Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers — book cover

Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

Susan Jeffers · 1987

Fear never fully goes away when you grow, so the goal isn't to eliminate it but to stop letting it run your life. Susan Jeffers hands you a practical toolkit to feel the fear, trust that you can handle whatever happens, and act anyway.

9 min read · 9 chapters · Personal Growth

Why it’s on the shelf

A classic on moving through fear to act with confidence and ownership.

Three of the ideas you’ll keep

The Clif summary of Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first three.

  1. Stop waiting to feel ready: fear is a permanent companion of growth, so the only way to dissolve a specific fear is to go do the thing that scares you.
  2. Replace 'I can't handle it' with 'I'll handle it whatever happens', nearly every fear traces back to doubting your ability to cope, and that one belief is the lever that moves everything.
  3. Rewrite your vocabulary from pain to power: swap 'I can't' for 'I won't', 'I should' for 'I could', 'It's a problem' for 'It's an opportunity', and 'I hope' for 'I know'.

The other 4 — and the full 9-minute summary — are in the app.

What’s inside: 9 chapters

The whole summary runs about 9 minutes, read or listened to.

  1. Fear Will Never Go Away: And That's Okay
  2. The Real Fear Underneath All Your Fears
  3. From Pain to Power: Your Position Determines Everything
  4. Rewrite Your Vocabulary, Rewire Your Mind
  5. Take 100% Responsibility: And Stop Blaming
  6. Silence the Chatterbox With Positive Affirmations
  7. Make No-Lose Decisions
  8. Fill In the Grid: Live Your Whole Life
  9. Say Yes to Your Universe

Finish Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway tonight.

Read or listen to the full summary in about 9 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.

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