Authors note: this newsletter contains a fair few videos + footnotes with banterous commentary. To save yourself jumping in and out of Youtube and to see the footnotes, best click the title above and read it in your browser.
Wahhhooooooo! Welcome!
Shoutout out to River, Steven, Srour27, Eric, Anna, Hannah, Andre, Shayn and Ben for joining this past month!
I’m going to stop apologising for my occasional extended absences and acknowledge that this former weekly newsletter is now a sometimes weekly, sometimes fortnightly and sometimes monthly newsletter. Why?
My ego wants to say it’s because I want to prioritise quality over quantity so will only publish when I have something worth publishing. In reality, it’s because life happens.
My favourite question to ask people I meet is “if your life is a story, what chapter are you in?”. Not the literal chapter number, but the themes of it.
To answer my own question, I’ll refer to one of my favourite images from Visualise Value:
The past three years I found myself exploring the depths of my soul. You only need to look at my past essays to see the existential nature of the thoughts that consumed my mind. However, I feel I’m finally to the other side of that convergence and am ready to emerge.
Trusting this feeling since my last newsletter this has seen me hand in my notice of resignation for my Sydney job. By doing so I’m free to continue living in Uluwatu, Bali, a place that feels like home. But most importantly, go all in on Sprouter. A cohort-based course for aspiring solopreneurs who know they have gifts to share with the world but find themselves feeling stagnate.
As the emergence continues, I’ll be writing each step of the way, however expect a week or two between posts.
Without further ado:
Essay: Overcoming Fear
What’s something that causes fear to grip your bones? For every fibre of your being to rebel? For your heart to beat like German techno1?
For me, that was to sing in public2.
I feared rejection. I feared failure. I feared I wasn’t good enough.
But I did it. I uploaded a video to Instagram of me singing my favourite song from when I was 7 years old: All Star3.
The biggest surprise? When I hit publish I barely flinched. All my fears had evaporated.
How did I make them disappear?
I began rewiring my brain.
Here’s how:
Fear of Rejection
We’ve all been blessed with faulty wiring. Unfortunately, unlike iPhone’s, our brains can’t be updated with new features that suit whatever the demands of modern culture are. Consequently, we’re all running around with software that was designed to live in a society 50,000 years ago. A time when we lived in tribes as hunter-gatherers and all we needed to stress about is eating, sleeping, fucking procreating, having fun and not being eaten.
To survive we were heavily dependent on the community. To be rejected from the tribe was a death sentence. To fear ostracisation was pivotal for the survival of the human race. It ensured we continued to live on generation after generation.
This was great while we lived in tribes. But now we live in a world where rejection no longer means death but our brain still fears it as if we do.
It’s why since the minute I signed up to Instagram at 15 years old I became riddled with fear at the thought of sharing a video of me singing. Despite a precisely zero percent chance of me dying as a result of sharing a video like that, my body reacted as if I would.
There’s two default responses to covering up this fear.
To let it consume us and prevent us from doing the thing
To wear masks that protect us
The first is what prevented me from sharing videos like me singing and sharing my passion projects publicly for the past ten years.
The second is why despite my fears of authentic expression, I had no issues sharing videos like this when I was 20 years old:
The reason I didn’t fear sharing myself doing dumb shit was because it could be rationalised away. Thought he was an idiot? Me too. Didn't like the bloke? I wasn't his biggest fan either. Thought he craved external validation? I absolutely did.
“Jackass Nic” could withstand rejection because it was simply a character I played. It wasn’t really “me”.
But when I’m my vulnerable, authentic-self, if you don’t accept that person my brain can’t rationalise it away. It perceives it as a direct threat to my existence.
Devastatingly our outdated brain software fooled me into thinking it's a choice between authenticity and isolation. Between being myself and being accepted by the “tribe”.
I believe it’s this faulty brain wiring that caused me to live with a crippling fear of rejection. A fear that caused me to suppress my authentic expression.
In reality the opposite is true. As Brene Brown shares, “our vulnerabilities are what connect us”.
Through this lens we realise that acting true to ourselves leads to greater connection.
We realise the irony of by failing to express ourselves authentically our fear of rejection is more likely to materialise.
We realise we are the only ones stopping us from being us.
Viewing things in this way I no longer feared rejection or embarrassment from sharing the video of me singing. Rather I saw it as an opportunity for greater connection.
Guess what happened when I shared? Here’s a sneak peak at the comments:.
Fear of Not Being Enough
Want to see the power of our mind to affect our reality?4
The experience feels like a quirky gimmick, but it has massive ramifications. What our mind imagines is communicated to our body causing it to respond as if the situation were real.
If we tell ourselves we aren’t smart enough, people won’t like us or we’re going to be embarrassed, what do you think happens to our body?
It seizes up with anxiety.
Before completing a magic show for a crowd of thirty people I found myself wrestling with this anxiety. I love magic, but I’m not a magician. My preparation was learning one magic trick a day from Youtube in the lead up to an Open Mic event. An event where local creatives have a platform to perform.
Rather than succumb to my anxiety I began changing the narrative I told myself. People in attendance were there for entertainment. That entertainment could take any form so upon getting on stage I announced “I’m here to do a magic show, but it may be a comedy show. We’ll find out soon” <cue audience laughter>.
By changing this narrative, I no longer told myself I needed to get every trick right. I simply needed to entertain which I would, perhaps even more so if I messed up the trick. By doing so, all the pressure I felt disappeared.
When I did this something amazing happened: I nailed all the tricks.
By changing my self-talk, my fear of not being enough evaporated and I became empowered to show-up as my best self.
Fear of Failure
Want to know the definition of anxiety? Focusing on something you can't control but want to control.
The problem is our western culture's default definition of success is found in exterior motivations: money, status, material goods (to name a few). All things outside of control.
By judging our “success” off these exterior metrics we constantly wrestle with anxiety and fear failure.
Our challenge is to rewire away from focusing on exterior motivations and begin connecting to interior motivations. Like our purpose, process and play.
By attaching to the interior, we focus on what we can control and we become successful simply by showing up.
Lets see the difference:
Focusing on exterior motivations:
Before uploading the video of me singing, if I was thinking I hope this leads me to finally going viral, seeing a dramatic increase in my followers and people respecting me more.
My anxiety would be off the charts. In that state do you think I’d hit publish?
Fuck no Absolutely not.
Focusing on interior motivations:
By sharing this I’m proving to myself that being less than perfect is okay and I’m proud of how brave I’m being.
How much easier is it for me to publish?
So easy in fact that I recorded it in one take and published it immediately.
I believe I struggled with a fear of failure because my metrics of success were exterior motivations outside of my control. By rewiring how I viewed success towards interior motivations, I became successful simply by rocking up.
By defining success in this way, my fear of failure evaporated.
Learning These Principles
If you’re tired of living with fear, keen to grow and ready to begin doing things you only ever previously dreamed of. Let me know.
I run a 4-week program called Sprouter where you not only learn how to embody these principles, you are held accountable to do the things that bring your visions to life.
Enter your details to learn more.
Fail of the week:
7-year old Nic would be laughing his head off. There’s not many things 7-year old Nic would beat 26-year old Nic but after attending a Men’s Group here in Uluwatu I unearthed at least one.
To begin the session we did a quick workout which involved climbing monkey bars. Upon jumping up onto the bars I lost my grip and slipped almost landing square on my back. At the last moment I managed to get my feet under me to avoid complete embarrassment in front of my new friends.
However, upon quickly checking to see if anyone caught sight of my incompetence. I realised I didn’t escape unscathed. To quote Ed Sheeran “one of my toes doesn’t work like it used to before”:
Normal Toe
Newly Broken Toe
Until next week,
Cheers,
Nic
Fancy way of saying fast
If we consider social media to be public which for the sake of this I'm saying it does.
To be clear I’m a horrible singer. So horrible in fact that in year 4 when most kids sound angelic and the choir accepts everyone, they didn’t accept me
For those who don't want to watch:
Take a moment to imagine you’re in the kitchen. You walk up to the fridge and grab onto the handle, noticing how smooth and firm it feels. You give it a little tug to open the door.
Upon opening it you see a lemon sitting on the shelf at eye level. You grab it, immediately becoming aware of how cool it is to touch. You take it over to the chopping board you have sitting on the bench. You take out a knife and slice it into thick, juicy wedges.
You pick up a wedge, noticing the juice slightly dripping. You bring it to your mouth and take a big bite into it.
Even though you only did this in your mind, do you find your mouth contorting and reacting as if you actually bit into it?
You are so awesome Nic <3 all the way down to broken toes
Epic Nic! This newsletter made my day. So stoked for you!