Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

What happens when we don't lean into our fears or we just allow our fears to stay inside of us,

our insecurities to stay inside of us for years or decades and we never actually learn to act on them and improve them? What happens to us if we just allow these fears to hold us back? Well, what happens to a muscle if you don't use it? We say you lose it, you don't actually lose it, but it gets weaker and weaker, as you well know, right? And what happens the minute you start making demands on it? Especially if you haven't made demands in a while, it doesn't take much to see real muscle

growth, right? And so it's like if you constantly live in fear, your world gets smaller and

smaller and it tends to get more fearful. Like who's more fearful? Someone has broken 10 bones

in their body and healed them as a kid or someone

never broke a bone. You know the answer is. The kids that are overprotected are fearful all the

time. But if you've gone out in the street and you know, you've gotten in a fight and you

busted your arm or your hand or finger or you played football or whatever the hell it is or boxed

or something, it's like, now it's

like, I'm not afraid of that crap because you've lived it. And there's no substitute. I always tell

people a belief is a poor substitute for an experience. You think you know what China is, but I take

you to China. You have a little different experience. And so almost everything I do is give someone

an experience. That's the reason, you know, I did the firewalk, I still do, but did for so many years. I did, before that I used to do skydiving, but it's hard to get 15,000 people above the sky in New York in the middle of the night. So I'd come up with other tools, but the firewalk was again, giving you an experience of something that seemed difficult or impossible,

and then you get yourself to do it, and your brain goes, wait a second.

If I could do that, what else got to get myself to do?

That psychological shift is the most important shift that people can make.

It's a shift in your identity.

Why is identity so important for us to shape a positive, powerful identity?

Well, first of all, so everybody understands what I mean by identity is we all have a way of identifying ourselves. We have a way of labeling ourselves.

So most of us came up with our labels based on how we behaved.

But really smart people can do stupid things.

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