 I know a lot of folks had kind of a late night last night and it's still rather early in the morning today so I have a little poll I want to take but you don't get to raise your hand you have to stand up so get ready to stand up. I've been to all eight Ruby comps and all of them have been fantastic this one included but I'm kind of curious like what the makeup is as far as how many people so first one I'd like to do is I'd like everyone who if this is your very first Ruby comp stand up. All right that is sweet. All right. Excellent okay you can sit down. If this is your first Ruby comp you can sit down. No Rails comp doesn't count I'm just I'm just counting Ruby comp this morning sorry. I've been to every American Rails comp so far so maybe we can do that sometime at Rails comp but so now I'd like everyone who's been who this is your second Ruby comp doesn't have to be in a row but let's see how I want to do this yes so actually if if you've been to two or more Ruby comps this one included go ahead and stand up so this should be everybody else stand up now if so now if you if this is your second Ruby comp then go ahead and sit down if this is your third Ruby comp go ahead and sit down okay if this is your fourth Ruby comp go ahead and sit down if this is your fifth Ruby comp you can go ahead and sit down same set of people if this is your sixth Ruby comp go ahead and sit down seventh and now Paul and I are the only ones left standing so the amazing thing to me is those guys that have been to all of them are still in the room but as I've spoken at every Ruby comp so far as well some reason they keep coming back for more I'm not sure why but this morning having yet another opportunity to get to talk to you about whatever I want to what I want to talk about is the fear programming so let's back up a little bit this is a talk about making stuff it's a talk about the act of creation so we just had in this room if you were in here we had a great talk about Aristotle and the art of software development and that was really more focused on philosophy but I want to talk about coding as art and as creating I'm not gonna debate with anyone whether software is engineering or art I'm just gonna say that a significant portion of what we do when we write code is art and if it is art then there's a lot of interesting things that we can learn from artists in terms of how they approach art and in terms of in particular their emotional relationship with the art that they're creating we're all software development guys we're like we're geeks analytical rational we don't necessarily talk about emotions very much but artists they don't have any trouble really they just very touchy-feely this is how I feel about what I'm creating etc and I like to step back for a minute I hear a lot of talk and have heard a lot of talks that sort of talk around this issue of how emotions and particularly the emotion of fear affect us we talk about procrastination and how to be more productive and how to hack our mind but to actually go and deal directly with the emotion of fear and how it affects our development I haven't seen very many conversations about that and that's what I want this to be I want this to be sort of a conversation and I hope that everyone walks away with this certainly with I hope I can offer a few answers but even more I hope you walk away with some very key questions that you can apply as you're going through software development and that we'll begin having a conversation about more more about how fear as an emotion affects our development so to start with everyone has fears fear affects all of us we have this emotional reaction to what we're doing I would say on a daily basis and usually it's it's in the background we don't even necessarily notice it and and many times it's a healthy relationship that we have with it it's something that we deal with we move on and it doesn't even affect us but at the same time we all have fears that do affect us that affect our productivity how many of you would like to be spending more time working on a side project that you have that you're really passionate about okay I would say that all of us if we think about that side project there is fear that affects our working or not working on those side projects and the amount of time that we spend on them it's certainly not the only factor certainly we have other constraints on our time but at the same time we make regular decisions about what we're going to spend time on and I think that fear is a very significant emotion that affects whether or not we do those things so everyone has fears everyone has different fears and fears affect us in different ways let's talk about a few different fears that might affect coding first one would be say the fear of a blank page so okay I want to start working on this project but I'm in a fresh directory I have an empty editor with a blinking cursor how do I get started and the interesting thing about fear a lot of times is you actually won't even necessarily get to that point because you already are afraid of getting to that point so you don't even go to start the project because you know you'll have to encounter the blank page another fear might be a fear of existing code how many of you have seen existing code that you're afraid of well actually there's two ways so the obvious way is legacy code yucky code that you're looking at and you're thinking oh man if I have to maintain this it might even be code that you wrote it man if I have to deal with this if I have to maintain this I'm like you get that feeling in your gut like oh no but the flip side of that you can be afraid of really nice existing code and not want to contribute to a project because you're afraid that you're going to get in there and mess things up so you can have there can be really beautiful code and I'm afraid that I'm going to get in there and and write bad code and so that's another way that you can be afraid of existing code and along those same line just in general the fear of writing bad code the fear that you might sit down to create and you might create something that you don't respect that you don't like or that you think that when you show it to other people they will not appreciate it usually if you are afraid that you will show it to other people and that they will not appreciate it's because you yourself somehow have an interaction with that code emotionally that you don't completely respect it and a lot of times again this is something that can affect you before you even write the code so you never write code because you're afraid that the code that you write would be bad another fear might be a fear of not finishing so if I start this project I've started five projects in the past and none of them are finished and if I start another project it's just going to be another failure I'm not going to finish it so you can have this fear where you never start anything because you're afraid that you might not be able to finish it now an interesting corollary to that and I see this especially as sort of an organizational fear in large organizations is a fear of finishing how many six month projects turn into 18 month projects because everybody's afraid to actually call it and say we're done and we ought to be done and we need to push this out so there can also be a fear of finishing even just you working on your side project it's easy to hack away on a side project for months when you could have released very soon after you began but be there's that fear of having to push it out and have other people encounter it and and what they'll say and and the different issues that will come up when you actually get real with it so now what I want to do is dig into this a little bit more what other fears have you encountered in when you approach code so I'm sure I'm afraid that I'm not excited about programming anymore kind of burnout okay so if a fear that programming is just not gonna be fun anymore who else I've just a few minutes at a time during a day I guess the problem I have is sometimes I'm afraid I'm not gonna finish what I start in those few minutes and I don't want to start something and then leave it when the test is failing or when it's incomplete mm-hmm is this my car yeah so that was a fear of sort of not finishing but in the small so you've got a few minutes but you don't start because you're afraid that in those few minutes you won't be able to finish fear that what I'm doing doesn't actually help anyone or isn't interesting to people that what I'm doing is actually meaningless right fear of commitment something getting a clips three seconds after you release it and then like do I maintain this do I you know start recommending something else or how does that go excellent we're all on the couch and tend to be afraid that I'm gonna do something not the right way that I'm gonna waste time re-implementing the wheel and not finding like the one method call that would make it all work perfectly right absolutely I'm often afraid that when I go to investigate the patches that people have given me these are things they felt passionate about they've taken time to make a patch I'm afraid of saying no to them so often I'll avoid going through my patch list for that reason gotcha I can totally understand that I had the fear of committing time to the project on a consistent basis anybody else burning fear that affects you when you're going to code I'm afraid of all the extra work aside from programming that it takes to make a project successful excellent one more I'm afraid that my imagination outreaches my ability I've definitely felt that before so there's all these different fears that affect us and keep us from causes to avoid what we know what we want to do what we believe would be the most satisfying I mean you wouldn't you wouldn't even encounter the fear if you didn't want to do the thing right and so you must believe at some level that that activity would be satisfying and yet these fears keep us back from approaching that so and the other I guess the other point that I have about fear and this is something I read I didn't come up with this myself but you there are both fears about others which is the one that we often think of well if I publish this I'm afraid of what others will think of it and think of me but there's also fears about yourself there's those times when you you want you go to do something and you're afraid of sort of whether you'll respect yourself after you do it well I'm if I write this code it might be bad code nobody else might ever see it but I'm still afraid that I won't like it and therefore I'm not going to approach it so fear about others fear about self here is the key point of this whole talk so if you walk away with nothing else you can just like grab this piece this is what I want to communicate all fears are legitimate okay they are legitimate because what you have to understand is what fear is fear is a warning mechanism that's all it is it's a flag it's it's an emotional warning mechanism it's basically your memories you have your memories of past experiences and those build up to a point where you've learned different things and part of the way that that comes out okay I experienced pain in the past due to something or something around this thing and so now I am afraid to approach it the key the the the thing that we have to understand is that they are just a warning mechanism they're really great as a warrant fear is really great as a warning mechanism it's really pathetic as a decision maker and so it's not that the fears are illegitimate or that we want to have no fear rather it's that we want to take fear elevate it to a level of conscious thought think rationally logically about it and then make a decision versus approaching a situation feeling that gut feeling of oh no and just decide just deflecting a different direction without even ever thinking about that reaction and so often our fear happens at this low emotional level we don't even necessarily recognize that we're making a decision simply based on this emotional reaction and so what we need to do is is look for this and watch for it and elevate it up to the point where we can make a conscious decision about the the thing that we're afraid of so one analogy to help us think about this and it really helps me think about a lot pain or I'm sorry fear is to your mind as pain is to your body right so there is an actual medical disorder in which people cannot feel pain they they have no ability to feel pain it's a very incredibly dangerous disorder to have because you can be in a situation where you basically stick your hand onto a hot stove and like lean on it for minutes at a time and never realize the damage that you're doing to your body until you pick up the black and stump right it's very dangerous to not be able to feel pain and pain is an important mechanism that you that we use on a regular basis to inform our decisions about what we're going to do and what we're not well in the same way fear is this important mechanism that we have that warns us okay well last time I took on this ugly legacy code from someone and tried to maintain it it was really painful I shouldn't do that again right or to take it back to a much more basic level a child touches a hot stove for the first time and goes out that hurt right if they don't learn fear from that they'll continue to do it over and over and over again continue to injure themselves so fear does serve a very valid purpose in the same way that pain does to warn us at the same time pain makes a very bad decision maker because one of the best things that you can do for your body one that most of us myself included probably do not do nearly enough of is exercise and what what does exercise do exercise hurts right if you spent your all your time working to avoid pain with your body there's a lot of wonderful things that you would never experience you would never go mountain biking or biking at all because you might fall off the bike and you might get hurt and in the same way we we don't touch the stove over and over again but we do choose to do some things regardless of the pain involved such as exercise or such as do things that have the risk of pain and with fear there are some things that you're afraid of and you ought to be afraid of them and you ought to let that fear be a very strong factor in your decision-making to avoid doing that thing ever again but at the same time you want to make those conscious decisions and not simply something where you're making your decisions completely out of your gut and saying oh that that's I'm afraid of that so I'm just I'm not even going to go close to it so what are the tools that we can use to move beyond making these decisions based on our fear and make elevate them to a rational logical process that we're making with our mind I think there are two key tools that we have in order to do that the first tool is more learning more knowledge more wisdom one of the the biggest I'd say one of the most detrimental fears that we can have and one that we ought to fight in every way that we can I don't think it's ever I won't say that it's ever a legitimate fear but it's almost never a legitimate fear at least and that is the fear of the unknown and so many times and we're at where and we're afraid of something it's not even like we don't even know what we're afraid of it's just this big amorphous blob and I'm afraid of that that thing right it's an emotional reaction it's not a rational reaction and so you you haven't differentiated yet what you're actually afraid of and so if you can basically learn more about that so the first way that knowledge helps us is by learning more about the thing that we're afraid of so when you first decided to take on Ruby I'm betting there was some fear involved with that move what if I go after and you probably don't even remember all that but what if I decide to take on this new language and it it's not successful I spend a whole bunch of time and nobody else is using it and it's just me all by myself what if I take on this new language and I'm no good at it or I hate it there's all these fears around it and so but if you want to learn a new language what do you do you start experimenting with it you dabble with a little bit you don't have to commit the next five years of your life to it what you're trying to do is get enough of an understanding to eliminate the unknowns well okay I'm afraid that nobody else is using Ruby so what could you do you could go and learn and do a little bit of research to figure out who else is using Ruby and all of a sudden that is eliminated as an unknown and you can continue to focus down and learn more so very often knowledge is direct antidote to fear particularly if you're dealing with a fear of the unknown which is one of the most detrimental ones the other way that learning really helps with dealing with fear sometimes you're going to encounter a fear you're gonna elevate it to your your conscious thinking you're gonna go oh I'm afraid of this and I know exactly what I'm I've I've learned enough about the fear the thing that I'm afraid of to kind of know what it is that I'm afraid of and I'm I've decided that it's work doing so I'm gonna pursue this thing regardless of the fact that I'm afraid of it well the the thing is the the fear emotional reaction it doesn't just instantly go away because you've decided to disregard it and plow on it's still there and there's a whole bunch of techniques that you can use to get through that regardless because it's still going to continue to affect you so what are some of those techniques well as coders one of the ones that probably most of us I hope all of us are familiar with is testing right testing is a wonderful antidote to fear when you've decided to take on that ugly piece of legacy code and you have to go in and change it what's you can take tests surround it with tests train it with tests to the point where you're confident then to go in and change it without worrying about breaking it nine ways from Monday also testing is a great way and it sort of ties in with another technique testing is a great way to break a problem down so a lot of times when you're afraid of a problem right it's this big hairy thing well big hairy problems are made up of little fuzzy problems and the little fuzzy problems are much easier to tackle when you're looking at that blank page and going oh man how in the world am I going to get started on this it helps a lot to say well could I write one test well yeah I can I could write one test so you write one test and it breaks could I make that test pass well yeah I can make that test pass go and make the test pass and so you incrementally move through breaking the problem down into small steps and it becomes much more approachable I mean how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time and so Jen and and not just in testing but just in general when you're afraid of something breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces is a great way to tackle that fear so break it down until you're dealing with pieces and with problems that are small enough that you you can't really be afraid of them right or you're not nearly as afraid of them and so you at that point have enough motivation to get past that and as the thing is once you take that approach and you start working through those smaller problems all the sudden you'll go oh wow I'm not really afraid of this anymore you start to build up momentum you get in the zone and all the sudden you're through the thing that you are afraid of another one would very coding specific that I've used before is to prototype something so I'm afraid of this thing I'm afraid in particular that I don't understand the problem well enough to write good code around it I'm afraid that I'm gonna write code that is gonna be really ugly and then I'm gonna end up having to maintain that really ugly code well my one technique that I've used for that is prototyping something and forcing myself to throw it away when I'm done basically saying okay I got four hours I'm gonna hack on this thing maybe I'm not even gonna write tests I'm just gonna hack on this thing understand the problem better and force myself at the end of that to chuck it and then all the sudden that frees you up from the fear of creating bad code the fear of not understanding the problem well enough etc you just have given yourself freedom to to tackle the problem in a constrained way and an interesting thing so I gave this talk at the local ruby brigade last month and we had just a fantastic discussion afterwards about things and one of the things that kind of came out of discussion is a lot one of the real antidotes to fear is setting yourself boundaries right it's the big things that make that can be so scary it's that amorphous thing of oh I should work on the side project but you haven't really broken it down into what you should do on that side project and setting yourself constraints basically building your own set of fences it gives you the comfort then to move into that thing and prototyping with force trashing would be a way to do that another one and this is this is one of my favorite techniques actually and I use it not just in coding but in other things as well and that is doing worst case scenarios what is the worst thing that could happen if I if if this fear was realized well you know okay I'm afraid that I'm gonna start working on this project and I'm not gonna finish it so what's the worst well I'd spend a whole bunch of time working on something and it it would it would basically go for nothing well I mean that's that's kind of bad I mean it would be better to work on something that you would get more results out of but at the same time it's not gonna kill you right you won't be dead so if you can take that worst case scenario now the one thing I will say is you're all pretty creative people so you don't want to get too creative when you do worst case scenarios I mean I could probably work up a scenario under which not finishing a project might result in my death so you don't want to get quite that creative but at the same time you know apply apply a good amount of reasoning skills to saying what is the worst thing and it might be really bad right it but it probably doesn't result in imminent death I've heard a lot of people in the business arena very successful businessmen say the best thing that ever happened to me was losing everything right they were in business and they lost everything they lost their shirt but it was the best thing that ever happened to them because then they knew in business nothing like they survived the worst thing that could ever happen and so they were free then to go and take risks because they knew that even if their worst fears were realized they would come through they would learn something and they'd be able to start over so doing worst case scenarios and then the other thing that I would recommend is there are some really good books there's one book in particular the war of art an excellent book by a writer about art in particular he talks a lot about writing and and what he has found is necessary in writing it's an excellent book it's like this thick it's really quick read I read it on an airplane one time but it will change your thinking I'd highly recommend it the other book that I read the book called art and fear also good if you read the war of art and you still want more than I'd suggest reading art and fear it is it's basically it's from two artists collaborating and talking a lot about the fear that we encounter when we go to create something and ways to mitigate that fear okay now I'd like to hear from all of you what some of your techniques are to go through fear when you decided that something is worth doing how do you how do you move through that I know there's some really productive people in this room way more productive than I am so I want all your tips and tricks honestly pair programming is one of those things that helps me deal with it with the first time I paired I sat with someone who had more experience than I did and I thought that they were just gonna see me for the fraud that I was and when I was able to get past that and get past that acceleration at first or you're afraid of coding with someone I was getting feedback from them and I was learning and I realized that I didn't know a few things that this other person didn't know and that helped me build confidence in myself and in my work and build confidence in the other person so I think that pairing really helps so I recommend that absolutely I found that as well so here what I tend to do is I'll try and explain my idea to someone and especially to someone who doesn't understand programming at all and like my wife I spend many many hours explaining a problem explaining 20 different solutions and through the repetiveness of it I'll teach myself what is the best way to approach this problem excellent yeah what one thing I do to address the fear is try to identify what is the scariest or the biggest most uncertain part of the project and try to prove a solution to that first and then you feel like everything is more downhill after that right couldn't be any worse than what I already did yeah this is not specific to programming but I find it extremely useful to write down my fears on paper and ask myself why I have them excellent and sometimes talk about them out loud with somebody else too excellent just gonna keep working back this way I saw some hands back here back here way way way it's interesting actually that everyone is answering this question is coming up with kind of upbeat positive ways that they've handled their fears I think there's also a dark side to this I mean one thing for example that I think of is the I mean I hope it's more just kind of an impulse and I don't really act on it too much but for example with musical projects name you know sort of upcoming concerts this feeling that you know I can at some level handle my fear by not practicing so I'll have kind of an excuse of course that does that's not really you know the people in the audience won't know that but there's this kind of weird kind of inverse comfort to thinking well you know of course I won't play well I haven't been and of course then you have that's the solution to the fear but then you have to fight that in other words not every solution to the fear is itself productive and and positive and that's something to watch for too right absolutely yeah I mean the goal is to to do the things that satisfy you that you know at some level will be satisfying so who over here we have that one up there you know I do two things if something's like really intimidating me or frustrating me I get up and take a walk and usually by the time I get all the way around the block it's not a big deal anymore the other things if I have a really short period of time and I'm worried that I'm gonna get into something and not solve it I write some failing test cases like I focus the time only on writing the test cases I don't try and solve the problem and I see you know sit down to code like I used to read the train all the time so I have 30 minutes right right failing test cases during that time and then when you get into the office you know exactly where you were because it says so right there on the screen right so what do you do when you don't know how to write the test like if you don't know what tests are right in other words you're not sure how to test the problem if you haven't designed the issue yet then usually it's time to sit down with a piece of paper and just play with it and try and get some idea of you know what's the flow going to look like what you know if it's user interface what is the wireframe look like if it's you know a system level interface like how is it really kind of function and just do the mind map and get everything out and get an idea of like what does it look like from the user's perspective or what does it look like from the interface perspective cool nobody else okay one thing I'm afraid of is that my code after I first written it won't work which typically it doesn't so what I find is that that helps me is to actually just take a deep breath and press return and just do it yeah there's definitely something for just leaping it's interesting that you mentioned worst-case scenario because in a corporate environment there's actually a very formal process what they call risk management which involves documenting the risk evaluating the the chances the probability of it coming to fruition and then documenting how to mitigate the risk but also how to respond to it if it does in fact occur yeah I definitely didn't come up with worst-case scenario it's cool and borrowed it's kind of weird to me that I'm more accountable to other people than I am to myself like if I have a deadline at work I tend to meet it but if it's something I want to do for myself I'll put it off and off and off and I've tried a lot of these things the one that you mentioned the one about breaking it in the little steps that worked the best for me until I started getting even smaller and smaller and I tend to stop right it's the same thing as what the gentleman back there said about the music I guess it's in high school if you take a test you don't study it doesn't reflect on you because you didn't study for it so you don't feel bad it's the same idea with music but I don't really know what works that's why I'm here but I love some of the ideas and and I don't I'd love to understand why I'm more accountable to other people than I am to myself that's so I'd have a theory about that actually I so one of the ways to overcome a fear is to be more afraid of something else right so if you you reach that point in a project where you're procrastinating on something because you're afraid of it and then all the sudden it's like oh the client is gonna come after me like this is really gonna hurt so now I'm gonna work on the thing right but seriously it's this it's this scales and all the sudden the fear of the client becomes greater than the fear of whatever it is that you're trying to do but I think that that is somewhat it works into in some sense but I don't think that behave like acting out of fear is the right way to act because you're still at that point like we don't even recognize that that's what's happening and you're still at that point making your decision based on the gut feeling and not actually bringing it up and making rational decision and it means that you don't do your most satisfying work so Carl has something back here soon he has to say oh yeah all right so I've been reading a book great book I would recommend everyone called the road less travel by Scott Peck and he talks about he quotes Carl Jung who said that neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering so what we do is if we're afraid of something we create some sort of neurosis to cope with that fear but what often happens is that the neurosis actually becomes worse than the original thing that we were trying to avoid the original pain we're trying to avoid and sometimes you can actually create layer upon layer of neurosis in fact almost everybody has this and he recommends that we should have no fear of going into therapy because probably because he's a psychiatrist it makes money off of it but also because like everybody no matter how well adjusted they seem to be actually could benefit from being able to analyze and discuss their life with someone else and try to see ways in which they do things that cause cause themselves harm you know and I think that that it was brought up here a little bit of that where like the not practicing was sort of a neurosis for you know actually preparing for the event and I think that if we look hard we can see a lot of ways in which we do that in our daily behavior just to comment yeah absolutely last one one of the things I do is pray I mean when you lift these things up to the God of the universe it's a fear seem pretty small so that's right so there are lots of techniques for that you can learn to help to overcome fear to do our most satisfying work right I mean the the the real problem that I see with acting out of fear is that well well and it really gets down to the next tool so more knowledge more learning but the other tool that we have for combating fear and I actually think the more powerful tool for combating fear the most powerful tool we have is love I was so pleased when Moss brought up love in his keynote because now I feel a little less funny saying it but seriously like I think that love is actually the ultimate antidote to fear because when we make decisions based on fear it's much better to make decisions based on passion for what you're doing right what happens is like you were saying you you don't you work on the projects at work because you're accountable to other people but you don't work on your side projects what you're completely missing the fact that you what you want to do is is put your poor yourself into the things that you love into things that you enjoy into things that you're passionate about and if you have that passion for something it allows you to go through it gives you the motivation to go through the things that you fear if you're not passionate why would you why would you even bother with going through the things with that you that you're afraid of what's the point and so to do your most satisfying work what you want to do is be motivated by your passion by the things that you're excited about by the things that you love and so more love is is sort of the the ultimate antidote to fear and you know this is sort of if there was a hill that if if we were fighting over hills this is one that I would die on and that is that I can't think of anything more tragic well I can think of a few things more tragic okay one of the biggest tragedies that I can think of is someone going through life not doing the things that they're passionate about because I believe people were made to do specific things and if you're not doing the things that you are made to do that you're passionate about then what's the point why are you doing anything so and if you do find that thing that thing that you're passionate about I mean in particular we're talking about sort of your your work life you're the and I think that that work is a good thing if we're talking about the things that you choose to put your hand to you on day in and day out you want to be you're not going to have overpowering issues with fear if you stay focused on your love for the things that you're doing if you're passionate about what you're doing then you go oh that's scary but I don't care because I want to do this I love to do this and I'm gonna keep doing it and nobody's gonna stop me and a lot of times the issue is that our fears build up and we don't even recognize that we've lost our passion for something and if we'll again if we'll if we'll recognize those fears saying oh you know those are great indicators that you've approached your passion probably in some wrong ways in the past ways that didn't work but at the same time what you want to do is recapture that passion this is what I love to do I love to code I love to create things to make things to solve problems and so recapturing that gives you a powerful force to just run right through the fears and that's something I I actually found last year I mean I've done a lot of exploration into into business and it's still something that I'm really interested in and I'm learning a lot about but I'm also passionate about making things and particularly writing code and I've kind of lost my passion for everything because I'd allowed myself to move away from that and so rediscovering that passion reinvigorating my passion for code actually reinvigorated just about everything that I was doing and allowed me to move past fears that I was having across all kinds of different areas so finding your passion and pursuing it is key the other part of more love in conquering fear is having people around you that love you and that you know love you I mean what's the cliche I made a website and my mom checked it out and she loved it right but it's true I mean it's a cliche because it's true we our moms empower us I hope you had a mother that empowered you by loving you no matter what you did succeed or fail and in the same way that is a powerful antidote to fear knowing that there's somebody whether you succeed or fail whether your feelings completely realize knowing that somebody loves you and regardless of that and also having those people around you that you know respect you and will tell you when you're off the track but you know that they're not attacking you personally they're trying to make you better so all fears are legitimate they're just warning signs and we ought to use them as such to make decisions we need to move beyond them make decisions decide when we ought to abandon a path based on a fear and also decide when we're gonna go through them and the tools we have are more learning and more love so that is fear programming I hope it's helpful I'd love any feedback that you have I'm not sure let me check the time here so we have some time no we're out of time so thank you