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“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
Anaïs Nin
I quit my cold shower streak on day 389.
Day one my heart raced going in. That’s why I logged the shower as a courage challenge: one daily act that scares me.
A clinician would call this exposure therapy.
A year in I stepped in without flinching.
Then I made the shower longer. 30 seconds became a minute. A minute crept toward two.
Each jump was uncomfortable for a while. Then even two minutes stopped registering.
In 2012 an investor turned down Jia Jiang’s startup.
Jiang set out to get rejected once a day for 100 days, to desensitize himself to the pain of it.
Day one he asked a security guard for $100, got a flat no and was terrified doing it.
Day two he got turned down again and made himself stay and joke with the man. Day three he walked into a Krispy Kreme and asked for doughnuts arranged like the Olympic rings. The shift leader made them and handed them over for free.
A UCLA exposure therapy protocol has you climb to the next item on your fear ladder once your rated distress on that item drops by half.
Rate “having a conversation with a stranger” at 80 out of 100 and work it until it reads 40.
Researchers at RMIT put 19 people through three virtual-reality public-speaking runs in one session. It took all three runs to bring the distress down.
The second run rated worse than the first.
Barbra Streisand walked out in front of 125,000 people in Central Park in June 1967 and blanked on her lyrics. She didn’t sing for paying audiences again for 27 years.
The fear started before that night, back in her Funny Girl run. She avoided the stage instead of returning to it. In her 2023 memoir, 56 years later, she writes that it’s still there.
Sara Solovitch trained at Eastman and quit the piano at 19. Her hands sweated too much to hold the keys and her feet shook too hard to work the pedal.
She kept away from audiences for nearly 40 years. In her late fifties she gave herself one year to fix it and booked the recital.
She practiced in airports, hospitals and retirement homes.
She played the recital the day before she turned 60, for an audience of 50.
The cold shower stopped scaring me, so it stopped being a courage challenge.
Do the thing that scares you until it no longer scares you. Then find the next one.
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What could you try that makes you nervous?
