Kelly connects with happiness entrepreneur Scott Simon to talk about his new book: "Scare Your Soul: 7 Powerful Principles for Harnessing Fear and Living Your Most Courageous Life."

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While you build out your life doing things that scare you, you’re not anti-fear.

“Crush your fear, destroy your fear, annihilate your fear. Ten steps to conquer your fear, you know, and become a fearless person, and I think it's all crap. I really do. Not only is it not realistic, but it is also false because we need fear in our lives. Right? Like fear keeps us safe. Fear protects us from things that could hurt us or hurt the people that we love. But fear also holds us back. So, what I became really fascinated by is, what is that process of determining how you can? What's safe and unsafe? And how can we really push through those fake toxic fears as you guys do when you're on-stage? Because there is no script in real life, and when you walk out the door in the morning it is an unscripted performance.”

Your journey starts with a very unhappy childhood, and I find a lot of people find themselves in improv for the same reason.

“The memory of that pushes me now to want to make my life better and to make other people's lives better. I have empathy for humanity, which is such an underrated concept in today's world where everyone's on the attack. It takes courage to be empathetic and to care about people who may not care about you or listen to people who may not agree with you. In my mind all of that takes courage. The easiest thing to do is to stay in your silo, to stay in our comfort zone, to stay in your bubble. What you guys do and what your listeners do is you put yourself out there into the crazy unknown.”

I like it when you talk of courage as a kind of muscle.

“It is the small, consistent act of pushing comfort zones that works our courage muscle. that gets us living life and connecting with life in a way that is vibrant. And when stuff really hits the fan, you have this. You have this self-perception of being a courageous person. You know you can step up to that moment where courage is required.”

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Photo credit: Kim Ponsky