Fear Gets a Voice, Not a Vote

The win isn't never feeling fear. The win is shortening the amount of time that fear gets to run your life.

Love or fear

There's someone I've worked with for many, many years, a longtime consultant and friend of mine. And we've had some deep conversations over the years about leadership, about business, about competition, insecurity, money, all of it.

And quite a while ago, she had introduced me to an idea that has stuck with me. It’s a hypothesis that almost every emotion we experience can ultimately trace back to 2 things, love or fear. And it almost sounded too simple when I heard it the first time. I probably thought it was a little soft, actually. But the more I talked about it, the more we talked about it, the more I really started noticing it everywhere.

Jealousy, fear. Anger, fear. The need to criticize someone, fear. Fear of embarrassment, fear that somebody else is getting ahead of you, fear of being wrong. On the other side of that is curiosity, appreciation, creativity, interest, love. Not romantic love necessarily, but love as a way of moving around the world, love of work, love of a process, love of another person enough to tell them the truth, love of yourself enough to take responsibility for your own life.

And once I started looking at life and looking at things in this way, it actually became difficult not to see it.

Above the line

And a little bit further along, she introduced me to a book called The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp. And within the book is a very simple concept about being either above the line or below the line, and the concept goes like this: when you’re above the line, meaning you're open and curious, you're committed to learning.

Below the line, you're closed off, you're defensive, you're always committed to being right. And the authors describe the difference between a by me mentality or a to me mentality, where life is happening to you rather than being caused by you, rather than taking responsibility.

And the first time I heard that, I thought, "Oh, my gosh, I really feel like there's something here," because I could immediately see both sides of this concept in myself. I'm an incredibly competitive person. I like to win. I like to compete. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that.

You can be fiercely competitive and still operate above the line. But competition itself can also be rooted in insecurity if the only thing that matters to you is beating someone else. Their success starts to feel like your failure. Their accomplishments somehow become evidence of a deficiency on your end.

And now you're not competing because you love what you're doing. You're competing because you're afraid of what it means if someone else wins.

None of us live above the line all the time

One of the most liberating things I have come to understand is that none of us live above the line all the time. That would be nonsense. We're human beings. We get insecure, we get jealous, we get angry. We blame other people sometimes. We become defensive sometimes. We go below the line. The trick is recognizing it as quickly as possible and getting ourselves back above. (That, by the way, begins with acknowledging that you are indeed below the line, the authors point out.) The win isn't never feeling fear. The win is shortening the amount of time that fear gets to run your life.

And I think about this all the time because I hate the way it feels when I realize that I'm in victim mode. It's an insecure feeling. I suddenly feel dependent upon another person or some outside circumstance. I'm waiting for someone else to change. I'm blaming, I'm explaining, I'm giving away control.

Responsibility is freedom

Taking responsibility feels exactly the opposite. It feels free. It feels independent. It's not a burden. Responsibility to me is freedom. It doesn't mean everything that happened was my fault. It just means whatever happened, I still have some say in what happens next. And I see this with clients all the time.

The markets decline, somebody starts talking about the current administration as though whoever occupies the White House at that time has suddenly taken control over the rest of their financial life. Or I'll meet a prospective client who tells me that their previous advisor is responsible for every financial disappointment or seemingly every disappointment that they've ever had.

Maybe their advisor did screw some things up, and that happens. I'm not interested in sitting here judging them or telling them they're wrong. I usually just ask, "Well, how? Tell me how. Having gone through that experience, what would you have done differently or what would you like to do differently now? How would you like to proceed differently from here?" Those questions matter because blame may explain something about the past, but it does almost nothing to create the future you want.

And the guide, the coach's job isn't to agree with someone's victim story. The guide's job is to help them reclaim responsibility without creating any kind of humiliation. That's love. Love doesn't mean telling them everything they want to hear. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is to help someone recognize that they've given their agency away and show them how to reclaim it.

What people are actually thinking

And that's actually become part of an entirely different conversation I have had recently about how we communicate as a company. Go to almost any financial advisory website out there and you'll see words like trust and integrity or some phrase like, "We have 175 years of combined experience." I suppose there's nothing wrong with those words. I certainly hope people trust us. I hope we always operate with integrity. I hope experience has made us better at our jobs. But I've always been suspicious that this is not the language that's necessarily running through the head of the person who truly needs our services, needs our help.

I think that person’s inner monologue probably sounds more like this: "I feel behind financially, but I don't really know what behind means or what I need to do to get ahead." Or, "I know there's probably a better way I could be doing things for myself, for my family financially. I just don't know what that is, or I don't know where to start."

That's what people are actually thinking, I think. They're not sitting at home saying, "I really need an advisory firm with a lot of combined years of experience." They have a problem. They feel disorganized, insecure, inefficient, uncertain. They need guidance. They need direction. And underneath that feeling of, let's say, being behind, something else often exists: shame.

Fear gets a voice, not a vote

Now, Vinny and I recently interviewed one of our great clients, Alexis. She's an incredible athlete, and we were talking about her origin story with us and the first conversation she and I had about 4 or 5 years ago now, and she told us something I thought was amazing. She said, essentially, "I felt totally in over my head because I didn't know anything about finance, and I didn't want to be embarrassed by how little I knew."

But then she said she made the decision. She thought, "Hey, this is too important for me to allow embarrassment to stop me from asking questions, so I'm gonna ask every dumb question I have. Dumb question after dumb question after dumb question until I understand what I need to understand in order to put myself in the best position to move forward."

I love that. Especially for someone in their 20s, fear was absolutely present. The fear of looking stupid, the shame of feeling like maybe she should already know more. But fear didn't govern what happened next. Fear got a voice. It just didn't get a vote. And that may be one of the biggest misunderstandings I think about fear.

Fear isn't always bad. Fear is incredibly useful. Fear has kept us human beings alive for a very long time. It gets us out of bed. It helps us prepare. It makes us pay attention. Fear can tell you something deserves your attention. The problem is when we take information from fear and automatically turn it into an instruction. Fear is allowed to speak. It is not automatically allowed to decide.

Fear disguised as responsibility

And money is one of the easiest places for that distinction to get lost because there are so many pressures attached to it. Think about somebody in their late 40s or early 50s. I happen to fall into that category. They have accumulated some money. Their kids might be heading to college. Their parents are getting older. They may be part of what we call this sandwich generation. Retirement used to be something sort of far out there in the distance, more conceptual than anything. And all of a sudden it feels like it's coming really freaking close.

And then come the thoughts, "Do we have enough? What does my spouse think if we don't have enough? Can I put my kids through the schools that we want? Can we live the life we said we were going to live? What are people going to think if we can't?" And then fear does something very interesting.

It disguises itself as responsibility. Maybe this person accumulates an inordinate amount of cash, but it's sitting in their savings account. Not money they're gonna spend tomorrow, not an emergency fund. Money they actually need 10 or 15 years from now, but they say, "I've worked really hard for this, I can't afford to lose it."

Now, in the moment, that sounds almost prudent. On the surface it feels secure, but every day that that money sits there, the cost of living is working against it. And meanwhile, that person reinforces this emotional idea that safety means keeping the number on the screen from moving down. And fear is incredibly convincing because it rarely introduces itself by saying, "Hey, I'm here to destroy your long-term wealth." It says, "I'm here to protect you."

The question is not whether the pressure is real. The pressure is very real, and it can be very real. The question is whether fear gets to govern what you do about it. And this is where I think love becomes creative. When I think of love in this context, I think about freedom. I think about independence, independence of thought, being able to live and breathe freely in a way that feeds your soul.

Love is creative

I had a discovery conversation a few months back with a younger guy, new client named Rodrick. Great guy, entrepreneur, influencer, lives on the West Coast right outside of San Diego. I was actually traveling at the time we spoke. I was making the call to him from my hotel room in Indianapolis. We were probably on the phone for a couple hours, and at some point he turned the conversation, the discovery conversation, around on me, and he started asking me questions. What got me into the business? What actually drives me?

And then he asked me something like, "Hey, Ben, what's the big audacious goal for you? And I don't mean retirement. What's the thing that really represents independence? What's the product of all this success? What's that going to create for you?" And I sat there and I thought about it for a second. I told him, "You know what? I really want to fly a helicopter." I'd actually taken steps before that to learn a few years ago, and one day I would love to own my own helicopter. My dad flew helicopters in the Vietnam War and then subsequently in the Army Air National Guard for about 20 years after that.

I've always been enthralled with that machine. But it also represents something important to me. Helicopters represent freedom and independence. I picture having one maybe in my backyard and on a whim, me and my wife jumping in and heading up to the coast of Maine to eat at one of our favorite restaurants like Fore Street or Scales, spending the night and coming home.

If you've ever watched Yellowstone, the show with Kevin Costner, there's something about him being out there where they live on the ranch in Montana and the helicopter sitting just out there in the field, somebody just getting into it and going somewhere like Bozeman. It always struck me. Is that a traditional financial goal? Maybe not. Is owning a helicopter some universally rational expression of financial success? Of course not. But that's not the point. It means something to me. That conversation with Rodrick reminded me that money at its best is not a scoreboard. It's raw material for creating a life.

And that's what I mean when I say love is creative. It asks, "Hey, what can I build? What can I become? What can I make possible?" Fear is the opposite. Fear contracts when love expands. And that doesn't mean love is comfortable.

Jerry Seinfeld once made a comment I love. I see it on Instagram a lot. "Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you're comfortable with," he said.

He was talking about things like marriage and kids and work and exercise, the worthwhile parts of life that come with their own forms of difficulty. A wealth of common sense. I think it's freaking brilliant because love doesn't save you from the torture. Love gives you a reason to choose the torture.

Choosing the torture

Now, one of the tortures I've chosen is burpees. Last night I did 50 burpees for the 1,300th day in a row. 50 a day, every day. It takes me somewhere around 2 and a half minutes to do the full set. And I started doing it, well, 1,300 days ago. Even though I was working out every day consistently, doing CrossFit, I'm pretty active, I felt like something was missing. I wanted something that was completely non-negotiable. I can skip a CrossFit workout one day, I wanted to find something that I couldn’t miss a single day.

Part of it came from something a longtime elite CrossFit competitor, Jason Khalipa, said. He said, "The older you get, you wake up a lot of mornings, you're sluggish, things hurt, you're tired, work is crazy, the kids have something going on. It becomes really easy as you get older to say, 'Hey, you know what? I'm gonna take a day off.'" And sometimes you should take a day off, but that can become a slippery slope. 1 turns into 2, 2 turns into 6, 6 turns into 14. And as Jason was describing, then the concrete, so to speak, starts to form around you. Suddenly, 3 weeks have gone by and getting started feels like you're standing at the bottom of the mountain.

And the 50 burpees for me have become my way of preventing that negotiation. I don't care how I feel. I don't care where I am. I don't care what responsibilities I might have that day. I can find 2 and a half minutes. Is that extreme? I don't think so, but maybe some people do. Every day I post them with the hashtag, “nobody cares, work harder.” Obviously, that doesn't literally mean that nobody cares about me. Of course, people care about me. It's a reminder to myself, to ask how legitimate is this pain or distress that I'm feeling or I think I'm feeling? How much am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Is something actually wrong or am I simply just uncomfortable in the moment?

And I try to use the same thing in business, investing, in relationships, in parenting. Something happens with one of my kids and maybe I get really upset. Pull it back. Is this where I need to be emotionally? Something happens in business. Same question. Fear gives me the information. Fine. It still doesn't automatically get a vote.

A strategy decided in advance

This makes me think of our investment strategy, which is built really on the same exact idea as the burpees. Before we start investing, there are 3 questions we have to answer. What do we buy? When do we sell? Where do we reinvest the proceeds? Those are non-negotiables. There are others, of course, but those are 3 questions that are fundamental because we know fear is going to show up eventually. It always does. Markets are going to decline. The headlines are going to get scary. Something is going to hurt. Maybe the market equivalent of waking up sore is the 10% or 20% decline, and suddenly fear starts bargaining with you.

Maybe we should take a few days off. Maybe we should wait until things feel or look a little better. Maybe this time really is different. That's exactly why the strategy has to exist before the fear arrives. A real strategy is a set of decisions made in advance, so fear doesn't get to rewrite the rules when things start to hurt.

Mature love can tolerate reality

And for me, that comes back to something very simple. I love equities. I love what they represent. I love the resilience of capitalism. I love the fact that over a long period of time, we get the opportunity to own pieces of some of the best-financed, most professionally managed, most innovative companies literally in the world, and we get to participate in what they create. To me, that's something that should be celebrated, not feared.

Loving equities doesn't mean pretending prices only go up. Quite the opposite. Mature love can tolerate reality. The road to independence and freedom is not a straight line, and neither is life. There are gonna be things that challenge us, of course. How else would we grow? How else would we know whether the direction we have chosen actually means anything? Fear tends to interpret difficulty as evidence something is wrong. Love can say, "Oh, of course, this is difficult. I knew there would be some element of torture attached to the thing that I chose."

What a great advisor does

That is also what a great financial advisor should be doing for someone: not trying to remove every ounce of fear, not pretending the market won't decline or overwhelming people with numbers to try to turn clients into junior financial advisors. Nick Murray has said something I thoroughly agree with. My goal is not necessarily that you understand every single thing that I understand. My goal is that you believe me. And I don't mean blind belief. I mean that you believe that I understand you, that I'm telling you the truth, that I'm not judging you, and that I know how to guide you from here. Belief creates confidence. Confidence allows somebody to maybe open up a little bit more. And when folks are opening up, that creates clarity, and then the plan starts to mean something.

That requires advisors to deal with their own fear too. Advisors are terrified of looking like they don't have all the answers. So many of us “perform certainty,” right? We fill the silence. We use jargon. We make ourselves sound sophisticated sometimes because we're afraid that the client might realize we're human. I think that's backwards. Some of the strongest relationships I have with clients become stronger when I've said, "I don't know. I need to look into that." Or when I've talked about something I've personally struggled with or screwed up. People don't believe you because you sound perfect. They believe you because you sound real. And fear says, "Protect the image." Love says, "Tell the truth. Be useful."

Where is fear running things?

So maybe the question I want to leave with people, if you're a financial advisor, is…where is fear governing your decisions and your conversations with clients? Are you avoiding the hard conversation because you're afraid they'll think less of you? Are you agreeing with the victim story because challenging it would make the meeting less comfortable? Are you changing the investment strategy because you're afraid of being wrong for a while? Are you pretending to know something because saying, like Alexis said, "I don't know," makes you insecure?

And for everyone else, where is fear running things in your life right now? Your money, your health, your marriage, your business? What are you avoiding because you're afraid of embarrassment? Where are you comparing yourself to someone else? Where are you saying, "This happened to me," when maybe the more useful question is, "What am I going to do from here?"

The truth is, you may actually be behind. Your fear may actually be pointing at something very real.

Fine. But you're not powerless. You can right the ship. You can incrementally get better every day from here. You can ask the dumb question. You can take responsibility. You can walk back into the gym or have the conversation. You can change direction. Fear is going to be there, and I don't think we're ever getting rid of it, and I'm not sure that we actually want to.

Let fear talk. Just don't give it a vote. Have a great week, everybody. Thank you.

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Ben Beck is Managing Partner & Chief Investment Officer at Beck Bode, a deliberately different wealth management firm with a unique view on investing, business and life. Subscribe to his newsletter Relentless Abandon on LinkedIn