Gamifying fear as a way to start doing

Gamifying fear is an approach to help you to overcome fear and start participating in that activity. Assuming your feared activity isn’t deadly and you can find a way to approach it with safe baby steps, I a gamification based approach may help you start and keep working at it. Gamification can help remove a mental block and also keep you moving forward.

Three of our popular posts have been about a specific strategy for the gamifying fear for specific social fears: Networking Bingo, Public Speaking Bingo, and Speaking in a Meeting Bingo. These present an approach to make a game out of tasks that many people find challenging. The Bingo approach is to take typical and feared outcomes of the task and make them into squares of the Bingo card. By making the feared negative outcome have a positive aspect, we change its experience.

The bingo approach is particularly well adapted for networking as there are many points for different interactions. For public speaking, the duration of the talk and potential interactions afterwards provide lots of potential outcomes to track. Even if a single meeting doesn’t have enough interactions, most of us, unfortunately, have enough meetings in a week to fill a bingo card.

The bingo approach for gamifying fear does not fit well with others situations. In this post, I introduce a method I have personal success with, and it can be easily applied to most fear situations.

Gamifying fear by counting outcomes

Most activities have only a smaller set of outcomes that are realistically possible. It is a challenge to fill out a bingo card with them. Learning and most activities have an important different quality, repetitions. Instead of a larger set of outcomes, we have a larger set of repetitions.

With repetitive tasks, the simple approach to gamifying fear is to count the number of times our set of outcomes occur.

5 steps to gamifying fear:

  1. Identify potential outcomes, both positive and negative
  2. Disregard unreasonable fears
  3. Create your list
  4. Do the activity and record each time you get a specific outcome
  5. You win

Taking this approach, what can happen?

  • You don’t ‘play the game’ and continue avoiding. Take courage and try. Reduce the ‘size’ or pressure if you can. If that doesn’t work, potentially seek allies or professional help.
  • You get only negatives. Congratulations, you are winning! You did what you would have avoided before. Now you can work on skills instead of just succumbing to your crippling fear.
  • You get positives and negatives. Congratulations, this is how it goes for everyone! Now you can work on activity specific skills to move the needle to the positive side. Just remember, you are doing it!
  • You get only positives. Possibly, up the challenge.

My Gamification of a fear

I personally felt the power of this approach. I had overcome my fear of public speaking before, yet certain social activities still were very uncomfortable for me. One of these is cold approaches to sell. As I have done before, I put myself into a trial by fire situation. I simply had to accomplish it. After spending enormous amounts of energy trying to start approaching people at an expo and failing to start, I decided to try gamification.

I spent a bit of time trying to figure out how to shoe-horn my current fear into a Bingo approach. I just wasn’t getting anywhere. Eventually, I gave up on that and contemplated how else to approach it. The Bingo approach works well, when you expect a lot of different responses. I had a list of a few negative response and a few positive, but not enough to make a whole bingo card. It occurred to me that in this case I was going to have multiple occurrences, at least to any of the ‘reasonable’ fears.

I decided to try just counting occurrences of these outcomes. I ended up putting down 2 negatives that were realistic to happen:

  • Outright rejection
  • Brush offs

Intrusive thoughts – like “they’ll yell at me”, “they’ll kick me out of the booth”, “they’ll call security” – I disregarded completely. I’ve never seen anything even close to that happen at an expo, so I could disregard them as silly. Any positive was recorded as a contact point so I didn’t add explicit counting on the same page.

Gamified results

This is what I ended up recording:

Results of sales approaches at an expo using a gamified fear approach in a notebook.

After creating this I managed to start approaching people; prior to that my fear made it impossible to even start. Was it suddenly easy? no. Did it still take lots of energy? Yes. I won; I started.

Did I approach more than one person? definitely. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I had more occurrences that I could have counted there, but after recording that first one I didn’t need to. Just having that positive spin on the negative encounter was enough to change how I could handle it in the moment.

Gamifed Fear

In this post, I introduced a simple approach to gamify fear and provide a 5 step process to prepare your score card. The process provides the first benefit, by actively discounting unreasonable fears. Playing the game adds a positive to otherwise negative outcomes, changing how we handle and approach those situations. Gamification of your fears this way helps overcome blocks to starting and keeps you progressing, leading to you doing your activity.

Founder/CEO at Virtual Orator | Website

Dr. Blom is a long time researcher in the VR field. He is the founder of Virtual Human Technologies, which applies VR and avatar technologies to human problems and helping better understand people. Virtual Orator exists largely because Dr. Blom wishes he had had such a tool instead of the ‘trail by fire’ he went through learning to speak in public.