ago, not long after the Bible began. Any Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat fans out there? That is one for you. But way, way back to when human survival was genuinely on the line every single day, and I know I speak about this a lot on the podcast, our brain back then needed a very specific operating system to keep you alive. It needed to be so tuned into threat, like a rustle in the bush. We needed to be tuned in so much to that rustle because that was the predator. We needed to remember danger so vividly, so viscerally in your body, that you would never fucking make that mistake twice.
[00:12:32] Because the cost of getting that wrong, the cost of that calculation going wrong, was death. If your brain treated a threat as safe, and it was a predator in the bush, it was game over. So over tens of thousands of years, the brains that survived were the brains that were wired towards danger, because those were the humans that made it through, the ones that were not eaten by the lion.
[00:13:04] So obviously we have inherited that. That is the operating system that we are running. And now we live in a world where there are no lions in a bush, but we still keep behaving like it. And I honestly think it is genuinely wild that the same system that was designed to save you from a tiger in a bush is now firing when you go to post a reel.
The Tiger In The Bush Is Now Your Sales Page
[00:13:32] When we actually look at it from a bird's eye view, it is pretty fucking wild. I am sorry I am swearing so much today. But it is crazy. When you go to pitch yourself for that podcast that you have been dreaming about being on, you are acting like the tiger is in the bush. I want you to see that in your brain.
[00:13:55] Your brain is scanning for it. It is scanning for the lion, and it is finding the sales page. And it is responding to both with exactly the same feelings. So the reframe here, the reason why I am telling you this in the first place, is that the fear right now being bigger than the payoff is ancient. It is neuroscience.
[00:14:21] It is literally neuroscience. So when we look at that, what if it means that the solution stops you fighting the fear all the time? Because, as magical as I am with your subconscious, we cannot willpower our way past 50,000 years of neurological wiring.
[00:14:49] And I can do a good job, but it is deep in there. 50,000 years deep. So what we can have a look at now, the solution to [00:15:00] this, is to change what the brain is weighing the fear against. To make the payoff, what you want and how you want it, feel so real and so present and so felt that your brain actually has something to weigh it against.
Give Your Subconscious Something To Weigh The Fear Against
[00:15:21] And this is really, really powerful, because we want to make the payoff, and like I said, when I say payoff, that is what you are going to get on the other side of the scary thing. So what you are going to get on the other side of you being on that podcast. It might be thousands of new audience members.
[00:15:42] Followers is what I meant then. But we need to make the payoff so emotionally real. So emotionally real. And this is so powerful to pair with the subconscious digging work that you are doing. I always do this in tandem with any clients that work in my world. Yes, we can dig into the past and understand where you took things on and why, and rewire that, but we also want to be future pacing and really working with who you are becoming.
[00:16:19] That is my favourite part. This is the part where NLP, which stands for neurolinguistic programming, alongside hypnotherapy and subconscious work, completely changes the game. And I am going to be very practical with you today and give you some NLP techniques to do, so this is some of the stuff that you can actually use. So a lot of the time, and like I said, we know that the subconscious runs very much on feeling.
[00:16:44] So we know that right now, for you, the payoff feels more distant than the fear feels in the present. So the work for you now is bringing the payoff into the present tense, and we want to make it as specific and as vivid and as emotionally real, and I mean so real and felt in your body, as the fear currently happening.
Make The Payoff Feel Real With Visualisation Techniques
[00:17:19] So how do we do that? The first thing that I want you to do is to know that the subconscious wants specifics. So if the payoff for you is "Well, I want to do that because I want more success", your subconscious is like, "Well great, but what the fuck does that mean?" "I want to grow my business." Okay, that is a concept.
[00:17:45] The subconscious is speaking in sensory specific, emotionally charged experiences. So it needs detail, it needs colour if there is any, it needs sound and shape and texture. It needs to know what it feels like in your body. So if the emotional payoff is more money in the bank account, "I want to make more money", no.
[00:18:17] I want to know what it actually feels like to open your bank account on a Tuesday morning and see a number that makes you go, "Ah, well that is glorious." What does your body do at that moment? I have just had full goosebumps even from doing that sigh. What is the first thing you think? Do you sit there?
[00:18:46] Does your whole body soften? What is the texture of that moment? And I really want you to get sensory specific here. Tap into it. We call it the submodalities in NLP. Tap into what you are seeing, what you are feeling, what you are hearing, what you are thinking, what you are tasting, what you are smelling.
[00:19:07] Get into all of them. Get into all of it. And I really want you to start to paint the picture. Yes, if you are more visual, use that. It does not have to be visual, it can be completely felt. Now, what I want you to notice as you are doing these visualisation techniques is that the fear you feel is in high definition. If we are looking at the film, it is in HD.
[00:19:32] You can see the bank account does not look great. You can feel the dread of checking the bank account. You can almost hear the fucking silence of it. The fear has detail, the fear has texture, the fear has specifics, and you play it every time. Now, if your payoff is a complete blur, your first job is to bring the screen or the feeling or the sound or the taste or the texture, whatever you are playing with, into the same resolution as the fear.
[00:20:06] So I want you to get specific, I want you to get sensory. Get it out of your head and into your body. Now, if you do want the specifics around this, what I want you to do is go to the show notes. There is going to be a link specifically for the specifics. Click on that and you will be able to download the questions that go with this as well.
[00:20:33] So even just for step number 1, if you want to do this, head to the links in the show notes and you will be able to download the document that has all of these in, that I will help and guide you with to get more into the specifics. Once you have done that, what we then move into is future pacing.
How To Use Future Pacing To Make Your Future Feel Familiar
Now, future pacing is an NLP technique, and honestly one of my absolute favourite tools that I use with clients. I use it all day, every day. And what it does is exactly what it says on the tin. It takes you to your future and it lets you experience it as if it is already real.
[00:21:29] Now, the reason this works, and you have probably heard this before, is, yes, okay, it is a lovely visualisation exercise, and it is woo, we are having a nice time. But it is really working with how your brain processes experience. So your brain, your subconscious, cannot distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a real one. You can connect to the same feeling of an experience that you have had without being there. The same neural pathways fire.
[00:21:53] You will have the same emotional responses. If I was to ask you about a time where you were really embarrassed, a specific time, you would be able to go back into your imagination and boom, you would be in the feelings 100%. So it does not realise that we are no longer in that place, which is great.
[00:22:13] Which means the payoff that you are going to get, and the payoff that you want to have, if you have imagined it in enough detail, with enough presence, with enough sensory richness, your subconscious starts to file that as evidence of what is possible. It actually starts to go, "Wow, we have been here before. This feels lovely. This feels safe. This feels amazing." That is going to change everything.
[00:22:36] These NLP techniques are really powerful when you are speaking. If you are doing any speaking work and you are speaking in front of an audience, there are a hell of a lot of techniques that you can use, and this is one of them, where you show your subconscious how it is going to be, where you are going to go, what it is going to look like, how it is going to feel, that you have already done it again and again and again in your mind, so that your subconscious is like, "Well, we have done this. It is familiar."
[00:23:07] And guess what your subconscious does not argue with? Familiar. We know what the subconscious does with familiar things. It moves towards them. So future pacing is just so powerful. So once you have got all of the details from step number 1, what I want you to do, and this is where you can come into the membership, we have got a lot of future pacing in the membership.
[00:23:38] I will leave the link below in the show notes. You can do this by yourself, where you really go, "Where are you? What are you doing? Who is around you? What can you hear?" Actually, what can you hear? What does your body feel like? What are you not carrying anymore? What does it feel like to be her? And you stay there.
Why One Visualisation Is Not Enough But Emotional Rehearsal Is
[00:24:00] You really embody it. This is where embodiment comes from. You let your whole body system experience it as real, and the more real it becomes in your imagination, the more familiar it becomes to your subconscious. And like I said, familiar equals safe, and familiar is what the subconscious moves towards.
[00:24:21] This is why a lot of my clients, when they get what they want, are usually not like, "Oh my God, we are here. Wow, what a big change." They are like, "Wow, this just feels so natural. It feels like I was always meant to have this." Yes, because we have made it safe before you have even got there. And that is why people who have not done the work and have really big things happen to them without doing the prep work first, when things have happened randomly or taken off or gone viral, sometimes cannot hold it, because it feels so unsafe that they will sabotage everything about it.
[00:24:55] Okay, number 3 is that we want to make this an emotional rehearsal. So one visualisation, one time doing this, is not going to be enough, I am afraid. Because a lot of people do this, and they go, "Oh yeah, well, Bec told me to do this, and I have done it once, and it did not work." Well, yeah. Guess what? The fear that you have got right now, how many fucking times have you rehearsed that?
[00:25:21] How many times do you think about that fear every day? Every single time you think about the fear and you feel the dread, boom, that is a rehearsal. That is why the neural pathway is so strong. Every time you have talked yourself out of it, boom, deeper. So that fear that you are feeling right now is probably quite deeply ingrained.
[00:25:44] The payoff that you want, I want you to give that same investment. Emotional rehearsal. I want you to return to that payoff, that feeling, that image, that picture, that sensation, that smell, that sound, again and again and again. Go back to it. Experience it. Feel it. Let your subconscious, let your nervous system sit in it, until it feels like, "Oh, this is who I am now", wink wink, nudge nudge, that might be coming back very soon, if you know what I mean.
[00:26:21] But just be in it. This is why hypnotherapy is so powerful for this, because in that hypnotic state, when we are not with the analytical, critical, "this is not real" part of your mind, we can actually place you in the payoff with such a beautiful depth and richness that is quite hard to access when you are awake and your critical mind is on and running.
[00:26:53] And if you can do that repeatedly, this is why hypnotherapy is so powerful, because it is so subtle, and a lot of my clients are like, "Wait, hang on, I have changed? When did that happen?" But it is laying down these new neural pathways, these new grooves, and getting it in so deeply as well.
How Anchoring Locks The Payoff Into Your Body
[00:27:12] Now, the last thing that we can do, the last NLP technique, is what we call anchoring, and you might have heard of anchoring before. We have all been anchoring for a very long time. Is there a specific smell that you smell, and boom, it takes you straight back to that specific time that you smelt that smell?
[00:27:33] Is there a specific song that you hear, and boom, you go straight back to that place? That is anchoring. And in NLP, anchoring is an association between a specific physical stimulus, so it might be a touch, it might be a gesture, I have got quite a few anchoring gestures that I do, it might be a word, and it links with a specific emotional state.
[00:28:00] Now, what you would do to use it for this is, once you future pace into the payoff, when you are fully there, when you are in your body, when you are feeling it, 10 out of 10 feeling it, we call it the peak of that feeling, I want you to create an anchor. So it could be something physical, you might press your two fingers together, you might squeeze your wrist, you might squeeze your ear, you might hold onto your thumb.
[00:28:27] Whatever feels right for you, hold that there at the peak of that feeling, and what that is actually doing is linking that emotional state, the felt, the vivid, the present experience of that, to a physical cue. And if you practise that enough times, and you have to do repetition with this, or do it properly with an NLP practitioner, and I know many, then when you are in the fear, or when you are right on the edge of doing the scary thing, you can fire the anchor, and boom, the payoff feeling will enter too.
[00:28:51] It is magical. It is magical. And so what we are doing is, when you are in that next moment where that fear could be stronger than the payoff and the dream and the desire that you want for your life, you are refusing to let that fear be the only thing in the room, and you are going, "No, no, no, no. The payoff for me is so much fucking bigger, is so much more powerful."
How to Make The Payoff Louder Than The Fear
[00:29:24] Ah, I love it, I love it, I love it. So there was quite a lot in today's podcast episode. I hope you have been able to take something away. Like I said, if you do want the specifics of how to get specific with the payoff and really get into the submodalities of that, there is a link in the show notes that you can visit.
[00:29:55] You will be able to download it, and then you can have it, and I can guide you through it within the document. But really start to think about the feeling, the sensation, the emotion behind what you want on the other side of the fear, because that is why you are fucking doing it anyway, isn't it? That is why you are doing it anyway.
[00:30:18] And if we can make the payoff bigger than the fear, that is when you will push through, and you will push through without motivation, and you will push through without the need to push through. Oh wow. How amazing that will be. So if you know exactly where that fear is running loudest in your business right now, I want you to visit that.
[00:30:45] I want you to visit that and really see how we can shift the payoff to feeling stronger than the fear. So when it comes to overcoming fear in business, your job from today is to make the payoff so real and so specific and so present and so felt in your body, that your subconscious actually has something to weigh against when it gets to the fear.
[00:31:11] I am so excited for you to use these NLP techniques, and I will see you on the next episode.
More about The Subconscious Expert:
Welcome to The Subconscious Expert, the podcast where your subconscious becomes your one-way ticket to the mind-blowing results you desire in your life and business! I’m your host, Rebecca Haydon, The Subconscious Expert who went from being stuck in victim mode to a multi 6 figure business owner. Each week, I will be giving you the subconscious tools and techniques so you can become the woman who is living out her vision with a life and business that she is truly OBSESSED with. I have said it before, and I will say it 100 times again: "Your business can't outgrow your mindset, and if you want to grow your business, it always starts with growing your subconscious." So let's dive into the subconscious breakthrough you so deeply deserve!