Focus on Where You’re Deeply Excited to Go
Not on What You’re Afraid Might Happen

The 5 AM Miracle Podcast, hosted by Jeff Sanders

Episode #516: "Focus on Where You're Deeply Excited to Go, Not on What You're Afraid Might Happen"

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

It's the dream afraid of waking that never takes the chance.

It's the one who won't be taken who cannot seem to give.

And the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live.

This is the 5am Miracle, episode number 516.

Focus on where you're deeply excited to go, not what you're afraid might happen.

Good morning and welcome to the 5am Miracle.

I am Jeff Sanders and this is the podcast dedicated to dominating your day before breakfast.

My goal is to help you bounce out of bed with enthusiasm, create powerful, lifelong habits, and tackle your grandest goals with extraordinary energy.

In the episode this week, I'll break down how you become what you think about most of the time, how fear is a debilitating addiction, and how to break that addiction with positive, forward-moving thoughts and actions.

Let's get to it.

I have caught myself, more times than I can count, thinking about all the wrong things.

You know, fear is a nasty monster.

It can be all-consuming and a massive distraction from doing the few things that can eradicate the fear itself.

The intro to the episode this week featured a stanza from the song "The Rose."

This is a song that I sang in high school choir and just fell in love with this song, with other choral music that has the same kind of vibe.

And there's a lot to be said about that kind of music and the genre that it came from.

This specific song originated from the movie, also called "The Rose," and it came out in the late 70s, early 80s.

So it's older than I am, but it's a really, really great song.

And specifically, the lyrics from this song are... they speak to me.

They're poignant and they're powerful.

And there's a lot to be said about this song specifically, but more importantly, how it relates to the topic this week.

And so what I'd like to do next is read the lyrics from the entire song.

And I want you to think about these lyrics from the perspective of fear as a thing that guides your attention when it shouldn't, and then more importantly, what you should be focusing on and what that then does to change your thoughts and change your actions and ultimately change your results.

So once again, here are the lyrics from the song "The Rose."

Some say love, it is a river that drowns the tender reed.

Some say love, it is a razor that leaves your soul to bleed.

Some say love, it is a hunger and endless aching need.

I say love, it is a flower and you its only seed.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

It's the dream afraid of waking that never takes the chance.

It's the one who won't be taken who cannot seem to give.

And the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live.

When the night has been too lonely and the road has been too long, and you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong.

Just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows, lies the seed that with the sun's love in the spring becomes the rose.

There's a lot you could break down with this.

Let me go back to my theater days in college specifically.

I majored in theater and one of the things that we did a lot, and I mean every single time we did anything in my classes and my productions, was we would break down scripts.

We would break down text.

We would look for subtext.

We would look for deeper hidden meanings and really spend a lot of time trying to dissect what the author of the text was trying to tell us.

It was in many ways just philosophically funny and goofy, but then in so many ways it was incredibly powerful.

I mean the term subtext was one that I became very aware of during this time because there is the text, what it says explicitly and directly, and there's the subtext, what the author actually means but is not saying directly, the thing you would infer that they mean.

When I see lyrics like these, when I hear a song like this one, there's so much subtext that's going on here.

My brain just keeps pinging with, "What does this mean in real life?"

It's a made up fictional work of art.

This is not life, but it resembles life, and there's a lot of lessons from this you can pull and then apply to your own life.

When I see these lyrics, specifically the stanza that I read at the top of the show, which we're going to go back to right now, "The heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

A dream afraid of waking that never takes a chance, and then finally the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live."

There's a lot that's been going on in my life recently that has been incredibly stressful, and I may discuss that in more detail later of what I mean by that, but let's just, in a blanket statement, just say that I'm going through a rough patch, and from that, I'm more aware of these kinds of phrases, right?

A heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance, right?

You're never going to take that opportunity to go express your best self, or a dream where you want to stay in a fantasy, and never actually wake up and take the chance and take the risk to go do the thing you're just born to do, which then, of course, this final one here, the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live.

The soul in you, the spirit in you, the life that's in you that is fearful, afraid of dying, and because of that fear, you hold yourself back and you never actually experience the beauty your life could have.

A lot of these lyrics speak to me right now in large part because the tough season that I'm in, you could argue, stems from my own fears that have held me back from doing the thing I was meant to do, or many things I was meant to do.

And so, in many ways, I have distracted myself with things I think are "important" or necessary that I've come to realize aren't.

And because of that, I then get to dig a little bit deeper into my own life and ask these questions, "What am I afraid of?

What am I holding myself back from?

What am I actually afraid of, and is that fear based in reality or some worst case scenario that's never going to happen?"

There's a lot to be said about goal achievement from the aspect of risk-taking, of saying, "Not just I have a big goal, but that big goal requires risk.

It requires taking a chance.

It requires digging deep and doing something you've never done before to experience an end result you otherwise would never have."

I've been a big fan of ambitious goals for a long, long time.

I have taken on many of these in my life, but one thing that I've seen in myself, the older that I get, a few things have been true.

The first is that life is more complicated now than ever.

And the second piece is that I get into rhythms, and I'll call them even ruts, habits that just hold into place and they don't let up unless I become acutely aware of them and break that cycle on purpose.

It's easy to get into a rut, especially when your life day to day feels exactly the same as the day before it.

And if you find yourself in that position for too long, you are defining your life in that very narrow perspective.

And because of that, the longer you stay in that, the more fear that could show up when you decide you need to break that cycle.

Or if you even ponder the idea of breaking that cycle, fear will kick in immediately because our brains love routine.

We thrive on it.

I have built this entire podcast essentially on the concept of habits.

Everything comes down to what you do every day because what you do every day defines you.

How you think about your life every day defines you.

And if what you're defined by is your fear, well, you can imagine the outcome that that would produce.

It's not what you want.

Almost guaranteed that's not what you want.

And so the only question you could possibly ask is, well, how do I get past this?

How do I break that cycle of fear?

How do I tap into my best self?

How do I learn to dance and take the chance?

How does my soul learn to live instead of being afraid of dying?

I find these lyrics to be very, very poignant.

They really speak to me right now.

They may not to you in this season of your life, but these kinds of things.

I've seen this in my life over time where I'll hear a song like this.

By the way, go to YouTube and play this song.

Bette Midler is an incredible artist and this song is beautiful.

And one thing that I know from hearing this song is that in some seasons of my life, I won't care.

It doesn't mean anything to me.

It's just a pretty song and I move on.

But in other seasons, this is everything.

It speaks to me in such a profound way.

And so because I'm in that season now where this is speaking to me, I want to listen.

I want to pay attention.

I want to make sure I can take every bit of value from this that it's offering to me.

So from that perspective, let's go to kind of how I titled the episode this week of focus on where you're deeply excited to go and not what you're afraid might happen.

There's an episode of this podcast, if we go way back to episode 420, where I talked about how you become what you think about most of the time.

And the majority of that conversation had to do with your inputs, right?

Had to do with the podcast you listen to, the audio books you listen to, the TV shows you watch, YouTube videos you might watch, people you hang around with, like all those things where we are consumers.

We're listening, we're bringing things into our life.

And then because of those inputs, it changes how we think and therefore changes our actions and our results, which is true.

Inputs directly affect outputs in such a profound way.

So when you change what you listen to, what you watch, what you read, those inputs will then change all of those additional components about your life.

You change the kind of consumption that you are consuming.

It's an awful way to say that, but change what you're consuming and you will change your life.

From that same perspective, old thinking habits, like the way that you've been thinking about your life for many, many years, maybe even decades, those can be hard to break.

Your past thoughts can cloud your current thinking.

And really from my perspective, it's the negative thinking, those negative thinking habits that become a rut, get stuck.

And then you get stuck in them and then all of a sudden your default response to life or to any challenge or scenario, it comes through that lens of old habits that are in that case, in this case, negative and hard to break.

And then the past thoughts you had from 10 years ago are now incorrectly and inappropriately clouding your current thinking and they are preventing your current success because of an old thought that you had many years ago that you just never let go of.

Thinking about fear brings about more fear.

You do become what you think about and you think more about what you think more about.

It's a cycle here.

And so if you start thinking about something like fear, you get more of it.

But the opposite is also true.

The more you think about solutions, the more that you think about creative, awesome solutions, paths forward, ways to make things happen, to break old cycles and to forge new territory.

It's all possible when you change these thoughts.

And yes, thinking about actions and habits that are productive in nature will then cause you to adopt more of them and get more of those same results.

The way that this works to the negative, towards fear, works in the exact same powerful way towards positive forward-moving action.

The benefits and the consequences all stem from the same thought process.

The question is, how do you change that default response?

How do you go from someone where fear is dictating your life to one where it just doesn't nearly as often?

It's still going to be there.

Our brains are kind of looking for those red flags and those danger zones.

We're never going to be able to eradicate fear from our lives.

That's not the goal.

The goal really is to acknowledge when that is taking over, to be aware of that thought and then pivot in the moment.

This has been the biggest kind of personal growth experience I've had in the last few years and one I'm still very much working on because it's a weakness of mine and it's one I need to spend more time on, which is acknowledging when I have a negative thought or a fearful thought specifically and change the thought.

Pivot.

Think about something more positive.

Think about something that actually is productive, creative, solution-oriented, something that brings about the result that I want, not a theoretical, philosophical result that may never take place to begin with.

It's a big shift.

Thinking or changing thinking is one of the hardest things to do.

It's one of the things that I think a lot of people just believe is impossible to do.

That if you have a certain personality, a certain charisma, a certain bent towards life in some way, that you're just going to stay there.

I don't believe that's true.

I believe we have the power of choice.

Even with something as deeply ingrained in us as how our brain thinks about life, we can change that.

From my perspective, we absolutely should.

I don't use the word "should" very often, but this is one where ...

A simple example, if you're not getting the results you want from life, the only thing that needs to change is you.

If you don't change, the results go nowhere, or if anything, you just get more of what you're already getting.

If what you're already getting is not what you want, if you want something different, something better, something more grand, more beautiful, more filled with potential, the only thing to change is you, and specifically, how you think about you, because that's where it all starts.

I want to go back to this concept I mentioned at the top of the show about fear being a debilitating addiction, because that's what we're talking about.

Old negative thinking patterns or old thinking habits can be, in many ways, an addiction.

You can get addicted to thinking negatively.

You can become addicted to defaulting to fear.

If it becomes an addiction, you actually get a high from it.

You get a high from thinking negatively.

This is when things get really screwy.

This is when things get really weird.

You don't want that to happen.

We don't want to become the kinds of people who, I'll use a good example of this.

You love true crime documentaries, true crime podcasts.

I do.

I think they're phenomenally fascinating.

I was just watching a documentary about a cult just a few hours ago before I recorded this show, because those kinds of shows are fascinating.

They're amazingly not just entertaining, but thought-provoking.

I love to watch documentaries about cults, specifically.

Because of that, I think a lot about the way cults think, a lot about how the cult leaders think about those who are members of cults think.

It really just blows my mind how people can find themselves in those positions.

You can't.

It's very possible and very common, which is very scary.

What I've seen from all of this is that you can become, in many ways, addicted to consuming true crime content, consuming documentaries about cults, listening to a true crime podcast, that listening to that kind of content, in and of itself, can be an addiction.

You're getting a high, ultimately, from someone else's tragedy.

Someone else's trauma is entertaining you.

When you think of it through that lens, it really puts a spin on this.

It makes you go, "Whoa, wait a minute.

What did you just say, Jeff?

Are you saying I'm getting a personal benefit from someone else's tragedy?"

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying, because that's exactly what it is.

When you turn a trauma into entertainment, it's really getting in a weird territory of human behavior and human psychology.

From my perspective, as interesting as it is, from my personal growth perspective, I have to ask the question, "What is really going on here?"

What really is going on is an addiction towards the consumption of this, what I would call just negative material, negative entertainment.

Ultimately, what's going to be positive in my life about watching someone else's life fall apart?

Maybe I'd feel more grateful that my life is not as bad as theirs.

That's kind of a dark place to go.

That's not it either.

But then I think about my own life and think about the fears I have about my future, because that's what fear is.

It's a thought about the future of how things could be worse.

From that perspective, I have to ask the question, "Am I consuming the wrong kind of content?

Am I addicted to cult documentaries and podcasts about true crime?"

In many ways, to justify this fear addiction and to reinforce it, even accidentally, maybe not.

This is a theory of mine.

It's very real.

But I have to look at this in the perspective of if fear is an addiction, and it certainly can be, how do you break an addiction?

How do you get away from that negative recurring pattern that has the potential to bring you down, especially during times of life where there's no practical reason to feel that way?

It becomes very complicated.

But in my mind, it doesn't have to be.

It can be simple, and it can be positive.

And that's really where the opportunity rests.

If fear is potentially this debilitating addiction, it's also a fleeting thought.

Fear is the kind of thing that can hit you emotionally and then pass.

You could act as a distraction in that moment where it comes into your brain and then it flows away.

From my perspective, when I get that feeling, that fleeting momentary thought that's fear-based, I want to acknowledge it.

I want to be able to pause and go, "Wait a minute.

I just had a thought about my future that's negative in nature, that's not productive, not creative, not solutions-oriented.

This is an irrational thought."

It is irrational because the odds of it taking place is just not very high, or maybe it could happen, maybe it will happen, but that's still not beneficial.

Having a negative thought about it, unless you can somehow convert that into positive action in the moment, which is the goal here, it's just a distraction.

It's a thought that holds you back in the moment.

So then the question becomes, how do we break this addiction?

How do we shift from that pattern of negative thinking, fear-based thinking, focusing on things that might happen that are unlikely, to where are we going?

What is this all about?

What are we actually trying to achieve?

And so then my question is, how do I focus on what I want to see happen, where I'm deeply just enthusiastic about life?

What is an ideal scenario that could actually take place?

What actions could I take right now to move myself forward?

And then ultimately, what thoughts can bring me back to my best self?

There's a question I thought of recently while on a hike that I have used for years that I forget the source of this quote, this question, but it's a very powerful one, one that has a lot of potential, which is, what would the hero of your story do now?

I love this question because it makes a couple of assumptions that are beautiful.

The first is that there's a hero in you somewhere, right?

That you have a version of you who is heroic, a version of you who is courageous, a version of you who can overcome challenges and adversity, a version of you who has the potential to make very ambitious and bold choices and achieve enormous success.

The other assumption is that this hero can make a different decision.

This hero has the potential to pivot your life.

And when you attach yourself to that identity, when you believe this to be true, that there is a hero in you and that hero is courageous and ambitious, and that hero has the power to change your life in this very moment, well, then all of a sudden that question of what would the hero of your story do now becomes a practical, action-oriented strategy.

All of a sudden now you can ask this question, well, yeah, what would this hero do in this moment with this challenge?

Well, the hero wouldn't think about fear, would they?

This hero wouldn't be bogged down by negative thinking.

This hero would go do something.

This hero would go make the phone call, send the email, launch the business, make the thing happen.

The hero is going to move.

It's going to run.

This hero is going to make something out of nothing or just start moving at all.

Action really is the key here because fear will freeze you.

Fear is a frozen mentality.

It's a cycle.

This is the addiction part of it, is that you think about the fear.

It comes in.

Well, it comes in again and again, and you freeze in this moment, which means you're losing the present moment by this thought about a potential future that likely will never happen, and it just cycles back again and again, and so you're frozen in the sense that you're not taking forward-moving action in the present moment, which is kind of a freaky thing to think about that you're just living in a false future, a frozen false future.

It's too many Fs here.

To break this cycle, we bring this hero in, and this hero changes the trajectory.

The hero breaks this cycle.

The hero moves us forward.

Now, very good chance this hero will have to take risks and bold actions and implement new daily habits and disrupt old patterns.

This hero will have to do something that you're not currently doing, which can be hard.

Absolutely.

The hardest part of this whole process, from my perspective, is that we have to acknowledge that in many ways, we are where we are because of choices that we've made, mistakes that we've made.

This has been one of my personal biggest challenges recently, is the responsibility angle of owning my problems, of acknowledging in real terms that I am where I am because of me, for better and for worse, and that if anything has not taken place, if anything has failed, if anything is falling to pieces, it's my fault.

And I'm going to own that, and I'm going to tap into this hero story and change it.

This is the opportunity.

This is where things get really, really fun.

Because when you own your story, when you own your life, when you own your problems and the solutions together as a whole, you're in control.

And episodes of this podcast, every week, you have the power to change your life.

The hero in you has this power.

That's what this is.

So if you've been in this cycle where fear has been freezing you in place and you need a disruption, I think the disruption is going to come from inside you, from this hero you tap into, from this series of risks you're going to take.

Let's go back to the stanza once again from The Rose.

The soul afraid of dying never learns to live.

What's the point in surviving if you can't actually live?

What's the point in continuing the process if you can't break free of the process?

There's so much to be said about risk-taking, and I am absolutely in a season of that right now for myself.

So don't take this episode as a personal challenge towards you as much as a reflection of where I am.

But I think that that's a powerful thing to experience is the acknowledgment that I am my own problem, but I am also my own solution.

That if I want to break free and not just survive and actually want to live, that I have the chance to do so.

I can dance, take a chance, move things forward, make things happen.

And that's an awesome place to be.

And for the action step this week, catch yourself in the moment and pivot.

This is a strategy and a skill you can practice.

The very next time you have a fearful thought, change it.

Focus on something you love, something you want, something you can do right now.

Fear is nothing more than a fleeting thought, and your actions can override those thoughts more often than you can possibly imagine.

JeffSanders.com/516 is the place to go for episode notes.

And of course, subscribe to or follow this podcast and any awesome podcast app you're using right now.

And that's all I've got for you here on the 5 a.m.

Miracle Podcast this week.

Until next time, you have the power to change your life, and the fun begins bright and early.