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Listen on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
Chapters:
0:00 Cold Open
2:35 Show Intro
4:18 Today’s Topic - Fear
5:24 What is fear?
14:32 How we get stuck with fear
26:27 How to have a productive relationship with fear
38:07 Practical, Tactical, Actions to work with Fear
1:02:33 You can’t kill your fear
1:03:28 Corey’s controversial takes
1:10:15 Wrapup
What’s the common thread that links all of the places that you’re stuck in life?
My bet: Fear.
Fear is, for so many of us, a challenging emotion. It’s usually the dominant emotion that arises in the areas where you feel most stuck. Because of this, it’s easy to feel like fear is the enemy.
What if that isn’t the case? What if fear itself isn’t good or bad? What if fear is just an emotional experience containing important information for you to pay attention to? What if the real problem isn’t fear, but the way you relate and respond to fear when it shows up?
In this episode of No Clear Answers, we discuss everything related to fear. What is fear? Why does is so consistently make you feel stuck? How can you have a productive relationship with it?
Personally, I loved our discussions on:
Why fear itself isn’t good or bad
The difference between pure “primal” animal fear and human “egoic” fear
How fear as an emotion is different from our automatic responses to fear, and why the latter is much more important
How fear fits the archetype of both a wise “Gandalf” mentor and a frightened inner child
The relationship between fear and excitement
What to do when your mind and body are overwhelmed by a fear response
Cognitive and Somatic tools to work with and move through your fear
Inspecting your Relationship to Fear
Fear isn’t a complicated emotion.
While your response to fear likely cause lots of complications and strife in your life, fear itself is quite simple.
It often feels like tightness, constriction, and shakiness in the body.
A knot in the throat.
Butterflies in the stomach.
Elevated heart rate.
Sweaty, fidgety palms.
And it usually guides you to pay attention to something. To remain alert. That something important to you is at risk.
How often do you get to the core of what your fear has to tell you? My experience is that it’s very rare. Most people have a variety of automatic responses to fear that keep them from getting to its wisdom. Those responses include:
You freeze when fear shows up, avoiding and hiding from the things that trigger fear in you
You override fear and power through whatever brings it up in you, sometimes to your benefit and sometimes to your detriment
You fixate on your fear, trying to “figure it out”, resolve it, fix it, or make it go away
Which fits you best?
I don’t mean to make these patterns a problem. It’s okay to respond to fear in any of those ways. But if you’re really honest with yourself, you can see that they certainly keep you from having a friendly relationship with fear and gaining access to its wisdom.
In the episode, we explore three big ideas for getting to the wisdom of your fear:
Mobilizing your body to move the fear response. This might look like going for a walk, shaking, running away, hiding, or moving some fight energy. Fear is energy in the body. If that energy is overloading your system, you need to dispel it by completing the response.
Identifying what the fear has to tell you. In my experience, it usually looks something like “X important thing will be at risk if I take Y action that I want to take.” That thing may or may not truly be at risk, but what fear is telling you is that you believe it is. Once you know what you’re perceiving to be at risk, there’s so much you can do. The questions I like to consider:
Is that thing really at risk?
If it is, what action can you take to protect it?
If not, are you willing to risk if to get what you want?
Acting with fear. If you decide you’re willing to risk whatever important thing fear is pointing to for the sake of what you want, it doesn’t mean the fear goes away. My experience is that fear rides right along. It is a wise advisor, inviting you to continue paying attention. This means that the core skill to create what you want in life is to become comfortable acting while afraid.
There’s no right or wrong way to be with fear. But there is a way to be with fear that stops you, and there’s a way to be with fear that teaches you something. I prefer the latter.
If you want to dive deeper on fear, give the episode a listen. It’s on all streaming platforms, including Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
As always, don’t take our word for it. Run the experiment(s) and see what happens.
Best,
-Justin
If you enjoy reading the Leadership Lab, consider clicking the ❤️ or 🔄 button above so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏