Good day to you. This is David Sammel with another nugget of the week. Naturally, we're all free thinkers and there are plenty of people doing podcasts and blogs on all of these subjects. I'm just one extra voice in the crowd, but I hope that I can get to the crux of the matter, to the nub of the problem very quickly in a short space of time, so you can get an alternative perception that can maybe spark something in your brain to help you in a given topic.
Today's topic is based on steps to control your fear. Well, the first step when you really are thinking fearfully is to write your fear down, or your fears down. Once you write them down, because a lot of times when things are swirling in our heads, we see them as far bigger than they actually are so when you actually write them down on paper, it can immediately take the sting out of them. The second thing is to look at that fear and say, firstly, is it rational? Well, in my experience, most fears are rational. It's the chances of them happening and that idea that they could happen very easily that is irrational.
So as an example, if you're afraid of swimming in the sea, because you'll be attacked by a shark, that fear is incredibly rational. I mean, who the hell wants to be attacked by a shark. But the part that is irrational is the chances that it could happen. Now, if that's, you know, highly remote, and we know all the statistics about that so basically, you have that fear in the wrong box. It should be in the box that says, remotely happening, like getting run over on your walk to the local store.
The third way to actually help bring us under control is imagine and write down what the worst thing is, that could happen. So, the worst thing that could happen is that you could be attacked by that shark. Well, ask yourself this question. How much money would you bet on you being attacked by a shark if you were swimming in the sea? If the answer to that is you wouldn't bet on it, then that gives you an idea of how remote the chances are of that happening. I'm going to tell you a little story when I was in high school. In South Africa, in high school, we used to get caned by teachers if we forgot to do our homework. And I had homework Afrikaans homework for the next day. I was watching a TV programme and you know, just didn't get around to doing the homework. And then I said, Okay, I'm going to get up early in the morning and do the homework. And of course, the alarm went off, pressed the snooze button, didn't get up early enough to do the homework. But hey, it was the last period of the day so I would do that homework in a break time. The first break time came, and I thought, well, this is a really short break, I'll do it in the second break time. Second break time a game of football broke out and I decided Yeah, I'm going to, you know, go in and play that football. And all this time, the fear of the caning that I was going to get in the last period was just getting bigger and bigger and bigger, I was basically frozen by this fear. We got into that classroom, and it turned out that the teacher had to go home because he was ill. Therefore, all of my fears of getting caned that day didn't actually happen. Sometimes when we fear things that could definitely happen and it's rational and there's a good chance of it happening, even then there's a chance that it won't happen.
All in all the three steps are:

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