Fear: A Path to Authenticity - Emotion Series #5

Most of the things that we don't understand, we fear. Approaching your fear allows us to go places and understand things that we wouldn't otherwise.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host Joe Hudson. All right, Joe, how are you doing today?

I'm good. I, um, I just got off of a houseboat for Thanksgiving with my family for a week. And we go to a place where there's nobody at all. There's no cell reception, no anything. And it was just so nice to be reconnected as a family. And it was really interesting to watch my girls. At the beginning of that holiday, they were like, "I don't—" They have fear. They were like, "I don't wanna get away from being out of connection as far as cellular connection or Wi-Fi." There was definitely some resistance. And then by the end of it, they were ready to have another week where they weren't connected to anything and we could just be together as a family. Unfortunately, we couldn't do it, but it was really nice to see that transition for them.

Tell me about the fear that they were— the fear of losing connection to Wi-Fi.

It seems like such a little thing, but I don't think it is. You know, when kids are growing up, they're like learning this whole social thing, and to be out of connection of their friends, the Wi-Fi, it's like anything can happen. Right? Somebody could start saying bad things about them online. There could be these dramas that they don't know about. They're not informed. And then all these consequences can happen. And I think my guess is that's the real driving fear with, for my girls anyways, about not being in connection, cellular connection, not the connection of the family, but that cellular connection was really important to them because it's like, it keeps them up to date on the social, you know, the mercurial social nature of teenage girls.

I had some sort of experience with fear myself this past weekend. I was in Moab, Utah in the canyons, and I was trying highlining for my first time in a couple of years since the first time I tried it. Wait, wait, wait.

Highlining is like where you go between two massive cliffs kind of thing with like a slackline? Is that what that is?

Yeah. Or is it like tightrope? Yeah, it's like a 1-inch slackline anchored between two cliffs about like 500 feet over the ground. And you, you clip into it with a harness and then slide out and then stand up and walk the line. And I've been doing a lot of slacklining over the past couple of years, particularly over the pandemic when I've just been in one place. And this is my first time trying to highline again. And there's definitely a strong fear that comes up when you're hanging out on a line and you're putting your feet on it and trying to stand. And I definitely immediately fell and took a little whipper, and, uh, the line caught me and it was perfectly safe. But definitely— when you say whip—

wait, wait, wait, what's a whipper?

Oh yeah, a whipper is when, uh, when you come off the line in a rather uncontrolled and, uh, extravagant way and take a nice big swing around the line. Oh wow.

Yeah, it feels like you're getting whipped around. I'm just imagining it. Okay, I get it.

Yeah, yeah, the experience of getting kind of whipped around and disoriented and In that moment you're like, how good is this? You know, how good are these anchors? How good is my equipment? Did I double back my harness?

Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah. Right. So that's another thing of fear, right? So that's interesting, which is cool 'cause that's what we were meant to talk about today, which is like fear. And it's cool to think about like those two different kinds of fear.

Yeah, you've got the subtle fears that are guiding so many small decisions in our life and making us feel resistance to go out into nature and have a connective time with family because we're away from Wi-Fi. And then we have the more extreme and present fears of physical annihilation, even if it's not really present, even if you're actually protected, but the visceral feeling of it. And I think that's a really good analogy or just something to bring into the ways that we feel fear all the time in our business and in our life and the way that we show up in the world.

Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating when you think about it that way. I think what it brings is that question of like, what is fear essentially? And I think that's an incredibly difficult question to answer. You know, the typical answer to that question is, you know, if you feel in threat, if you feel your person, what you love, care about is in threat, some version of that is like the typical idea of fear. But if you think of fear that way, then You know, you could define anger that way. You could define sadness that way. As far as the body goes, if you define it as the body, it's a very different experience, right? So the experience of anger and the experience of fear are very different. Like, like after fear, you're gonna shake. During fear, you're gonna scream. Your facial expression is gonna have like big eyes and an open mouth. Anger is gonna have a closed mouth and tight eyes and So if you define it, you know, intellectually, it kind of makes it sound like fear is at the bottom of all the anger and all the sadness. And I think there's an interesting truth to that perspective, but it's not a body truth of anger— of fear, excuse me. There's a definite felt experience of fear in the body that is unique to all the other, you know, big emotions that we feel.

Yeah, it sounds like any of the fight, flight, freeze, or feed, or any of the other Fs that people have come up with to describe various responses that are linked to fear and the perspective of like that there's only love or fear, which— Yeah. —is useful and not necessarily entirely true. It sounds like fear can have a lot of different flavors and be identified as other emotions. And it can also be its own distinct thing. You know, it can be the thing that's underneath anger. And it can also be the thing that anger is underneath.

That's right. Yes, that's exactly it. And so I don't know the feed one. So I've heard of fight, flight, or freeze. I use that a lot. What's the feed?

What does that represent? Feed is just, you know, there's a, let's say if I'm procrastinating and I just go to the fridge frequently and I might as well just put some more calories in my body because maybe that'll help with whatever this, like, undetermined risk is.

That's another thing that I think that it gets confused a lot is like there's fear and then there's anxiety. And they, to me, those are very separate things, right? So, and I don't think we could talk about all of them in one podcast, but I think there's like fear as anxiety, there's fear as in power struggles, and then there's like the actual fears in like an emotional, experience that's happening. I think that we should do a different podcast on the, like, fear and how that creates power struggles. And what I— what some people call the drama triangle, I would call the fear triangle. And another discussion on anxiety and what that is and, and how it's related but not related to fear. For me though, fear, the experience of fear when we're in the body is like a shaking, screaming, a like a jittery sensation. That's kind of how we know fear to be there. And when we're in fear in the head, what we know is that we start thinking about binary. We start binary thinking. It's either going to buy the red car or the blue car. But I don't see that there's like a black car or a green car. He's like, I either marry her or I don't marry her. Like, that really tells them— that's the mental, you know, that shows the mental that you're in.

Or I take the job, or I don't take the job.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Or that there's like a false— often fear creates this false end in the system where it's like, oh my God, I'm gonna lose my job. But you're not thinking, and then what? And then you lose your job, and then you find a new job, and then you are you know, get a 2-month vacation while you look for a job. And then you, you know, go into credit card debt and then you repay your credit card debt. Like there's this false end nature to having fear in the system. It also, it's all, it also presents when you think you have to make a decision. That's another thing that like how fear shows up in the head. So I think fear in the body is that shaking, screaming, whereas fear in the head is binary thinking, false end, and thinking that you have to make a decision.

Yeah, making maybe a list of pros and cons to try to intellectually analyze it to the max and come up with a confirmed answer.

Right, if that's true, if you're doing that, it means there's unfelt fear. It means that like, we all make 1,000 decisions a day, right? Easily 1,000 decisions a day. And we don't even think that we're making them. We don't even consider them. They just happen all the time. So when we think we have to make a decision, it means that we're scared of a consequence. We're scared that we're gonna do something wrong. And so the first thing to do in those moments is to address the fear, not try to figure it out. 'Cause the brain doesn't figure out fear. It can't. It doesn't do it very well at all. But the next most obvious thing can be found so easily. You know, it's, I can't make the total decision, but I can definitely know what the next most obvious thing is to do if all I do is just feel the fear and let it move through me.

So what makes fear take hold and not just move through so cleanly as you just described?

Like all emotions, there's like, you know, different societies have different ways of handling it. Like there's definitely societies that I've been in or subcultures of our society where like showing fear is not okay. If I show fear, then I'm gonna get harassed by the cops. Or if I show fear, then I'm gonna be on the bottom of the totem pole. To show fear is not an acceptable experience. If I show fear, Dad will attack me, or Mom will attack me. So like all of the emotions, actually letting that fear move through your system is going to, is going to create, you know, the potential of harm for you, and or some history of harm for you. Um, and again, like all emotions, The mind then forgets that, oh, we can actually express the fear, just not with anybody around, or when it's safe, when we know we won't be attacked for it. So, so that's one of the reasons that fear doesn't move like incredibly quick through us. When it doesn't, that's one of the reasons. The other is just sustained. Like when you have a situation where you're scared for a sustained period of time, the body just can't handle it. You have to you can deal with a certain amount of it and act through that and feel that for a certain amount of time. But if you're doing something like, I remember when my girls were young, both of them had life-threatening diseases at different times. And it was like 10 days of sustained fear in a hospital. And it was like, that took months for me to move through because I actually had to compartmentalize some of that fear to make decisions. I had to operate. It's the same with like war that, you know, there's, if you're in the sustained trauma for an extended period of time, you have to go back and let your body move it after the fact. So that's another reason that it's important. And because fear was meant, like historically, like for most mammals, fear is meant for a very short period of time. It's like run from the lion. It's not for like a sustained thing. And also for most animals, the only thing that they're really, trying to protect is there and the physical welfare of, you know, their family, so to speak, the, the, maybe the tribe or the, or the whatever, the different words for different animals, but the group of animals or the herd of animals. That's really the only time when they're feeling the fear. Whereas humans, their sense of self is far beyond just my physical form. It's what I stand for, my political nature, my sexual orientation, my reputation, how good of a person I am, my reputation, how good I look, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so now that we have extended ourselves into all of these, I would say, illusionary things, then our fear can be more sustained over longer periods of time. And so it takes more to just have it move all the time, or you have to see through the idea of self. You have to see through what you're protecting. And then there's just a lot less fear in the system generally.

Yeah, so it sounds like what you just said there is that our fear, we can have a gradient of fear all the way from the visceral level of walking a High Line and being afraid for our personal wellbeing, all the way to something so abstract as if I'm away from cellular connection, somebody might invite me to a party that I miss, and then I won't get the social connection that I want and I'll have FOMO.

Or there's gonna be a whole bunch of people who say shitty things about me and I won't be there to defend myself. And when I come home, my social rank will have lowered and I'm gonna be the person who's bullied, right? Which feels a little more real than like, I'm gonna miss a party. But yes, all of that, all of that is now part of fear. So anything that we project our identity into now has to be protected.

And so what's interesting here is that it all still links right back down to the body. No matter how abstract the thing you're afraid of, connects straight to the body. And whether— if you're not aware of it and you're not letting it move, then you'll find yourself in this binary thinking, being afraid of a false end, some consequence that just seems like it's the end of the world, and that you have this big weighty decision to make. And these different streams of information that if you could only understand it fully, you would know what to do to keep yourself safe, and if not, it's all lost.

The consequence piece is really important too. I love that thought process. So from the way I see that is like when I'm coaching clients, what I see a lot of is they wanna be their authentic self, but they're scared of the consequences of it. And then that's like, that's when the fear really takes hold. When it's like, when that ratio gets out of balance, right? What I also see is when people consistently show up and be themselves despite the consequences, then what happens is the part of the world that doesn't like who they are falls away, maybe dramatically, maybe violently, but it falls away. And the part of the world that supports who they are actually and their authenticity shows up. And it's not magical thinking. This isn't like New Age, like I wish it and therefore it's so. It's just literally the same way that if, if there's something that's feeding on insects, creek is a good place to be to eat the insects because there's more insects near water than there is in dry spaces. So you're going to get more insect-eating animals near creeks. And it's just as simple as that. It's just like we go to the places and the, and the things are attracted to us depending on what we're what we're delivering. If we're a creek delivering insects, then we're gonna get insect eaters around us, so to speak.

Yeah, or if we're someone who's patterned into experiencing a lot of interpersonal drama, we'll tend to find where there is drama and try to fix it because we're afraid of it and draw ourselves into it even more and create more of it. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Trying to fix it creates it. Yeah. Exactly, perfect example. So when it's so clear in your system that the consequence is so much less important than being yourself, then there's no fear that shows up. When you start worried about, you know, that the consequence could stop you from being, or being yourself, then the fear really hits. And, and what the, the, the ridiculous thing about it is then you're like, okay, I'm so scared that if I do that, I can't be myself, then I won't be myself right now, right? Like back to my daughters, I'm so scared that if I tell my friend that the way that she's treating me really doesn't work because then I might lose my social network and then I can't be myself at school. It's like, really? So you're sacrificing being yourself now for the fear of not being able to be yourself in the future, which is almost always Like, I'm scared. It's the same thing, like, I'm scared of losing all my money. Like, okay, so you're gonna not be yourself now because you might lose all your money so that it, and so that way in the future I can be myself 'cause I have the money. Yeah. Like, so it's a funny bargain that we make often.

If everyone around us loves a certain identity of us and we're afraid of losing that identity, well, if we can accept losing that identity, which will happen if we step into our authenticity rather than that image, then we do— that self does die. That's right. And if we're willing to go through the experience of finding what we are underneath it and finding our place in, in our environment and in our world, then, then the fear falls away because then you can look forward to it. What is this journey I'm about to be on?

Yeah, that's why I have this poem about this where I talk about it, which is like, fear is like one of the most direct paths to freedom. And it's because of exactly what you're saying is that like, the fear tells you where you're scared that your identity is gonna be taken away, attacked, your idea of self, whether that's the physical self or the friends or the wealth or whatever. And there's this great quote that says, "If you wanna find out who you are, offer yourself up to annihilation and the part of you that can't be annihilated is you." is who you actually are. And so fear is this incredible path. It's like this incredibly quick way to get to freedom because you're just annihilating all the parts of yourself. It's directly like, oh, I'm scared of that means I'm scared of that level of annihilation. And then you can find what is truly true about you, which is the part that can't be annihilated.

Yeah, and on a visceral level, that reminds me of by Journey and BASE jumping and just how going into jumping off of a cliff and parachuting is something where it brings up all these fears of visceral annihilation. And those being in constriction around those fears just makes your performance far more rigid and clunky and far more likely to lead to your annihilation than if you simmer in it and sit in it and let yourself feel all of that fear and let yourself feel the subsequent fears of, if I die, you know, my partner will have a bad day and my family will have a bad day. But if you let yourself continue to constrict in those fears, then that's gonna be the thing that pops on your mind if something goes a little bit off of the plan.

Right, also the flow state that I think so many people who do these kinds of sports look for, let's call that the freedom for a minute, is directly linked to allowing the fear. It directly leads to the embrace of the fear. So if you're not embracing it, you're constricted. If you are embracing it, if you're like, oh yeah, there it is, that's the fear, I'm going to fully allow this thing to be felt and move through me, then you're in flow state. And it's the same thing in the fear, any of the other fears. So that's how fear is such a direct path.

This is something that I experienced a lot and saw a lot, that if you, if you let your attachment to a certain identity cause you to suppress a certain range of fear, then the, the thing that that fear would keep you safe from becomes more likely to happen to you.

Yes. The things that we fear are the things that we invite into our world often. The other thing that's interesting is that like, I, I remember hearing like some monk at some point tell me, I can't remember who it was, he was like, I don't really feel fear anymore. And that idea is so foreign to me because And I don't know exactly what they meant by fear. So I can see a way in which that may be true. But, but what's, what's foreign to me is that like every time I embrace fear, I find that there's a new level of fear that exists, that there's a more subtle form of fear that exists. There's like a, it's almost like if fear is the direct path, then to say that fear goes away would kind of say that the path goes away. Right. And what I notice is that in my own system, there's just like a deeper embrace of the fragility or the limitations of life.

Yeah, I think that points to a common misconception around fear is that it's something to be overcome. Yeah. Courage is overcoming the fear. And, you know, one definition of courage is feeling the fear and doing the thing anyway. I think even in that, there's still a little bit of, a little bit of like pushing through. I think more like courage is feeling the fear and then doing what's authentic.

Yeah. It might just be feeling the, feeling the fear and the rest happens. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's like, yeah, fear is such a great signal and it tells us so much about our situation. Like what part of life we're not embracing, what things that we're not asking for that we need. There's so many aspects of fear that it, and there's so many levels of it. And it's beautiful. And there's a way of also defining fear, which creates like the power struggles, like fear is power struggles or fear is anxiety. That are, it's kind of a unique situation because most of the time when those things are happening, people don't know they're in fear. So there's this level of fear that's happening in the world that people don't actually, they can't, they can't see it. They can't see that they're in the fear when they're acting in those ways. Like, anytime, the way I see it, anytime anybody's in a power struggle, they're scared. Right, yeah. They're scared that their identity is going to be destroyed.

How do we practice, come into a practice of feeling and welcoming our fear and letting it move through us in a way that allows us to accept all the consequences to our identity or to our physical self or to those that we love in order to engage with the world more fully and more authentically?

Yeah, well, the first thing is to see that when you resist fear, it doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't stop. It just kind of leaks out sideways. It like just doesn't come out of the front of the toothpaste tube. It comes out of the side. So that's one thing is that like resistance doesn't work. You know, that, that which we resist persists is a kind of common thing. So that's one way to, you know, keep on trying to resist it. See what happens. See, see how that works for you. See how big of a shield you have to put up between you and life to be able to resist fear.

I noticed that what you just said there was not, don't resist it, because that's another form of resistance, but— Correct. Feel it. That's right. Feel what it's like to resist it. See, feel where it gets you, and then let your system update and just determine, experiment with new ways to relate to it.

Yeah, that's right. Also loving fear, finding out the wisdom of fear, learning how to listen to it, and then seeing how much wisdom brilliance it has, and then allowing yourself to feel it is a natural thing once you see how cool it is and how much it informs you and how much freedom it— Oh my God, I'm scared. That means my decision-making sucks right now. So I can feel my fear and then my decision-making can be great. Holy crap, right? Like what freedom? Oh my gosh, I'm in fear right now. That tells me that I have some needs that aren't being met. Great, like, wow, why would you not wanna have that signal? That'd be like saying, oh, you know, like, fuck this speedometer on my dashboard. Fuck that. I don't want that speedometer there. Like, it becomes completely nonsensical when you see it as that. And then finally, when you embrace the fear deeply and you get that flow state or you get that freedom, not just in the long term, but in the short term, well then you're just like, I can't wait to find it. I mean, then you do things like, And then put a 1-inch rope across 500-foot cliff and go walk in there. Then you're like, yeah, great. I can't wait. So if you have that felt experience of that, of that full embrace of the fear, then you feel the freedom of it and you're like, this is wonderful. And just to be, and there's somebody somewhere right now who's saying like, wait, if I, If I embrace the fear, then I'm inviting danger. You know, like, I'm not saying go create fear. I'm just saying, and I'm not saying that like, don't listen to fear. I'm saying listen to it. And if the more you feel it, the better you can react to it, the better the natural reaction will be to the fear.

Yeah. Like that moment, that moment when you're with a colleague and you have a piece of difficult feedback and you feel that fear, you feel that constriction. Looking for that, looking for where in my life am I feeling fear right now? Because those are the, those are the doorways to get out of whatever pattern I'm in and into some beyond that I have no idea where it's going to take me. And if I feel like I want to expand in my life, then wherever I feel some subtle or, or deeper fear, those are exactly where I need to go.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. The places we don't go are the places we're scared. Or we don't know exists. Most of the things that we don't understand, we fear. Approaching your fear allows us to go places and understand things that we wouldn't otherwise. Yeah.

So how do you relate this to helplessness, which we've talked about helplessness before, and it could even be sort of its own feeling, but it also seems like it might just be describable as the state of allowing fear to move through.

One thing I wanna say before that is that In the Connection Course, we do the VIEW thing, which is vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder. To some degree, that also is a really neat response to fear, meaning that it's really hard. I have an experiment up on the website, I think, where we talk about how being in wonder is impossible if you're in fear, right? So in any kind of deep sense of fear. And so it's really interesting to feel like And one way that you could say, what is fear? And I would say it's when you're not in view. It's another way to describe fear. And so how to approach it, I would say approach fear in view. Oh, how does this really making me feel? What am I really scared of? That would be the vulnerability. What is the impartiality is not trying to get out of it. It's like, okay, well, how long does it wanna be here? What does it wanna tell me? Empathy is like being with it, not trying to avoid it. It. And wonder is like, oh, what is this all about? Like, so to me, like, you can approach the internal states that you resist the same way that you can— just like difficult conversations in the world, you can approach with view. It's the same way. So that's another one. As far as the question that you had before on helplessness, I would say helplessness is— I would say maybe the deepest form of fear. That's what I would say. Like, It is when you feel like there is absolutely nothing that can be done, that you are without, you know, it's the thing that when we're doing trauma work with people, they go into during rapes or during car accidents or with a parent who just couldn't, wouldn't love them no matter what they did. Like it is a feeling of helplessness and it is incredibly freeing emotion to feel. It's incredibly freeing. Because just like all the emotions, when we feel sad, we actually come out with more joy. If we feel helplessness, we come out feeling so much more potent, so much more viable, so much more empowered, right? And so feeling that helplessness is like an amazing thing. And it's usually the deepest of journeys, right? And it's weird. It's like there's this weird little nuance that happens when people feel fear or helplessness is that they're scared and therefore they conflate being scared to feel the feeling with the feeling itself. Like, oh my God, I'm scared and I'm feeling the feeling, so therefore I must be scared of feeling the feeling. And so it's like one of the more challenging feelings for people to experience is what I've seen. But it's one of the most useful experiences to really allow yourself to go into.

So a lot of what we've just talked about has been ways to intellectually recognize if you're feeling fear and then to kind of go into feeling it and recognize emotionally if you're sensing the fear and letting it move through. And I'm curious also if there's a purely somatic or a visceral way to let fear process. And a pointer to this is that sometimes it— like there are practices that they use with veterans with PTSD where you just lay down on a bed and you just start letting your limbs shake a little bit. And that's a way to burn off fear. What's the visceral process of feeling and burning off fear? And what are some tools that can help somebody get into that, that they could further explore?

What's really good is to have a place with a whole bunch of people who love you and can support you in the process. So part of fear often is that I'm alone in it. And so to see that you're not alone in it is incredibly useful. Yes, shaking your body, like just allowing your body to shake is an amazing thing, or even Putting your body into a position where it shakes is also— can be very useful. You can go into memories that created a lot of fear and relive the physical experience of it. There's certain breathwork that opens up fear that can be done. That's another one, too hard to explain right now. There's also— there's some benefit to this as well, which is just literally allowing the fear in your body without reacting to it, just like observing the fear. I think there's some— as long as you don't do that to create separation, you do it to create intimacy with the fear, is another incredibly useful tool. So all of those can be really useful. I like— I will lay down and shake, and during helplessness, I will make the sounds of helplessness, which is screaming and/or really tight feelings like that, tight emotion, you know, or not being able to say anything sometimes is helplessness. It's like you feel stuck in it. And so, yeah, all of that is really, really useful.

Yeah. In case this sounds crazy to anybody listening, it does. It's a natural reaction when, when you see an animal who goes into freeze because there's a predator around, before they get up and move again, they will get up and shake. And that literally releases and burns off some of the chemicals in the the energy that was stored in those muscles to keep them frozen, or whichever form of fight-flight you might have been in.

It's so obvious even in dogs. Like, if you just look at dogs, like, they shake all the time. And we think like, oh, there's this thing called fear, and this is— now we have to shake, and like, we're going to shake 2 times a week. And like, you watch a dog, they shake like 20 times a day, 30 times a day easily. Not for a long period of time, but they shake. And, and dogs that are more anxious shake more. They, they— and they, you know, they put out their legs and then they like start with their head and then their whole body shakes. It releases their muscles. It's amazing to watch. All, all animals do this. And the fear does compile like that every day.

Yeah, it'll just stack up until it moves, uh, and it'll either show up in a deep subconscious way that makes you recreate the thing, and then you feel it all at once when the thing you're afraid of happens. Or you can just let it through a little bit a day, or in real time, as close to real time as you can get to. That's right. Yeah. And so something I want to touch on before we close, for anybody who's just listening to this and wants to experiment with feeling their fear, what's a good way to notice the difference between feeling fear and letting it move through, and then getting into a story about it that just deepens it? 'Cause I'm imagining somebody who might be alone, feel alone in it, and then go off alone and start shaking and then reify the story that they are alone and that nobody loves them and find more truth in it than letting the fear just process. What advice do you have for that?

So that would be a good episode on anxiety because like I'd like to do an episode on the power, I'd like to do an episode on the anxiety because what you're describing is someone who's not feeling the fear. So maybe they shake, but they're not actually allowing it. And so that story, this is the part that we've talked about. The one thing is you process your fear. The other thing is your sense of self becomes so expansive or so the veil is seen through that there's nothing like you're the part of you that can be annihilated is like, I know I can't be annihilated, the part of me that's actually me, and all the other parts, they're not me. So what is there to protect? You know, I ask this question to people all the time where they're like defending themselves, and I'm like, what are you actually defending? And nobody can really answer that question. It's this idea of self. And so to me, I think it's really spending time there And the way you spend time there is to see what stories you're telling yourself. Nobody loves me is a story, and that's your definition. Your definition is, I am the kind of person that nobody loves. I am the kind of person who needs to be liked. I'm the kind of person who has money. These stories of ourselves are the things that we're defending. And so to some degree, that might be necessary to start the fear process, but if you're in the story through the fear process, then it's not moving.

I think one of the ways to tell if you're moving through the fear is that your stories will be dissolved by it. And you might be in a new story, a larger story, a different story. But the— any— and this works for pretty much any emotion. If there's a story and an emotion moves through it, it will change the story if you're moving it. That's right.

Or soften it. That's right. The story will change. There will be relief, and there eventually will be long-term relief if you if you're moving it. If you're not moving it, if you're indulging it, if you're defining yourself, I don't even like to use the word indulge. If you're defining yourself by that story, then the story and the emotion, and therefore it's not moving, the story will remain the same. There won't be a sense of short-term and definitely no long-term relief. And you'll still feel that stuck relationship with the feeling, meaning you won't be like, I can't wait to feel fear again. You're like, I'm going to feel this fear to get rid of it. If you're feeling the fear to get rid of it, then it's not going to work. So that's— those are the ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Beautiful. Cool. This has been an awesome episode. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, me too. Me too. Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and rate us in your podcast app. We'd love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions or comments. You can reach out to us join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.