The Gradient of Fear

Which brings me to chapter four, the gradient of fear. We have a lot of different words for fear. We have uncomfortable, we have anxious, we have awkward, we have embarrassed. All those words are
sort of low-level fear concepts. They're not super high-level fear, but they're low-level fear concepts. And then we have kind of mid-range, like concerned, I'm frightful, I am afraid.Those are sort of mid-level fear terms.

And then we have like, you know, DEFCON 1 level fear words, like mortified, where you can actually die of a heart attack because you're so afraid. Terrified. So those are even stronger words. So it's important to understand the lexicon of fear. When somebody tells me I'm not comfortable with that, I say, well, that means you're afraid of something. What are you afraid of? They don't like hearing it that way, but it really is what it is. And the sooner you can drive it, what you're afraid at, the sooner you can get somebody to articulate what they're afraid at, that's the first step in dismantling it.

So the gradient of fear looks at the spectrum of words from the worst, which is the fate worse than death. That's like when you have some terrible stroke, you're neurologically devastated, or a vegetable in a bed and you can't move. That's a fate worse than death. Then above that is mortified, where you actually could die from being so afraid. Then it's terrified. Then we move up into the mid range area. Like I'm afraid, or I'm anxious. And then you move up to the lesser ones. Like I'm uncomfortable.

These are the lowest level fears. I'm uncomfortable. I'm embarrassed. I'm awkward. Like why are you think about the word awkward? Why am I awkward? Somebody is going to think less of me. Somebody's going to judge me. Someone's going to have less affinity for me, less respect for me. That's what awkward is, right? It's just simply a level of fear. It's just a level of fear. So we have to identify the lexicon of fear, and then we can start talking about what we're afraid of, how we can get to it.