Frightened, clueless or uninformed

I just read this post by Seth Godin, "Frightened, clueless or uninformed" and, as always, he hits the nail on the head. We've all been in each of these places at some point in our lives. As I look back at my life and the experiences of those close to me I notice a few things.

When we are frightened we tend to get stuck. We go into the fight or flight mode which leads us to avoidance (flight) or kneejerk reactions (fight). We just aren't in a state of mind to make good, solid decisions or to follow them up with effective action.

And the main reason we are frightened is that we are clueless. We just don't have any idea what to do so we start to panic.

But what if we focus on going up the ladder. When we find ourselves in a place where we are frightened all we need to focus on is alleviating the fear, not solving the entire problem, just lessening the fear.

Once we've calmed down and can engage the rational part of our brain we likely will realize we are clueless. So what can we do here? Again, don't focus on solving the problem. Focus on finding possibilities. Talk, read or watch; talk to people, read books, blogs and articles, watch vidoes just to see what's out there. Discover things you never knew about. Grill the expert.

This has moved you up the ladder to uniformed. But now that you have all these possibilities you can become informed. Choose an option or two from your possibilities and get informed - find out what you need to do to follow that path.

Once we move past this point we become informed and that means we can make a good decision and follow up with effective action - the key to getting anything you want.