The Flinch Kindle Edition

Take a cold shower. Even the thought of taking a cold shower is enough to make most people experience "the flinch", according to Julien Smith in this book. The flinch is the instinct which tells you to run, the reaction which causes you to refuse a challenge and prevents you from moving forward. It urges you to avoid risk and hard work, and it pushes you to choose the safe and easy options.Some of the author's thoughts on the flinch:* The flinch is why you don't do the work that matters, and why you won't make the hard decisions.* Over a lifetime, those who listen too much build a habit of trust and conformity.* Avoiding the flinch withers you, like an old tree that breaks instead of bending in a storm.* The anxiety of the flinch is almost always worse than the pain itself.* Flinch avoidance means your everyday world becomes a corridor.* Train yourself to flinch forward, and your world becomes a series of obstacles to overcome, instead of attacks you have to defend yourself from.* If you aren't willing to sacrifice your comfort, you don't have what it takes to make a difference.It is hard to argue with the author's arguments. Many of our failures to act which we explain away as being part of our personality or wise choices designed to minimise risk are in fact little more than an ingrained lack of courage, a persistent failure to face up to our fears. The book provides a number of homework assignments designed to train the reader to avoid flinching, but it seems to me that the battle against flinching is one which lasts a lifetime.

If you don't get out and do the things you want, that for whatever reason make you uncomfortable, your life will stay the same until you die. So get out and do stuff! Try new things. Do all the things you've been wanting to do. Stop letting another day, week, month or year pass you by! The flinch is that moment that stops you. You can choose to stop or keep going. This book will help you get passed that moment. I will re-read this one again and again. Low price, quick read. Give it a read

This books is something Tyler Durden from "Fight Club" would write. It's a small treatise in living life with less fear and more power. On the surface, that is the idea behind every self-help book, but Julien's book focuses more on why we stall on becoming an improved self. Julien argues that our ancestral psychology (flight vs fright response), family, and society have conditioned us to listen to fear, regardless of what we are afraid of.His answer....Feel the fear and do it anyway.Julien coins this inability to live with less fear the "flinch" and provides Tim Ferriss-like experiements to help guide the reader through the first steps.Even though a lot of it was the same typical self-help spiel, Julien has a very unique spin of it that reminds me of Stoicism and the philosophy behind "Fight Club". I felt a little stronger because of it.The only downside was that other book excerpts were included that messed up the conclusion for me. When the book ended, I wanted to leave on the high note that I felt from reading. I don't want to read excerpts for other books.

By all means, take on challenges that push your boundaries. Do things that fall far outside of your status quo. Get yourself into situations that make you feel The Flinch. But when you feel the signs of The Flinch, don't just ignore the feelings. Stop, look around, try to figure out what is really making you uncomfortable. Why do you feel afraid, uncertain, threatened? Notice what you're feeling so you can recognize it. Engage the active thinking part of your brain so the automatic responses that are normally triggered when you feel this way don't take over your behavior.I felt The Flinch when I was looking for a small brewery that is very close to my lab last week. As I was getting closer to this place, I started feeling a tightness in my chest, I was getting a little anxious, and I started thinking that maybe I'll just try finding this place another day. Recognizing that I was starting to feel The Flinch, I kept looking for the brewery while thinking about what aspect of this situation was making me feel tense. Well, what if I get there and I can't find the tasting bar, or they don't have bottles of beer for sale, or I don't follow some procedure for getting what I want. The clerk will think I'm some kind of idiot. That's what I was afraid of? Some person I don't know who will never have a significant impact in my life might think I'm a dolt because I don't know how to get a bottle of their beer? How could I turn around when that's all that was holding me back? I found the brewery and bought some of their signature beer. It was decent.I fought through The Flinch and achieved my goal. As promised in this ebook, I was perfectly fine after going through a short period of heightened arousal. By reflecting on why I was feeling The Flinch rather than simply using this experience to build up my resistance to its power, I learned a little bit about why I felt that way in the first place. Recognizing and embracing the fact that I was feeling a little uneasy, provided a quick glimpse into a part of my thinking that I wouldn't be able to access by simply thinking about the situation.Follow Julien's advice and seek challenges that make you feel threatened, but take the process a step further and try to figure out why you're flinching. Hopefully you're sense of unease is rooted in something more substantial and significant than the fear that some stranger might think you're a fool.