Many of you know that the topic of moving through fear is one have often visited on this blog and that I sometimes broach as a speaker. I think it’s imperative to learn to conquer our fears so we can live our lives fully and accomplish our goals. I rarely publish an interview on this blog, but I felt compelled to do so after reading a free ebook, called The Flinch, by Julien Smith, which is also about moving through fear—or overcoming fear. The Flinch also is about asking people to change, compelling them to change. In that way, Julien is a change agent. So, I was thrilled to get a chance to interview him and to share that interview with you.
Julien is a New York Times bestselling author of two books, Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust and The Flinch. He is a consultant and speaker who has been involved in online communities for over fifteen years, from early BBSs and flash mobs to social web as we know it today. He also was one of the first Twitter users and one of the first people to podcast in 2004 (which is impressive to me since I’ve just struggled to get my first podcast up). He has worked with numerous media publications, such as Sirius Satellite Radio, GQ, CBS, Cosmopolitan, and more.
The following interview is part of a three part interview. You can read the other parts here and here. In this part, Julien talks about our bad habit of “flinching” when we expect to experience pain and how to train ourselves to consciously build the strength to get past our fear–to stop flinching.
I just finished reading your newest book, The Flinch, which, I loved. For those who have not read it, could you just briefly explain the concept?
Sure. I guess in a way The Flinch, in a nutshell, is about our pathological lack of courage as individuals. Many of the things we shy away from are, in fact, not painful, not damaging, not bad in any way, but we just sort of shy away from them out of habit. So, really it’s a book about how to break out of bad habits and break into good ones.
That’s something most people need to do. Fear stops people from doing what they want, from writing and publishing a book, trying something new, getting into or out of a new relationships or jobs, creating the life they desire and succeeding. Can you talk about that a bit?
You start to notice as you speak to a lot of people who are trying to make change in their life that there are two kinds of people. One is a general optimist who knows at the end of everything they’ll end up fine. The other kind doesn’t explicitly say so but often feels like they have a lot of anxiety around life, let’s say quitting a job or something like that. The feeling is, ‘I’ll be broke and then I’ll die,’ or something like that. That’s the kind of sentiment that they have around change, even though they’ve never verbalized it that way. What I tried to create in The Flinch is a feeling, through a number of exercises, that you can do painful things and survive and be better as a result of them. I think that’s a series of habits that you need to develop.
Any time they feel something is difficult, many people just quit. I know I just quit often. That was a terrible habit of mine until I broke it.
That’s a pretty common habit for most people. You suggest that people should get in the ring, like a fighter.
Exactly. The reason for the title of the book, The Flinch, is because I spent a lot of time around athletes and self-defense professionals and officers and so on. I noticed that the people who understand these things the most are the people who feel it in a visceral way. Some of the best reactions from people about the book have been from swimmers, for example. Swimmers are like, ‘I feel exactly like this every single time I’m about to do an open-water swim.’ And you have, of course, boxers and people who do Muay Thai. Athletes naturally understand this.
I think most people find it really hard to create change. Why do we not change even when we say we want to? Is it a fear of change?
Let’s talk in a more specific manner to try and sort of make this more concrete for people. They get this impression, ‘Oh, why is it so hard for me.’ We have no faith in our ability to reconstruct, and we have no faith in our own ability to make things better for ourselves. Some of the simplest things that you can do are to put yourself in situations where there really are no sort of negative social or psychological or physical consequences for what you do, but you feel this anxiety—what I call the flinch.
So try exercises in meeting strangers; you know, strangers are something very new in our lives. A hundred years ago there were no cities, or very few…Ninety-nine percent of the people we see every day are strangers, right? So this is new and in a way a sort of anxiety creating thing. We don’t feel that we have the ability to walk up to these people, but the reality is that there are no social consequences for walking up to a stranger at all.
I would say that one of the best things you can do is find hard things and do them over and over again. Before you can find them, you have to feel that sentiment inside of you, and most people just ignore it. Learn to train yourself in feeling that, and going, ‘I know what I need to do when I feel that feeling,’ and then go forward with it.
Talking to strangers is a great tip. Do you have others?
There’s a million of them, you know. I spoke to this guy who’s one of the lead speakers in regards to the stuttering community, and he said, ‘You know, some of the exercises that you present in [your book] are the same exercises that stutterers do.’ It turns out that [they are] some of the same exercises that people who have PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder, or people who have anxiety attacks use. I’ve, sort of, without really thinking about those problems, have created something which really works for them and also works for the population at large.
I’ve been building homework assignments, and I plan to release them later in some capacity. One of them is to stutter on purpose. It’s this amazing thing you can do maybe four or five times in a day, and then just go about your daily life. Everybody knows how to do this, but it’s an exercise they make stutterers do so they can gain control of something they normally would not be able to control at all. If you go over to someone, especially someone who’s paid to talk to you, like a clerk in the corner store or something like that, and you stutter through what it is that you want to do, and then feel that embarrassment—it’s almost like purposeful embarrassment—to realize that when you get past the embarrassment you’re totally fine.Something else I would do to feel it physically is to do something like begin weightlifting at the edge of your capacity.
Most people when they go into the gym, they’ll go and they’ll do weights, like twenty five or thirty reps of some insignificant weight. Instead of doing that, do something like put it up to what weightlifters call your five-rep max, and put up a weight that is almost impossible for you to lift. Stare at it, and then go ahead and do it. You’ll feel in your body this extremely hard not only physical thing but psychologically taxing thing. Even weightlifters say if you squat three times a week at that kind of ability you become psychologically drained from how difficult it is, but it also carries forward into other parts of your life if you’re able to do it.
Let’s say we don’t only want to create change in our personal lives, but we actually want to be change agents in the world. We want to make big change, or affect change. Do these small things you’re talking about doing, these exercises you’re giving us, help us learn to make change in the world?
Some of the criticism of this book comes from people who are like, ‘What the hell. This is so trivial.’ You know, Victor Frankel wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. He was in the Holocaust; he was in a concentration camp, and he was one of the few survivors. He wrote something which is a famous phrase: ‘Between stimulus and response, there is a moment, and in that moment lies our freedom.’ Basically, you have a stimulus, and you have an ability to react instinctively or an ability to think out a reaction to that stimulus, whatever that stimulus is. He claims the reason he survived the concentration camp is because he was able to stay psychologically strong. He could watch people and see that once they had psychologically given way, their bodies would begin to wither away after that.
To me, the biggest strength is an internal strength. No person can give you a job that will give you this strength. No individual can ever take it away from you once you have it either. To me it’s an internal strength that you build. It is built with a conscious sort of construction that comes from the mind and from the psyche, and then, thereafter, builds out into the world. And you’ll see that when you do this, when you become a more conscious person as a result of these supposedly trivial acts, that people will see you differently, and doors will open as a result of it.
What does it take to really accomplish something and to create something that affects change in the world?
I’ve already written a few books. To write is actually is not a big deal at all. You just have to sit there and do it. A girlfriend of mine used to say, ‘People respect travelers so much; but really all you have to do to be a traveler is to get on a plane. It’s an easy thing to do.’ In the same way, being a writer is a very easy thing to do. It’s the ability to sit down every single day and do it over and over and over again and to have the humility to destroy things that you once thought were good that you now think are bad because your standards are higher. This is really what makes someone excellent. That’s a great internal change which is really effective in the world.
Julien spoke to me about writing books, making them bestsellers, and being a change agent via your writing. You can read this part of the interview here. He also spoke about blogging and affecting change with a blog. You can read this part of the interview here.
I highly suggest you read The Flinch; you can download it for free for your Kindle (a free version of this program is free for your laptop). I’ve told all my family members to read it. I have a personal interest in the subject of moving through fear to achieve your goals. I wrote a short book, which will one day become a full length one on the topic: Navigating the Narrow Bridge.
Do you “flinch” often, avoiding fear and not moving toward your goals? Have you found ways to change your habits or thoughts about fear? Tell me about this with a comment.
If you are interested in writing and blogging, read the other parts to my interview here and here.
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