Let’s talk about fear
Kristen Ulmer was the extreme sports skiing champion for the world for 12 years. When I say extreme, I mean she was jumping off cliffs where you couldn’t see the bottom!
She spoke yesterday at this conference I am attending and she has an amazing analogy about fear that I want to share with you here.
We all have fear and anxiety sometimes – before a big day or even just before you see clients. There is a lot of talk about overcoming fear, how to make it go away and what we can do about it.
Kristen gave this a reframe that really clicked with me.
Let’s say you have a whole bunch of kids and they are named Happiness, Joy, Sadness, Anger, and Excitement, etc.
If you had all of these kids and you had Fear as a kid, how have you been treating Fear? If you treated Fear the same way you are actually treating fear in your life, and if Fear had sentience and was a child – pushing fear away, trying to overcome fear, shoving it out of the way, keeping it in the corner, not giving it the light of day, only giving it 1% of your attention and then giving Happiness 99% of your attention – imagine what happens to Fear?
I know from my kids that if I ignore them, what happens is that they come back with a vengeance. They pester you and pester you and pester you until you give them the attention they need.
Actual fear does the same thing. It acts up and you get resistance. It just resists and resists (and you know what we resist persists!).
If we keep resisting fear, keep resisting anxiety and refuse to feel it – just like if you’ve refused a hug from a kid (oh my goodness, how crushing is it?!). They just want your attention even more. They just want your love. Fear just gets louder. Anxiety just gets louder.
Embrace the fear
Instead, if you turn to it and start embracing it – what would it look like then? Honestly, what would it look like to actually FEEL the fear and do it anyway?
Emotions need to be dealt with on an emotional level. They can’t be dealt with on a mental level.
A lot of us are learners. We love knowledge and thinking about things. But you can’t think your way out of fear. Thinking your way out of fear is like thinking your way out of how to treat a child.
It needs emotion. You need to feel the fear. Feel it and embrace it. See what it needs. See what it’s telling you. See what it’s giving you a sign of and then do it anyway.
It’s very much like a child – giving it the space to be held, the attention that it requires, and listening to hear what it’s saying. It might be saying excitement!
Especially for those of you who are just starting out. Your fear of seeing new clients and things like that might be because it’s exciting to see new clients. It might be because it’s giving you an amazing preview of where you will feel confident in the future. It might be giving you the message that you are enough. But you’re totally just holding your hand up to it.
My fear, anxiety, and mini panic attacks before huge mammoth days with clients was actually telling me that I needed to respect my energy cycles. I need to give my nervous system a break during the day. Instead, I would just sit rocking back and forth, wanting the fear to disappear in the carpark of my clinic.
When you embrace it, when you lean in and listen to what it has to say and give it the attention it needs, it’s just like a kid. If you stop a hug, they’re just gonna keep coming back. “I need a drink.” “I need ice.” “Can you do some art with me?” All that means is, “I need more attention.”
But if you stop and really be present and feel the feelings with your child, then it’s like they’ve had the attention they need. They’ve had the light of day and then it can shift. Fear is the same.
I found this analogy profound and interesting. There are always things that you can learn over and over again. You hear them just slightly differently the next time and suddenly – BOOM! You get it.
Journaling to help with fear
We had another speaker yesterday, as well. Patrick Grove is a serial entrepreneur in Australia who sold his last company last year for 750 million dollars. He has actually taken five companies to 100 million dollars within two years and then sold them and put them on the stock exchange. His next goal is to make a billion dollars.
So, Patrick Grove came up on stage in his thongs and boardies. He didn’t have a speech prepared so he just asked the guy who’s running this conference to interview him (they did that with Jason Silva, as well). It was profound to hear what he had to say.
It wasn’t about business. It was about his journaling practice.
He showed us his calendar. Once a week he has one hour booked in to solve a problem. When he first started journaling, it was all about the dark stuff inside. He had stuff he needed to get out. He said it was all his “past whys.” Why did this happen? Why did this fail? Why am I feeling not enough? Why, why, why, and all on the dark side.
After he’d gotten all the dark stuff out, he realised there was room for some whys on the lighter side. His journal questions started to become visionary questions. Why do I exist? What is available for the future? Why am I here? Why this lifestyle? Why this business?
So he had to go through getting all the yucky stuff out and then it made space for creativity.
Clear the darkness to make space for action
The gold on the other side was when he talked about how as soon as he started asking the question of “how” (how to make a 100 million dollars in two years) from a space of cleared stuff, it turned into an actionable step.
Occasionally, the old dark stuff comes up and he just writes that out. Then he’s able to focus on how.
I was really moved that somebody who is potentially creating billion-dollar businesses has a journaling practice. He absolutely says that it was the game changer for him. The world that we live is full of bright shiny objects. He says that he believes he’s got ADHD and his ADHD mind needs more structure, so what he does is schedule in one hour a week to journal about how he can figure out a problem that he feels like he’s here to fix.
In going through that process, he said it takes four or five journaling sessions and then usually the answer, or a version of the answer, will drop in. He’ll take action on it and then something will come of that.
Wo what he’s just launched is iflix. Netflix is available in all the Western countries in the world and you know we all end up being addicted to the shows, right? But there are many more people in third-world countries or emerging countries (about a billion people!) and they all watch television from their phone. They don’t watch television as Western society does with big TVs. They all watch from their phones.
What he’s doing is answering the question of, “How can I create a 100 million dollar business that provides access to all the people?”
He lives here in Bali now and still runs his Australian and Singaporean businesses. But his focus now is “How can I create this solution?”
When he was thinking about how to make a hundred million dollars he thought about the people here and how they all watch things from their phone. They don’t have mobile-oriented Netflix in their language. So he goes and gets all the local content and puts it on this new platform that he and his team have created.
He’s just about to sell that off for literally a billion dollars. Africa, India, and Indonesia now have iflix. It’s emerging as the next thing and so he’s disrupting all of these different things such as free-to-air television, Netflix, and even YouTube as to what people in these emerging countries get.
He absolutely says that it all came from this journaling process that he does. He doesn’t get attached to the outcome. He just waits for something to drop in, knowing that the other stuff has to get out for the good stuff to drop in.
So guess what I’m doing? I’m journaling because when I was listening to him I was pretty inspired. That’s why I’m telling you all about it.
Big scary goals
I decided if I want to do this right (this is kooky as it gets people!), I needed to tell you my mission and my vision. Here it goes:
To create a global tribe of a hundred thousand natural health practitioners, activating a paradigm shift in the profession through an educational platform and immersive experience on personal and business development by 2025.
So how do I do that, right? That’s a really big how.
Breaking it down into the immersive experiences I want to bring you includes things like:
- flying my helicopter around the world and dropping in to do health checks with Jules and the volunteer organisations
- creating amazing volunteering communities all around the globe
- bringing attention to the needs of women and health and entrepreneurship in these areas
- as well as your entrepreneurship – what is your business and what does it look like?
- what’s the ripple effect?
So this is pretty scary. How can we do that? How can I create that? How do I take down those chunks and take the next actionable set?
It’s really easy to vision big things but it’s a whole different story to turn them into actionable things where you don’t get sidetracked.
Challenge: Embrace your fear
I hope this has been helpful to you! I was just so inspired and I really learn through teaching and speaking it, so I wanted to share it with you.
I invite you to take on whatever you got from this – maybe watch Inside Out with your kids, if you’ve got them. Maybe write a letter to fear about how you could have a different relationship with fear. Maybe journal – get that yucky stuff out first and then tap into your why, tap into your vision and then find a big problem and ask how you can help with it!
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