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 his book The Flinch. 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.