What Happens When You Stop Treating Fear as the Enemy?

Speaker A: If fear and self doubt are keeping you stuck as a leader, if you still experience imposter syndrome, if you sometimes don't raise your hand and speak up in meetings, if you're not, quote unquote, playing offense with your career, putting yourself out there, developing strategic relationships and taking the necessary steps to continue getting ahead, whether it's your career or scaling your business, then I have exactly what you need. Myself and Shannon Sedlacek are hosting a, ah, two day leadership intensive in Montreal, Canada on October 2nd and 3rd. In this powerful two days, you're going to be led through a series of exercises where you are going to learn how to develop your relationship with fear. Fear is natural. Fear in a way is good. But what you need as a leader is tools and skills to work with that. Because if you want to keep moving up and moving forward in life, you're still going to experience fear. We just got to give you the tool set to work with it. Now, uh, if you ah, want more information, go to rmichaelanderson Intensive. We have a whole much, much more about it. We're hosting a reception the day before. If you get there on the Thursday, the day before October 1st, you get a chance to hang out with me and Shannon for a little while before the real work starts on the Friday and the Saturday. This is ideal for leaders who really want to invest in their growth and love the in person type of format. This is not virtual, this is us sitting in a really powerful room. In fact we're calling it the bravest room in Montreal. So if you're interested at all, go to the link if you have any questions, uh, if it's right for you, if you're right for it, drop me a note, we'll figure it out. This is limited to 10 spots and we already have five accounted for. So if you're interested, make a move now because it is going to be a powerful event that you're going to want to make sure you're there for. I'll, ah, see you in Montreal.

Speaker B: Welcome to Leadership Mindset 2.0, Practical Neuroscience and psychology to transform you from a tactical doer into a strategic leader. Here is your host, former social entrepreneur of the year and coach to some of the world's top executives are, uh, Michael Anderson.

Speaker A: Today's a special day. I very rarely have guests on the show because when I do I want to bring something special. And I'm really excited today to bring Shannon Sevacek here because she has a fascinating background, she's an amazing coach and her and I are going to be doing some stuff together, which I'll tell you in a little bit, but we're here to talk about something really interesting. We're here to talk about fear. And not just fear, but your relationship to fear. Because, look, uh, pretty much everybody has fear. And as leaders, we always need to be pushing ourselves to the next level. Almost by definition, we are in positions, we are in situations that we've never been in before and we don't like that. So, uh, our brains and our body fight that. But what we need to do is we need to have the tools and skills to recognize when we're there and then have tools and strategies to overcome that. So, Shannon, thank you so much for being here today.

Speaker B: Michael, thanks for inviting me.

Speaker A: This is going to be fun. Instead of me trying to give you an introduction, you are. I love listening to your stories and you have a very interesting background. So can you tell us a little bit about how you got here? What are all the crazy steps in your life that got you sitting in this chair right now? Not all of them. That would be a long way. But the ones you're interested to leaders out there.

Speaker B: I do have a unusual, uh, arc of a career. So I started out as a litigation attorney and practiced for what I call seven dog years. And then at the ripe old age of 39, became a professional firefighter. I really wanted to just do something very different and combine really high intensity work with high intensity physical work. And that's exactly what firefighting gave me. And because I was so old when I started that career, I'm in the fire academy with guys that are in their 20s, and I say guys, since I was only this second female hire in my department and I think there was one other woman hired the entire time I was there. So it was definitely a male dominated field, which parts of that were fantastic. It was like having a bunch of great big brothers and uncles. And then before I retired, actually, I knew that there would come a day when physically I wasn't going to be able to do what I wanted in the fire service. And even though I'd been promoted to an officer's position, I was still a, uh, working member of crew. Most people don't know that officers are like right in the fire with their crew. So it's not like I would stand outside the fire with the clipboard. It's not me. Anyway, I was asking myself, um, what is it that's fascinating to me and what could be my next iteration where I combine these two, um, different but very Similar skills of litigating, solving legal problems and solving problems on an emergency, really life or death basis and coaching came up. So I became certified as a coach before, several years before I left the fire service and became coach. And the joy of being able to combine my years as a litigator and my years as a firefighter has been a blast. Because even though they feel different, they really are very similar. In lawyering, what you need to do is be a great listener, listen to what's really underneath what's going on, the, uh, problem underneath the presenting problem, and be able to respond really quickly, verbally at least. You don't have to be physical. But when you're standing in front of a judge on that altar, they're always raised and they have a black robe on, it can be pretty intimidating. Right? And you have to be very quick in terms of like, where do I want this argument to go? Am I losing the judge? Am I losing the jury? Where do I want to pivot? How do I want to change this? And the fire service is very similar. You just add a whole physical component to that. I'd be required to wake up at four in the morning and within minutes be forced to make life, literally life or death decisions about how m my crew were going to operate and solve the problem. Either a massive car accident, a hazmat issue, a, uh, fire, big medical issue. And those are skills that are directly transferable to the business world. Right. It's being able to work in that high pressure, high stakes environments. And we're going to talk about fear and doubt and how that works. And most people think when you're in those careers, you must have done something to get rid of fear or not have any doubt. And that we've discussed this, that could not be further from the truth. In fact, I always told my crew the day that you aren't afraid going into a fire is the day you should retire. Because that fear is going to allow you to be aware, it's going to allow you to avoid tunnel vision. It's going to allow you to not miss things that could save either your life, your crew's life, or the life of the person that you're there to rescue. So fear is fear and doubt and how trust gets mapped in there and action. It's. Yeah, it's all kind of a fun big bowl.

Speaker A: We got a lot to talk about here and for the listeners there. Shannon and I have known each other for a couple years. We're in a mastermind together, for lack of a better term. And the stories that always are the most compelling are not about being a, um, high end litigator. They're all about being a firefighter. And I never realized how much stress and how much life or death they go through regularly. It's incredible. But something Shannon, you brought up, which is really interesting because I, the listeners know I work on a relationship with self and really a lot about self, compassion, and how everything our body does is, has been trained. And you're exactly right. Fear isn't necessarily bad. We should have fear. Sometimes it's our body giving us signals that something's changed, it's not comfortable. And just like everything else in our life, there's a positive to fear. And when we have the right relationship with it, then we can use it for what it's needed for. However, when we don't have the right relationship with causes, issues, I don't think

Speaker B: fear, I don't think you ever get rid of fear. I think it's your relationship with fear. And unfortunately, most people are taught that when you have those big feelings, when you get sweaty palms and your heart's racing and your stomach's upset, that's trying to tell you to stop or don't do that, don't go there. I look at it as, no, those are all signals that should have forced you into more of an intentional decision. Do I want to go there? What are the risks? Or do I not want to go there? I'm going to make a different decision. But it's not a stop sign, per se. It might be a pause sign, it's not a stop sign. And I think culturally we are taught to not go there. That's a sign of put the brakes on danger.

Speaker A: Yeah. Because I was reflecting, took a nice dog walk before this, and I was like, where are all the places that I have fear? Currently, I always really work to be honest with everybody and myself, and especially when I'm, uh, on a podcast with leaders, et cetera. And what's interesting is I first was like, oh man, I'm okay everywhere. And then I started to really think and I have all these little micro fears that I think there's two things. One is I try to convince myself I don't have them, and then I have them and I forget about them really quickly. It's like I have this really helpful memory that I just push them down or shove them aside. There's that. And I've also really worked hard on my inner talk. These are some of the tools and skills that to work with the fear, to have that relationship with the fear. And I'll just be honest, I'll bring some of them up, I'll have a client and I'll have a fear. What if the client doesn't get the result that I want, that they're coming to me for my wife, she pointed out, and look, this is absolute honesty here. She pointed out that I'm getting a little bit of a belly. And we both made a commitment to each other that we were going to point that out to each other as we get older and stay in good shape. And this is embarrassing to say, but she'll say that. And then this tiny little voice goes, oh, my God. Uh, she is not going to find me attractive and that's going to cause issues in our relationship. Part of me knows that's not true, but then part of me follows this little strand down to these really cataclysmic type conclusions. And I say it like, I'm like embarrassed to say it because it's so crazy, but it takes up a little bit of my mental real estate, if I'm honest.

Speaker B: Michael, I love that. I think it's beautiful. I think you just illustrated a couple of things I really want to point out in that one of the habits that high performers have, and it can lead to a lot of success, but ultimately it doesn't serve us, is to have fears and have doubts and immediately just push them down. I'm, um, going forward, I'm going for it. I've got whatever it is on the horizon and I'm pushing through this. And in some ways that can really serve us. We can actually create a lot of success in the business world. Maybe not so much in relationships, but sometimes, and it can serve us well. And when we practice over ignoring those little voices that go, oh, that doesn't feel good, and you kind of have that spiral of, oh man, this could go really bad. That is just being human and recognizing that and actually having a conversation with yourself is super healthy. Because then you can go, okay, I get what I'm doing. I'm just totally catastrophizing this and it's not the end of the world and my wife loves me. And then you can have this other conversation. I think we get so practiced as high performers of ignoring those little doubt and fearful voices and we don't allow them to express. That actually becomes a huge danger because then we actually can't tap into that self awareness, which is an absolute tool that we need. The more practice we get at, uh, ignoring, the more difficult it is to Tap into, wow, what's going on with me? What is this feeling? What's happening? And that self awareness is so vital for the next level of success.

Speaker A: I'm totally with you and let's talk about that. Because I've had high performers say, look, I know I'm doing this, I know that I have this fear. But this fear drives me. And oftentimes the fear in some people, the fear got them to the next level. And they're like, look, I. I'm driven by this fear, but I've also achieved a lot and I want to keep achieving. So they actually are worried if they lose this fear, they don't know who they'd be without that. Or they don't know if they'd be as successful without that.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's a classic conundrum. And what I would say is, you don't lose the fear. What you want to create is choice. So that you're feeling and you're making a very intentional, conscious choice. Okay. I can feel the intensity in my body. I can feel my increased heart rate, I can feel the sweaty palms. I can taste a little taste of adrenaline, the metallic taste on my tongue. And I'm really excited to do the thing that's causing me this little fear. And I am aware it's all about putting the parts that maybe we don't want in the driver's seat, but allowing them in the backseat, allowing them in the car. Because if you don't allow them in the car, that's when they really cause problems. Right. How many of us know somebody in their 40s, 50s, and 60s really run into a brick wall? And oftentimes it's because they aren't listening.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: They aren't listening to the signals our body is telling us. There's a tremendous amount of wisdom that we have in our bodies and we are taught, I think, that it's so woo woo and it's not. And we've reached so much success with our head space that we totally forget there's a lot of real estate beneath our chin. And there's a lot of wisdom coming from our body that is challenging, I think, in this day and age to verbalize and be aware of. And it's just another tool to be aware. It's just another tool to have. I don't know why anyone would not want to have more tools in their toolbox.

Speaker A: Uh, two things stick out. I'd like to point out that you said the two things that popped out are acknowledgment and Choice. And to me, when you have fear and you don't acknowledge it and you shove it down, you lose your intuition, you lose your connection. People don't trust you as much. They sense it. You're not in your authentic self, you're in your ego. And then that can cause sickness. There's been link between people pushing down fear and cancer, people pushing down fear and stomach problems because that's where a lot of it lands. And then choice, it's like, okay, I have fear. I had a coach tell me if you're not a little bit anxious before a game, you don't know what's at stake. And that I've always thought that. And you know, if it's a board meeting or a difficult conversation, I'm like, I'm a little anxious. That's good. You should be a little bit. If you're going into a burning building with your team, you should, like you said, you should have that fear. If you don't have that fear, that's a problem.

Speaker B: Like I said earlier, most people think that when people reach a certain level of success, uh, somehow that fear magically goes away. I don't know if you're aware of the great basketball player Bill Russell. He died recently of his story in that he would run to the restroom before every single game in vomit. Every single game. I grew up with Karen, his daughter, and Bill Russell actually watched me play basketball as a kid. But I was thinking, that's a fascinating story, right? If you weren't told, he would be like literally one of the greatest athletes, uh, of all time before every game. And he just, he said, I worried when I didn't. And I thought, what's wrong? I'm not ready, I'm not feeling it. My hand's not in the zone. That was his signal that I'm nervous. This game means a lot to me and I am going to play full out. Uh, he recognized the anxiety in his body and just knew that was the outlet. Literally. I don't really want to have that outlet. But I have to say, who hasn't felt really nauseous before something big, right? I can tell you before a lot of legal arguments, as a baby attorney, before a deposition or a motion, absolutely wanted to vomit. I remember in law school thinking to myself, okay, it's a timed exam. I'm going to give myself 30 seconds. Neither vomit now or you gotta wait till after the two hour exam because you can't vomit in the middle. Like, I'm gonna flunk the exam. Cause it's timed. So, uh, vomit now or later. That's your choice. It never goes away. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but just knowing that to me is somewhat comforting. It's like these amazing athletes and, uh, these incredibly successful people absolutely had that fear and had that reaction.

Speaker A: Wow. And if people have ever seen Bill Russell, he outwardly looks like the most confident guy. He's very stoic. I think people relied on him for his presence. So that's nuts. We talked before about this. I'd just like to bring it up so that people listening can hear Shan tell us more about the relationship with doubt and fear.

Speaker B: So for me, when I was really reflecting on how fear shows up for me, similar to you, you can say to yourself, I think I have a lot of fear. And then I think, oh, um, but I do have doubt. And maybe that's just my brain's way of saying, I don't know. Maybe it's not fear yet, but definitely shows up as a doubt, right? A little voice that says, are you sure?

Speaker A: I don't know.

Speaker B: Will that really work? Or do you really want to do that? Is it worth it? There always is going to be that little voice in our head. We'd love to not have it. My experience is that, uh, there's a little encourager and there's a critic, and I've never met anybody yet. Maybe there are some people, I'm thinking like the Dalai Lama or maybe Mother Teresa, whose inner encourager is so loud that they barely have an inner critic. But most of us don't dwell there. And most of the times our inner critic is pretty obnoxious, pretty wicked at times, pretty loud and hard to ignore sometimes. And our inner encourager is typically subtle, more quiet, and really requires us, uh, to have that muscle of self reflection so that we can actually hear our inner encourager with pell, the ability to slow down and self reflect and listen. I think the only voice you hear is that inner critic. And that to me is sad because we need the balance of, uh, both of those voices. They both play a role. And with both of those voices, I think our choice points become better, cleaner, clearer.

Speaker A: It's interesting because I, I have found that people who don't necessarily have that fear don't take risk because they have doubt. It's easy not to have that kind of fear if your life doesn't change. You eat the same thing for breakfast every day. Maybe you're leading the same three people for the last 15 years. A department that companies Never change. Maybe you don't have a lot of fear, but maybe that's playing it safe. And to me, whenever there's change, whenever you put yourself in a new leadership role, you get promoted, you scale your business, you have to deal with a customer four times larger than the previous customer you've ever done. That's when these can be amplified so the people out there. I also realized for me, I'll say yes to a lot of stuff that I'm really uncomfortable with and ah, then I'll just deal with the massive fear for a couple days or weeks, hopefully not months and that to earn my place there. And I'll tell you, the older I get, the, the less that uncomfortableness is. I've achieved some pretty good things in my life, but that's not always been easy or graceful. And something else we talked about, and this is what I want to talk about is self abandonment and high performance because that's one thing I'm getting better at. And you're very good at articulating this. Can you talk about that a bit?

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm good at articulating it only because I'm really practiced in self abandonment. I didn't even know that term, but I think most high performers initially are in that. I think back to when I was a young attorney just practicing crazy hours. And it was the norm, right? It was absolutely normal to work 10 to 12 hour days. We used to say that the weekend was just two extra days of the week. I actually didn't take a vacation in seven years that was more than three days I think and not a real true vacation. And that was the absolute norm. And when you get in a situation where you are letting go of uh, my sleep was pretty horrible. I still ate pretty good. But I recognized at one point, and this will make you laugh, Michael. So I had a friend who was an orthopedic surgeon. He's my neighbor. I grew up with him like a dad figure to me. And I'm running uh, every night after work and then lunchtime I'm going to the gym just down the street and I'm doing that StairMaster. And it's all to burn off stress, right? I'm doing an hour on the StairMaster, then I'm running about an hour every night after work. And it was all just to let go of the stress of the job. That StairMaster just. I had no knee problems but that StairMaster was doing something to my knees and my knees were killing me. And I was practiced law in a where we had Multiple floors in the high rise building. And obviously you don't take the elevator to different floors. You just run up the stairs. If you had somebody you needed to talk to, right? I remember I'm in my, like, late 20s, early 30s. I'm like, using the railing. I'm trying to go up the stairs, and my knees are killing me now. This was going on for months, and then I'm finally like, wow, I really need to see my friend Dr. Mars. Like, my knee. Something's going on with my knees again. This has been going on for months. And I go into the office. He literally just smiles and laughs at me. He's like, shannon, you need to stop the StairMaster. He looked at me and he's like. He goes, you are grinding your patella, and it's moving somehow. When you use this machine, you're grinding the underside of your patella so that it is so inflamed. I even go upstairs, how you're running at night. I go, that's pretty painful. You got to either run at lunch, but you got to take some time, right? Listen to your. What your body is telling you. Don't stop working out, but just listen. But I was under so much stress, and the pain was just like, yeah, that hurts. Just became really normal. I was abandoning myself. The work became such a priority that it didn't even dawn on me that I was under so much stress and I was working out so much that, hey, maybe I could do things different. And what I've come to really realize is we allow ourselves to do that as high performers until we hit some sort of wall. And for me, typically, it's been, uh, like a physical injury that's caused this forced stillness. And when you're in a place where you have to be still, those voices in your head, inner critic and the inner. Hopefully the inner encourager, they are really clear. You need to make some changes. Stop not taking care of yourself. This is not sustainable. You can still be a high performer and take me along. You. You don't get to not take me along. I'm like, your body and you gotta take care of me. Don't hammer me so much. Being brutal. I'd love to say I've only learned this lesson once, but I haven't learned it just once. It's a repetitive lesson for me, and I think I'm getting better now that I'm in my 60s. But honestly, it is. And the lessons have become not as horrifyingly bad in terms of the physical stuff. But, yeah, it's A lesson that I continue to get. Oh, wow, there it is again. There's my choice. I'm self abandoning myself. And that can show up in so many different ways. Right? There was literally a time when I was practicing law that I thought it would be amazingly a great idea if I had one of those Murphy M beds in my office where I could just pull the bed down, get a couple hours of sleep. I had a dog at the time, obviously not in a relationship, there was no time for that. But I didn't even think about what feed the dog. But I was so focused on putting in his maximum hours so that I could get whatever it was I was working on done. And it didn't even dawn on me like how ridiculous that uh, was. No, Shannon, you actually should go home and sleep and take time off. That actually will help the very thing you're working on.

Speaker A: And that's part of wisdom and leadership, isn't it? Because when we're young, we need to prove ourselves. We have the energy, we can do that. And you're honestly at the bottom of the totem pole and you're there to work, get experience and everything. And our evolution of a leader in leadership. The higher we go in leadership, the more we have to be so crystal clear with our boundaries. We have to be so crystal clear with our ethics, our values, and we need to communicate them. We need to hold ourselves and others accountable to them. And when we have to me, self abandonment, you're right, there's many different aspects to it. But that is a lot of the self abandonment, uh, is when we don't stand up for ourselves, we don't stand up for our team. We're not clear, we don't, we're not disciplined, we don't set boundaries, we don't communicate and hold people to an ethical standard. And then we wonder why we're always tired. We wonder why the culture is not great in our team.

Speaker B: And it's something, I think as you move up in leadership, that it is so necessary to model that behavior. If you're working 12 hour days and then you're telling your team, hey, you guys should take care of yourself. And you're on your fifth marriage and your kids won't talk to you, really, who's going to listen to you? Nobody. Right? I joke that one of the reasons I stopped practicing law was I started actually looking at the partners who I was working for, a couple of whom I really love. But honestly, we joked that if you weren't on your third marriage, you weren't Working hard enough. It was kind of a joke. It was exactly what they were modeling. Did I want to become a mini theme? No. And I want to model something very

Speaker A: different and that's important because you don't want your team to go through that. But also I've worked with people, they're like, hey, I don't want to go to the next step at this company because I know what my life is going to be like because Beth is stressed out, Joe is stressed out. So it's time for me to get promoted and I'm a superstar. I'm just going to go somewhere else where my life's not going to suck. We gotta, as leaders we have to create a job and a position and a role that people are gonna aspire to instead of just hop into another ship to losing our best people.

Speaker B: Yeah. I always think of how amazing it is if you had somebody promoted who was so self aware they recognized that the old model absolutely has to change and that's gonna have a um, massively positive downstream and that's, that's hard to do but that's leadership. Leadership is making those really hard decisions over and over again and sticking with it. It's much easier if you have that at the very top and it dribbles down. But oftentimes it is the middle that's going to drive that or the upper third that's going to drive that change.

Speaker A: I find this relationship with fear fascinating and if you're listening to this and you're like, hey, I go through some of this too and but what can I do about it? Shannon and I are hosting a leadership, we're co facilitating a two day leadership intensive in Montreal in October 2nd and 3rd. This is two full days of intense work on yourself. It's going to be self reflective. Reason I partnered with Shannon is I'm just going to give you a little teaser. I'm not going to tell you too much is because she's an expert in what we call experiential learning. So she, her and I are designing a program that is going to get you in action, your leadership and your fear in action so that we can play with it, so we can work on the relationship with it, so you can understand it better, so you have the tools and skills that the next time you are in front of the CEO of a big client or the chairman of the board calls you in that you have your facilities to be your best. You, you can set the boundaries so that you have that inner confidence that you need to be successful as a leader and to do it gracefully and healthily too. Shannon, what else should we share about them without giving too much for our two days together?

Speaker B: I think the other piece that really comes in there, the more that this is practice because this is a practice. This isn't ever a one and done is trust. And a big component of trust is self trust. And as we move up in in leadership responsibility, having a gorgeous relationship with your own self trust, even when fears and doubts come up, that's the beautiful relationship that allows you when you uplevel that relationship, it allows you to take on more and more challenging things. Are you going to always succeed? No, absolutely not. But having that self trust and continuing to build that self trust allows you to stay in the game. Allows you to go, yeah, oops, that didn't go well. What did I learn? And now let's move forward and iterate using whatever I learned in my next iteration.

Speaker A: And to me that self trust is what people are attracted to, they're looking for in their leaders that you need to model because we can't talk about this stuff. We need to show up with it. So if you're listening to this and you're like, hey, I want that next level of self trust. I need the tools and skills to support me getting to the next level. The link is in the show notes. If you have any questions, drop me a note because I want to make sure that you're in the right place for it and it's a, uh, good fit for you. We'll have a little conversation with it and if you are ready to be courageous, ready to look inside and ready to get the tools and skills, we'll see you October 2nd and 3rd in Montreal.

Speaker B: It's going to be a blast.