Penny Zenker | What is your Relationship with Fear?

Well, hello everybody and welcome to Fearless. Uh, today we've got an amazing guest, uh, known internationally as the Focusologist, Penny Zenker. Penny's been, uh, given keynotes worldwide for many years now. She's an expert in stress management and, of course, focus, you know, creating clear focus. And without clear focus, how is a team to be aligned? How is an individual to be aligned? You'd have heard me in the past talk about life is like going through a series of paths where if you get off Track. It is like a GPS system that is going to reroute you. It is going to help you reset. She will talk about reset. But in order to get where you want to go, you have to know where you want to go. Otherwise, you are going to be going around in circles. So, focus is absolutely essential. We both see it as business consultants working with corporations large and small where there is misalignment. at the very top. Why is there misalignment? Because there is no clear focus or other things get in the way like ego and fear. We are going to talk about fear and your relationship with fear. Penny has 2 award-winning books out and a TEDx talk where she has got over 1 million views. Her first book, The Productivity Zone, we will talk a little bit about productivity and then the second one here, The Reset Mindset. which is also a Fuel course. So, we encourage you to go to Fuel, myfuel.io, where there are a panel of amazing instructors. And now many of us have AI instructors. I call them twins, where you can actually interact with us 24/7, asking us questions, getting coaching, getting some guidance and direction. And there is a 7-day free trial. We urge you to go. As a matter of fact, I was chatting last night with Penny's AI bot, some people call it, or AI twin, AI instructor, asking some pretty deep questions about life, about stress, about reset, about things like that, and got brilliant advice. So I've had conversations with my own AI twin, and it's remarkable because in my case, and Penny's too, but in my case, I've got 38 years of professional consulting experience. I've started my company 38 years ago next week, actually.

Wow.

And it's downloaded with hundreds of articles I've written, hundreds of workshops, talks, interviews, things like that. Over 400 video clips. The bot is loaded with authentic work. It's not going to the internet to give you answers. It's coming from Penny. It's coming from me based on our own experience. And it's got perfect recall. I mean, there's things I wrote 30 years ago that I I don't even remember writing, actually. And so, but the bot does. So it's kind of fun to do that. So we're going to talk today about your relationship with fear and how do you handle things when it's paralyzing almost? And we're going to talk a lot about energy. So with that, Penny, welcome to Fearless. You are the perfect guest for a show like this.

Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited. Not fearful, but excited.

That's right. You talk a lot about energy, and you quote Einstein, energy— everything is energy. And you like to reverse that to energy is everything. And I, uh, I'm a big believer. In fact, I quote Einstein frequently as well. And one of the things to add to that quote, he said, everything is energy. Match the frequency of that which you desire. the reality you want, and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics. That's Albert Einstein.

Yeah.

So that's powerful stuff because if our mind is thinking about something that could go wrong, it's a projection, right? Something could go wrong. It's going to trigger fear and it's going to trigger our hormones and our body and our fight or flight and the amygdala and the cortisol, things like that. And then all of a sudden we're going to think, It is right to be afraid. Our body is telling us you should be afraid. You like to talk about reset where you actually, I don't know, you comment on it. What do you do in a reset moment?

Well, a reset moment, let's look at when that fear comes up or any emotion, anger, sadness, hurt, you know, guilt, shame. When those emotions come up for us, those are signals. Right. It's a signal to reset, to ask yourself, what is this? Right? A reset moment, what I call a reset moment, helps us to take back control so that we are more intentional about the next action. What I like to do, you're probably also familiar with Viktor Frankl. And he talks about the space in between stimulus and response. So, I like to call that reset moment the space between stimulus and response. And When we give ourselves that moment, then we're being able to take back control emotionally, to reduce the intensity so that we can activate the logical side of our brain that helps us to, you know, connect with what our greatest, um, our best next step is and to reconnect to the bigger picture. And so that reset moment just gives us that That purposeful pause. And I don't like the word pause because it's really an active pause. Because we're shifting, we're reframing, we're gaining insight in that moment so we can take, you know, before we take action. So it's kind of an active pause. And that's how I refer to it.

Yeah, I love that. And, you know, we've talked about this before, what you call the reset that moment, or I call minding the gap. And, you know, we talked earlier about, you know, you spent time in London, and I know a lot of time in Switzerland too. But, you know, in London, you hear mind the gap a lot because every time you get off the train or the subway, there's a, you know, there's watch your step, basically. But minding the gap, you know, I talk about minding the mind. And if fear shows up, all right, don't resist it. Because it's going to grow stronger. There's a great Zen teaching that I use a lot. It's let it in the front door and let it out the back door, but don't invite it for tea. So it's a wonderful way to think about any emotion, any feeling that's not in your best interest. You know, you do a lot around stress. Okay, well, instead of resisting it, which makes it stronger, it's like locking that front door and it's, you know—

Absolutely.

Sooner or later, the wolf's going to blow the house down. No, no, just, and you know, I'll just, let's have a conversation with it because the fear, like you say, is a signal. And maybe it's just telling us that you need to be cautious here, John. And that's why I use a tool, FMEA, Failure Mode Effect Analysis, in every event I do. So before we make a change, we say, what could go wrong? What could fail? And what could we do about it to make sure it doesn't go wrong? It's a classic engineering tool, right? FMEA. And I also do an FMEA with the team on what if we don't make the What's the risk of not making the change? And guess what? Most of the time, not making the change is more scary, so to speak, in terms of staying alive as a business or doing well as a leader or performer, athlete, whatever. You've got to continue to ride that wave of change. Learn from the signals. Don't be foolish. Don't be careless. But mind that gap, that reset moment. And so how do you get people in your space? How do you get leaders when it's a short timeline? It's, it's, we got to make a decision. This is, we don't have time to just, you know, put it into the next quarter. What's your strategy and how do you help, help teams pull together and be decisive and get through the fear?

Well, you know, it does come back to the moment, but perhaps it's best expressed in a story, right? When I was caught up in some fear and how I recognized it and how I helped myself get out of it. So, I had this situation with a team member of mine that I had my own IT business and I built it from a small business just myself to a multimillion-dollar business. And as the team grew bigger, I had less visibility, less direct contact with people, and you have more policies and ways that people can support following the standards. And of course, in technology, when you make a change to software, it has to be tested before you put it into production. So there are certain protocols for that. And we had a team member that didn't follow the protocols for testing and immediately put it into active, live at the customer, and their systems went down. For a period of time. And, you know, it's not like that engineer has direct contact with the customer. I'm taking the heat for that. That customer comes to me, wants to know what I'm going to do. And, you know, it was a lot of time, money, and energy to turn around the situation. And that customer was expecting me to fire that engineer, right? How can you allow somebody like that to continue to work on my team? And I had fear that if I didn't fire that employee, that that client would leave us. And that was one of our biggest clients. And in that moment, right, in that high-pressure moment, I had to really think about— it reminded me of something that my mentor had shared with me, a similar type of situation. And they said, why would I fire somebody when I spent so much money Training them, and I was like, "What? I didn't understand." So they said, "Yeah, you know that the fact that they made a mistake, they're going to learn way more from this mistake, and they will never do that again because of the pressure and the you know and and everybody else who saw what the costs and consequences of that were. We just had a huge training moment. So you know, I remembered that in that moment that okay, what? So I took that reset moment again before I. Take action, I allowed myself to rethink what is the purpose. Am I being driven by fear here or am I really looking at what's the big picture? So it's a question that I often ask myself when I'm caught in a situation is what's the big picture? To step back in my reset practice from my own experiences, I have a 3-step practice and it's step back, get perspective, and realign. And that can happen like that. You can use a framework to do that. You can use simple questions. So, in this case, it was just like, okay, what's the big picture? And I could find out, well, why did they skip it? That was a question that I had to ask. Okay, well, what happened that made this person skip that protocol? Maybe they were afraid that they were going to miss a deadline, right? Because fear often has us do things, take shortcuts, and make short-term decisions. So, you know, what was happening there? And, and so just taking that moment to think about what the big picture was in that intense— because I'm not sure if you said it, but, you know, you mentioned fight or flight, right? When the pressure is high and our emotions are high, our intellect is low, right? That's what brain science tells us. So that reset moment is so critical. To ask that question, to step back, get perspective so that you can make better decisions in those moments. So that's, that sort of just has reinforced itself over and over in every business situation. And whenever I acted without taking that step back, there was usually a bigger painful lesson that I learned as a result. So I keep coming back to that practice.

Yeah, and you know, sometimes people when they feel rushed, they think for some reason, again, this is just a thought, maybe it is subconscious and it is habitual, which is most of our thinking. They think that they have to speed up when in fact it is much wiser to actually slow down for a minute. Think about sports. I was a very competitive athlete and in simple terms, we call them timeouts. You know, that reset moment where we need to just step back, to use your words.

Exactly.

Maybe refocus, pull together, and then carry on, so to speak. So it's critical in events like sports. And, you know, and if—

I use that analogy as well. I mean, oh, sorry, didn't mean to interrupt you. I use that analogy as well. If you think about it in sports, right, there's so many different reset moments. There's those timeouts, but there's also the huddle, right? There's halftime. There's calling an audible, right? That's a reset moment. So we can learn a lot from sports as well in that we can dig so much deeper into what that reset moment can do and when it can be, and not just as a reactive practice, but also as a proactive practice.

Absolutely. You mentioned audible. I was a competitive quarterback growing up, up through college. You know, that's— by the way, I use this as a metaphor for life is that, you know, when a quarterback walks up to the line of scrimmage, you've got goals, you have a vision, you have a game plan, you have a strategy, you've practiced all week, you've studied the competition, but guess what? You have no idea what's going to happen when that ball is snapped. So you might have to scramble, you might have to audible when you get up to that line and go, whoop, we weren't looking, we weren't expecting this. And so it's real-time change. And I use the metaphor because when people get up in the morning and they face a day of uncertainty, How do they approach the line of scrimmage? Is it with fear and anxiety and doubt? Because to quote Einstein again, whatever it is you're feeling vibrationally, energetically, you're asking for more of. So if I approach life with fear, I'm going to attract more things to be afraid of. So once the shift happens and I realize, you know, there's an alternative to fear— I'll call it faith. Let me ask you this. You give keynotes all over the place. You know, you're up in front, you know, on TEDx, you got a million-plus views. Uh, were you scared when you get— what, are you scared when you get up on stage to give a talk?

Well, I have a couple answers for that. First, yes, every single time. So, uh, every single time I have fear that comes up, you know, because I want to do my best. I want to serve this audience. And, you know, I don't want to disappoint in any way, not any single people. Like, I know they say don't worry about— there's always one person that might not connect with you or whatever, but I care about that one person. So, so yes. And what's interesting about me becoming a keynote speaker is that not very long ago— so I had a lot of anxiety, even though I'm an A personality, and I'd love to interact and connect with people in large groups. If I had to ask a question, my heart would be beating outside of my chest to stand up and ask a question in a room. But I'm naturally curious, so I want to dig deeper. I want to ask those questions. So I, I do it anyway, right? Feel the fear and do it anyway in those kinds of situations. And, and I guess the same thing happened for speaking is, is that I decided that I wanted to make a bigger impact. I wanted to reach more people, especially after I wrote my book, my first book, The Productivity Zone, and I started to do more speaking. And I guess the thing is, is that the desire to make an impact was greater than the fear. So it allowed me to see it as a signal and use it, you know, shift that energy to drive me forward. And then, and then there's a point on stage where as soon as I say my first 2 sentences or whatever it is, You know, all of that fear goes away.

And yeah, I hear that. Yeah, I hear that from speakers all the time. After you get the first couple of lines out, you just get into what I like to call flow. But, you know, I've had on this show already this year Jim Cathcart, Hall of Fame speaker Brian Byro, Ross Bernstein, some pretty, pretty significant speakers. And You know, I remember Jim Cathcart saying, uh, I don't, I don't, I'm not scared at all when I get up there. And the reason I asked that question is because according to some research, public speaking is like the second scariest thing in the, you know, to human beings after death.

I know.

So it's like you're really afraid to get up in front of people. And I like to ask, what thoughts are you thinking that trigger that hormonal response, that, you know, that nervousness? What thoughts? Because if you can get down to that Well, I'm thinking I might not get 100% of the people to value what it is I'm saying. It's that mindset. I flip that over sometimes as I'm letting fear go through and not inviting it for tea. And it's that— there's an old story, I don't know it in detail, about some little person, a little girl or something, throwing a starfish into the ocean. There's starfish all over the beach. And somebody says, you know—

Right.

You really think you're going to make a difference? And she said, I made a difference for that one. So it's kind of like when I approach a talk or something like that, if there's one person that can walk out of there with a massive nugget who can impact hundreds or thousands of other people, okay, that's a big win. And I remember one of my first workshops—

That's a healthy way to think.

Yeah. And I had a small room of people. There wasn't a big room of people. But, you know, and I put a lot of money into this workshop. This is before there were social media and internet and YouTube and Google. All of that was gone. You actually printed brochures, put them in the mail, and people would show up to your workshop. And it was a money loser. My very first one was, you know, I put a lot of money in and I didn't get enough people there to to break even, let's call it. But there were 2 people in that workshop. One worked for a bank, head of human resources for a bank, and the other one was the plant manager for a manufacturing company. 2 people. I mean, there were others, but both of them came up to me afterwards and they said, would you teach this to our executive team? And the bank offered me a loan if I needed it. So I trained the executive team for the bank and then many others. I trained the management for this manufacturing company that went on to become Michigan Manufacturer of the Year like 3 or 4 years in a row. So that it made a difference to that starfish, if you will. And, uh, and that helped me because I was terrified initially to get up in front of people and speak. I, I was like, I don't want to make a fool out of myself or say something stupid. But that's the mind projecting something's going to go wrong, right? And once I learned how to—

It also—

To use your words.

Yeah. Also, it, it, um, it, uh, it triggered something in me. So as a child, right, I, I had some sources that I, I felt judged. And so it's kind of a, um, a sore point for me is I don't like to be judged. I don't like to judge other people, um, for that reason, because I don't like to be judged. Uh, you know, whether I was compared with my brothers and I wasn't as smart as they were, you know, on paper according to grades and everything. But at that time, that was made a big deal. And, you know, those, those little things. And so I— for me, that's what it brought up, is that, you know, you're in front of this audience and I don't want to be judged, right? That's why that one person mattered, because I don't want to be— I don't want to be judged. But like you said, you know, you can go into it just saying, I'm here to make a difference, and it'll hit for those people it's meant to. I also have a little thing where they don't know, they don't have the book, they don't know what you were going to say. So if you forgot something that you think was important, they didn't know that you forgot it. So, you know, there's a lot of little things that just help you to let it go. And, and that's, you know, that's really helpful for me. And it's made all the difference is those, those little tweaks, not, not to listen to that little voice. Yeah.

And I was advised some time ago to, to think about this. And this really blows people's minds, but you can't ever get it wrong and you can't ever get it done. What do you mean by that? What do you mean I can't get it wrong? What if I say something really stupid? Well, you're going to learn from that. You won't repeat it. It's like your example with your IT company. And, you know, this person made a big mistake, so to speak. But imagine the learning that came from that. Reminds me of the Tom Watson story way back at IBM. It was something like somebody made a $100 million mistake. It was huge. And everybody expected him to fire the guy. And he said, I just made a $100 million investment in my employee. I'm not firing him. And it was that—

Oh, I hadn't heard of that story. Okay. That's kind of like what I had mentioned earlier.

Yeah. Exactly. It reminded me of that. So wait a second. If I can't get it wrong, and I never get it done, then relax, basically. You know, relax. And, uh, so I, I think about, well, like, but yeah, but what if I, what if I really do something foolish? And the answer is, as long as you have positive intention— positive intention is what it's all about— if you have positive intention, you're going to self-correct. It's that GPS system, so to speak, just saying, you know, John, that, that wasn't right. You know, how are you going to— what are you going to do from here? You can't undo it. You can't undo the past. And if you, if you carry any guilt or regret or grief, those are some of the lowest frequency energies on the map of consciousness, which I've talked about. So misery loves company. Grief loves grief. Guilt brings more guilt. Shame brings more shame. So people in that frequency— are just repeating the past over and over and over again. You mentioned about your childhood. This I find really interesting research from Dr. Bruce Lipton, but that most of our subconscious programming happens by the age of 6, and our subconscious mind runs over 95% of our life. So we've got programs we're running on that we don't even know we have, you know, right?

So, and things are triggering it all the time, right?

Oh, you know it. People are triggering it. Jobs are— AI is triggering it right now. People are like, I mean, AI is going to take over the world. It's going to take over my job. And I, you know, what am I going to do? Well, guess what? When you have that vibrational, uh, essence, that thinking that's triggering fear and anxiety, what you're thinking is triggering, you know, a hormonal response, a feeling, a vibration. Um, it takes great mindfulness And reset, right? To essentially challenge that program. Let it in the front door, challenge it, have a conversation with it, and then just say, it's time to leave. I've got a job to do. That's how I am typically. Yeah. Just, you know, fear, I hear you. Just go over there.

Yeah. Can I share another quick story? It relates to what you were talking about. A few, a few minutes ago about, you know, uh, ways to— I, I forget the exact, uh, trigger sentence that you used, but, um, it reminded me of this story. So when I was, uh, I was getting a divorce and my kids were very young, and it was very difficult for me. It wasn't my choice at the time. My kids were 1 and 3, so I was like, not only was I Upset for me, but I was really mostly upset for my kids. What was this going to mean for my kids? And I'm an extremely loyal person, so it kind of challenged my own identity. You know, which was more important—the loyalty or my self-respect—in terms of the situation. You know, you don't want to stay in a relationship that that the other person doesn't want to be in. But I spoke to a child psychologist, and I spoke to a bunch because I was really concerned what this. you know, what's the right thing to do? How do I handle this in the best way for them? And I remember one of them said to me something that, you know, sometimes it's, it's a short statement or a mantra or something. They said, listen, they said, you are guaranteed by the parent-child relationship to screw up your kids, so just do as little damage as possible. And I have to tell you that You know, it was, it was freeing in a way, because like you said, it just kind of like let you let it go, right? Um, is it— let me get on with it and go, okay, I'm, I'm guaranteed to, you know, that's just the psychology of the relationship. Do the best you can. Go in with your best intention and own it 100% that you are committed to, to, uh, put them first.

Yeah.

And that's what I did. And, and I can say that I, every time I made the best decision I could with the circumstances and knowledge that I had and utilizing this practice of resetting to check in, is this in their highest and best good? And that's made all the difference.

Oh, absolutely. In fact, it's one of the spiritual laws, you know, the universal laws is intention. You know, there's karma, there's dharma. You know, there's attraction and allowance, laws like that. But intention is absolutely critical because when you have positive intention and you know where you're trying to make things better, not just for yourself but for the world, everything just pulls together. It's essential that you have that positive intention. So maybe that's one of the biggest takeaways for our audience today is just stop and examine, take a reset moment and examine your intentions, whether you're going through a divorce. I've been through 2, Penny. By the way, when I was talking to your AI, a twin last night. I have a friend going through a divorce, and I just, I thought, I wonder what Penny would say about this situation.

Hmm.

And your, your, your answer was, it was awesome. And I didn't know your history about whether you'd been divorced or not, but you, you knew in a very logical, articulate way some positive things to say. So I found that really interesting. And then I asked you a bunch of questions about, you know, my leadership team's misaligned, and I, you know, I'm not sure how to pull them together, and what should I do? And you gave some wonderful Wonderful advice that way too. So, uh, well, we're about out of time, uh, but I'm going to encourage everybody to, uh, a couple of things. One is if you got value out of this, uh, as I hope you did— I did, um, listening to somebody as experienced and amazing as Penny— um, like it and share it, uh, on YouTube and invite others to come and join us on Fridays. I got a great guest next week, Brynn Tillman. She's also a Fuel instructor. There she is with an AI twin, as she likes to call it. Wonderful, wonderful voice. In fact, I hire Brynn to help me with my work. She's fantastic. On Monday, I am going to be leading Mindset Matters, another Fuel podcast, and the topic is the 8 Disciplines of Balanced Leadership. I've been teaching the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator for development, career counseling, team building, things like that. And the 8 Disciplines about balance, like balancing your right and your left hand. You know, one dominates just like your personality and these 8 disciplines, but you're naturally 4 out of the 8. So great leadership is about finding the right balance between all 8. Because some people label themselves, well, I'm just extroverted. I can't help it. And that's not a wise thing to do as a leader, you know. So, uh, Penny, did you want to comment on that?

No, I have to drop off. I'm so sorry, our time is, uh, is, is up, and I have— as we all do, right? We're off to the next thing. So thank you so much for having me, and thank you everybody for listening.

You're welcome, Penny. Reach Penny through her website, reach out to FUEL, and with that