Turn your fear and indecision into confidence and action (Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway - Susan Jeffers)

Member Name: sandra101

Product:	Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway - Susan Jeffers
Date:	04/09/08 (210 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Will hopefull improve your outlook on life

Disadvantages: none for me

Susan Jeffers is a trained psychologist. She is honest in how this book came about and explains the low point in her life when she struggled to move forward and explained how she coped to get over this which led to the book "Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway" being written.

To me this is more than a book it's a learning guide which should be referred back to time and again. I would recommend buying it rather than borrowing it from the library as it's around £5.00 and it's the type of book you might want to highlight passages from and certainly the type of book you will want\need to read more than once.

The book itself has twelve chapters, which will educate you on how to grow and improve your life. There is a very common sense approach coming through the book but that just makes the ideas for branching out in your own life seem much reasonable.

Excerpt from the Introduction

"Whenever we take a chance and enter unfamiliar territory or put ourselves into the world in a new way, we experience fear. Very often this fear keeps us from moving ahead with our lives, The trick is to FEEL THE FEAR AND DO IT ANYWAY".

The point is to increase your awareness of where and how fear has a hold of you, and it will provide the tools to overcome it. In most cases and I realize we are all different but once you have read this book and probably read it again you will find that you are less stressed and are much more likely to reach out and grasp opportunites because you know that no matter how things turn out - You'll handle it.

Susan writes simply, her views and experiences are easy to relate to she gets you to think about what you want and how you are going to get it, but she always makes you think about how it could turn bad and gets you to work out a strategy if the worst comes to the worst. If you have your strategy in place for the worst case scenario then you may as well go for it and not have the worry about failing.

Susan Jeffers does not claim to be able to cure agoraphobia\panic attacks\mental problems or to get you a top management job what she does claim is that she can set you on the road with small steps to being able to try to do anything you want.

A lot of our problems in adulthood stem from the way we were brought up. If your mother waved you off every morning warning you to watch out for perverts, not to fall over, wash your hands or the germs will make you sick you are obviously more likely to grow up more afraid than someone who's mother waved them of at the door simply saying goodbye and cleaned up their bloody knees without mention of septicemia when you came home. These small habits effectively influence your later life.

Some people have a tendency to always blame other "I'm unemployed, it's the governments fault", "I'm stuck in a rut, it's my husbands fault" but rarely look to see how they can fix things, always waiting for others to do the fixing. It's much easier to blame everyone else for your failings that to make the effort to make things better yourself.

Susan describes three Levels of Fear

The first level is an event that you fear - eg losing you job

The second level - is what this could mean, I'll lose my house, my wife and kids will go, I'll have no respect, I'll end up on the streets living in a cardboard box.

The third level - The fear that you won't be able to cope once this snowball effect kicks in. If you were confident that you could handle it and would make ends meet, eg work from home, temp, there is no point in being afraid of the first two. All fear therefore is a fear of not being able to cope when something happens.
If you knew you could handle anything that came your way, what would you possibly have to fear? The answer is Nothing

I believe this book for most people will help build confidence, raise self-awareness and build self-esteem. It changes how you see the present and future. You will still make lots of mistakes but with this book you will be able to accept these mistakes, learn from them and move on instead of wallowing in self pity for a long time.

Reading the book without acting on the information within is like washing your feet with your socks on. You need to get in there, separate those toes, scrub hard if you want to get the results no glossing over the headings, read the content and act on it.

You can choose to rise to the challenges that come your way and get through them intact or you can lie down and get walked all over. You need to switch off the nagging voice inside your head that says "I can't get that job" or "That fella wouldn't look twice at me".

This book will not eliminate fear from your life but it will allow you to have more faith in your own capabilities to cope as Susan says - "If you can handle more then you can do more".
She relates stories of people who have trapped themselves in a circle of fear and do not have the ability to climb out. Their lives do not move forward, they just continually stay in one place. Susan tells how she got them to fight back and reclaim their lives.

Main lessons

Positive thinking over negative thinking.
Silence the nagging voice in your head
Whatever the worst case scenario, imagine it and imagine how you could handle it.
When making a decision all options are good - simply pick the best one

There are exercises to compliment her teaching which are thought-provoking and should lead you to analyse your life and how you can improve it.

A lot of self-help books seem to offer the same old stuff regurgitated in a new way I believe Susan Jeffers Feel the Fear is at the top of this genre and offer something a little different from most of the other titles.

I have given this book to friends who are struggling after a painful experience, redundancy, divorce etc. It doesn't cost very much but hopefully it shows them that someone cares and that they'll learn to cope a little better with what they are going through.

Even someone who poo poos the idea of self help books who reads this will take away an ability to be better able to deal with the type of situations which happen in everyday life.

Summary: This really can be a life changing book