Last week, I lead a workshop for 20 top female executives from around the world — it was a great pleasure and a great honor.

We worked on the issues that are holding them back at work, as well as the things that are keeping them from enjoying the lives they’ve worked so hard to create. Not surprisingly, there are many structural and cultural aspects of their workplaces (male domination, for example) thwarting their careers and their lives.

Here’s the thing: These brilliant executives didn’t really need strategies for changing their workplaces. They needed strategies for cultivating courage, given the difficulty of the work ahead of them.

Isn’t that what we all need? Courage to live lives where we can fulfill our greatest potential at work and at home? Where we can fulfill our potential for joy?

Here is my question for you: What are you afraid of? Where is your fear holding you back? If we are to live and work from our sweet spot — that place of great strength, but also great ease — we need courage. Courage to be authentic, to take risks, to be different.

Here are my three favorite tactics for building bravery:

1. Manipulate your thoughts.
Our thoughts profoundly influence what we feel and what we do. When we think about times when we’ve done poorly at something, we are likely to feel insecure and weak, upping the odds that we’ll actually do something insecure and weak.

That said, trying to control what we don’t think about doesn’t work. (Consider the old experiment where researchers tell their subjects not to think of a white bear: Most people immediately start thinking about a white bear.) In other words, it doesn’t work to say to yourself, “I have to stop being afraid.”

Instead, take a two-pronged approach to thinking brave thoughts. First, pay attention. If you notice yourself having a thought that undermines your attempts at bravery, simply label it as such: “Oh, there’s a fearful thought.” For example, say you are trying to get yourself to ask a question at a conference, but you are too afraid to raise your hand, and you notice yourself imaging that the presenter thinks you are dumb. Say to yourself, That is a thought that will make me feel afraid to ask my question, and take a deep breath. Noticing your not-brave thoughts can give you the distance you need to not act according to that thought and the feeling it produces.

Second, actively fill your mind with courageous thoughts. Consider times when you’ve been brave before. Focus on how people just like you have done what you are mustering the courage to do. Think about how the last time you did it, it wasn’t that hard. Think about how you’ll regret it if you don’t do it. Think about how the worst-case scenario is something you can deal with. Remind yourself of your long-term goals.

2. Consider that your fear isn’t legitimate.
Sometimes fear is more about excitement and thrill and passion than it is a warning that you are about to do something dangerous. As Maria Shriver writes in And One More Thing Before You Go, often “anxiety is a glimpse of your own daring… part of your agitation is just excitement about what you’re getting ready to accomplish. Whatever you’re afraid of — that is the very thing you should try to do.”

I love Harvard-trained sociologist and life-coach Martha Beck’s advice about how to know whether or not your fear is holding you back. Legitimate fear, she says, tends to make us want to get the heck out of whatever situation we are in. I once lived in a really nice neighborhood, but I had a really scary neighbor. Every time he’d stop to chat with me, friendly and normal-seeming as he was, the hair on my neck would stand up, and my heart would start racing and thudding in my chest. It was all I could to do not run and hide from him. It turns out that my fear was legitimate: After I moved, I found out that he was fresh out of a maximum security prison for violent sex crimes.

Not-helpful fear, on the other hand, makes us hesitate rather than bolt. We are afraid of looking stupid, and so we don’t ask a burning question. We fear failing, and so we don’t even try. Years ago, I was terribly afraid to make a desperately desired career change. I wasn’t happy, but my current job brought me a lot of security. What if I couldn’t make it in my new field? I waffled — hesitated — for more than a year before making the leap into a new profession. My fear was unfounded. I was immediately far happier and just as successful as I had been in my old job. I wished I’d had the courage to make the change sooner.

The key is knowing the difference between legitimate and not-helpful fear. Do you have the desire to get the heck out of whatever situation is making you fearful? If so, your fear is likely legitimate. Run like the wind, my friend.

But if your fear is making you hesitate, consider that your fear is unfounded. Take a deep breath, and make the leap.

3. Make specific plans for the obstacles that you might face.
This is an important technique not just for being more courageous, but also for being more successful in your endeavors.

Ask yourself: What obstacles are you likely to encounter? People who plan for how they’re going to react to different obstacles tend to be able to meet their goals more successfully; in other words, scary challenges don’t stop them, especially when they formulate “If X, then Y” plans for each potential difficulty. For example, say you’d like to stop working weekends but are afraid that your team will start to question your dedication. Here is what an “If X, Then Y” plan might look like:

“IF my team grumbles or pushes-back because I’m not working on the weekends anymore,

THEN I will forward them Leslie Perlow’s Harvard Business Review article about how ‘Predictable Time Off’ improves both work quality AND quality of life, even in client-oriented businesses.”

It is important to remember that the hard things we have to do or say are actually rarely what make us uncomfortable. It is the fear we feel that makes us uneasy. Fear is the thing that in truth makes actions hard, not the action that we think we are afraid of. Not doing something because we are afraid is actually not the easy way out in the long run. Though it might seem counterintuitive, it is finding the courage to try, or push ahead, or speak up, or make a change that will help us live and work from our sweet spot.

Ironically, when we do the hard thing, ultimately we find more ease.

What is your favorite way to cultivate courage? Inspire others in the comments here.

Want more tips for being brave? Please join me for a rejuvenating weekend retreat fromNovember 1 to 3, 2019 at 1440 Multiversity, a beautiful 75-acre campus nestled in the California redwoods near Santa Cruz. Register or learn more here.

Photo courtesy of Ashton Pal via Flickr. 

Being constantly connected to our work and smartphones makes us feel vaguely stressed and anxious. It prevents us from focusing and thinking deeply, and from spending time on the things that bring us lasting joy. It’s good to take a break.

But taking a break can be hard to do, because our smartphones and social media and email are designed to be addicting. (If you think you aren’t addicted, I challenge you to take this quiz.) It doesn’t work for most people to just will themselves not to check their phones or their email.¹ Below are a few strategies to put some distance between yourself and the things that are stealing your attention.

1. Get an old-fashioned alarm clock and banish all devices from your bedroom. Your bed and bedroom are not for working (or checking social media, or watching Netflix). They are for sleeping and resting and connecting with your partner if you have one. Don’t let your phone, and potentially your work, be the last thing you do before you go to bed and the first thing you do when you wake up.

Say goodnight to your phone and computer at least one hour before you’d like to be asleep. Do this so that you are able to sleep deeply and wake up rested. Charge your phone outside of your bedroom, and set it to automatically go into do not disturb mode an hour before your ideal bedtime.² Set your computer up to automatically shut itself down at the same time every night.

2. Get a good book to read before bed. It’s important to replace the time you would have been on your phone with something that will capture your interest, but not keep you awake.

3. Plan and schedule two or three specific times to check your email — strategically — per day. Block off enough time to get all the way to the bottom of your inbox in one way or another. If you need five hours (or three hours, or twenty minutes) a day to deal with your email, fine, but make sure you’ve actually blocked off those five specific hours on your calendar (or three hours, or twenty minutes) every day. Now do the same thing for checking social media, if you want to do that every day, and for checking and responding to your texts.

 Download a Take a Break from Your Phone & Email Cheat Sheet PDF here

Set up an app like “Inbox When Ready” to deliver email only during your scheduled times. You’ll still be able to access your email (in case you need to retrieve a file or something), but you won’t be tempted to check for new emails until your scheduled time…because you’ll know that there are no new emails. This is like methadone for email addicts, because it takes all the reward out of checking.

4. Turn off all your alerts. Every. Single. One. Unless you are actively checking your email/texts/social media during one of your scheduled times, you don’t need to know what communication is coming in. So turn off all notifications for your text messages, email, and all of your social media feeds on your desktop, laptop, tablet, and smartphone. Vibrate counts; turn it off. Breathe. Even if, through the strength of your ironclad will, you are able to resist reading a message that comes in, if you see or hear or feel a message notification, your brain has still been interrupted by that alert. Even a millisecond attention hijack like this will make you less focused, less able to resist other temptations, and more irritable.

5. Reorganize your phone so that it is less addictive. This will help you stick to your scheduled checking, and will help you not get sucked in when you don’t want to be on your phone. Move all the most addictive apps (like social media and email — and anything you check compulsively or on a whim when you see it) off the homepage. Put them in folders on back pages so that you have to search in order to launch them. Don’t worry, they’re still there. They just won’t be constantly seducing you with their siren songs.

6. Tell your people what you are up to. Tell your friends, family, and coworkers that you’re going to be checking your email and messages strategically, at pre-scheduled times during the day. That way, when you don’t respond to their messages, they will know it isn’t personal.

Give people a way to get ahold of you if something urgent comes up. This is more for you than for them, so you don’t worry about what emergency you are missing out on. Finally, and this is the most important one, ask your people to help hold you accountable. Consider this a form of crowd-sourced willpower.

7. Practice bringing your attention back to the present moment. This is what the famous Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer termed being “mindful” more than 25 years ago. To Langer, mindfulness is the “simple act of actively noticing things,” and she’s shown that it results in increased health, intelligence, and happiness. So wherever you are, whatever you are doing, look around and really notice things: What is different in your environment? In the people you are with? In your own body?

8. Feel what you are feeling. Without email, social media, and messages as your constant companion, you’ll find yourself doing things like standing in line at the grocery store…just standing…staring into space. Perhaps dying to check your phone. This may be uncomfortable at first. Resist the temptation to numb this discomfort by, say, eating that whole box of cookies you’ve got in your cart.

Why? Because when we numb unpleasant feelings, we numb everything that we are feeling. So to honestly feel the positive things in life — to truly feel love, or joy, or profound gratitude — we must also let ourselves feel fear, and grief, and frustration.

If you are feeling anxious or excited or bored, let yourself FEEL that emotion. Surf your emotions like waves.

Where in your body does the feeling live? Is it in the pit of your stomach? In your throat? What, really, does it feel like? Does it have a shape, or a texture, or a color?

Breathe. You are strong enough to handle the feelings that come your way.

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 Download a Take a Break from Your Phone & Email Cheat Sheet PDF here

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¹ If you want to learn why, read Catherine Price’s excellent little guide called How to Break up with Your Phone.
² I actually turn my ringer ON at night when I put it in the charger. That way if one of my kids wants to get ahold of me in the middle of the night, they can call twice and “break through” the do not disturb mode.