Welcome to ROAR! Courage!
Nothing happens by coincidence. So I'm guessing you're here for a special reason.
This website compliments R!k Schnabel's latest book, "ROAR! Courage - From Fear to Fearless." By using the links below, you can access FREE resources or get a copy of the book in printed or Kindle version. For access to free videos, audios and helpful resources (including free coaching) simply click here.
R!k believes the reason why most people don't achieve their goals is because 92 percent of us have got courage wrong. (Only 8 percent of people achieve their goals according to new breakthrough research).
ROAR! Courage - From Fear to Fearless was inspired by the courageous, conscious artist and activist Katy Perry.
This website compliments R!k Schnabel's latest book, "ROAR! Courage - From Fear to Fearless." By using the links below, you can access FREE resources or get a copy of the book in printed or Kindle version. For access to free videos, audios and helpful resources (including free coaching) simply click here.
R!k believes the reason why most people don't achieve their goals is because 92 percent of us have got courage wrong. (Only 8 percent of people achieve their goals according to new breakthrough research).
ROAR! Courage - From Fear to Fearless was inspired by the courageous, conscious artist and activist Katy Perry.
Filmed and Edited by Jack Swart.
Get your copy of ROAR! Courage
Within 7 hours of being released on Amazon, ROAR! Courage - From Fear to Fearless became an instant best-seller.
ROAR! Courage - From Fear to Fearless is now available in Kindle or in printed books. Within 7 hours of being released on Amazon, ROAR! Courage became an instant best-seller.
You can order your printed version here.
Or order your Kindle version here.
ROAR! Courage - From Fear to Fearless is now available in Kindle or in printed books. Within 7 hours of being released on Amazon, ROAR! Courage became an instant best-seller.
You can order your printed version here.
Or order your Kindle version here.
A Message from the Author...
'm so glad you found me here...
I shared in ROAR! Courage, that I believed that the way to bring kind back to humankind, is to encourage greatness, to follow your dreams and to take the sort of action that inspires you to be the best you that you can be and help others to do so.
To help you, my company Life Beyond Limits would like to give you access to some of our best courage building tools. You can access them here.
Be courageous enough to be the greatest you!
R!k Schnabel
I shared in ROAR! Courage, that I believed that the way to bring kind back to humankind, is to encourage greatness, to follow your dreams and to take the sort of action that inspires you to be the best you that you can be and help others to do so.
To help you, my company Life Beyond Limits would like to give you access to some of our best courage building tools. You can access them here.
Be courageous enough to be the greatest you!
R!k Schnabel
Experience R!k Schnabel Live!
Find out how you can get FREE tickets to see R!k Schnabel!
Extract from ROAR! Courage...
Chapter 1: Training Your Brain to ROAR!
Last Friday I went surfing with a shark. No, not intentionally. Thankfully I wasn’t close enough to see its teeth, but by the size of its dorsal fin, my guess it was a biggie. Robyn spotted the fin. A small group of us were sitting on our surfboards in the line-up, about 437 yards (400 metres) offshore, behind the breakers.
A shark’s dorsal fin is triangular with a straighter trailing edge, it’s distinctly different to the curved dolphin’s fin. I have surfed with lots of dolphins and very few sharks (that I know of), I know how to tell the difference—unless they are coming straight at you.
While our clique of surfers all knew that a shark was only fifty or so metres from us, surprisingly not one of us got out of the water. I thought I would be scared, but I wasn’t. I had to ask myself—was my reaction courage or stupidity? While many would say its stupidity, part of me cannot disagree with you—though another part of me knows we fear far too much of the world and it is time to stop this pandemic.
I went surfing again the next day, but this time alone. After paddling the first hundred yards or so from shore, I noticed a strange shadow in the water. But it was nothing. That morning there were many nothings. I started seeing dark shadows everywhere! The water where I usually surf is a clear sapphire colour and no matter where I looked, I kept seeing dark shadows and immediately felt a sense of paranoia. These are the tricks that are generated from a fearful mind.
The physiology of fear writes code in our neurology. It forms patterns that starts with a stimulus and like a chain reaction, ends with the release of chemicals that cause our heart to race. We breathe faster and shallower, our muscles tighten and our voices shrill at high frequency, immediately broadcasting a warning to everyone within earshot. Once we learn a fear, we automatically create sensory triggers that fire off our unconscious mechanisms that have us jumping like a cat on a hot tin roof.
If you have seen the movie Jaws then you will know the music used in every shark scene. That music engages a powerful neural fear trigger. Still today, Jaws the movie is responsible for people’s fear of sharks. Fear triggers simply initiate the fear response.
A fist waved at your face or someone screaming at you can become a fear trigger. Being made to perform in front an auditorium full of people will do it for most. The sudden thud of a branch landing upon your roof late at night can cause you to fear to sleep in your own bed! So all we need is to experience the trigger again and we immediately respond by feeling fearful all over again. Even if we logically deduce that we are perfectly safe at that moment. Hence, fear is not logical, it is learned.
Every unresolved traumatic experience is like a ‘jack-in-box’ spring loaded into our neurological library in a part of the brain called the ‘amygdala.’ The amygdala seems to be the boss of our emotions and how our mind works when it comes to fear is simple.
First, we experience something (like my latest shark experience) and we react immediately to the potential danger and do everything humanly possible to make it back to safety. Once the fear trigger jump-starts the fear response, within a split second physiological changes take charge of our entire body. Following the traumatic event, the brain stores that experience within the unconscious to speed up our reaction times. Just in-case the event occurs again. Should we sense anything resembling the trauma again, the fear trigger is fired and we immediately fight, flight or freeze our way to safety. Fear is rarely rational, yet it is actually a perfectly healthy and normal response. Bowling over your family to escape a spider on the wall is not always helpful, but it is healthy and just needs to be normalised. I will share some strategies with you later in the book.
Psychology will often call irrational fear, ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ or ‘PTSD.’ I prefer to frame it as Dr Doreen Virtue does; ‘Post Traumatic Stress Response’ or ‘PTSR’ as I don’t believe it is a ‘disorder.’ Disorder suggests there is something seriously wrong with someone when it’s just a response. So here is how PTSR works.
First, our sensory organs—our eyes, ears, tongue, nose and skin pick up cues from our surroundings and feed them back to our brain’s threat centre, the amygdala. If the amygdala identifies the data as a possible threat, it sounds the siren, immediately activating our fight, flight or freeze response, hyper-activating our senses. The response is what most calm individuals would describe as an ‘over-reaction.’
A normal heart-rate is between 60 and 100 beats per minute, depending on your physical activity, age and overall health. During a panic attack, it may beat from 8 to 20 more beats per minute. A faster heart increases our breathing rate and depth, our breathing shifts to fast shallow breaths, up high in our chest. Our speech rate equally increases as we sweat profusely to cool our bodies and our muscles tighten to intensify our power should we need to defend ourselves or make a quick getaway. If you consciously tried to emulate each of these responses now, you would likely feel yourself becoming fearful or stressed. A part of the peripheral nervous system called the ‘autonomic nervous system, is responsible for these biological changes and it regulates automatic changes to the body's vital functions.
The brain is a profoundly complex organ. It has more than 100 billion nerve cells comprising of intricate communication networks that influence what we sense, think and do. Some of these communications lead to conscious thought and action while others produce autonomic responses—unconscious behaviour. The fear response is almost entirely autonomic: we do not consciously trigger it or even know what's going on until it has run its course.
Because cells in the brain are constantly transferring information and triggering responses, there are dozens of areas of the brain at least peripherally involved in fear. But research has discovered that certain parts of the brain play central roles in the fear process:
Amygdala: decodes emotions; determines possible threats and stores fear memories.
Sensory cortex: interprets sensory data. It often tries to make sense of nonsense.
Thalamus: decides where to send incoming sensory data (from eyes, ears, mouth and skin).
Hypothalamus: activates the physiology, ‘fight, flight or freeze’ responses.
Hippocampus: stores and retrieves conscious memories; processes sets of stimuli to establish context, such as ‘when that happens I do this.’
So in summary, that is the neurology of fear—but how does it work psychologically?
When we have a fearful experience, the incident excites and fires off electrical pulses, activating a neural network in our brain’s sensory cortex. This process stores all of our experiences encapsulated in sounds, pictures, feelings and self-talk and transforms them into a chemical reaction, in specific locations in our brain. So that we can recall them, they are most likely stored in the hippocampus. So now we have a neural system of connections that allow us to recall and access the fear, so that next time an event that is similar to the previous fearful event occurs, we can react instantly, without having to process our thoughts.
That neural network also has a hair trigger, which is fired-off by anything that reminds us of the initial event. The trigger could be a sound, a picture, a feeling, sense or a word or phrase that someone says or a combination of all four. Every fear has a specific trigger or set of triggers that initiates the fear pattern. In the case of the shark, it could be something we see, like shadows in the water and POW! We are back to feeling and experiencing that initial event. A trigger could be a word said in a certain tone or at a particular volume such as the word ‘shark!’ or ‘look out!’ The trigger fires off the original neural pattern and we immediately feel the fear running its program throughout our body.
We can equally trigger the thought pattern by stimulating the associated feelings in our body again. For example, after the shark experience, the next time I got on my surfboard and got wet, the associated feelings might trigger the memory of the shark from the day before. All my thoughts may move to high alert and become focused on spotting another shark. Should I have seen another shark, my thoughts would have been immediately rewarded. That is how we create fear patterns in our lives. That is why I became sensitive to all the shadows in the water. None of the shadows were sharks, some weren’t even shadows; they came from my vivid and over-productive imagination triggered by trauma from the day before. If we keep on experiencing fear, the associated neural pathways are metaphorically deepened in our memories, to the point they can turn into ingrained, core-based phobias. They are irrational though our senses can rationalise anything—as crazy as this may be. Therefore, fears are learned and while irrational to an observer, they are completely rational to the person experiencing it.
So how do we resolve trauma and fear?
So while I was feeling the fear in my body due to the shark sighting from the day before, as I paddled out behind the breakers, I initiated ROAR! Courage., I consciously made a new decision that I was safe and powerful and while at first I didn’t believe it. I just decided that I would whip myself up into a powerful state! I felt that decision quickly shift my state and so my thoughts altered to match my new state. I simply pretended that I was channelling my higher self, who believes that we never die and death is an illusion. It might sound crazy, but no crazier than a phobia.
“Once you become fearless, life becomes limitless.” - Unknown
Another way to get beyond fear is to excite yourself (no, it is not what you think though that would work too). All you have to do is remember or imagine a time you were excited, recall what you saw, remember what you heard, evoke what you felt and recall what you said to yourself at the time. Bring back the memory to the present and you’ll notice your state starting to change. When your state changes, so does your thinking. Your thoughts commence to match your state. The moment you feel that your state has changed, click your fingers or clap your hands in a particular way, do anything to initiate a memorable trigger that immediately is associated with the state. I suggest you do this exercise and run this new pattern about three to five times to deepen the response. In NLP, we call it ‘anchoring.’
All thoughts and memories are state based
So all memories are state based. If you can stimulate and trigger a specific state, you will have all sorts of memories surface that were placed into your neurology when you were in that state. This knowledge has all sorts of brilliant applications and possibilities including education.
The lack of understanding in our schools about ‘state-based learning’ is why I’m so passionate about getting this knowledge into the hands of our children. Our educational systems could gain enormous insights from this knowledge alone. For example; we educate our children in a relatively calm environment (hopefully). Therefore all the information that enters a students’ neurology is associated with a calm state. Can you imagine what happens when nervous students enter a tense exam room that has time limitations imposed? You guessed it! Their state is typically a polar opposite to the state associated to classroom learning. It is no wonder many children cannot recall their classroom lessons and get poor marks in exams, and as a result, their self-confidence is compromised. Imagine what would happen if teachers learned this technique? Our children’s ability to learn will improve. I hope you’re a teacher reading this now!
So, we now know that all memory is state-based, just as fear is state-based. Therefore, if we can alter our state, we diminish our fears. That is ROAR! Courage. If you keep shifting your state by using your triggers, such as clapping your hands or another simple action, then you will train your brain to become courageous. It’s as simple as that.
STRATEGIES TO GET YOU FROM FEAR TO FEARLESS
1. Do something every day that scares you a little and builds your courage muscle a lot.
2. Before you do something, determine the best state to get it done and elicit that state.
3. Create your ROAR! anchor which helps you to immediately shift your state and thoughts.
AN OPPORTUNITY TO PRACTICE ROAR! COURAGE (Paying the second price)
1. Practice shifting your physiology and state. Begin to notice how this one technique seems to make all the difference. When you are about to do something that you normally fear, excite yourself, ROAR! play full out and notice how much more you feel you can achieve. Remember, we don’t do what we think we can do, we do what we feel we can do.
A shark’s dorsal fin is triangular with a straighter trailing edge, it’s distinctly different to the curved dolphin’s fin. I have surfed with lots of dolphins and very few sharks (that I know of), I know how to tell the difference—unless they are coming straight at you.
While our clique of surfers all knew that a shark was only fifty or so metres from us, surprisingly not one of us got out of the water. I thought I would be scared, but I wasn’t. I had to ask myself—was my reaction courage or stupidity? While many would say its stupidity, part of me cannot disagree with you—though another part of me knows we fear far too much of the world and it is time to stop this pandemic.
I went surfing again the next day, but this time alone. After paddling the first hundred yards or so from shore, I noticed a strange shadow in the water. But it was nothing. That morning there were many nothings. I started seeing dark shadows everywhere! The water where I usually surf is a clear sapphire colour and no matter where I looked, I kept seeing dark shadows and immediately felt a sense of paranoia. These are the tricks that are generated from a fearful mind.
The physiology of fear writes code in our neurology. It forms patterns that starts with a stimulus and like a chain reaction, ends with the release of chemicals that cause our heart to race. We breathe faster and shallower, our muscles tighten and our voices shrill at high frequency, immediately broadcasting a warning to everyone within earshot. Once we learn a fear, we automatically create sensory triggers that fire off our unconscious mechanisms that have us jumping like a cat on a hot tin roof.
If you have seen the movie Jaws then you will know the music used in every shark scene. That music engages a powerful neural fear trigger. Still today, Jaws the movie is responsible for people’s fear of sharks. Fear triggers simply initiate the fear response.
A fist waved at your face or someone screaming at you can become a fear trigger. Being made to perform in front an auditorium full of people will do it for most. The sudden thud of a branch landing upon your roof late at night can cause you to fear to sleep in your own bed! So all we need is to experience the trigger again and we immediately respond by feeling fearful all over again. Even if we logically deduce that we are perfectly safe at that moment. Hence, fear is not logical, it is learned.
Every unresolved traumatic experience is like a ‘jack-in-box’ spring loaded into our neurological library in a part of the brain called the ‘amygdala.’ The amygdala seems to be the boss of our emotions and how our mind works when it comes to fear is simple.
First, we experience something (like my latest shark experience) and we react immediately to the potential danger and do everything humanly possible to make it back to safety. Once the fear trigger jump-starts the fear response, within a split second physiological changes take charge of our entire body. Following the traumatic event, the brain stores that experience within the unconscious to speed up our reaction times. Just in-case the event occurs again. Should we sense anything resembling the trauma again, the fear trigger is fired and we immediately fight, flight or freeze our way to safety. Fear is rarely rational, yet it is actually a perfectly healthy and normal response. Bowling over your family to escape a spider on the wall is not always helpful, but it is healthy and just needs to be normalised. I will share some strategies with you later in the book.
Psychology will often call irrational fear, ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ or ‘PTSD.’ I prefer to frame it as Dr Doreen Virtue does; ‘Post Traumatic Stress Response’ or ‘PTSR’ as I don’t believe it is a ‘disorder.’ Disorder suggests there is something seriously wrong with someone when it’s just a response. So here is how PTSR works.
First, our sensory organs—our eyes, ears, tongue, nose and skin pick up cues from our surroundings and feed them back to our brain’s threat centre, the amygdala. If the amygdala identifies the data as a possible threat, it sounds the siren, immediately activating our fight, flight or freeze response, hyper-activating our senses. The response is what most calm individuals would describe as an ‘over-reaction.’
A normal heart-rate is between 60 and 100 beats per minute, depending on your physical activity, age and overall health. During a panic attack, it may beat from 8 to 20 more beats per minute. A faster heart increases our breathing rate and depth, our breathing shifts to fast shallow breaths, up high in our chest. Our speech rate equally increases as we sweat profusely to cool our bodies and our muscles tighten to intensify our power should we need to defend ourselves or make a quick getaway. If you consciously tried to emulate each of these responses now, you would likely feel yourself becoming fearful or stressed. A part of the peripheral nervous system called the ‘autonomic nervous system, is responsible for these biological changes and it regulates automatic changes to the body's vital functions.
The brain is a profoundly complex organ. It has more than 100 billion nerve cells comprising of intricate communication networks that influence what we sense, think and do. Some of these communications lead to conscious thought and action while others produce autonomic responses—unconscious behaviour. The fear response is almost entirely autonomic: we do not consciously trigger it or even know what's going on until it has run its course.
Because cells in the brain are constantly transferring information and triggering responses, there are dozens of areas of the brain at least peripherally involved in fear. But research has discovered that certain parts of the brain play central roles in the fear process:
Amygdala: decodes emotions; determines possible threats and stores fear memories.
Sensory cortex: interprets sensory data. It often tries to make sense of nonsense.
Thalamus: decides where to send incoming sensory data (from eyes, ears, mouth and skin).
Hypothalamus: activates the physiology, ‘fight, flight or freeze’ responses.
Hippocampus: stores and retrieves conscious memories; processes sets of stimuli to establish context, such as ‘when that happens I do this.’
So in summary, that is the neurology of fear—but how does it work psychologically?
When we have a fearful experience, the incident excites and fires off electrical pulses, activating a neural network in our brain’s sensory cortex. This process stores all of our experiences encapsulated in sounds, pictures, feelings and self-talk and transforms them into a chemical reaction, in specific locations in our brain. So that we can recall them, they are most likely stored in the hippocampus. So now we have a neural system of connections that allow us to recall and access the fear, so that next time an event that is similar to the previous fearful event occurs, we can react instantly, without having to process our thoughts.
That neural network also has a hair trigger, which is fired-off by anything that reminds us of the initial event. The trigger could be a sound, a picture, a feeling, sense or a word or phrase that someone says or a combination of all four. Every fear has a specific trigger or set of triggers that initiates the fear pattern. In the case of the shark, it could be something we see, like shadows in the water and POW! We are back to feeling and experiencing that initial event. A trigger could be a word said in a certain tone or at a particular volume such as the word ‘shark!’ or ‘look out!’ The trigger fires off the original neural pattern and we immediately feel the fear running its program throughout our body.
We can equally trigger the thought pattern by stimulating the associated feelings in our body again. For example, after the shark experience, the next time I got on my surfboard and got wet, the associated feelings might trigger the memory of the shark from the day before. All my thoughts may move to high alert and become focused on spotting another shark. Should I have seen another shark, my thoughts would have been immediately rewarded. That is how we create fear patterns in our lives. That is why I became sensitive to all the shadows in the water. None of the shadows were sharks, some weren’t even shadows; they came from my vivid and over-productive imagination triggered by trauma from the day before. If we keep on experiencing fear, the associated neural pathways are metaphorically deepened in our memories, to the point they can turn into ingrained, core-based phobias. They are irrational though our senses can rationalise anything—as crazy as this may be. Therefore, fears are learned and while irrational to an observer, they are completely rational to the person experiencing it.
So how do we resolve trauma and fear?
So while I was feeling the fear in my body due to the shark sighting from the day before, as I paddled out behind the breakers, I initiated ROAR! Courage., I consciously made a new decision that I was safe and powerful and while at first I didn’t believe it. I just decided that I would whip myself up into a powerful state! I felt that decision quickly shift my state and so my thoughts altered to match my new state. I simply pretended that I was channelling my higher self, who believes that we never die and death is an illusion. It might sound crazy, but no crazier than a phobia.
“Once you become fearless, life becomes limitless.” - Unknown
Another way to get beyond fear is to excite yourself (no, it is not what you think though that would work too). All you have to do is remember or imagine a time you were excited, recall what you saw, remember what you heard, evoke what you felt and recall what you said to yourself at the time. Bring back the memory to the present and you’ll notice your state starting to change. When your state changes, so does your thinking. Your thoughts commence to match your state. The moment you feel that your state has changed, click your fingers or clap your hands in a particular way, do anything to initiate a memorable trigger that immediately is associated with the state. I suggest you do this exercise and run this new pattern about three to five times to deepen the response. In NLP, we call it ‘anchoring.’
All thoughts and memories are state based
So all memories are state based. If you can stimulate and trigger a specific state, you will have all sorts of memories surface that were placed into your neurology when you were in that state. This knowledge has all sorts of brilliant applications and possibilities including education.
The lack of understanding in our schools about ‘state-based learning’ is why I’m so passionate about getting this knowledge into the hands of our children. Our educational systems could gain enormous insights from this knowledge alone. For example; we educate our children in a relatively calm environment (hopefully). Therefore all the information that enters a students’ neurology is associated with a calm state. Can you imagine what happens when nervous students enter a tense exam room that has time limitations imposed? You guessed it! Their state is typically a polar opposite to the state associated to classroom learning. It is no wonder many children cannot recall their classroom lessons and get poor marks in exams, and as a result, their self-confidence is compromised. Imagine what would happen if teachers learned this technique? Our children’s ability to learn will improve. I hope you’re a teacher reading this now!
So, we now know that all memory is state-based, just as fear is state-based. Therefore, if we can alter our state, we diminish our fears. That is ROAR! Courage. If you keep shifting your state by using your triggers, such as clapping your hands or another simple action, then you will train your brain to become courageous. It’s as simple as that.
STRATEGIES TO GET YOU FROM FEAR TO FEARLESS
1. Do something every day that scares you a little and builds your courage muscle a lot.
2. Before you do something, determine the best state to get it done and elicit that state.
3. Create your ROAR! anchor which helps you to immediately shift your state and thoughts.
AN OPPORTUNITY TO PRACTICE ROAR! COURAGE (Paying the second price)
1. Practice shifting your physiology and state. Begin to notice how this one technique seems to make all the difference. When you are about to do something that you normally fear, excite yourself, ROAR! play full out and notice how much more you feel you can achieve. Remember, we don’t do what we think we can do, we do what we feel we can do.
Get Your Copy of ROAR! Courage
ROAR! Courage (the book) is now available in Kindle or in printed books. Within 7 hours of being released on Amazon, ROAR! Courage became an instant best-seller.
Get your printed version here.
Get your Kindle version here.
Get your printed version here.
Get your Kindle version here.
Would you like to train with R!k?
Besides being a best-selling author, Rik Schnabel is also well-known as an Accredited Life Coach Trainer and Trainer of Neuro Linguistic Programming, Speaking with Confidence and Trainers Training. If you would like to train with R!k, check out some of his programs here...
For more information about R!k and his company Life Beyond Limits - visit: http://www.LifeBeyondLimits.com.au
