“My marriage is falling apart,” Robert says. He pauses and sighs. “I fear divorce. I’m at a loss with what to do.”

As a super-successful options trader, Robert is unaccustomed to not having the answers.

“We’ve been married for years and somewhere, I don’t know exactly when, she shut down on me.”

Has your wife shut down on you?

Robert’s wife not only shut down on him, but she tried turning his son against him as well.

He was stunned when she called him an asshole while his kid was in the back seat of the car.

“Why would she do that? I don’t even know who she is anymore.”

Have you lost your wife in your marriage?

Robert had. And he fell into fear. Understandably so.

Robert feared that divorce was on the horizon. He feared that his wife would try to take his son away from him.

He had fear that he’d failed in his marriage. And fear that he wouldn’t be ok.

Fear was killing him. But he wanted something greater.

Do you fear not being ok if you divorce?

Robert did. And what he did initially, something I see a lot of men do, exacerbated things.

He isolated.

And made sure nobody knew that his marriage was on the rocks. He hid out, fearing judgement from friends and family. In particular, he feared his father’s response.

Ultimately, he wanted to know things would be OK, regardless of what happened in his marriage.

Do you want to know you’re gonna be ok if your marriage tanks?

Well, here’s the key to knowing you’ll be alright. And it’s counterintuitive.

As Pippin said in The Two Towers, the second Lord Of The Rings film,

“The closer we are to danger, the farther we are from harm.”

Say what, Stuart?

Let me break this down for you. It means that when you look under the lid of your fears, that’s when you’re more likely to get your ass in gear to do something about it.

Why is that? It’s because we become serious about taking action when we are no longer in the abstraction of fear. No longer willing to terrorize our self and do nothing about it.

As you may have heard before, fearlessness is not the absence of fear but presence with it. And when we are present with fear, we are in a greater position to act on it.

This sounds great on paper. But how the hell do you act on fear?

First, you don’t isolate.

Second, you find other men to hold you accountable to call out your fears, to act on them.

And third, you find support and challenge yourself to step into action instead of swirling doing nothing.

Initially, Robert swirled. He mistook information for action. And that’s easy to do in the information age.

He went deep into personal growth books and internet research to get him out of his problem. But that got him only so far.

When it comes to your fears, will you step into action or just swirl?

If you said action, check out this one big thing I taught Robert to be fearless in the face of the possibility of divorce.

In the video below, I talk more about that one big thing and how it freed Robert to act on his marriage like never before.

In a nutshell, that one thing, that game-changer that I taught Robert, is what I call outcome independence.

The key is to think independently of feared outcomes.

To not live in fear of your wife freaking out on you. Not fear your kids hating you. To not fear your finances blowing up. And not live in fear of divorce.

In other words, to know that you’ll be ok whatever happens in your marriage.

Would you like to achieve outcome independence?

Maybe you’re saying, “Yeah, right, Stuart. It sounds like a pipe dream. You don’t know what I’m going through, man.”

You’re right in that I’m not you. But I was there in a 20+ year marriage.

I was stuck in terror between the truth that my marriage wasn’t working AND I still loved my wife and family and wanted to stay married.

In that moment, like Robert, I dug deep into achieving an outcome-independent mindset.

It gave Robert the freedom to go after what he wanted in his marriage like never before.

The crazy thing is, as you do this, you’re modeling behavior that helps your wife do the same. And it’s liberating.

Do you want to be free of your fear of divorce?

If so, let’s explore what’s possible for you. Connect with a bunch of powerful guys talking about this stuff fearlessly in my next Men’s Relationship Tools call this Tuesday at 12pm ET.

And for daily relationship tips and action items, join my private men’s only Facebook Group Men Mastering Relationship.