You’re listening to the Transform Your Life from the Inside Out podcast. This episode is titled “Eliminating the Illusion of Fear.” You know, you’ve probably been trying to get rid of fear your entire life. I know that fear was something that plagued me for many, many years. And many years ago, I would try meditating. I would fight it. I would push it away. I would stay busy. I would distract myself.

And then I got involved in self-help. I’ve read tons. Literally, I read over 5,000 books in the personal development industry, thinking that all this stuff could help me eliminate fear. But you know what? It kept coming back. What if I told you that everything that you’ve been doing to try to escape fear has been the exact thing that’s keeping fear alive in your life?

So we’ve talked about fear before, but in this episode, I’m going to share a perspective with you that will completely eliminate any fear from your life. And I know that because I’ve used this very same approach. So if you’d like to kick the fear to the curb, keep listening.

Hi, I’m Jim Fortin, and you’re about to start transforming your life from the inside out with this podcast. I’m widely considered the leader in subconscious transformation and I’ve coached super achievers all around the world for over 25 years. Here you’re going to find no rah rah motivation and no hype because this podcast is a combination of brain science, transformational psychology, and ancient wisdom all rolled into one to take your life to levels you’ve never thought possible.

If you’re wanting a lot more in life, to feel better, to heal, to have peace of mind, to feel powerful and alive, and to bring more abundance and prosperity into your life, then this podcast is for you because you’re going to start learning how to master your mind and evolve your consciousness. And when you do that, anything you want then becomes possible for you. I’m glad you’re here.

Okay, so eliminating fear. Now, I talked earlier in the intro just a couple of seconds ago about all the things that I had tried, the techniques and the hacks and everything to eliminate fear. In this episode, it’s not going to be about more techniques and hacks or any of that. It’s going to be about awareness and realization. I’m not attempting to teach you a better way to fight your fear. What we’re really going to do in this episode is we really want to start seeing fear, seeing it for what it is for many of you the very first time.

And after this episode, fear may still exist to some degree, but I can tell you this, you practice what I’m going to give you. And it’s simply a way of thinking, okay? A simple way of awareness. You practice this new way of awareness, which by the way, you’ve been conditioned backwards by society. So we’re going to create a new awareness for you. You practice this awareness, and I can promise you this, fear will never control you again.

The first thing we want to talk about, and this was a big one for me when I really got it. You know, working with a shaman for decades, he’s always said nothing exists except the present. It took me a long time to get my head around that. And what I’ve realized over the years is that fear really has no place to live if you are living and I’m living in the present moment. For the most part, fear has also never shown up in your life in the present moment.

Now, notice this. For most of us, fear always arrives, it always shows up, but it looks like something tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about and see what applies to you. I was scrolling the news today. I don’t read it. I just scroll. I just catch headlines every couple of days. And I read that Facebook was laying off 8,000 employees. Maybe you’re one of those employees. I don’t know.

But when somebody gets laid off from their job, the first place that many people go is not, oh, this is amazing. I’m glad I got fired. I’m glad I got released. Most people go into fear. So what relates to you? Maybe you lose a job. Maybe in your personal life, your relationship is pretty shaky and you’re not sure that it’s going to last. And that might create multiple fears. The fear of maybe being single, the fear of living alone, the fear of not knowing where you’re going to live, the fear of people thinking this, you know, X, Y, Z about you, whatever it might be.

But you may have many fears wrapped up about maybe leaving a relationship. This is a big one for a lot of people and it was for me many years ago. One of my biggest fears is that I might run out of money. And when we get into these fears, it’s very easy to catastrophize and obsess about these fears. But other fears that we get into, and I see this literally just paralyzing people, is, oh my God, what are people going to think about me? What are people going to say about me?

Maybe medically, you may have gotten a diagnosis or you might notice something going on in your body. And you might actually start incubating fear around what you think, what you’re interpreting may be happening to you. So I have a question for you. If you can relate to any of what I said, the scenarios that I gave you, maybe the job, maybe an impending relationship loss, the job losses I mentioned, recapping that, maybe a health element you’re not sure about, whatever it might be.

Here’s the question that I want to ask you. Is all of that happening right now? Notice, there shouldn’t be an epiphany right there. No, it’s not happening right now, unless it actually is happening right now. But what I’m going to illustrate, most of us live now from the future, from things that have never happened. And that just literally festers and creates fear in us.

I read something one time. I request you pay attention to this because it changed everything for me. And you’ve heard it in some form, but maybe in the way that I say it, maybe it will make a lot more sense to you and be a lot more digestible. But fear is worrying about the future, but lived as if it is a fact right now. Ponder that. It is a fact right now.

Think about all the things that you might have worried about in the past. Maybe you were worried this morning. Maybe you were worried about, you know, 30 minutes ago. And when you’re in that worry, you are living, get this, get this, please. When you’re in that fear, you are living that fear as if it’s happening right now. But the fear most likely is about a future event.

So here’s a big aha takeaway for you. The first lie that fear is going to tell you is that your future is already decided. So you lose a job and you go in the fear. You might not have noticed it, but in that fear, you are acting as if your future has already been decided. Maybe you and your partner are talking about splitting. And then you stay up all night worrying and pacing and worrying and pacing and worrying and pacing. Where am I going to live? What am I going to do for money? They made more money than I did. All these tears that go through your head.

And in that moment, when you were entertaining the fear, you’re entertaining the fear as if it’s already decided what’s going to happen to your future. Forget about the fact that you’re a creator. And when you’re 100% responsible, you can create what you want. We forget all that. And we live in the fear of what may and probably won’t happen later as if it is a fact right now.

I’m going to say something here that you have all thought about. I know you’ve thought about this. How many times have you feared something and you’ve gotten into fear about something? And guess what? It never happened. Now, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I think Abraham Lincoln, I read, and who knows who said this, but I read it was attributed to Abraham Lincoln. And he said, most people worry about things that never come to pass. That is a true, I’m laughing because that is a truism, a truism, a truism. You might worry all damn day, but guess what? It never happens.

And this is something else. I don’t know about you. To what degree you experience fear? My fear was around money. But when I would have the fear of money, OMG, I would catastrophize. And I would literally, I am not exaggerating, I would suffer. I would suffer through the fear. I mean, it was misery. It was hell. And in my 20s especially, and I don’t know why it was so prevalent in my 20s, but in my 20s, I would worry and worry and worry and worry. Money, money. What if I can’t pay my bill? What if I can’t pay my student loans? All these kinds of things. And it just caused so much misery and stole so much happiness. And the reality is, as I look back, some of the things that I worried about, some of the things may have happened, but the majority, 99%, never happened.

So here’s something I want to drive home. We talk a lot about this in TCP, the Transformational Coaching Program, which, by the way, we just started. We are on week number one. I’m not sure when you’re listening to this. I’ve done that program for 10 years now. I had thousands of people from all over the world in it. And I’ve made a dramatic, that program has made a dramatic difference in people’s lives. And doors are closed forever. We’re never offering that program again.

And one week in that 13-week program, we talk about stories. So please recognize this. Fear is an illusion. It is a story, and you are the one telling the story. And this is something that I’ve said many times before, the unhappiness gap. The unhappiness gap is the story between where you are in life and where you think you should be. For most of us, there is a disparity between those two places, where you are and where you think you should be. And this space in the middle is the unhappiness gap for a lot of us, but recognize this, it’s all a story.

And once you accept that your fear, for the most part, I didn’t say danger, like somebody’s chasing after you with a knife or a gun, but most of your fear is socially health-related for things that haven’t happened that you may be perceiving. Maybe it’s a prognosis and you’re telling all these stories about it. Maybe it’s all these stories about an ending relationship. Maybe it’s all these stories about you’ve lost your job. Now, what are you going to do?

But once you can get your mind around and you accept that those are simply stories, fear, this is good. I’m giggling it a little bit. In this moment, fear starts to lose its control of you and its grip on you. If you’re like me, what I did for many years, I talked about in the introduction, I used to fight the fear. And I would fight it through, I would push it away. It’s kind of like, I don’t know, I’m trying to think of a metaphor. It’s not coming quickly, but it’s kind of like, nevermind, I can’t think of a metaphor. So I’ll just move on. I can’t think of a metaphor in this moment.

And like most of us, I’ll do the episode. And then later I’m like, damn, I should have used XYZ metaphor. It popped in my mind. That happens to all of us. But anyway, we fight it and we try to run from it. The reason we have fear, it comes from the amygdala. It’s a part of the brain that’s responsible for our survival. But what we try to do, which is part of the survival mechanism, is we try to push it away. We fight it. We overwrite it. We negate it. We argue with it.

And then for me, many years ago, it was affirmations, self-hypnosis, reframing and breath work, and many people even cry, you know, willpower, and that doesn’t work. And I had these in my arsenal, my tool belt, so to speak. My tool belt of, okay, if fear comes knocking, I got my tool belt of affirmations and willpower and breath work and reframing and all these kind of hacks. But guess what? Fear kept coming until I saw through the illusion and recognized it was a story. And I had to keep wearing my metaphorical fear tool belt because I always had those tools on me.

Until I understood what I’m sharing here with you, fear would always come knocking like the grim reaper. It would always come back. But what I noticed is when I’d use the techniques, and I’ve heard this from a lot of people, when we talk about techniques or a hack, many people will say, and I can say the same thing, oh, okay. That worked for a little while. And then shit, here comes the fear again, roaring like a lion, even louder and bigger and badder before.

And the reason why is because when you’re using all these techniques, you’re into resistance. And resistance, when you’re trying to resist fear, is akin to throwing gasoline on a fire. And the reason why, and this is profound when you get it. Because fighting a thought, which is what fear is, fighting a thought confirms to your mind that the thought slash fear slash threat are real. So the harder you push, the more it persists and tries to stay in your life.

So what do you do with this? Stop resisting. And the techniques, the hacks and the strategies and all this, they’re simply you trying to resist the fear. And you’ve heard the phrase before, we all have, what you resist persists. Now, the pieces should start to fold together at this point, recognizing you’re seeing yourself do these things. But in Buddhism, what you observe dissolves.

And the reason why even neurologically, brain-based, psychologically, the observing fear is I call an emotional disassociation. Meaning you’re not saying I am in fear, I am in fear, I am in fear. You’re noticing the fear. And when you notice the fear, you’re no longer working from I am in fear. You’re observing the fear and that gives you power and autonomy over the fear.

So what you want to do in the future is a bit of a Buddhist practice is notice the fear without fighting it, without hacking it, without technicking it away, without breathing it away, without battling it. Identify it. And this is a concept in psychology. When you name something, it’s easier to understand it and work through it.

So what you want to do, I suggest, is recognize when fear comes, recognize what it feels like, recognize it sounds like, recognize what it looks like, recognize the voices that you hear. Now, dialogue with yourself. Here it is again. And that’s the whole thing. That’s the whole thing. That’s the realization. Now, the key is you’ve got to practice that. But when you practice that, it becomes second nature and it becomes second nature to see when fear comes knocking.

And because you’re recognizing it and you’re observing it as opposed to being smothered and engaged in it, it’s a lot easier to literally just let the fear fall away. What you may want to do also when I said naming it is give it a name. But give it a name you do not like. Now, I’m just randomly picking any name. Let’s say you do not like someone. Let’s say you know somebody in your life that’s hurtful. They’re abusive. Bob. And I’m sorry if your name is Bob. I’m just picking a name. Bob. So you can give your fear that feeling the name of Bob and then talk to yourself about it. This is awareness.

Here we go. Here comes Bob again, bringing the same old stories and the same old bullshit. And in that moment, that frees you because you recognize it’s Bob. It’s outside of you. That disassociates you from the fear and that gives you peace and power. So recognize this with what I just gave you. You’re not the fear. You are not the fear. You are the awareness of when fear arises. And that is soulful. Because your awareness is not physical in the 3D world. Your awareness is purely mental.

Now, back to what I was talking about earlier. Notice this. This small distinction is big. Fear is protecting a story, but it’s not your life. And I’ve talked a lot about stories. I’m working with a shaman. I’ve said it here on the podcast before. He taught me something many years ago that’s been candidly a lifesaver for me. And that phrase, a simple couple of sentences or a sentence is: the world is this way or that way because I tell myself the world is this way or that way.

When you are in fear, you are telling yourself the world is this way or that way. You’re declaring it. But when you recognize and you’re aware that it’s simply a story, that is the way, this way or that way, that is the way you’re telling yourself now, that fear is not associated to you. It is a story that you’re telling yourself.

So then we have to ask, well, because this was a question I had for many years. If I’m aware of it, then why do I feel like it’s so real? Because we think we’ve learned that fear is protecting your body. It’s protecting your story. Let me give you a quick example here. Maybe you’re at home by yourself. One night, the curtains are closed. You have a fence around your backyard. No one is supposed to be back in your backyard. The gates are locked. You’re watching a movie. It’s quiet out at night. And you hear footsteps in the backyard: crunch, crunch, crunch.

In that moment, you get into fear. Notice automatically what you do. You start telling yourself a story. And that story is, oh my God, I’m home alone. The curtains are closed. I hear something outside. Yes, I remember I did lock the back gate. No one is supposed to be in my backyard. Oh my God, let me get my phone. I might need to call 911. Maybe there’s somebody in my backyard. And then you go into protecting the body. If there’s someone in my backyard, am I in danger? Am I going to get hurt?

Notice all this fear is protecting your story that you’re telling yourself, which is what I just went through. Your story is that there may be somebody in my backyard that I like to get. It’s all a story. Notice it’s all a story. So fear is not protecting your life. Fear is not protecting your body for most of us, unless somebody’s got a gun pointed at you or you’re in imminent danger. At that point, you call the police or run like hell. But fear is protecting your story.

Now think about this. I’m going to give you some real life scenarios here. Many people hide. I know so many people that want to do things online. They want to start their own business, et cetera, and they hide. And they hide because they’re ashamed, they’re embarrassed, they’re afraid of what people are going to say, all these kind of things. And you may be able to relate to that. But maybe people are afraid of embarrassment. So what they’re really afraid of is some image of themselves being exposed.

A lot of people are afraid of failure. And the reason why is because we have these self-images, these identities, these self-concepts of ourself, and we believe other people see us in a particular way. And if we fail, then other people are not going to see us in that way anymore. A big one, you’ve heard me say before, the two biggest fears, the fear of rejection and the fear of inadequacy.

The fear of rejection. And that is basically, if we’re afraid to be rejected, it means that we are trying to maintain a certain projection of ourself or a version of ourself that other people see in a certain way. And as long as other people see us in a certain way, they’re going to like us. And as long as they like us, we are safe.

So what fear really does is it’s a guard. Like, you know, a guard. I can’t say it anymore simply. It’s a guard for the illusions and the stories that you have created in your own mind. It’s the identity. It’s the game that you’ve been playing for so long that you’ve even forgotten that it’s a game. It’s a story. It’s a role that you’re playing. And many people, you hear the word authenticity. Many people literally are afraid of even being authentic. So if they play the story and they play the game, they’re not being authentic. But they’re literally contriving and manufacturing the way that other people see them. People might not see the real them, but they see the manufactured them.

When I first started with a shaman, one of the first things he said was, is you’ve got to let go of your past history. Two things he said is let go of your ego and let go of your past history. Now, these are tall orders. These are big things. But notice about fear. The fear is in the ego. If they see me for who I really am, they won’t love me. Now, we’ve created this story from the past. We’re living in the past, not the present. And the past is they can’t see me because if they see me, they’re going to reject me. Therefore, I’m going to hide and I’m going to put this mask on. And as long as I put this mask on, you can’t see me. And if you can’t see me, you’re going to love the illusion of me that you think that I am.

Been there, done that. And there was a quote that I read, and I don’t know why. It’s pretty easy for me to read a quote and apply it and let go of stuff. But being gay, for many years, I hid. I was in the closet until my 20s at some point. And it was a different time. I grew up in a different time, different world than it is now. But I hid for so many years. And Don Javier pulled me aside one time on a family trip and said, on this trip, you will come out tomorrow. You’re going to stop hiding. And he said, you hiding, literally, it drains your energy. You’re going to stop hiding.

But I remember, I think back, you know, this is decades ago, 30 years ago or more. I think back about the fear that I was living in. And at that time, around the time Don Javier said that to me, we’re on a family vacation, I read a quote. And that quote is what released me from the fear. And if you can find it in yourself to live from this quote, it will also release you from a great deal of your fear. And that quote is: “I would rather be hated for who I am than loved for what I am not.”

So at that time, I wanted to be loved for this illusion of me, but I was not being who I was, which was a gay person. I was not being that because I was afraid that I’d be rejected, which I wasn’t. I was fully embraced by my family, but it was all a story. And I put myself through sheer, fucking hell hiding in the story. And, you know, I’m laughing here. The irony that I recognized is the false self that I was presenting to people was creating the exact pain that I was trying to prevent.

When I got that, it was like a two by four right between the eyes. So for you right now, think of some social fear you have right now or some fear that’s in your mind right now. It can be economic. It can be relationships. It can be whatever. But the reality is, is you don’t have certainty about it, but you’re thinking about it and you’re telling yourself stories about it. Now, get that fear now. Maybe it’s a fear about the economy, a fear about your health, a fear about your relationships, a fear about your new business, a fear about moving, whatever it is.

Ask yourself this question: What story is this fear protecting? What image am I defending? It’s important that you recognize this. And this is where I’ve lived my life from for many years. Your soul cannot exist under that story. When you work from the soul, which is why I’ve said many times, know yourself as soul, which is where I am endeavoring to take these podcast episodes. But I keep coming back to the practicality all because it’s great to talk about bigger and higher concepts, which I will do a lot more of. But I have to ground it in practicality because we have to use it in everyday wisdom and everyday living.

So know this, that your soul doesn’t worry about being rejected. Your soul doesn’t get in the fear about failing. Your soul does not get into fear about your health or your diagnosis. That is all, I’m going to say it very slowly, that is all your 3D ego and your, the operative word is your stories. And when you rest in that and you absorb that and you get that, the fear is a story. If you can even get a fleeting glimpse of that, fear will lose its power over you.

Okay, so how do we, as I talked about in the intro, how do we exit the prison of fear? Well, the solution is surrender, not force. And many people think, and I did for many years, we think that surrender is weakness. We think surrender is giving up. No, it’s not. Surrender is actually accepting what is in the moment, not later, not the past, and the moment.

And notice this. Fear is always in negotiation with an outcome that you can’t guarantee. So I look back at my life and all the times that I’ve gotten into fear, and mine was, again, even though, well, let me back up. Mine was money, as I’ve said several times, and I’ve talked about a lot in the episodes. When I had the heart failure and stroke in 2020, I kid you not. And I wish there’s some way you could see in my brain to know that I’m telling you the absolute truth. Completely.

I had no fear. None. When the doctor said to me, I remember the exact second the doctor said, you’re in heart failure. Okay. No big deal. That’s literally what I said. No big deal. One of the cardiologists told me a very bad story about what could happen to me. No big deal. They told me stories. They told me their story about their observation from other people who did not know how to heal, but I know how to heal. So when they told me these things, many people get in the fear of the stories that other people give them. I’m simply like, I’m going to be fine. I’m going to be totally fine.

So when you recognize that, okay, is when you surrender and recognize and you accept what is in the moment. And you recognize the fear is an illusion. You recognize the fear is a story. That’s one of your big takeaways. You recognize it. Take a step right now. I’m going to be quiet for 10 seconds. Just notice this. Just think about it and let it settle in. All of your fears, unless you’re in imminent danger, is a story. Let that settle in now.

Notice this also. When you’re in your fear, and this was a big one for me. When you’re in your fear, you’re trying to control something. Think about that. When you’re in your fear, you are trying to control something. And when we recognize that we control nothing, nothing whatsoever, we can choose and we have free will, but we can’t control anything. When we recognize that right there, everything will change just like that. We start becoming alive again. We start having presence. We start seeing beauty in the world. And all the things that we feared in the past start falling away.

But you’ve got to take that with you after this episode and recognize anytime I am feeling, not just thinking, anytime I am feeling fear, it is because I am telling myself a story about something, and that story is trying to protect me from XYZ. Judgment, rejection, inadequacy, people not wanting me in their life, whatever it might be. And recognize this when I said whatever it might not be.

Some takeaways, transformational takeaways for you is fear is never about what is. It’s always about what might be. A couple of more things here. Resistance makes fear very real because you’re fighting the paper tiger. Observation, like I talked about a few minutes ago, is what makes it—and this is what we want—observation is what makes it dissolve.

I also want to point out the brain has to relearn. You have learned to have all of your fear. Think about that. They say babies are born of two fears, the fear of loud noise and the fear of falling. All other fears are learned. So you’ve learned the fears. You have to unlearn the fears, and that happens through repetition is the way the brain learns. Now we work from observation, and you observe the fear as a story. That will actually dissolve the fear.

Two more quick points here is recognize this. Control is the illusion that fear hides behind. Think about that. Control is the illusion that fear hides behind. And like I said earlier, surrender, we’ve got to surrender. Surrender isn’t weakness. It’s literally the only way that we can start eliminating the fear that might have paralyzed us in the past.

I’ve said it a couple of times before I give you the transformational takeaway here. This Buddhist monk was sitting with some people. And somebody in the audience said, “You’re always so happy. And how do you do that?” And he said, “I just say okay to everything.” Now, you’re listening right now, and maybe the same thought I had back then was, what the hell are you talking about saying? I’m not okay with this. I’m not okay with that. I’m not okay with blah, blah, blah.

What I recognized is I can’t, here’s this word again, I can’t control those things. All I can do is be aware of them in the moment and be okay because that is surrender and surrender is accepting what is now. It doesn’t mean I can’t change it later. It just means that I’m okay that guess what? That’s what’s happening now and I can work. I can tend to change it later.

So here’s your transformational takeaway, okay? Memorize this. Write it on your bathroom mirror. Write it on your forehead, whatever it might be. If fear comes knocking again, simply say to yourself: “This is fear. Maybe you gave it a name, Harold, Bob, whatever. This is fear or this is Harold or Bob or Susan or whatever. This is fear. This is a thought about the future. And right now in this breath, I’m okay. I’m okay right now.”

You start applying this and you will find. In a pretty short amount of time, in a matter of a couple of weeks, literally, you’ll start rewiring your brain. Just start doing this, and I promise you, you do this with what I shared in this episode. A month from now, you will find that fear has significantly lost its grip on your life or completely disappeared.

Okay, I rarely ask for this, and I’m going to start asking for more of this. I rarely, rarely ask, but if you get value from these episodes, please, please go to Apple and leave me a five-star review. Anything less than a five-star review is not going to help me. And more five-star reviews will potentially help me more with the algorithms. If not, if nothing else, it helps me just create more credibility so you and I together can reach more people and help more people. As well, if you found value here, please share the episode. I’d be grateful. Thank you so much for listening. I’ll catch you over on another episode. Bye-bye.