Fear Hack – Feb 2019Street Wisdom is particularly powerful when the question being asked of the streets is crystal clear: the clearer the question, the clearer the answers. We encourage people to say their question out loud and make it super simple, taking away any jargon. A group with a collective, clear focus – where the individual experiences are brought together – can be even more powerful.
Last October, Hilary Gallo, author of Fear Hack, was a guest speaker on one of our Members Club huddles. A fascinating discussion on fear led to us collaborating on a special Street Wisdom event to explore our fears and importantly how we can hack those fears. Fast forward a few months to an ice-cold Tuesday afternoon in Kingly Court where a group of strangers were writing down their fears on post-it notes before adding it to the ‘Fear Wall’ (pic below). There were lots of common themes on the wall: failure, inferiority, rejection, loneliness. All of which, Hilary explained, were in our heads – there was no real evidence for any of these fears. Fear is totally normal and the only way we can grow is to step out of our comfort zones, something all of us were doing with this exercise…
There was something quite liberating about opening up about fears in a group who’d just met and in realising that everyone present had similar, albeit restricting, beliefs. As Hilary said, our heads can be a ‘dangerous neighbourhood’ to spend time.
The quest was all about learning how we can embrace these fears – rather than avoiding them – knowing we can grow by learning from our fears and working with them. Starting the session with this Fear Wall exercise was fascinating and really gave the group laser focus.
People came back from their quests with clear steps on how they can hack their fears. Taking the time to think about their fear was hugely valuable: where it stems from, how it’s holding them back and why they need to move forward. There were some real breakthroughs. One of the group described the experience as ‘turning fear on its head and making it beautiful’.
At the end of the session, my group had an interesting chat on how much we’d shared with one another. Some of us speaking openly about fears we’d not said out loud before. I think we were all in agreement that it was an exercise well worth stepping out of our comfort zones for.
We have put together Facilitators Instructions for leading a Fear Hack Street Wisdom event, which you can find here. Get in touch if you’d like to run your own event on [email protected]
Thank you to Hilary Gallo for leading, Nikita Mikhailov for making it happen and Justine Clement and Nick Hammond for facilitating.
