# An Exercise to Build Resilience and Face Your Fears

An episode of [The Daily Mastery Podcast by Robin Sharma](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1521068608), 15 Oct 2026, 9:38.

Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1182776/episodes/19947367-an-exercise-to-build-resilience-and-face-your-fears.mp3

Lead where you’re planted! Never say, “I’ll show more bravery and resilience when I have a higher title.” Start now. …thinking like a victim is a program you’ve learned and practiced so often it may have become your unconscious operating system. Step outside it and see what you’re doing. Then each day catch yourself and begin inscribing the habit of thinking like a leader. In today's episode you'll learn one simple yet potent method to habituate the trait of facing your fears to make you wiser, stronger and more resilient in the future. I'm truly super excited over the upcoming release of my new book The Robot and the Gardener: Being Fully Human in an Artificial Age (Penguin Random House). It's a parable and it's different (by far!) from any book I've ever written. You can join the list here if you'd like to be among the first to receive any updates. FOLLOW ROBIN SHARMA: Instagram Facebook YouTube

## Transcript

If you're human, you're going to face fear. And so one of the things that a players do that
leaders without titles do that I human beings do is they develop a resilience or hardiness
in the face of fear. A story I remember reading in a in an ocean book a while ago. So
there was this man and he was a mountain climber. So he climbed the mountain and he
reached the summit. But he sort of misjudged the timing, and it became dark. And so he
made his way down the mountain as the sunset. But he got to a place where it became so
dark he couldn't move, and he thought he was on this ledge, and he just became paralyzed by fear. He just realized that if he moved a few inches over, he would fall thousands and thousands of meters or feet to his death. And so all night, that was the most terrifying night of his life. He was on this ledge. He couldn't even move forward because he thought he'd fall. And he just stayed there, frozen for hours and hours and hours. And then with the first rays of daylight, he started life. And the reason he started to laugh was he realized just below the ledge there was this huge stone platform. There was no danger whatsoever. It was just his perception of fear that caused him to feel terrified. And I think that's a powerful idea for us, the things that most frighten us when we actually have the courage to do them dissolve. I mean, just think about it. How many times there was something you were afraid to do? And maybe for years you avoided it. And then one day you decided to confront it. And when you ran towards the fear, the fear itself dissolve.
And so what I want to do in this podcast episode is offer you a few ideas to help you.
Really pure fear. And the first idea is simply this practice bravery training. You know
you want to be a great footballer. We understand you've got to put in the time to practice.
You want to be a great chef. We understand. You've got to do the practice. You want to
be a great entrepreneur, you've got to put in the hours of rigor and discipline, building
your business. You want to be a great chess champion. Of course, they're obsessed,
monomaniacal with practice. And yet, when it comes to fear, we don't live in a society
that values bravery training. You don't really hear people saying, go out and use this day
to practice becoming fearless. And yet, you know, we all know the ten zero zero zero
hour rule. We all know the ten year rule pioneered by Anders Eriksson at University of
Florida, the preeminent researcher in the field of exceptional performance. And that ten
year rule has now been popularized by a lot of authors. But what he found was this if you
look at any great performer that had one thing in common they spent the equivalent of ten years or 10,000 hours practicing their skill before the first signs of genius showed up to become fearless. Why not find some time every day to practice becoming fearless? Why not use whatever irritates you, or frustrates you or frightens you during your day is
bravery training. So let's say your supervisor walks in and says, you know, tomorrow I'd
like to give you a you to give a presentation on that project you did so brilliantly on and
start to pay attention. You notice, you start to feel afraid. Develop the mindset where you
say, okay, I'm going to say yes, because that is bravery training. Let's say you go home
and with your intimate partner, you want to speak up. You want to say something. Maybe
you want to ask for more love. Maybe you want to ask for one of your needs to be met
because you feel it's unmet. But then you feel, well, what if he or she judges me? What if
I get laughed at? What if they think I'm strange? Develop the mindset where you
recognize that everything that scares you is bravery training. Okay. So what I'm
suggesting on the first insight is really practice becoming fearless and you will become a
fearless human being. The second thing, release your attachment to outcomes. Now you
say, Robin, what are what are you talking about? One of the real reasons we don't do the
things that frighten us is because we are afraid of being judged. We are afraid of failure.
We are afraid of success. We are afraid of stumbling. What I'm suggesting to you is, one
of the reasons we don't really step into our heroic nature as human beings is because
we're attached to the outcome. And so just developing the philosophy where you live in
the moment, you do the things that frighten you, and you don't really worry about what
happens. That will develop a sense of fearlessness and a sense of bravery. The third tool,
or the third tactic to become fearless, hang with the heroes. Well, if you've followed me
before, maybe it's Facebook or Instagram or you've read my books. You know that I
believe you become your conversations because listening to an audiobook or reading a
book is nothing more than having a conversation with the author, and you do become the
people you surround yourself with. And so what I'm encouraging you to become fearless
is to read the books of people who have transcended adversity. I mean, it might be a
Nelson Mandela, it might be an Elon Musk, it might be a Martin Luther King Jr. It might
be someone in your neighborhood who overcame adversity, and you decided to have a
conversation over coffee with them. I mean, a lot of times the media will ask me, well,
Robin, your books work for people who had gray backgrounds. People who have a lot of
money. People who had the lucky breaks. That's just not true. If you look at the people
who have become iconic in business and in in whatever the field might be most of the
time. Those are people who actually came from nothing, or they had a lot of adversity,
but the adversity allowed them to get to know their talents, the adversity develop their
strength, the adversity allowed them to become better thinkers, and they actually used
failure to develop greater levels of freedom. And one of the best ways to do that is to read
the books, or listen to the audio books, or to spend time with people who've overcome
adversity, who have been frightened. And they've over they've transcended it to higher
levels of confidence and bravery. And then the final thing I will offer to you is simply
embrace the mess. You want to be fearless. Remember that the things that you now find
easy were initially hard. You want to become fearless. Remember that every master was
once a beginner. You want to become fearless. Remember that all change is hard at first
and it's messy in the middle and it's beautiful at the end. And so as you go from where
you now are to where you want to be in terms of your confidence and your fearlessness,
welcome the mess. I mean, progress is messy. Standing in the fire of your next level of
potential is terrifying. But you have a choice. You can spend the best hours of your best
days as a timid soul, locked into your current thinking, locked into your current emotional
life. And that's just a recipe for stagnation. And that's really just a recipe for a life filled
with regret. The second choice you can make is embrace the mess. Do the things that
frighten you. Ask yourself what things are blocking me and limiting me in my potential,
in my life and my income and my creativity in in my happiness. And literally take out a
piece of paper and start to record the things that you're frightened to do, because every
single thing you're frightened to do is carrying a little bit of your power, or a lot of your
power. And the moment you actually do the thing that you're frightened to do, you take
back your power that you gave to that condition and you become a more powerful person. And if you do that every day by using every day as a platform for higher levels of bravery then the rest of your life is just an exercise in you becoming world-class.

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