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Have you noticed there are 2 camps of people during this pandemic? On one side, you have fear mongering on the worst outcomes, and on the other side you have the optimists insisting you must remain positive. Here’s a third possibility. What about using the inevitable and natural feeling of fear—as fuel for creative renewal? In this episode, I’ll share a quick 6-step process for doing just that.
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Topics Covered:
1:30 – How the creative process works
3:00 – Why it’s so important to reinvent yourself as the world outside reinvents
8:30 – The true cause of huge fear responses
16:00 – A 6-step process to turn fear into fuel
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LINKS
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MindStory Inner Coach Book and 2 Neuro-Blueprints (FREE)
https://mindstoryacademy.com/book-free/
Apply for Coaching with Carla Rieger to Turn Fear into Fuel
https://mindstoryacademy.com/mindstory-personal-coaching-series-lp/
CERTIFICATION in the MindStory Method – Build a Career as an Online Coach and Speaker
https://mindstoryacademy.com/join-mic-certification
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Connect with Carla Rieger:
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/carlarieger
Twitter – https://twitter.com/carlarieger
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlarieger/
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This is episode 47 – using fear as fuel. There seems to be 2 camps of people in these days of global pandemic and economic freefall. On one side you have the fear mongers predicting the worst, and on the other side are the people saying that being fearful lowers your immune system and to maintain a positive focus. Here’s a third possibility. In this episode I want to share six steps for using fear as fuel. Hi, I’m Carla Rieger, and you’re listening to the mind story speaker podcast for influencers who transform the lives of others through their expertise.
The third path I’m talking about honors the fact that we live in a dualistic world where, of course, you can’t have light without dark, day without night, a rose without the soil it arises from, nor prosperity without scarcity. If we lived in a world of all prosperity, all day, all light, all lotus flowers, it would have little value or meaning, because there’s nothing to contrast them to. We appreciate prosperity if we’ve been living in scarcity, we appreciate day if we’ve just endured a long night, we appreciate a rose, if we had to get down on our knees in the muck to plant and tend it. I believe that the lower emotions such as fear, anxiety, worry, anger, frustration, hopelessness are actually part of the creative process. Anyone in the arts, knows that to create something out of nothing, you have to go through a dark phase of chaos, the breaking down of the old, entering into the abyss of nothingness, before you can create something new. You may be familiar with the mythic journey, or what Joseph Campbell calls the mono myth. It’s the basic story structure at the root of all stories that humans tell each other throughout history and all cultures. It reflects the soul journey that we go on in big ways and small throughout our lives. There is always a part of every personal and global hero’s journey where you enter a dark night of the soul, the deep abyss of loss, just before entering into the light. As we’ve heard many times before, it’s always darkest just before dawn.
So, if you can reframe any fear, concern, worry or anxiety as the raw fuel for creating something new in your life, it can help you navigate it all with much more grace and ease. But the resisting of those emotions strengthens them and keeps them stuck. I like to use the metaphor of fear being like raw gasoline you put in your car that then goes through a combustion process in your engine to move the car forward, fear can move your life forward in creative ways IF you process it. If you block it, or deny it, or distract yourself from it, then you cannot use it as fuel, and so you cannot reinvent yourself. Of course, now is very important time to reinvent yourself. As the world outside changes, how you belong to the world must change with it. I believe this global situation is going to change people individually, culturally and globally at a very deep level. We will look back on this time as a a kind of renaissance period. Likely new inventions will arise that will blow our minds, new ways of being, new ways of interacting with each other, new ways of exchanging value, new ways of doing business. And the people who are willing to face this darkness, process it and transform it, do it not only for themselves but for the collective human consciousness. Those people will be in a prime position to be on the leading edge of innovation. They will be not only the most prosperous, but the ones named as heroes helping others through this intense transition. Will you be one of them?
Most of us are programmed to stay within the safety of our comfort zone. This is happening at the unconscious level. You might say you enjoy change, but when it’s thrust upon you, when you didn’t choose it, most people’s reaction is to resist it. That said, people often have two voices within, one that wants to grow, change and create something new out of a state of chaos, and the inevitable opposite reaction which is to stay the same, go back to a sense of order and security as soon as possible.
Anytime you set a goal, such as trying to turn around a challenge, or make more money, or launch a new business project, even changing your life habits, you unleash an internal Civil War. The prefrontal cortex, the creative part of your brain, likes to think in innovative ways, to create new goals, to envision a new future. On the other hand, the reptilian complex or survival brain is programmed to stop anything that is unfamiliar or that might be uncomfortable. The truth is, this doesn’t just happen at the beginning of a goalsetting process, it happens throughout the process. For example, let’s say you’re having to move your business online, so you buck up and you learn what you need to learn. Just when you’re within sight of the finish line, suddenly the survival brain activates and the self sabotage triggers go off. I’ve talked about that another podcasts. This is normal, it’s a natural part of the creative process. Don’t beat yourself up about it, because that entrenches you further in the Civil War.
That’s when it helps to activate a third voice that’s like a mediator, a peacekeeper between these warring oppositions. It’s a neutral compassionate witness. For example, I remember when I started doing online speaking back in 2010. I was used to addressing groups in person, not in a webinar format. There were all the tech things I had to learn. Then, I had to learn to speak to a camera on my computer instead of an actual group of people. All the days leading up to my webinar, and especially just before starting I had that nervous feeling, sometimes called butterflies in the stomach. I knew this was the vagus nerve being activated by the survival brain. The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve. It runs all the way from the brainstem down to the stomach. I knew that this energy could help me as long as I didn’t try to suppress it, or judge myself for having it. In my case, and you may have noticed this phenomenon too, that once I got going, the vagus nerve activation faded and I began to enjoy the experience.
People with zero fear in a high-stakes situation, usually aren’t learning and growing. You have to have some pressure within your life; something at stake to drive you to better yourself. It’s that willingness to get uncomfortable that is sends you on the hero’s journey. If you want to be more than average and create a life that matches your vision, then it helps to do things every day that might make you a little bit uncomfortable.
If you have a huge, overwhelming fear response its usually because something has happened in your past this is unresolved. Usually it’s an experience you interpreted in a negative way, and that you never fully learned from. That’s when the experience becomes lodged in the brain and stored as trauma. The survival brain then goes on autopilot to avoid similar situations. For example, one of my clients came close to winning a spelling bee as a child. He interpreted coming in 2nd place as a sign of his unworthiness. After that he avoid most competitions. Another client also lost a spelling bee as a child but interpreted it as a good learning experience. He didn’t avoid competition after that, but instead each loss made him more eager to learn from his mistakes and get better. Of course these experiences weren’t front of mind for either person, but the interpretations of those experiences were running their present day lives.
So, any feeling of disappointment, upset or humiliation that you experienced in childhood was a choice. It was based on a thought or an interpretation of the event. It wasn’t about the actual event. Once you realize that, you can free yourself of a lot of present day anxiety.
My mother worked as a social worker with troubled teens. She noticed that two children could come from the same dysfunctional home, and one would go on to live a purposeful and healthy life, and the other would live a destructive and unhealthy life. Same situation, different interpretation, which led to a different result in life.
One client, was shy as a child. Other children assumed his lack of friendliness meant he didn’t like them, so they excluded him from social activities. He felt rejected many times as a child.
Fast forward to present day, and he was getting triggered in any situation that might involve rejection. At the survival brain level, it felt like potential death. Even though he knew logically that he would NOT actually die if he made calls to prospects, it still felt like that at a bodily, somatic level. It is a sad truth that unless we reinterpret these past events, we stay stuck getting triggered over and over again.
When we are young, in the period of time we call the imprint period, which is generally up to the age of seven, negative things sometimes happen to us. We learn fear responses to various things like speaking in public, being told off, getting in trouble, being excluded, getting bullied, failing an exam or fumbling the ball during an important game.
Some people have very little memory of childhood, the good or the bad experiences. Yet forgetting what happened doesn’t necessarily mean it didn’t have a detrimental effect on your psychological and physiological well-being. The trauma can stay lodged in your nervous system and cell structure.
One client was forced to stand on a chair and read out loud to the other students as a punishment for talking in class. Her brain associated being in front of people with punishment and humiliation. Fast forward to adulthood, and growing her business involves lots of public speaking. It was only once she reinterpreted the experience of standing on the chair that she could resolve the inner war, and get on stage with confidence.
It’s simply a kind of phobia. Many people have them in some form or another. It’s a built-in self-preservation mechanism. For example, I had a paper route in my neighborhood when I was eleven. Once I was attacked by two German Shepard guard dogs and had multiple bite on my legs and arms. My survival brain photographed that experience to ensure I didn’t put myself in that position again. For years, I froze whenever I saw a German Shepard, even a sweet tempered one. After using the techniques I’m going to share with you, I no longer have that phobia. So you can use it on whatever plagues you such as cold calls, prospecting, public speaking, dealing with authority figures, flying, spiders, heights, water or whatever.
Here are 6 key steps you can take to transform the fear.
As soon as you accept fear and allow yourself to feel the vibrational frequency of fear, it helps ground you into your body, where you can begin to transform it and access higher capacities.
So, here’s step 1, what does the fear or anxiety feel like physically? Just try describing it from a neutral place, like you were a visitor from another planet. For example, some people describe it as:
How does fear show up for you?
The last one, number 6 is..
To summarize…let’s talk about a NEW MODEL OF BUSINESS
The old model of business was based on scarcity: take as much from as many people as possible because there isn’t enough for everyone to win. The new model is completely different. It’s based on prosperity and abundance and the powerful ideal that the person who helps the most people will win. Give and you will receive. Once you really get this, everything in your life changes. So remember these 6 tips:
This podcast episode, by the way, is based on Chapter 8 of our new book, MindStory Inner Coach. If you’d like more tools like this, for a limited time we’re offering this book for free on our website: MindStoryAcademy.com. You’ll also see the free book link in the show notes. Along with the book, you also get two short guided audios that are called neuro-blueprints. They are form of mental rehearsal that opens up communication between your conscious and subconscious mind to deepen these kind of core belief and interpretation changes that run our lives. One is called how to end self sabotage, it’s one you would use at night. The other is called your hero’s journey, which is about reframing the challenges of your life in terms of a mythic adventure and how those challenges have forged you in the fire of wisdom to now help others. Sometimes that’s hard to see until you do a process like this. And this is a version you would do in the morning. These take chapters 2 and 10 of the book to a much deeper level. All together, the audios and the book come to $94 but you can get them free right now.
Also, we’re looking for more speakers and coaches who want to learn to use the MindStory Method. If you’re interested check out our certification tab at MindstoryAcademy.com. It’s where we train you how to make extra income or even your next million working online, from the comfort of your own home, living from anywhere making a huge difference while making a great living speaking, teaching and coaching others to become masters of their own mind…one of the most important skills you can learn in this day and age.
So that’s it for today…I hope that was helpful. Until we talk again, stay safe, do this work on using fear as fuel. You are not only be doing yourself a favor, but all those who count on you to be there for them. Until next time, I’m Carla Rieger, thanks for listening.
