I was interviewed in this month’s issue of Fear.Less Magazine! Here’s an excerpt. If you’d like to read the entire interview, please download the magazine [PDF].
Ishita Gupta: How do you deal with fear?
Josh Sundquist: A helpful way I deal with fear – when I know I’m going to be afraid in a particular situation – is by being very prepared. Preparation calms me down because I can say, “You know what? I did everything I possibly could to prepare this speech. I read about the audience. I wrote a great outline and I practiced it a million times. I know it by heart.” Preparation gives you confidence and it is transferable to anything, especially a new situation.
JS: The most important thing is to start doing things. If it’s too big and you think, “How will I ever do anything?” it will overwhelm you easily. With my book, for example, which is 100,000 words long, if I sat down and said, “Man, I’ve got to write 100,000 words,” that sounds crazy and overwhelming. But you have to think it out, write it down and figure it out, day by day what you need to do. Maybe you write 2000 words a day and that will take fifty days and fifty days is just a couple months, so you think, “I could probably do that.” You have to make it manageable for yourself.
IG: Your speeches are about creating a purpose in life. How can we begin to define our own personal purpose for our lives?
JS: Purpose comes from passion. What’s important is not what you think your purpose is but what you are passionate about. You have to sit down and look at that. What gets you excited? What keeps you awake at night? Whether it’s out of excitement or anger, whether it’s out of fascination or curiosity, whatever it is that makes you passionate, that is what sits around your purpose. If you can find the nexus of those points, that’s where you can derive a powerful purpose.
JS: I think about it often. I people achieve by being willing to do one more thing and do it one more time. It’s my motto and represents how I trained as an athlete. I was always trying to find one more thing to do that my competitors were not willing to do.
