“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” -Anaïs Nin

I spend hundreds of hours reading every year. Reading is important to me because it teaches me what habits and mindsets have helped others become successful. Then I work to ingrain those same philosophies into my own life.

For instance, I just stumbled across the same success philosophy in three different books:

• Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss (a life advice book)
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield (a book about creativity)
• Five Stars by Carmine Gallo (a book about communication)

All three books include stories from people who credit their success to the same thing: running toward their fears.

Tribe of Mentors contains a section about performance psychologist Jim Loehr. Loehr’s job is to develop peak performance in his clients. He’s helped hundreds of Fortune 100 executives, Olympic gold medalists, and world-class athletes overcome mental barriers to achieve success in their respective fields.

In other words, Loehr knows the traits that set the best apart from the rest.

Loehr says that one of the keys to high performance in any field is running toward things that make you scared or uncomfortable.

“Protection from stress serves only to erode my capacity [to handle it]. Stress exposure is the stimulus for all growth, and growth actually occurs during episodes of recovery. Avoiding stress, I have learned, will never provide the capacity that life demands of me…In a real sense, to grow in life, I must be a seeker of stress.” -Jim Loehr

Stress leads to discomfort, which prompts change, which spurs growth, which results in success.

“Stress exposure is the only way we can expand our capacity for life,” Loehr says elsewhere. “We get bored without a constant sense of being challenged and finding new opportunities. We were born to grow, and stress is absolutely the key ingredient that stimulates that growth.”

This rings true in my own life. One of the scariest, most stressful things I’ve ever done was interview for a Director role at my last company. Out of the ten applicants for the position, I was the person with the shortest tenure.

After the company finished the interviews, the CEO and COO called me into a room and offered me the job. Shock, excitement, and stress flooded my brain in seconds. I was awash with fear, but I told them I’d gladly accept.

The following year was definitely the most stressful year of my life. I suffered from impostor syndrome, dealt with more angry clients than I could count, and made many mistakes. But it was also the best professional year of my life. I learned more than I thought possible, traveled to new countries to meet clients, and led our team to some of the highest servicing scores in company history.

Fear and stress illuminate the path that will teach us the most.

“Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good,” says author Steven Pressfield. “Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”

Pressfield wrote an entire book about how authors, musicians, and artists can overcome fear in order to create the things they were made to create. He dubbed the enemy “Resistance.”

“Resistance will unfailingly point to true North — meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing. We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others.” — Steven Pressfield

But what is most amazing to me is the universality of this concept. I’ve now heard this same advice from business executives, television producers, comedians, psychologists, and writers. It seems that using fear as a compass is one of the unappreciated (and uncomfortable) cheat codes to success.

For most of us, our gut reaction is to run the opposite direction from things that scare us, but incredible things can happen when we do the opposite. As motivational speaker Jack Canfield says, “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”

What is fear telling YOU to avoid right now?

Have you always wanted to write a novel, but you’re scared to begin?
Have you refused to speak in public because you think you’d get stage fright?
Have you turned down a couple of promotions at work because you don’t want to step into the limelight?

Can you use that fear to guide you?