The Fear Freak Out Problem

Chapter one, the fear freakout problem. So in this chapter, I really spell out the problem that I propose in this book, and that is the concept of the fear freakout issue. And the fear freakout issue is when we're going along in our lives and we're doing everything that we expected we needed to get done to achieve our goals, and maybe we've even achieved our goal, and then some unexpected event drops into our life and we don't know what to do. 

It's something that we hadn't thought of. It's something that threatens our goal or threatens our attainment or our ability to keep our goal, and it throws us for a loop and really paralyzes us. And I think that's happened to all of us in our lives at different times. 

And so I talk about the fear freakout issue being the exact opposite of what cognitive dominance is. And I spell out what cognitive dominance is. Cognitive dominance is enhanced situational awareness that facilitates rapid and accurate decision-making under stressful conditions with limited decision-making time. 

I first heard about this concept when I was up at West Point talking with Dr. Nate Zinser, who was my mentor for over 40 years. And when he first shared with me those words, cognitive dominance, I thought, man, what is that? And I liked the sound of that. And when I heard what it was defined as, I thought, how do I get more of that? And so when I came home after that West Point talk and I spoke with my father about it, the next morning at like 5 a.m., he sent me an email. 

He said, you need to zero in on this concept. This could be the concept that is the overall encompassing thought about your book. And indeed, that's how the genesis of this book came about. 

So bottom line is in this first chapter, I talk about how cognitive dominance is keeping your mind calm, acting yourself, being cool under pressure, as Hemingway would say, grace under pressure. And how do we address these events that drop into our lives, the unexpected events that cause us to be terrified or paralyzed and we don't know what to do. So we'll focus on, when we do cognitive dominance, when we talk about cognitive dominance, we're talking about focusing on the signal, not the noise. 

We're focusing on acting in a way where we are completely cognitively consonant in our values and what we hold most important. And when we do that, we're acting in a cognitively dominant way. So that's the problem.

What do we do when we get the fear freak out and how do we find cognitive dominance? So what I spell out in the rest of the chapters is how do we build the groundwork for training our brain to think in a cognitive dominant methodology? And then finally, the prescriptive portion of the book, as I spell out in part three, is how do we actually put it into action? So that's the outline in chapter one.