Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

Typically, abbreviated as FUD.

The whole point is to manipulate you. To harm your confidence. Make no mistake, a large part of marketing is doing this. They are making you think you need to be more, buy more, do more. You don’t.

What you need is to be you. Be confident in your dreams, your goals and your actions to get there.

I think of fear, uncertainty, and doubt as an analogy to driving a car. Let’s say you’re taking a road trip, and on the trip you go through a rural area filled with farmland, with few buildings and lots of roads. All of a sudden, your GPS stops working for a half hour. You start to question whether you should have turned off miles back or keep going after 30 minutes of no GPS. You start to slow down. You may think about pulling out of the direction you are heading and attempt to find some sort of landmark, building, or person to ask, or you could keep going ahead until you get a signal back to tell you whether you messed up or not.

When our destination is known, fear, uncertainty and doubt, are much less likely to distract us. We can swim through the area we aren’t familiar with, continuing towards the destination through the unfamiliar parts until we reach the areas we are familiar with again.

There is something unnoticed by many in this regard. Having even a single point of focus in your life can take away fear, uncertainty and doubt in others. This is why sometimes we see people go all in on certain aspects of life like family, business, hobbies, etc. It grounds them. They know what is awaiting them.

If you’re not sure what your focus is, you might succumb to fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Make some decisions now and you’re more likely to build some resilience against the FUD.