Check out part one and part two where I talked about the first two steps to recover from a major setback.

You suffered a major setback in your life. Following the advice in part one, you gave yourself permission to mope in a controlled fashion. You then confided in somebody to get your situation off your chest.

Step three is facing the WORST case scenario.

And I mean the WORST case. What’s the most horrible, disastrous, devastating thing that can happen? I want you to imagine it in detail… and look it straight in the face.

Why do you need to do this? In many cases, your negative emotions are an expression of the fear you feel internally. You are AFRAID – that you will never get the promotion, that you will never fall in love again, or that your business will fail and you will become destitute.

And because fear is sooo uncomfortable, our natural instinct is to suppress it.

But there’s a big problem with suppressing fear. It simply doesn’t work. Even if you try, fear still lingers beneath the surface. It HAUNTS you.

Until you confront your fear totally head-on, you will never, ever move on.

So how do you confront your fear? Feel it. And the best way to do that is to pretend – for a short time – that the worst-case scenario has actually happened.

• Have a piece of paper and a pencil ready.
• Sit down, close your eyes.
• Imagine the horror of it all. Really put yourself in that situation.
• Write down all the awful things that could happen.

When you try this, you’ll notice something very interesting: there are OPPORTUNITIES available to you. Even in the midst of your fear. Even if you find yourself in the worst-case scenario. You WILL be okay.

In fact, even while you’re trying to experience all-out terror, you won’t be able to sustain it for long. That’s because our minds naturally gravitate to rescue strategies – even when everything is falling apart around us.

That’s why you need that pencil and paper in front of you. Once you descend into the fear, within MINUTES your mind will start showing you opportunities to fix things. You won’t be able to stop it.

So not only should you write down all the bad stuff – write down any solutions, exit strategies, anything positive that comes into your mind.

After you have that “aha” moment, your fear diminishes. After all, anticipation of the unknown is the fuel for fear. When you’ve already gone through something – even if it’s just in your imagination – it’s no longer unknown to you. Which means it’s much harder to be afraid of it.

This is an important step to overcoming a major setback. Yet many people skip it. They try to bury the fear deep down, instead of looking it in the face. They doom themselves to the constant, low-level, nagging stress of wondering when the monster is going to jump out of the shadows and eat them.

But trust me, if you feel the fear and confront it,
you’ll be taking a shortcut to quickly plow through those negative emotions and be FREE of them.

This puts yourself in the strongest possible position to feel better and begin taking ACTION again.

In the next part, you are going to learn about how to approach taking action to get out of your situation.