Welcome guys and guys to The Man Talk Show. I'm Connor Beaton and today we are going to talk about dealing with fear and why fear is an illusion.

So recently I had a friend of mine, a close friend of mine, asked me about how I speak on public stages because he came and saw me a speaker this year in front of an audience of like 1,800 people.

And he said, how do you do it? I'm terrified of public

speaking. I want to do more of it. What's your secret? Because I watched you and it was like seamless. It was just like you and I were having a conversation, but there were 1799 other people in this room. And you just seem so calm and grounded like we were just sitting here having a coffee. And I turned to him with kind of

a smirk on my face, knowing that I was going to be a bit of a smart ass. And I said, well, I just remember that fear is an illusion. And then I go out on stage and I do my thing. And he looked at me with, obviously, he was a little bit like, all right, Joker, like, you know, give me the real, give me the real deal here. And I took a deep breath and I just looked at him and I said, look, I just remember in the

moment that fear is a byproduct of what other people think of us.

We're, we don't live anymore in an environment where we have to constantly be afraid or worried of, you know, a predator

jumping out of the bush and mulling us and eating us. We don't have to be worried about,

you know, the experience of like where our next meal is going to come from the majority of us.

What really terrifies us is what other people will think of us. And almost every single

experience that you experience in life, that when you experience fear, is coming from a place

of what other people will think of you. It's a worry about what other people will think of you.

A perfect example of this is when I was a kid, I hated speaking,

I hated reading in front of my classmates. I had ADHD. I wasn't very good at reading in front

of people. I was a little bit dyslexic. And just the thought of reading in front of people would

freak me out. And I wasn't a very good reader as it was. And so when it came time to read in

front of the class, I would always tense up and I would get super tight. And then I would stutter more. And then I would read slower and I'd have to go like word by word because I'd be so freaked out. And all of that fear, all the tension I felt in my body, all the worry that I had was all worry about what other people would think of me.

How would they judge me? How would they criticize me? What would they think of me if I didn't

get it right? And you see, we live in this culture where that is so dominant. And he said,

so my friend said, well, how do you actually get through that? How do you actually push through

that? And I said, one very simple but very powerful thing. I remember that I am what I love and not what loves me.

I am what I love and not what loves me. And what that means to me is that, look, we live in this very consumer-based society and this very consumer-based culture.

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