How I Use Fear to Make Better Decisions | Ep 268
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Fear exists to keep us alive, right? We are wired for survival, not success. And so when we perceive risk, that's our brains trying to keep us alive, putting that fear in our body because our bodies don't know the difference between public speaking and a lion trying to fucking eat you.

What's up guys, welcome back to Build, and today I want to talk about fear. I was at the hair salon the other day getting my hair done, and it's a small salon, there's just two chairs, and I go there most of the time. So there's actually another woman in there. Normally it's just me, and I don't really have to think about anybody that I'm talking to or what I'm doing, and I

I looked over at the stylist who I'm friends with, and she kind of looked at me, looked at the girl, she was doing her hair as if like, oh, you should talk to her. So then I said, okay, hey, what's your name? I'm Layla. You know, what are you getting ready for today? Because she was getting her hair done and she had her makeup done and she had like an outfit hanging on a rack. So I knew she was going to go do something. And she said how she used to give me a speech. And I could tell as I started asking more questions, this like,

I want to say it's like a feeling of overwhelm setting in in her face. The more that she talked about it, I could tell she got a little antsy. I saw her foot start tapping. I saw her like fidgeting with her hands and I was like, oh man, she's nervous.

And so I was like, oh, I feel for her because I have had so many times where I'm, you know, a couple hours away from a big talk, a big speech, a big presentation, and people are talking to me. And it's like, I'm there. And I'm like, sure, we're talking. But like, I'm not actually listening to you. I'm not actually engaged because my brain in the background is thinking about this upcoming thing that I'm going to present at this thing. I'm going to do this obstacle. I'm about to overcome whatever it is that I'm apprehensive, nervous or scared about.

And so I immediately go into, okay, I want to calm her down. I want to help her focus. And so I gave her some of my tips, but how I've dealt with that fear and how it's really helped me in doing other things and moving forward. And I could tell that by the end of the conversation, she actually seemed to feel like a lot better. I could see like visibly she relaxed. She looked like she was less fidgety. And I think she appreciated the talk because, you know, you never know what you're going to sign up for when you're sitting in a hair salon. And so I

After we had that conversation, I kind of went back to my condo and I wrote down some of my thoughts on fear and the things that have helped me throughout the years. I don't want to say like get over my fear because I haven't gotten over my fear. I think I've learned how to partner with fear and take on my dreams. Like if I really had to sum it up, it's like I've learned to partner with fear in a way that allows me to actually accomplish my dreams.

And I wanted to just kind of address that because I think it would help so many of you because I get so many messages where you tell me that you want to do something. You tell me that you have a change you need to make in your business. You tell me you have a business you want to start. You tell me that you have other things you want to be doing. And the only thing stopping you is fear. And the first thing I want to address is that

Fear doesn't make you special and fear is not special. Fear tricks you into thinking that you're the only person that has this type of fear. Fear tricks you into thinking that you're the only person that feels this way and that it must not feel so terrible for all those other people and that, you know, Layla and Alex and all these people have accomplished these things. They had to have not had this feeling present in their bodies because it is so debilitating. There's no way anybody could accomplish this.

Fuck that shit. That is not true. I absolutely feel terrified consistently. I still don't even love it. I don't, I don't even think I would say I like it. I don't even think I still, I don't think I like it.

And yet I still accomplish things and get things done. And so I think that if I give you my frame on how I've been able to partner with fear, I hope it can help you do the same so that you can accomplish whatever you want in your business, in your life, in your relationships, because fear is never going to go away. And we have to learn to partner with it to tackle our dreams. And that kind of brings me to the first point that I wrote down, which is I acknowledge fear, but I don't obey fear.

So there's a really great quote by Kobe Bryant, and I really appreciate this because a lot of people would never think of him as somebody who dealt with fear, right? I think a lot of people think they see these people who are icons and they're doing incredible things and they think they must have less fear. But the reality is, is that they don't have less fear. They have more courage. And courage is only present when fear is there. He said,

I have self-doubt. I have insecurity. I have fear of failure. You don't deny it, but you also don't capitulate to it. You embrace it. It reminds me because like when I first stepped in as CEO of our first business and I'm running meetings with, you know, clients that are worth a lot of money to the business, I'm

I'm getting on sales calls, you know, selling products I've never sold at that magnitude before. I'm hiring people who are twice my age. I'm running a team of now 100 people when I'm 23 years old. I was prepared, but I wasn't fearless. Like, my hands would sweat, my voice would shake, but I still showed up. And I'm not afraid to say that I'm not.

I think that's the part that most people miss is that successful people absolutely feel the fear. They just refuse to give it the final vote. They just refuse to let it actually dictate what they do. And that's the only difference between somebody who's successful and somebody who isn't. It's just, are you obeying fear? It's not that I suppress it. It's not that I get rid of it. It's that I acknowledge it and then I just don't obey it. And the reason for this is because

Fear exists to keep us alive, right? We are wired for survival, not success. And so when we perceive risk, that's our brains trying to keep us alive, putting that fear in our body because our bodies don't know the difference between public speaking and a lion trying to fucking eat you, right? And so the only thing that calms down after you step in is showing it that you'll survive,

That's the only thing. You have to step into the fear. You have to do the thing and show it that you didn't die, which means that the only way to actually reduce fear is the exact way that you don't want to, which is to walk right into it. Because our brains learn safety through exposure. The reps are the antidote to fear. And so the truth is, the reason that you don't want to obey fear in 99.999% of situations is because if you do, then it creates more fear.

Because if we avoid the thing and we don't go and expose ourselves to the thing, then we teach ourselves to think that the thing is really, really threatening. It's really, really scary. It's really, really bad. And we could die. And that's why people always say, I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't know why I'm so scared of this thing. My first question I ask them is I go, how long have you been avoiding this? And then they're like, oh,

four years. I'm like, that's why, because you've reinforced to your brain for four fucking years that this thing is terrifying. You know, and that's why I love, well, I don't love my own quote, but I did say it one time and it sounded pretty good. Theor is a mile wide, an inch deep.

You know, this fear, this thing that you've been so scared of. The moment that you step in, you're going to feel that sensation. You're going to feel scared for a minute there, a few minutes, maybe an hour. But then it dissipates because your body says, oh, I'm not dying. Oh, a tiger's not killing me. Oh, we're okay. We can stay here. And then it's like, oh, this is safe. I can do this. That's how the brain works.

And so you running away makes complete sense because guess what? I want to fucking run away all the time. I really do. I'm like, oh, get me out. I don't want to do it. But then I just train my brain into thinking it's even more scary and more threatening than it was in the beginning. I remember when I made my first piece of content, I had avoided making content for, I want to say actively avoided for 12 months. I want to say passively avoided for four years. And I had people always telling me, you should make content. You should do this. You should do that.

And I just could not get myself to do it because every time I went to record, every time I went to do something, all these thoughts rushed into my head. I was like, oh my gosh, people are going to compare me to Alex. He sounds so much better on camera. I sound like a fucking doofus. People are going to make fun of me. They're going to say I'm ugly. I'm fat. I have a big nose. They're going to make fun of my voice because it's weird. They're going to do this and that. I let all these excuses come to mind, which got in the way of the one thing I wanted to do, which was like, I really want to save people the pain that I experienced.

And I really just felt like there was nobody doing that at that time. And it's funny because finally, one day, I realized that that was an area where fear was controlling me, where I was obeying fear. And I was on a vacation with Alex. We were in Bear Lake, Utah, actually. I love that place. It's beautiful. And I woke up early and I had, you know, the slight pang of anxiety as I like to in the mornings.

And one of the fears that popped in my mind was like making content and how I hadn't made content. I committed to making content. I made a podcast cover. I made this, I did that. And I still hadn't done it. And I was so fed up with it. I said, fuck it. I'm doing it. I'm going to do it right now. I put makeup on. I put a random ass outfit on and I recorded myself making content. And that wasn't enough. I was like, I need to get it posted as soon as possible because I wasn't really scared of recording as much as I was of seeing people's feedback, right? If I record a video, put it in a black box and never look at it again, who the fuck cares?

So I reached out to Alex's podcast and YouTube person. I was like, I need to get a show up. I need a channel up. I need to post this as soon as possible. But he was like, oh, what is this emergency? I'm like, no, but I need you to do it because I'm going to back the fuck out because I'm scared.

And so within, I think it was four days, I had a video up on YouTube, posted it. And I remember I was just sitting there so anxiously awaiting. I was like, I don't know what are people going to say? I'm going to be completely slammed. Nobody or nobody's going to watch it. I think I'm a piece of shit. It's going to be embarrassing. I'm going to humiliate Alex because his wife's such an idiot. Like everything you can think of came into my mind. Right. And I'm

Finally, I looked. Alex messaged me. He said, have you seen the video? And I said, well, of course I watched it before it went up, but like, what do you mean? He said, you should go look. And then I went and looked and it hadn't even been an hour. And I had almost 2000 views on the video. I had like a hundred comments that were all really nice and it was good. It was very well received.

And I was like, wow. In that moment, what happened was I actually, the next thought, the next thought that occurred was not, oh my gosh, what a relief even. It was, oh, what a relief. I should make more. This thing I had been avoiding for so long, not only was I now not scared of it, now I wanted to do more of it. Now I actually liked it. This is similar to people who have like a fear of flying and then they end up becoming a pilot.

Because as soon as you get that rush of endorphins, once you've realized that you can retrain your brain, once you realize, holy shit, it's not just me. This works for everybody. I'm not special. I'm not unique. I can create anything.

I could turn my fear into power by just facing it. And I think that we all need to be reminded of that because every situation we come across, we seem to find a way to think it's unique, but it's not. It's just never is. Now, the second frame that I want to give you on fear is one that actually I got from Sam Zell. I heard him say a quote and it led me to this frame, which is that fear is a tool, not a weakness. Okay, so what his quote was this.

Fear is a healthy characteristic. I don't do business with people who aren't afraid. Here's a truth that people don't like, okay? If you're not afraid of anything, you are probably reckless or full of fucking shit. Okay? I really think that fear can be a great data point because it signals where there's risk.

So a lot of us say, I want to eliminate fear. I want to get rid of fear. I want to. But here's the thing. There's many areas of life where fear is a gift. Fear is a blessing because it signals to us where we need to look, where we need to investigate, where we need to do more diligence. And so for me, I use my fear as a tool.

And there's a lot of situations where it might not be the best tool for the job, but there's also a lot of situations where there is. When I'm making a hiring decision on senior leaders, when I'm firing somebody who isn't aligned with my company, when I'm deciding whether I should invest millions of dollars into this building, millions of dollars into this deal, the fear forces me to pressure test my thinking. And then what I do is I do more diligence, I run more scenarios, and I essentially am more strategic about my decisions.

And so we have to understand that just because fear can have an extreme or it makes us want to completely avoid something, fear is also a fantastic tool for making good decisions. In fact, fear triggers a response in your brain responsible for detecting errors and weighing uncertainty.

Okay, and so when you completely shut off fear, because you're just like following, you know, it's kind of like when someone says jump off a bridge, you jump off a bridge, like everyone always says that, right? Would you jump off a bridge if this person told you? It's like what you're doing at that point is you're just shutting it off and you're shutting off your risk assessment.

And that's how people make terrible decisions. They blow up companies. They blow up relationships. They convince themselves that they are invincible. And so the goal, and you don't want this. You don't want to be fearless. You want to be discerning. And that's the word that I really try to embody and I strive for. I want people to say she has high discernment. I feel the fear and I say, okay,

I'm not going to run away from this thing. But what I am going to do is I'm going to do more diligence. I'm going to do more studying because there's a reason why that fear is there. There's something that I see or something I don't know enough about. And either I should find out more about it or I should dig in and see what it is. A great example of this was that we had a big deal that we were into. We were going to invest almost $20 million into a company.

It was a huge check size for us. This was, you know, three years ago, especially because we use our own principal capital at the time. And I was, for some reason, like through all the diligence, through everything we're doing, I just like didn't feel great about the deal. I was like, I don't know. There's like something here that just doesn't feel right. And so I said, okay, I need to do more diligence.

before we can even make our best offer because I just am not, there's something off here. I don't feel like this about deals that I am gung-ho doing. And so as I did more diligence into the company, I'm sure fucking glad I did because what I found was that this technology that they had sold me on, that they had built, they didn't even fucking own.

And so I would have been buying the company for a software that they did not even own because that was the majority of what created the value of the company. And so as soon as I found that out, I flagged it to my team and we were all like, oh yeah, no, we're fucking out. And so in that moment,

Would I say that fear was a bad thing or fear was a great tool for the job? If I hadn't felt that fear, I wouldn't have dug deeper and deeper and deeper only to find this paperwork that nobody had wanted to show me to show that they didn't own any of the things that they had built. And so I say this because a lot of the times people come to me, they just want to get rid of the fear. Well, guess what? One, you're not going to get rid of it.

You're just not good. Like you can spend the rest of your life trying to get rid of it. It will never fully go away. It is a survival mechanism wired into our brains. We can absolutely overcome it in circumstances, in certain situations, and then that will transfer to others and we can reduce it, but we will not get rid of it. And there will be new situations and circumstances that make it even bigger. And so that is why one, you're not going to get rid of it. Two, it's not

a bad thing. And it's in many instances like this where I think to myself, I need to partner with my fear to figure out what the best decision is because I know that I need to dig deeper here, that there is a reason sometimes why we feel the fear. And so completely trying to rid yourself of it is not even a better solution than trying to completely

immerse yourself in it. It's like either we indulge in fear or we try to be fearless and neither is the answer. It's learning to partner with fear, to use fear and to point it in a direction that makes us better, not worse. Now, the last insight that I want to give you on fear that I think is especially important when it comes to decision-making is from actually the founder of Ikea. And this really resonated with me when I heard it.

He said, fear of making mistakes is the root of bureaucracy. And when I heard that, I was like, wow, I have heard that and I've seen it play out time and time again in teams. When people are afraid of being wrong, they hide stuff. They protect stuff. They create process for the sake of process and not progress, right? And so this happened really early on with my teams where I realized that

on our R&D team. You know, we in the early days of Gemlaunch, we had a research and development team that their job was essentially to figure out what was working best for our customers right now and to present us with those solutions. And I realized after some time that as we had gotten further away from that department, the ideas got worse and worse.

And I didn't understand what was going on. I didn't understand why, like what they were testing, the things they were rolling out were not as good as they were in the beginning until I realized that they were fearing

punishment for making a mistake. Now that myself and Alex were not involved in everything they were doing and giving them approval before they shipped something or giving them approval before they worked on an idea, they didn't work on their best ideas. They didn't work on the edge case ideas. They didn't work on ideas that could be game-changing for our customers. And the reason for that

is because they were scared. They were scared of making mistakes and they were scared. They were playing not to lose rather than to win. And so as soon as I realized that, I made a rule on that team. I said, listen, we don't get punished for bad ideas, only indecision. I said, I will never punish you for a bad idea. I will never punish you for making a mistake. What I will do is I will get on your fucking ass if you stay here stuck making indecision.

not doing what's best for our customers, not giving them your all. And that gave them so much speed and creativity. They were able to build things faster. They shipped things faster. They had way better ideas. And they were able to come up with some ideas that actually really drove the business forward and grew the business substantially. And that's when I realized when people feel unsafe, when they feel like there's fear around them making any kind of mistake, they're going to optimize for survival.

not success. On the other hand, when they feel trusted, when they feel safe to make a mistake, they are going to optimize for impact. So this can be applied to if you run a business, your team. It can also be applied to relationships. It can also be applied to yourself, right? And here's the thing. The reason that this can apply to anything is that the default mode network in the brain where creativity and idea generation live gets suppressed under fear,

So that means that when your team is scared of messing up, their brain literally can't think as creatively. That means when your spouse is afraid of pissing you off, they literally can't think as creatively.

That means when your kids are afraid of making a mistake, they can't think as creatively. And so you're never going to get the best of somebody, yourself or others, when you have fear of failure hanging over your head. So if you want a better relationship with yourself, with others, on your team, you have to reward people and yourself for making mistakes because it means you're fucking trying.

There's nothing wrong with making mistakes. It doesn't mean you're a failure. It just means that you tried and the thing didn't work. Great, let's try again. And I will say that that's probably been, I want to say that's been in the last few years, my favorite insight and shift within myself, which is I'm not afraid of making mistakes anymore. I'm really not. I'm not afraid of making mistakes anymore.

Because I trust myself that I can figure out what to do next. I trust myself to figure out what would work better. And I don't think it means anything about me. I think that it makes me human. And I think it makes your teams human. I think it makes your spouse human. Because everybody makes mistakes. So final thoughts is this, okay? Fear is inevitable.

okay but submitting to that fear is optional and so the question isn't whether or not you're going to be scared or whether or not it's going to show up it's whether you're going to obey it you're going to take commands from it or you're just going to use that as a compass to give you more information and i have built everything that i have today by getting used to that feeling and using it rather than letting it use me and so if you're afraid welcome to being human