Review of Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers
This is a book review of Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway: Dynamic Techniques for Turning Fear, Indecision, and Anger Into Power, Action, and Love.
No longer do you have to try a mumbo-jumbo technique, a psychological trick, or the latest dietary secret to “remove” your fears. According to Jeffers, just do the thing you fear. If reading that statement scares you, you are normal!
There’s no wonder this book has sold over 2 million copies. With fear being so common in society, Jeffers has a solution that gets the reader to act in the face of fear.
Ironically, your fears disappear, or at least greatly diminish, once you “just do it”. When you feel fear, yet take action, anxiety vanishes as you see the irrational nature of the fear. Then you become what people call “a confident person“. You save yourself time and worry in failed attempts to deal with your fear.
Jeffers’ best-selling book is named after a class she taught on fear. The class quickly became a hit. Her students were able to act in the face of their fears and build confidence from their action.
As was common in her classes, the students thought their fears were weird, unique problems. Her students felt different from the rest of society. As students gradually began to share their stories, each class always warmed and filled with a sense of excitement, a sense of hope their “weird problems” could at last be cured.
We think fear is a psychological problem. You may perceive yourself to have some weird mental or emotional problem, but it isn’t some weird problem. The fear we experience is more an educational problem than a psychological problem – an educational problem made clear to you in Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.
The book’s main message is that fear comes from an uncertainty in capability to handle the situation. Our fears come from a disbelief in our ability to handle whatever life gives us. Jeffers says, “All you have to do to diminish your fear is to develop more trust in your ability to handle whatever comes your way.”
Though this may seem contradictory to the book’s main message, the book is not focused on removing fear – as the title goes: Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. Many of your fears can go away, and the book helps you to remove fears, but as Jeffers shares with her first truth about fear, “The fear will never go away as long as I continue to grow.” The 5 truths about fear are real eye-openers.
Everybody fears doing, or being, something new because of the uncertainty within unfamiliar situations. If you don’t fear, you don’t grow. Moreover, if everyone experiences fear in approaching something new in life, the problem itself is not fear. The real problem is how you hold fear.
People paralyzed by fear feel helpless, indecisive, and angry; while those empowered by fear are powerful, action-oriented, and loving. The difference between the two categories of people is an educational problem solved by Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. Fear, indecision, and anger are transformed into power, action, and love.
As you may have noticed in this review, the book doesn’t only talk about fears. It helps you become more decisive, powerful, action-oriented, and loving. Many of our personal problems relate to these issues that are subtle fears beyond our conscious awareness. For example, a wife stays in her miserable marriage not realizing that she fears the uncertain life ahead of her if she moved out. She continues to remain in the marriage constantly blaming her husband for what occurs in her life. The wife has anger and indecisiveness originating from her fear. You likely do too.
Chapters are devoted to understanding fear, personal responsibility, blame, self-talk, positiveness, and transformation to name a few topics. Jeffers has you control the “chatterbox” within you that makes you worry. I think the chapter on wholeness is brilliant because a whole life prevents us from fearing loss in other areas of life. Another great chapter was on no-lose decision-making. The author made me realize that no matter what choice I select in any decision, each choice leads to its own unique, fulfilling reward. What a great way to remove anxiety in selecting a choice.
The book is well written and simple to read. It doesn’t have the psychological terminology that can throw people off reading books about the human mind. Its simplicity combined with a concise 209 pages will have you quickly finish the book. You can be feeling the fear and doing it anyway in no time. Securely grab your copy of Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway now from Amazon by clicking here.
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Update: What are your favorite songs to hype you up for pumping iron? For me, anything by King Tiesto.
Hi Joshua,
Really great review on this book. I read this book a long time ago and it is great. I must say that at the time, I was going through life experiences that caused a lot of fear and this book actually helped me make it through.
Thanks for sharing,
Denise