Work Worth Doing

Dean (00:01)
What is up? Thank you for joining. And today we're going to go through something a little bit different. Well, it's common, right? It's fear. Fear is just, it's everywhere, right? It's in business, it's in life, it's in this, it's in that. And I thought, why don't I make a little episode on my relationship to it? And that's exactly what we're going to go through today. If you make it the whole way, you'll...

here three sort of tactics that I implore myself at the best of times when I can and they have proven to be useful for me in combating my fears and doubts and things that generally stop you from doing things that you want to do. hopefully you'll find this of some value to whatever fear you might be currently exposed to or dealing with.

And if you happen to be completely new, the aim with Quiddable is to really to inspire you to remove things in your life that aren't serving you. And most commonly it's a job and perhaps you know yours isn't what you were put here to do for 30 or 40 years. And look, maybe what you're feeling isn't the end of the world. Perhaps it's like tolerable, but deep inside you, you know that you have more in you than to be resigned to this.

Maybe you've got habits, beliefs, relationships that you know aren't nourishing you. And while it's seen as a negative word, Quitting something like this is obviously anything but negative. So you'll hear from me and people I admire who've started businesses and chosen totally different paths or found purpose from quitting something that wasn't right for them. And the hope is that you can feel inspired from these stories to do what's right for you. That's the gist, right? That's what we're about. So.

Let's get into it.

Dean (02:01)
As I have started with the first episode and will continue to do on solo episodes, I will start with a question.

And the question is designed to get you thinking, to get you pondering. OK, so here it goes. If you could click your fingers and be running your own business and you're earning the same amount of money that you are now with five times less work and ten times the flexibility, would you click your fingers?

Now, I'm going to assume, and I know you shouldn't assume in this life, but I'm going to assume that you said yes to the question.

What happens at this point is fear. Fear then sets in. You know that there's steps that you could take today. You know there's dominoes that you could tip over to start a chain reaction to get you towards that life I've just described. But then all these doubts, all these fears, all these reasons that you shouldn't do it start to creep in. know, what will...

Tony down the road say? Well, John, what if he thinks I'm stupid? What if Mary doesn't agree? All this stuff just comes into your head and then boom, you do nothing.

So let's get into the fear. And by the way, each of these three components kind of feeds into the next one. So one feeds into two and two feeds into three really nicely. And if you can use all three together, you are unstoppable.

Now the first one is an obvious one, right? It's, you're probably gonna laugh at me when I say this one, but it's a really simple yet very profoundly impactful way of handling fear, right? And it's simply becoming aware of it. Now roll with me for a second. You might be thinking, "Dean, what the hell are you talking about? Just being aware I'm fearful?" Of course I know I'm afraid. But a lot of your fears,

might be actually so subtle that they can actually stop ideas even before they start. You can have an idea and it can be taken from you by this fear instantaneously. And this can happen in seconds. So it's so subtle you might not even realize it. And so you simply becoming aware of a fear has a lot more power than you think. So let me just tell you a quick story. When I went to an event, it was called the multiple streams of property income event. This is

free me starting my own business. This is actually day zero, you might say. And I went to this event and the idea with this event is they talk to you about all the ways in which you can make money through property. So the speakers that they get up on stage and they give you a big rah rah rah about how this strategy and property is going to change your life. And I'm not bashing those people. I'm trying to set the stage here.

And they deliver, they are some of the most powerful speakers. They are amazing speakers. And they tell these stories so well through the eyes of people who've been successful in property. They tell it in such a way that just fills you with belief. And I remember I went there with my friend. He and I went there. He said, Dean, you've got to come to this event. So I went with him.

And I saw all the speakers, they started giving us their pitch, if you like, on this strategy and property and that strategy and property. And I just thought, wow, I can do anything right now. They inspired me. They made me feel on. was in, I was capable of, of many, many great things. Right. And so I left that day and I said to Kane, who I was with, I said,

We're gonna do this. We're gonna change our lives through property. And this is how we get out of doing jobs that we dislike, right? What happens the next day? I wake up and I had spent money on this course on the day prior and all these fears started coming in. man, what if that doesn't work? you've spent a lot of money here. What if this doesn't go your way, buddy? And well, have you thought about all these risks and...

Well, what if people in your job, all these typical phrases and ways in which your mind tries to keep you in a certain place, keep you in what it knows is being comfortable, right? And I found that even writing these down and me actually looking at these and saying, right, hang on a minute, what is actually going on in my brain right now? And I realized it just wanted to keep me comfortable.

It just wanted to say, look, Dean, you've got a great scenario here. Why would you fuck it up? And if you think about it, that's actually very useful from my brain. Like that's actually a very helpful tactic because to the brain, comfort is a beautiful, beautiful thing. Whereas me going out on my own and trying something different has so many potential downsides. Whereas the downsides of staying where I was, well, you know, they were fairly non -existent.

And what I found was when I wrote down these fears, it all seemed a little bit less poignant in my mind. I realized that it was just my brain predicting worst case. And in doing so, it would create this feeling inside me that I should stop right now. And that is what stops us,

Dean (08:04)
We interrupt this broadcast to ask for a quick favour. If you are in any way remotely finding any value from this podcast, please consider leaving me a follow on whatever place that you are getting your podcasts. And if you really love it, please give us a five -star review as it really helps in this early stage of growth. Thanks.

Dean (08:19)
Now to go back to...

you and you have your dream of starting your own business, that is what might be happening to you now. You have the dream, you might believe it on some level, you know, you know you can do it. You know you are capable of getting this outcome that you want, whether it's the flexible lifestyle that I've just described or something maybe slightly different. You know you can actually do that, right? You are well aware that that is within the limitations of your yourself.

And the fears then come in. And if you can just become aware of those, you can create distance between them and realize that it's just your brain being a dick.

To illustrate this, I read a book, or should I say I listened to the audiobook of a fantastic author called Napoleon Hill. Now this book was written in the 30s by the way, and it hammers home this point. It's from a book called Outwitting the Devil. Now if you have heard this book, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. And if you haven't, I'll quickly explain what it's about. So, Outwitting the Devil is effectively, and I might butcher this explanation, but just roll with me.

It's about what the devil is. The concept of the devil in this book is everything that's negative in the universe, the antiness to everything, the minus to the plus. So fear, doubt, negativity, antimatter. Everything that is the opposing force of the universe is, quote unquote, the devil.

And in this book, the author theoretically, okay, for the purpose of the book has an interview with the devil and he asks him these very direct questions about why does he incite fear in people? Because that's what the devil is in this illustration. He is fear. It is fear, I should say. He holds no gender or human form. It is just the negative force. And in this book, it has a great quote. So I'm getting to the quote here.

to illustrate this point. And remember, this was in 1937, 35 maybe I think this was written. It says, the fear of criticism robs a person of their initiative, destroys their power of imagination, limits their individuality, takes away their self resilience and does them damage in a hundred other ways. He who is afraid to risk failure, seldom has to risk facing success.

And I think it's just a beautiful way of framing fear. And we all know how our mind can pop those fears in when we're trying to go for something new. Our brain says, no, no, no, no, no, no, comfort, comfort, comfort. So if you can just become aware of those, it might create a bit of distance between them. And that bit of distance that you have might be that little space that you need in order to actually drive forward.

Okay, so step one awareness, step two, let's move on to step two. So if you become aware of them, this is how you can now just maybe amplify this a little bit more. And you can do this through understanding why you are having this fear. Okay, now I'm gonna dig into this so you understand what I mean. So where does your fear come from? What is its source? What is its origin? Like why is your brain saying this to you? And this...

This might be slightly different for each of us, but I'm going to explain my relationship with my fears and it's somewhat, exposing in some way. It doesn't paint me in the best light, but I'm just going to share it because I know a lot of people can definitely relate to why my fears will be or have been present, I should say.

So when I started posting videos of myself on social media for my property business, which has, you know, since obviously came good for me in the beginning, I was very, I hated posting videos. I actually hated it. But everyone who was in my mentorship, I remember going there on the first day and people were saying to me, Dean, look, you've got to post on social media.

People need to know what you're doing. People need to know that you're doing property. You need to get yourself new clients. You need to get yourself brand awareness. You need to make yourself have credibility. So I said, OK, fine, I'll post me doing property videos online. And if you if you have been following me, you can you can scroll back on my Instagram. They are still there. And some of them are just

You can tell I really am enjoying it. You can tell I'm really stiff. And I'm sure I'll look back on this podcast one day and say, look how stiff I was then. And it's a curve of growth, right? But especially at the very beginning, I was so afraid of posting this. And I was also very uncomfortable recording myself.

But people told me I had to and I felt like this was necessary to get my business going. But believe me, I was afraid of people laughing. Right. And I remember I recorded my first video and I was sitting in my house in Hackney in London and I had finished the recording. I had chopped it up and I remember watching it back and I thought, OK, this is the kind of best I've got at this point. I'm not

production wise, I'm not going to bust out anything else much better than this right now. I felt like that was the best video I could put together, but I just felt so weird about it. And I was afraid. I was afraid of people laughing at me when I posted it. And this is the I'm to bring this back now to understanding this fear a little bit more and why understanding it was helpful for me. So. When you think about me.

being afraid to post that video, right? I was afraid because people were laughing at me. So now I've been aware of that. I'm aware that people are laughing. I'm afraid that people will laugh at me. But why is that a bad thing? What's bad about people laughing at me? Right? What's the answer? Nothing. There's nothing bad about people laughing at me if I post a video up. It's meaningless. It carries no meaning.

And it should carry no weight in my mind, right? So what does it also say? It says that if it's a bad thing, well then what's the opposite? The opposite is people praising me if it's a good thing. And what does that tell me? That tells me that I was placing my self -worth externally on what people said about me.

Okay. So I hope you're still with me here. So me realizing that I was aware that I was afraid people would laugh. What's bad about that? Well, it's only bad if it's good if they say nice things. So fear was driving this content that I was making and I needed a positive reaction from it in order to feel good at myself.

And, I realized then that I wasn't backing myself enough. This was the understanding, right? This is the gap that I identified then is that I wasn't backing myself enough. I was waiting for other people to back me when I was posting these videos. And I should say as well, this didn't stop.

after I posted the first video, this is still very much something I wrestle with sometimes when, you know, posting on social media, it's a very psychologically confronting thing to do. Now, believe me, over time it becomes easier and you work on this, but at this point I realized that I was putting my self -worth on what people said about me. And anyone who's ever listened to a podcast or two knows that

You shouldn't seek validation externally, right? We all know this. However, backing yourself and being your own biggest supporter is not often easy to do. And as an Irish person, any of my Irish peeps listen to this, you know, you all know that we are quite nosy as a nation. We tend to be...

checking what the neighbors are doing, if they're, did you see Mark is trying out this thing? Did you see Conor's up to that? Like this is common talk among Irish people. And

In knowing this fact, sometimes I think Irish, and this is my hypothesis, I could be way off here, but I feel like Irish people can sometimes be a bit more cagey about maybe putting themselves out there a bit more. Not like generally a rule of thumb, but I think in some cases, and I was one of them for sure.

But in becoming aware of this fear and then understanding why it was becoming present that I wasn't backing myself and I was awaiting other people to back me, I got ahead of this fear and got it a little further upstream this time because you can become aware of it and then it still come in front of your mind. But I feel like if you understand it, then you get it a little bit further back.

because you can work on that thing. And for me, that thing was working on where I was putting my self worth.

I have another quote here. I've two more quotes, by the way, for the rest of this episode. This is one of them to finish off this point number two of three. And it's a quote from Game of Thrones, right? And the quote is from Bran Stark. Now, Bran Stark is a five year old kid in this and he's watching a guy get beheaded, okay, by his father,

who is Ned Stark. And this person has to be beheaded because he has broken the law in the land. And Bran is obviously five years old. He's quite nervous. He's looking at this thing, but he has to watch it in order to become a man. And he says to his dad, says, can a man be brave if he is afraid? And he was talking about the guy, you the guy who was about to be beheaded. He was looking at him curious. He says, can a man be brave if he's afraid?

And his dad turns to him and says, that's

And I just think that's so beautiful because it illustrates that we are all required to be brave in the face of our fears anyway. And what I've realized myself is that we are never going to be free from fear totally. I think we can work on them and soften them a little bit.

but sometimes you still just got to be brave, especially when it's something new. So that's point one and point two. So becoming aware and understanding why. And this will give you a lot more control and awareness around these fears and maybe you can get some distance between them so that you can try that thing that maybe you're not trying, right? And then the last thing, step three, is reframing.

So reframing is a powerful one and it's effectively a way to talk to yourself and give yourself some new ideas as to what those fears actually should be viewed as in your head. And look, let's be real. The short answer to all this is it's all nonsense. It's never as bad as you imagine it be. And nobody cares about you anyway. We're all going to die in 80 years, blah, blah, Right? We all know that. But what you can do if you start to become aware of these fears,

and maybe you understand them a bit more, is offer your brain an alternative view. So I'll give you a couple of examples here.

So what you could do is simply just thank your brain. And this sounds a bit woo -woo, but believe me, this is actually useful. So you can literally thank your brain, say thanks brain, appreciate you saying that this is a risky thing. And then what you can do is offer a nice alternative. and say, thank you for that risky scenario you've just painted.

What I believe to be the case is this scenario where things actually work well. I think I'm actually okay. you might be laughing right now, but I know a lot of you are actually listening and knowing that this is a valuable thing to do because your brain will just take what you give it, right? And if you just let fears go around all the time, guess what? You're probably going to feel fearful. But if you can actually replace your fearful conversations with ones that are more

at ease, ones that are more hopeful, ones that are less worst case and catastrophic, you will walk around feeling different. And when you walk around feeling different and you have this different aura about you, your behaviors will be different. You will act differently. And it's about changing some of that talk in your head. And this is nothing revelationary.

I'm aware of that, but it's something that's been very useful to me and it requires effort. You've got to put some time into this. It's not something that's just you do it once and then you're boom, you're fixed. This is like an ongoing thing. And for me, initially, recently starting this podcast, that was that was most definitely one of them. And. One thing I will always say to people is get yourself good.

mates who support you and who back you. So for me, this recently happened when I was in the sauna. I go to the sauna a lot. I'm a bit of a East London boy in that sense. So I go to the sauna with my friends and we do this every week. Right. And he's also doing a similar thing to me. He's putting himself out there and he's going for his own thing as well. So we bounce off each other quite a lot in this regard. And for me, When I was considering starting this podcast,

This is how much he helped me reframe things because I was in my own head. I was saying, well, look, I'm not going to get it. It's going to be a lot of bollocks. won't. It'll amount to nothing. My message is useless. don't, who am I to give people advice? Who am I to try and help someone? All these things going through my head. It was all just negative and it was stopping my behavior. And stopping my actions. And without the actions, you can't get the outcome that you want. Right. So he helped me.

become more aware of these, to begin with, but then also replacing them with more positive, reinforcing things. And it wasn't this like bullshitty woo woo stuff that wasn't grounded in any truth. These were like truthful pieces of information he was telling me and reframing things for me. And the point I'm trying to make is, that

You can do this yourself and that is helpful, but getting your colleagues, your friends, your family to be that supportive energy for you as well will also be another bullet you can fire at these fears that might be stopping you doing the thing you want to do.

get yourself some good, supportive friends and surround yourself with people who are trying to do the same things as you or trying to improve in the way you're trying to improve. And you will only lift each other up. You will only raise one another further up. imagine it like this, right?

When you've got the scenarios and I love thinking about it in this way and I said this to a friend pretty recently about playing out the scenarios in your head, right? You know, the fears that are in your head and they're trying to stop you and they're getting in the way, right? Play those out in detail. Like, I mean, go into that scenario. Be like, okay, I'm afraid of starting the podcast. Why? Well, I mean, I'm afraid that it won't go so well. Okay, well, what's bad about that? Well, I mean, I might have to...

stop the podcast at some point. Okay. And what's bad about that? Well, people will think I'm stupid. Well, okay. What's bad about that? Well, nothing really, I guess. And that's just a very simplified example, but you get the idea. It's never not bad. It's not that big of a deal. The downside is never as bad. And then you've got the other side, right? So paint out the other side.

of it working really, really well. Now do this once you've painted out the shitty ones. So paint out scenario A, B, C, D, and F, and so on, if they're all negative, right? Do them. Agree with yourself that they're not as bad as you think they are, because they never are. They're just not. That's just the truth. And then paint out the one where it works beyond your wildest dreams. Paint out that scenario and then see how you feel.

and see how you feel. And you'll notice that all of these sort of tips that I'm giving.

They're aimed to change how you feel because if you feel different, if you walk around differently, you will take different actions. Your decisions will be different. You will make different choices. And because of those different choices, actions and behaviors that you are now

that you are now doing.

things will start to become different for you because your outcomes will change. You're behaving differently. The actions you're taking are totally different. And this is what I'm trying to help you with. Right. So I hope that was useful. Right. So just to recap everything, becoming aware, understanding why they're being there and then reframing them and replacing them with something different. It's really simple framework. Sometimes you might use one. Sometimes you might use two or all of them. But each one of those things in isolation or together can be helpful.

And the idea is to remove some of those fears so can just go for it, man. Just fucking go for it. You're fine. It's all good, right? And I'm going to leave you, okay, with one final quote. And this is an absolute banger. I think it was Rob Moore. I've been quoting Rob Moore on this podcast a couple of times now, but roll with me for this one. So here it goes. Drum roll, please. If you risk nothing, you risk everything.

in hell. Now let that one sink in. If you risk nothing, you risk everything.

And it goes without saying. Don't be beating yourself up. Don't be hurting yourself. It's all good. None of this is that serious anyway. So just give it a go. Just give it a go. It's never going to be as bad as you think. Yeah, I appreciate you. We're going to wrap this one up now. This has been a fun episode. Unfortunately, my light behind me has decided to go out mid episode, but we'll roll with it, whatever. And.

Like I said, I appreciate y 'all. I hope this was a useful tool for you to reframe some of the things in your mind. And I look forward to continuing this series. It's been really, really fun. And I just want this to be continued to help you. So please share it with people that you think would like this, that you think would find value in this episode or what we're trying to do and share the love. So yeah.

Thanks again for joining. Much love. See you next time.