What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life - Erwin McManus - #906

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
You said you've limited your impact in the world because of a lack of self-belief. Tell me the story, then.

**Erwin McManus** (0:08)
Well, I think when I was young, I had the view that some people were just naturally heroic, and some people were just naturally born cowards, and I fell into that category. If I look back when I was young, I was afraid of everything. And some of it was experiential. We got attacked by a dog, so I was terrified by dogs all my life.
I had a seatbelt break on a roller coaster and almost flew off the roller coaster, and so I was afraid of roller coasters or anything fast. And I began realizing that I began accumulating fear. And the problem with fear is that it doesn't stay in the category. It permeates throughout your whole soul, your psychological well-being. And I began realizing that I was more defined by fear than I was by almost any other emotion. And I didn't really have a strategy. We didn't have what we have today. So many ways of accessing insight and ways of understanding mental structures and mind shifts. But so I had to make my own decision. I had to decide how would I affect this? How would I change this? It's I developed a strategy to use fear as my life compass. Whenever I felt fear, I just moved toward it. Whenever I felt afraid of something, I actually moved more aggressively in that direction. And what I discovered by the time I'd finished my twenties is that there were actually international magazines and documentaries that were flying in to see what I was doing because they felt that was fearless. And I thought this is so ironic that I was being defined as someone who was fearless. And in fact, my favorite superhero is Daredevil, the man without fear. And it was because I iconically longed to become that person because I knew how my whole life was captured by fear. And so I learned how to take negative material and turn it to a positive asset. And I think that for me is the key is that I've lived a pretty adventurous life, traveled to nearly 100 countries, gone to some of the most dangerous places in the world, walked the streets of Damascus, dropped into Pakistan and throughout the Middle East, different parts of the world that very few people ever go to and very few people ever survive. And one of the most interesting things for me is that in those moments, I didn't feel captured by fear at all.
And a huge part of that was because I had learned how to take this emotion, this experience called fear, turned it into a positive fuel and used it as a way to motivate me to move forward in life.

**Chris Williamson** (2:31)
How can people work out if they are being ruled by fear in their life?

**Erwin McManus** (2:36)
Well, I don't think it's that difficult to teach. I think most of us know just intrinsically that when we're afraid. But it's usually related to when we have a dream, an ambition, desire, or goal. And we're more afraid of the consequences than we are the benefit. And so when we're paralyzed from moving into our best view of ourselves or our future, that's when we know we're controlled by fear.

**Chris Williamson** (3:03)
Yeah, the fact that the potential pitfalls are more terrifying than the potential outcomes are infusing. The fact that you've got this sort of running away from something that you don't want as opposed to running towards something that you do want. And the balance between those two energies is really interesting.

**Erwin McManus** (3:24)
Yeah. And one of the things we have to realize is that one of the things that's unique about human beings as a species is that we're interconnected to the future. Every other species, from the best that we can tell, is completely existential. They live in this moment. They're surviving the Serengeti.
You know, they're surviving the hunt and the fight for survival. But human beings are inseparable from a relationship to the past and the future. And when we live in the past, we tend to live a life of regret. But when we live in the future, we have two options. We have an option to either live a life that would be described as a life of faith or a life of fear, because the future is unknown and from my perspective, it's uncreated. I'm not a fatalist. I'm not a scientific determinist that thinks everything is mathematically already predetermined. I think we have choice, that we have creative agency as human beings. And so then we're connected to this obscure, mysterious space called the future. And how we engage that, whether we have a sense of optimism and hope, or whether we're filled with fear and trepidation, that will shape the way we experience life in the present.