There is fear everywhere at the moment, and it’s infectious. Everywhere you look it seems the world is collapsing. It’s beginning to hit your own life. You’re hearing it’s going to get worse. Recession, repossession, redundancies, loss, breakdown, pessimism, bad debt, businesses folding, unpaid bills.

You’re hearing that the economy is the problem. Jobs are the problem. Debt.

No.

The problem is fear. It is our greatest enemy. Fear is driving all of this.

The markets are diving because of fear. Your confidence is battered because of fear. The company you work for is slashing jobs out of fear. The stress all of us are feeling is because of fear.

You have good reason to be scared. It’s OK to be afraid. You may have lost your job, or might lose it, and there aren’t any new ones. If you can’t pay the bills you could get hauled in court or lose your home. There are so many things that could happen and so little to go around. A million “What If” scenarios are racing through your brain and the ground is unstable beneath your feet. It doesn’t feel like there’s any way out on the horizon or that it’ll get better soon. All the things you could have and all that spare cash that was in your wallet has dried up. You’re worrying constantly just like everyone else is. There’s no place to escape to or a way to get back to where you were. Things were comfortable but they’re not anymore. The world has changed.

At the end of this, i’m going to invite you to make a choice and stand with me.

The first thing to understand is: fear sells. You are being bombarded by the media relentlessly, who are pumping out terrifying headlines about our impending doom. It sells papers, gets radio listeners and keeps us glued to the TV. Melodrama, panic and worry get our attention, and we buy to ease our fear and/or curiosity. Our morbid desire and terror to avoid anything bad drives us to comfort ourselves and silence that fear. So media outlets do what they do to get us to buy, watch, read and listen. You are surrounded by things trying to get your attention by invoking your worst fears.

Remember that newspapers, TV/radio stations and websites are all businesses – their own companies are also suffering in the downturn so they need to increase sales to cope. That means their headlines will be more dramatic so they get more attention that drives purchasing and retention span for advertising rates. It’s no conspiracy - the media are just as desperate to avoid going bust as the banks. So treat what you see in the media suspiciously, with rightful scepticism. Check out the figures for yourself and make your own opinion.

Secondly, you will pick up and be affected by other people’s fear. Fear is *induced* in you when you detect it in those around you. Imagine going into a haunted house where it is dark and silent. You will feel the fear of everyone else, and even if you didn’t see a ghost, you would panic when the others did if they heard a sudden noise in the black. We are designed to express our feelings and sense those of others. Feelings flow across people and make up atmospheres. Even if you’re not scared, you will become afraid if you are around other people who are.

Once you realise you are “adsorbing” the fear of others who are broadcasting it and it’s panicking you, you can recognise it and interrupt the whole process so you’re not affected by it. We conduct it like electricity, and we spread it around, because it’s infectious like flu. You talk to a person who is, at the bottom of all it, afraid, and you start to feel tense and worried. A whole office or tube train of them maybe. They may not even say anything, but you pick it up subconsciously. The message everywhere is to be afraid.

Look inside yourself and ask yourself if you are afraid. It’s Ok if you are. That angry temper, that stubbornness and defensiveness, that grumpy frustration, or that silent misery is all derived from the same root: fear.

Thirdly, you need to remember that we automatically default to being a victim – the unfortunate recipient of this surprise disaster. These conditions were never a surprise to anyone as they’ve been warned about for months. You will default into thinking this is all happening to you. No. It’s just happening. You may be being affected by it, but you don’t have to be a victim of it. What it is depends on how you define it and the perspective you take on it. It’s just happening, that’s all. It didn’t come to ruin you or bring death and woe on the whole world. That may sound like some cheesy positive thinking routine but it’s just simple logic. It’s just happening, that’s all.

Ask yourself – why is this happening? What is actually going on? What change is occurring? An unexpected change has happened. It will reverberate for a while and it will take time for you to get used to it.

You will have to change, because things are changing. You will need to be more dynamic and flexible. It may mean you have to change your entire career or relocate. When the world bends, we need to be able to swing around the corner and accelerate out of it rather than just carry on headlong until we smash against the wall. Start thinking about those changes and come to terms with them emotionally. Things are going to be different and the past is now in the rear view mirror – you have to look ahead and concentrate so you can start juggling.

Fourthly, economics work in cycles. Ask yourself who and what is suffering. A recession is like when a balloon is over-inflated and needs to naturally re-balance. The credit holiday couldn’t go on forever. In hard times, people behave differently so your approach needs to adapt to the conditions. The first thing they do is to save money and chop off the fat. Jobs and businesses that save money are going to boom. The basic necessities (water, shelter, heating, food) will stay constant, which is why share prices in energy companies have risen. People will have more of a need for entertainment and escapism. Jobs that are indulgent and superfluous (unnecessary) will be cut as they shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

Fifth, ask yourself how this era is going to change and affect you, It may force you to take yourself more seriously. Maybe it really is time for that change of career, and to think about the things that really matter in this life. Do the fruits of the credit boom make you happy? Did they keep you safe? How can you help others? How can you be more creative to help yourself out of your current situation? The slowdown is making you re-consider the choices you have made – some of which were very bad. Acknowledge them. Let yourself feel what you need to, and the evolve. What is happening may be happening *for* you, not to you.

When you have a quiet moment, ask yourself this: “If all this material crap can’t just float away, why am i here?”

You’ve lived these last few years with comparative comfort, even if things haven’t been perfect at all. We have experienced an age of false “prosperity” and it made you live a certain way. Now you are going to be living a different way, and it’s up to you how that change occurs, what it means and how it affects who you are. It feels like you in a cage and everything is being stripped away from you – you’re losing what you gained and you don’t want it to go.

But here’s a newsflash: life isn’t meant to be like that. It’s a rollercoaster and all things are temporary. Permanent comfort lulls you to sleep. You’re built to be dynamic, and fight against difficult circumstances as it makes you grow. Suffering isn’t necessarily suffering at all. The most beautiful art comes from the most tortured heart. The best technology and inventions are developed when they are desperately needed, and we innovate to conquer what faces us. Disasters bond us together and help us to help each other, for the greater good. The most wonderful things emerge from the most desperate of places – ask Holocaust concentration camp survivors. If they can do it, so can you. And your situation is nothing as bad as being emaciated and diseased as human vermin in a Nazi death camp.

The simple fact is comfort is rarely good for us. We are built and designed to overcome obstacles as it’s how we develop and grow, even as children. The human spirit thrives and excels in difficulty. We need these periods simply because without them, we’re not going anywhere.

You’re surrounded by fear all around you. The fear of others, the fear of the market, and your own fear. It sets the limits of what you can do and what you believe. You will start to stifle and suffocate on it if you allow it to overwhelm you like it’s overwhelming everyone else. But we don’t need to fear bad news. We don’t need to be afraid of fear. We don’t have to be a prisoner in another crowd’s breakdown. We can live in the centre of the storm at peace, even with a smile on our face we change our hearts to what we’re facing.

Fear is not just a feeling, it is a choice. It’s an option.

That might come as a surprise to you because you think it’s forced on you and you have no control over it. It just happens. It’s something you were brought up with – circumstances are forced on you and you just accept them as you’re a victim of that feeling and helplessly under its control. That’s not strictly true. Fear is a mindset, an attitude and a choice, just as much as it is a feeling. It is something we get into agreement with by default if we don’t interrupt it and choose who we are and what we believe. You were never taught how to deal with it, so you just do the standard default thing, unaware there is an alternative.

When something happens, fear turns up – complete with a big fat paper contract you are to sign with it. The default option means you invisibly sign that contract and get into agreement with it. You agree to believe what fear tells you – you take on its views, opinions, thoughts and agree to internalise it. You agree to be scared. You agree to be terrorised, unsafe, worried, alone and vulnerable. Your hand picks up the pen automatically and signs the contract. All of it happens without you knowing. That’s how it gets in the door and what it relies on, as if you knew what was happening, you wouldn’t do it. Fear is a choice because you make a binding covenant with it.

What you can do at the moment fear shows up is to pull back, knowing there is a contract you have to sign. The decision you make is whether to sign that contract and get into bed with it. You have to choose. Right then. Right there. Not later. Right then. You make your decision and execute it ruthlessly. Fear is your enemy, and you need to know that. All you need do is remember what fear feels like to know it, as well as looking back on the damage it’s done. You stand up, straighten your back, grit your teeth, clench your fist, widen your eyes, and you say NO. You disagree. And strongly.

It helps to visualise fear as a person or object – a whole crowd or nation maybe. You will need courage and resolve, but you need to understand that you need to disagree, and do it firmly. That contract is NOT getting signed, there is no agreement whatsoever and you won’t be dealing with something that wants to hurt you, pollute you and cage you up in darkness. You set the limits, not your co-signatory. You wouldn’t take out a mortgage with it, so don’t agree to take it into the shower, bed and handbag with you either. It’s an unwelcome guest.

No deal. No agreement. You need to get stubborn about it.

Disagreeing means rejecting everything that fear comes with or wants you to do. If you want to curl up and conserve, give what you can instead, even if it is as small as a pound. If you want to stay in and hide, get out and run. If you want to sulk, look for something to be grateful for. If you want to criticise, compliment someone. If someone does you wrong, immediately do something good for someone else. You don’t have to fight or work for it, just interrupt your thinking and the actions that come from it. Like anything it needs practice to settle in and become automatic, and works like a muscle in that it becomes stronger as you regularly flex it.

Imagine you are standing on a long deserted beach, and the skies are dark and brooding because the sun is way behind the clouds. You’re alone, and water is lapping at your feet. When you look around the beach you can see the watermarks the tide has left in the ground and the stonework. As you come to return to look back on the ocean, the beach is 10x bigger. The tide has gone out whilst you’d turned around. Your feet are still damp sitting in the puddles, but you can see the ocean has pulled back away from you for miles.

That is what is happening now; the tide is going out. Think about how you feel about it when you overlook the ocean. You understand what it means: when the tide comes in, you’re immersed, but it also goes out dependent on the winds and moon’s gravitational pull which can be seemingly random and surprise events that are actually quite predictable when you study them in advance. The tide is not there to ruin you, it is just the tide. Even if the newspaper is writing headlines about massive slowdown and disaster of the ocean, it’s just the tide going out. You know what it is, and you know how to deal with it. Everyone else is terrified and fear is all around, but you know it’s the tide. It’s coming back in as it always does. It’s gone out like it always does. You don’t need to fear it.

So if you’re standing on that beach, are you going to just stay there and mourn the tide having gone out? How long are you going to be stood there? For as long as it takes? Until you get too cold and shivery? Are you going to set up camp and stubbornly wait for the ocean to find it way back? You could start building a boat. When the tide starts to come back in, you would have something to sit in as the water flooded – something that lifted you off the shore and allowed you to ride the new waves and follow the tide’s future movements. It could take you to a new place. Maybe if you built it quickly enough, you could drag it to the ocean’s edge miles out there and just sail to somewhere new?

So it’s now that i ask you to make a decision with me, together.

But just before i do that, think of where you are right now. It’s so easy to fall into waiting for something to happen, or for the ideal situation to come along when it will all be alright. You can trapped in that perpetual cycling of just hanging on and waiting for a break or better weather. Everyone gets their break if they hang on long enough, right? Yes, but they learn something far more important first that enables it to be released. That secret is you have to be able to be free from fear in the middle of the storm before you can rise above it. You need to be able to be grateful, loving and content wherever you are, as it comes from inside.

If you want to lead, you need to learn in the desert. If you want to be fearless, you need to rise above your fear on your own when no-one is looking in the dark. If you can do it there, you can do it in the shining light of success and prosperity too. If you learnt it and endured it when times were good, you would collapse and implode when it got tough – it can’t be done in reverse. You need to train in fire to be able to shine in the dark or be a beacon in the happier moments. To live the life you want, you need to be able to live it now, in the middle of economic chaos, without money or resources, in the dark. What you learn here you will take with you and pass on to others.

So if you’re waiting, you need to know that you won’t get to where you want to be unless you let go and embrace your circumstances where you are, no matter how dark they are. Once you have mastered that, what you want will arrive 10x bigger than you could have imagined before. No magic ship is coming, no prince charming, no rescue boat or ideal situation. You need to get into that place now in the hard times. You need to master yourself and override your situation those hard-earned dreams and what you want to materialise in front of you. That’s why so many people are miserable and give up on their dreams – they stick around waiting for their ideals when they can open the door themselves by changing their mindset. It’s a secret key to a very big public lock. The ones who make it through are those who actually bother and make the effort every day to actually do it.

It’s time for us to make that choice together.

Fear surrounds us everywhere we go, and everyone is being affected by it. We don’t have to be part of it, be scared of it or give in to it. I want you to disagree and say no. I want you to refuse to sign the contract and get out of agreement with it. The whole world might seem to be collapsing around us, but we can stand in the midst of all of it and shine a light. We can make it our finest hour. We can *choose* this to be our greatest moment. I want you to stand apart from it and choose not to agree with, sign up to, or make that deal. No agreement, no deal. Say no. Breathe in and focus your gaze. Refuse. Defy it. You don’t need to push, just stand your ground.

This is not going to be easy; nothing of value ever is. It’s time to put all the bullshit that came before to a close and murder it in its bed. This is when we can finally face the things we have been scared of and deal with them forever like a phoenix in a pit of burning fire. We have an opportunity to pick up the knife to all the crap that plagued and ruined us, right here in the darkness. We own it and control it first; we make it our own. Let the others fall, let the world collapse, but we don’t get into any agreement with fear.

And i’m not talking about reading this and having a nice 24hrs. This is a decision for a lifetime. If you choose to opt out of the contract and make the decision, we make it for all time, forever. For now, tomorrow, the day after, next week, 2 years on, in a decade and when we’re in our rocking chairs. It will take energy to make a habit, but it needs to be embedded so deep it never changes. That means in every situation you face, no matter how big or how small, you stop, stand apart and remember the covenant you made – and honour it. Make this oath with me. Others may run around in panic but we refuse to connect in to that fear. We stare it down right where we are no matter what happens. Find your courage in the dark, and you will be able to use the same courage in the light to conquer worlds.

So take your time. Think it over. This is a big and bold choice that will affect the rest of your life and everything you do. It will shape you. We make it here in the darkness. I know you’re scared and I know things look hopeless. The dark is pretty fucking frightening when you know it may get darker, but that’s the point – even if it does, you can stand inside it without needing to fear it. Our generation will be remembered for this age and we need to choose who we will be and why. They will look back and refer to us an example of what to do in the future if something similar happens.

The interesting thing about darkness is that the more there is of it, the brighter a light seems. Choose this as your finest hour. Stand next to me. When they look back, in the midst of the contagious fear smothering everything, they will remember a group of people who simply refused to co-operate with that fear and shone a piercing light out that was deadly just because the darkness was so broad and deep. It was in that moment that they too realised they didn’t need to get into an agreement with fear, and that the darkness was the very thing that brought out the light itself.