Episode 411: Don't Get Rid of Fear

Hey podcast listeners, today's episode is a topic that I return to over and over again. I return to it in my conversations with folks like you, with other entrepreneurs. I return to it in my conversations with my kids, and I definitely return to it in my conversations with myself. And that is how to have a healthy relationship with fear, how we deal well with risk and find that sweet spot of motivation without overwhelm.

My favorite way to work through fear, of course, is on the flying trapeze. And I would love to invite you, your families, any entrepreneurs out there to come have this experience with me. Let's take it from the abstract and put it in a laboratory in the 3D in our bodies. Come to the family play day.

We are hosting this in Minneapolis in the middle of March. It is the Sunday after the next circus show. And I've had lots of folks do trapeze with me over the years, and it consistently is a fun, but also really legitimately challenging source of, I guess, working through fear in real time. So please consider it.

And in the meantime, thanks so much for listening. Welcome to the Zen Founder Podcast. This is a place where we have conversations about mental health and entrepreneurship. We have a pretty broad conceptualization of what mental health means, sometimes depression, anxiety, sometimes relationships or physical health.

The goal here is to bring some calm into the crazy rollercoaster of ups and downs that is life for many entrepreneurs. I'm your host. I'm Dr. Sherry Walling.

I'm a clinical psychologist and an entrepreneur, married to an entrepreneur, live in the world of entrepreneurs. and I'm so pleased that you have joined us for this conversation. Hi, my name is Dr. Sherry Walling and I'm a clinical psychologist who specializes in the well-being of entrepreneurs leaders.

I'm also a circus artist so I spend quite a bit of my time thinking about fear and how to have a healthy relationship with fear. This applies very much to my life supporting entrepreneurs, but it also applies a lot to my life as a circus artist. And I think that people fundamentally can confuse fear as weakness, as lack of confidence, as something that needs to be overcome or ignored. And I think that fear is a very important and powerful part of our bodies and the connection between our bodies and our minds.

And that really the path of wisdom or maturity is to develop a healthy relationship with fear as an important source of feedback. When we feel afraid, it's possible that we are in danger. You know, it's possible that there's some knowing within our physiological system that the thing that we're doing or trying may cause us physical harm significant harm And so fear is a warning system to say hey hey pay attention be careful What you doing may hurt you I think the trick comes of course, in our evolutionary development where we're doing lots of things that are maybe not dangerous to our bodies, or at least our perception is they're not dangerous to our bodies, but they are dangerous to our psyches.

The fear of embarrassment, of failure, of giving a speech in front of a group of people and it going miserably, the fear of not being loved or accepted or having our flaws seen. These emotional kinds of fears also signal a kind of danger. I think the healthy or the reasonable strategy with fear is to pause and listen to it. Let the fear speak to you.

Don't override fear. Just because that you're listening to the fear doesn't mean that you are doing everything that the fear wants. And I do think about it like a voice of fear, like it is another voice that's almost talking to us when we are in fear, when we're afraid. And so it's It's helpful to sit down and have this conversation with this voice of fear.

Ask the fear what its concerns are. You know, let it be heard. Let it lodge its concerns for your prefrontal cortex, for the planning executive function part of your mind so that you can get a sense of what the fear wants to communicate. And often the fear, of course, is a warning sign about potential danger.

and when there are warning signs about potential danger generally there it's useful to heed them it's useful to assess like can I fall off of this trapeze 20 feet in the air and break my neck is that possible here or if I make the bet and buy this company or launch this product is there a scenario in which it goes very badly and causes destruction or disruption in my life. So asking the question about the worst case scenario isn't feeding fear. It's just having a conversation with the fear.

And it's only after fear has been listened to that a thoughtful analysis or assessment of fear is possible. And so it's useful then to sort of ask, okay, if I'm afraid of falling, What are the chances that I'll fall? What are the safety mechanisms in place that help prevent me from falling? How competent am I at the skill that if I do it 20 feet in the air, it will work or not?

And I think fear can be a really important reminder of your actual ability, of your actual safety, of your actual competence. Again, whether that's in the business world or the athletic world, the circus world, some other part of your life, the relational world, Fear can serve as this inadvertent reminder of how strong, how capable, how competent you are in your skills or in your position So going through the fear conversation asking fear what it worries about and then listening to it enough to take careful accounting and then counterbalance that fear with a bit of the logic question of like, how likely is this bad outcome?

And what's the worst that could happen? These are very common cognitive reprocessing tools that help us manage anxiety. Fear also has an important role in enhancing performance. The line between fear and excitement is actually very thin.

They're physiologically very similar. So when we are feeling that adrenaline fuel, when we are feeling our heart race, when our breath gets shallow, we are getting ready to act. And so if we're giving a talk or performing in some way or having a difficult conversation, that fear spike can actually increase our performance ability. It helps us to really dial in and engage our muscles and engage ourselves so that we are hyper-focused on the task at hand.

And so without fear, we don't always pay close attention. But fear makes us very careful of our movements, of our statements, of our words, of the things that might put us at risk or increase our likelihood of success and safety. So don't discount fear. Don't override fear.

Let fear be heard and let fear actually help to increase or enhance your performance. Of course, fear can impede our well-being and our performance when it is not heated and therefore almost like a child that you're trying to ignore who's requesting one more glass of water or a cookie after dinner. And when they're not listened to, they escalate. They get increasingly louder, are increasingly more demanding, fear can be like that too.

So it can be overwhelming when we don't give it proper attention. And when it becomes overwhelming, it floods our resources so much so that it is not helpful to our performance, but in fact can impede our performance because it becomes the only thing that our system has the capacity to deal with or to consider. So when the fear becomes so big that that's all that's playing on the inner screen of our mind, then obviously we're not able to really function well on anything else or really focus on what we're actually doing.

At its best, fear keeps us safe, helps us to perform, and helps us to focus. And at its worst, it undoes all of those things by making us distracted, by making us disorganized in our movements and in our decisions, and by rattling us so much that our performance suffers. I was recently in a circus show with Circus with Purpose in Nicaragua, and I performed alongside a woman named Jordan who is an extraordinary contortion artist and fire artist And Jordan and then did this performance where she was wearing these boots and attached to the boots were fire Her boots were on fire And then she gets up on a table and does all these handstand and contortion moves.

And Jordan is a professional. She's an extraordinary artist. But before the show, I said, hey, how are you feeling? Are you nervous?

And she's like, I'm afraid every single time. and she is a professional. She does this regularly, but it's never not scary to have fire attached to your body and then like dangling nearby your head. It's never like casual.

It's never blasé business as usual. It's always matters. It always deserves like catch your breath, pay attention, focus. That's the role that fear should function in our minds and in our hearts.

pay attention. This is important. It matters. The risk of sloppiness has dire consequences.

And in many ways, I see so many entrepreneurs either feeding their fears so that they become so bloated and disorganized that they're not harvesting the useful information from fear, or repressing their fears and ignoring them in ways that lead them to become potentially sloppy and thoughtless in, again, not heeding the information, not harvesting the information about what's important and what can help them focus. So we fear the things that will have the most dire consequences if we lose them or if the feared outcome happens.

We fear injury to certainly our children, to ourselves, to those that we love. We fear shame. We fear lack of belonging. We fear the crumbling of what we've built, the loss of our health, the loss of the things that we love.

And so fear is an important prioritization metric. We shouldn't play fast and loose with it. We should listen to it. Let it show us what matters.

Let it help us plan for safety and let fear help you focus, not flood you. I hope these simple reflections are helpful. I know they're helpful to me whenever I'm doing something dangerous involving fire or heights or flips or, you know, all the things. So thank you so much for listening and watching.

And I hope that you continue to cultivate a healthy and thoughtful relationship with fear. Thanks for listening. We'll be back in two weeks with a new episode of the podcast. In the meantime, feel free to check out zenfounder.

com for lots of resources about the kinds of conversations that we have on the podcast. You can get information about working with me, about maybe joining a Zen tribe. It's sort of like a mental health bootcamp for entrepreneurs. We also have lots of content on our blog, links to resources in our courses and books for sales.

So check us out there and we hope to provide anything and everything that you might need to make the entrepreneurial life a little bit easier.