Lissa Rankin has been setting my mind on fire recently. She is my mentor, my spiritual coach. Her book The Fear Cure, her blog posts and now this talk at the World Domination Summit that I want to share with you have been taking me in a totally new direction of growth. It’s one of those rare talks which gives you the goosebumps. Do check it out.

Her talk is about 2 things – overcoming our default fear settings and being happy, and finding our true calling, purpose in life. Both themes are very important and urgent for me. Let me talk about overcoming fear first.

In her talk (and in her book The Fear Cure) Lissa says that 4 basic fears, deep rooted beliefs plague most of us. I have memory of a fish so I abbreviated them into DULL to remember easily:

D – universe is dangerous
U – uncertainty is unsafe
L – we are all alone, loneliness
L – loss is an inevitable part of our lives

Most of our fears and anxieties come from, and most life decisions are made based on! these 4 default fears and we may not even be aware of having them and the role they are playing. To overcome these fears, Lissa proposes to reframe and replace them with positive beliefs:

P – universe is purposeful
P – uncertainty is possibility
O – we are all One
G – loss is natural and can lead to growth

Lissa’s original slide is below, I re-arranged these to match the DULL abbreviation, but the order does not really matter.

Changing your default beliefs and fears is not a one off process of course, and some will need to start by becoming aware of having these in the first place. It’s a mentality shift, you need to meditate on this, to reprogram your thinking and your real-time responses to be based on these next time you catch yourself feeling fear.

To help you on this journey, I really like Lissa’s idea of pronoia (as opposed to paranoia) – a belief that everything in the Universe is conspiring to support you. Next time you feel alone, scared, unsafe, stuck or are going through loss – try and think about this, about fears based on DULL beliefs and whether you could use one of the four courage cultivating truths to change your perspective.