Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

Susan Jeffers opens by listing fears common to nearly everyone: public speaking, making decisions, intimacy, aging, being alone. Fear, she argues, is epidemic. Yet the inability to deal with fear is not a psychological problem but an educational one. By reeducating the mind, a person can transform fear from a barrier into a manageable fact of life.

Jeffers grounds this claim in her own experience. For years, a negative inner voice warned her not to take chances. One morning, seeing herself crying in the mirror, she shouted "ENOUGH" and discovered a voice of strength and love she had never heard. She resolved to unlearn fearful thinking, reading widely and attending workshops. Eventually she designed a course called "Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway" at the New School in New York City, testing her conviction that fear-management techniques could be taught to anyone.

Jeffers introduces a three-level framework for understanding fear. Level 1 fears are surface-level and situation-specific: aging, illness, changing careers, public speaking. Level 2 fears involve the ego and inner states, such as rejection, failure, and vulnerability; because these are generalized, a single Level 2 fear can pervade many areas of life. Level 3 is the deepest layer and the root of all others: the belief "I can't handle it." If a person believed they could handle anything, they would have nothing to fear. The task is not to control the outside world but to build trust in one's ability to cope.

She presents five Fear Truths: Fear never disappears as long as a person continues to grow; the only way to eliminate the fear of doing something is to do it; the only way to feel better about oneself is to push through fear into action; everyone experiences fear on unfamiliar territory; and pushing through fear is less frightening than living with the chronic dread of helplessness. She illustrates these through examples ranging from her own first teaching experience, where dread dissolved through repeated exposure, to TV producer Shonda Rhimes, who overcame severe performance anxiety by committing to say yes to every invitation for a year.

With these truths established, Jeffers introduces the Pain-to-Power continuum. Fear itself is not the problem; what matters is how one holds it. Holding fear from a position of pain produces helplessness and paralysis; holding it from a position of power produces choice, energy, and action. The power she advocates is not control over others but power within the self: over one's perceptions, reactions, and ability to love. She encourages readers to track their movement from pain toward power and to adopt empowering language, replacing phrases like "I can't" and "I should" with "I won't" and "I could." She also urges readers to expand their comfort zones by taking one small risk each day.

Jeffers devotes significant attention to personal responsibility, contending that most people who believe they control their lives actually operate as victims who blame external forces. Her definitions of responsibility include never blaming others or oneself, recognizing negative emotions as clues to where one gives away power, and handling what she calls the Chatterbox: the relentless negative inner voice that drives feelings of inadequacy. She asks readers to identify hidden "payoffs" that keep them stuck and to recognize the many choices available in any situation.

Positive thinking, Jeffers contends, is not naive optimism but a disciplined daily practice. She challenges the assumption that negative thinking is more realistic, citing the philosopher Seneca's observation that people suffer more in imagination than in reality. She describes a workshop demonstration in which a volunteer's outstretched arm collapses after repeating "I am a weak and unworthy person" yet becomes immovable after repeating "I am a strong and worthy person," illustrating that words affect even physical strength. She lays out a daily program of affirmations, inspirational audio, and positive self-talk, stressing that this practice, like exercise, must be maintained or the skill atrophies.

Jeffers warns that as readers change, loved ones may resist because familiar patterns have been disrupted. She tells the story of Whitney, a woman with agoraphobia (an anxiety disorder involving intense fear of situations where escape may be difficult), who recovered rapidly in the author's class only to find her husband Brian trying to undermine her progress because her independence threatened his security. Jeffers acknowledges that not all relationships survive growth and introduces the Pendulum Syndrome, describing how people shifting from passivity to assertiveness tend to overshoot into aggression before settling into balance.

Decision-making receives its own chapter. Jeffers contrasts the No-Win Model, where every choice triggers agonizing over right versus wrong, with the No-Lose Model, where both paths lead to learning and growth. She illustrates through Vernell, a law student who left his program after two years to pursue psychology, gaining lasting friendships, useful knowledge, and hard-won self-reliance. She advises readers to trust gut impulses, discard mental pictures of expected outcomes, accept full responsibility for decisions, and correct course when dissatisfaction signals a wrong direction.

Jeffers maintains that building a balanced life is essential to reducing the fear of loss. She introduces the Whole Life Grid, a nine-box framework representing areas such as contribution, hobby, family, personal growth, work, and relationships. When a person's entire identity is invested in a single area and that area disappears, devastation follows. A balanced grid ensures that losing one area leaves a gap but not emptiness, because multiple sources of fulfillment remain. She pairs this framework with what she calls the Magic Duo: giving 100 percent commitment to each area and acting as if you count.

The concept of "saying yes to your universe" occupies a pivotal place in the book. Jeffers defines it as accepting what life brings and seeking possibilities rather than resisting change. She tells the story of Charles, a rehabilitation patient who grew up in poverty and was paralyzed by a gunshot wound. After initially refusing to participate in his recovery, Charles chose to say yes, joined the author's staff at the Floating Hospital, and came to feel that his disability had heightened his awareness of his ability to contribute. Jeffers cites Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, a memoir of survival in Nazi concentration camps, as the most extreme example: Frankl and others found meaning and preserved spiritual freedom amid unimaginable suffering.

Jeffers asserts that learning to give genuinely, without expectation of return, is the antidote to fear rooted in scarcity. She presents seven categories of giving: thanks, attention, information, praise, time, money, and love. She offers the Book of Abundance exercise, a notebook in which one lists at least 150 positive things in one's life and makes daily entries to shift attention from scarcity to abundance.

In the book's most expansive chapter, Jeffers introduces the Higher Self, a place within that contains creativity, intuition, trust, and love. She contrasts it with the Chatterbox, or Lower Self, the repository of negative conditioning since birth. The Conscious Mind chooses which source to follow and sends instructions to the Subconscious Mind, which carries them out without judgment. She discusses intuition as the Subconscious Mind's tool for connecting to what one seeks and shares how her fear class came about through an intuitive urge that led her to Ruth Van Doren, head of the New School's Human Relations Department, who had been searching for exactly such a teacher.

Jeffers closes by counseling patience, comparing growth to a log placed on smoldering embers that seems inactive until it suddenly bursts into flame. She quotes Rollo May's assertion that "Every organism has one and only one central need in life, to fulfill its own potentialities" (199) and distinguishes joy from mere happiness as the true goal. She urges readers to commit to the book's tools, seek support, and act rather than wait for transformation.