Anxiously Fearless: 7 Ways To Retrain Your Inner Voice to Conquer Challenges

By Joe Vandecar

In Anxiously Fearless, Joe Vandecar explains, dissects, and unpacks how our inner voices work and how they can be the biggest obstacle to our growth, development, and success. We don't have to accept this abnormal voice in our head dragging us down. Joe intertwines his personal story with guidance, tools, and techniques to master your i

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Jun 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889269724

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Anxiously Fearless

Anxiously Fearless

7 Ways to Retrain Your Inner Voice to Conquer Challenges

Joe Vandecar

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2023 Joe Vandecar

All rights reserved.

Anxiously Fearless

7 Ways to Retrain Your Inner Voice to Conquer Challenges

ISBN

979-8-88926-919-9 Paperback

979-8-88926-972-4 Ebook

To my seventeen-year-old self—you’ve got this, love, and you will build a beautifully fearless life.

&

To Aditi, Claire, and Jake—my pillars of support, who make me feel invincible and help me untangle my anxious thoughts every day. Thank you for believing in me even when I don’t believe in myself.

Contents

Introduction

Self-Awareness

Resilience

Self-Talk

Burnout

Stress

Scarcity 

Identity

Uncertainty

Acknowledgments 

Appendix 

Introduction

Anxiously fearless—the state of being both anxious and brave, willing to face a challenge despite having fears. You may experience uncertainty and worry but are still determined to take action toward your goal or mission.

What kind of life do you want? 

Usually, I get blank stares when I ask this question. People guffaw. Then they will mutter something about being richer or getting more of something they lack. I never heard people contemplate whether they could do with less. Less self-doubt, less anxiety, less social obligations, or less posturing. Think about this. 

What’s stopping you from living the life you want? 

People answer this question in many ways.

I don’t have enough time.

I don’t have enough money.

I wasn’t born into the right family. 

Rarely does anyone mirror Taylor Swift and say, It’s me. I’m the number one thing standing in my way. 

Before you throw this book across the room, thinking, I can’t take another person telling me I am not enough! I want to emphasize I am saying the exact opposite. 

You are enough.

You alone have everything inside you necessary to unlock your life’s fulfillment. You also have the power to block yourself from being fulfilled. 

After fighting my way to financial success and burning out, I finally learned this lesson and decided there would be no more running ragged or fighting anxiety and self-doubt. I learned to take charge of my inner voice by training my mind like I would train my body. I began understanding how my mind works and strengthening it one step at a time. 

In January 2022, I left Apple at the height of my career. A surprisingly swift decision I made after years of struggling and striving to achieve an ideal lifestyle. The decision crosses my mind often. Was I insane for leaving? 

My family questioned my sanity. My friends congratulated me. Those who knew me well knew it was a hard decision.

After reflecting on it for over a year, I have greater clarity about what drove me to leave Apple. I did not take care of my mental health or work on improving my mental fitness. I allowed my brain to run rampant. 

To me, mental fitness is the mind’s ability to function in day-to-day activities, despite worry and anxiety. Mental fitness involves managing my thoughts, emotions, and behaviors effectively. This definition is not meant to be an indictment on anyone. Some people negatively react to the term because it could imply people aren’t mentally fit when they experience adverse mental reactions. This is not my intent nor how I approach the concept. To me, mental fitness is comparable to physical fitness. We work our bodies in specific ways to prepare us for intense physical activities like marathons, team sports, and everyday health. I apply the same concept to the mind. 

Metacognition is the process of thinking about our thinking. It involves identifying our detrimental ways of thinking, challenging those thoughts, and developing more beneficial ways to think. 

I believe in this process because our brains are malleable. Neuroplasticity means our brains and nervous systems grow and change when presented with new stimuli. So we can change detrimental thought processes into beneficial ones. I also believe in metacognition because I’ve seen a huge reduction in anxiety attacks and endless worrying since working on my mental fitness. I still push myself, but it’s toward things that bring me joy and fulfillment. I still step out of my comfort zone to achieve new successes, but it’s with a stronger way of thinking. 

I am writing this book to my younger self because there were times when knowing how to increase my mental fitness would have made tough situations easier. Working on my mind during quiet chapters in my life would have enabled me to navigate the chaotic chapters better. I want to encourage and inspire the younger me to take control of his life sooner. I wish I had learned the value of training my mind earlier because it would have made weathering storms easier, both the storms which happened to me and the ones I created for myself. 

I worked my way from being homeless at seventeen to buying a home and leaving Apple by thirty‐five. It was a bumpy ride. I burned out twice and rarely considered how my inner voice negatively influenced me. I contorted to fit an ideal to survive, but instead I found exhaustion, anxiety, and empty promises along the way. 

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, I grew up poor in rural Michigan. We lived in an economically depressed region where jobs and stability were scarce. Abuse and mental illness tore apart my family, so I had to grow up quickly. 

This chaotic period formed my thoughts about the world, like a computer program designed for maximum vigilance and worry. I learned to spot dangerous patterns in others’ behaviors and to see scarcity everywhere. My inner voice hounded me daily on the importance of working hard, not taking risks, and expecting everything to fall apart at any minute. If I didn’t struggle, I was not moving fast enough. 

I was on my own before I graduated high school, bouncing from couch to couch after my mother kicked me out. I existed in survival mode with my mind on autopilot. A determination to attend college motivated me to find a way ahead. 

Never one to wallow, I took action and walked into McDonald’s, taking a job at $5.15 an hour. It was not much but it was something. Finding a place to live was more difficult. At seventeen, I had no idea how to do this. Fortunately, my church family let me couch surf as I worked and earned money. I ended up moving in with an older woman from another church after she heard of my situation. She was my guardian angel and gave me my first experience of real stability. Small towns may not always provide growth opportunities, but they know how to care for their neighbors. I got up, left for work, never took a sick day, came home, studied, slept, and repeated. 

I realized life could be much bigger when I headed to college. Still, I operated on old scripts developed in different places and circumstances. I found it hard to turn off the survival programming and turn on the excited college kid one. I struggled to match my identity as a poor rural kid to the college scene. 

I joke now I had the anxiety of a middle-aged man with four kids and college tuition to worry about. There’s some truth to the joke. This was the survival script for my small Michigan town, the way people thought in that specific environment. Even though this script no longer served me at university, it didn’t stop my brain from relying on it, even though I did not have a family to support. My brain kept making up scenarios that would not actually affect me. 

Graduating from college, joining the United States Navy, getting into Georgetown University, and joining Apple were huge transitions. At each stage, my brain ran the scripts of my previous life and caused unnecessary anxiety and fear. Scripts like If I want to be safe, I can’t trust that any good time will last, If I don’t want to be hurt, then I can’t trust anyone but myself, or If I want to be successful, then I have to hide the fact I grew up poor. 

Instead of taking control, I often felt pushed along by the momentum of any given moment and did not stop to think of what it all built to. 

I didn’t know changing the way I thought would reduce my worry and anxiety. I didn’t know how to retrain my mind to support me in stressful situations. I took for granted worry and anxiety had to exist for me to survive. 

The scripts I’ve mentioned are how I think of the processes our brains run, like software on a computer. It’s not a perfect analogy but it works. The brain writes instructions for assessing future incidents based on inputs like past experiences, emotional responses, lessons, observations, and the like. It then takes new experiences and runs through a series of computations to predict what these experiences mean for our well-being and survival. The computational output is what dictates our physical and mental reactions. 

From birth, and maybe before, the brain is busy making connections and registering our external and internal environments. We add scripts from other people to our own thinking as we grow up. Lessons can be taught explicitly,