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Read those words every chance you get. One day, when you’re ready to act and eager to conquer your fear, those words will suddenly grab you. Then you’ll be done with this sad truth: If you don’t cont rol fear, fear controls you. Then you’ll prepare carefully, challenge your fear, and conquer that fear for all time. Looking back, it’ll seem easy. And, every time you conquer one fear, you’ll find it easier to take on and beat your next fear. But you don’t always win the first time out. Be prepared for that. The important thing is to jump on that fear for the first time. After that, it’s not an uphill road anymore.
l3ut you have to get past that first time. After I thought about controlling fear by doing what I feared most, I had to agree that I was allowing a fear to control my life. So I called the company that had invited me to speak. I said I’d do it.
That was about a month before the date of my speech. I served those thirty days on death row, wishing every hour that I hadn’t done it. The nearer the time for my speech came, the more panicky I got. “What am I going to say?” I kept asking myself. “Why did I do this to myself?”
At night, after writing out what I was going to say, I’d read what I’d written out loud. Then I’d tear it up and start over. Finally someone told me to put it all on 3 x 5 cards. So I wrote it all out on 3 x 5-inch cards.
The night before my first speech, I didn’t sleep at all. The next morning! walked into a huge auditorium. Three thousand people were seated there. I stood off in the wings as they started my introduction. And what did I start re-living? My fiasco in the second grade. They introduced me. I walked
out—
By the way, if you’re not a professional speaker, have them provide a podium. That gives you something to hang onto. And the audience can’t see your knees banging together.
Well, I looked down at my notes and just let ‘er rip. I never looked at the audience, I just kept on talking. I was scheduled to speak for forty-five minutes. In eight minutes I’d covered every point.
That first time was awful. The second time was terrible. The third time was yuk. The fourth time they clapped a little. The fifth time they stayed. Now, after speaking day after day after day with the finest group I know, salespeople, I wake in the morning with anticipation. Excitement. All this for overcoming the fear of failure in the beginning.
How many people do you know who won’t try because they’re afraid they may fail? Isn’t it sad how many of us consign ourselves to the junkyard of mediocrity rather than accept the momentary rejections that success demands? If you take just one idea from this book, make this one yours and it’ll repay your reading cost ten-thousand-fold: “I’m too proud of my future to beat myself out of it.”
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