Eliminate Subconscious Saboteurs

Hello and welcome to the show. I am your host, Nancy Bos. So first, a big announcement, and that is that I am changing the name of this show. This will be one of the last times that you will see this show called EverySing with the EverySing logo. Because this show has changed to be so much more than just about why we sing and how we sing. It's actually about empowering your voice. And so yeah, that's the new title for this podcast, is Empower Your Voice. So welcome to Empower Your Voice, and I am your host Nancy Bos, and I am so glad that you're here. Thank you. So let's start with Why? Why are we here? Why are you listening to this podcast? You're listening to this podcast to learn how your voice can be impacted by things that you don't even realize are impacting it, like your subconscious. You're here to reach a goal that you haven't been able to reach, to empower your voice or to help somebody else empower theirs. And you're here to get the knowledge you need to overcome or solve even a problem that's holding you back. So today what I'm going to be talking about with you is subconscious saboteurs. The things that I'm going to talk about in this episode build on everything in the last 12 episodes about how these subconscious saboteurs, these personal narratives, these stories that we believe about ourselves show up in our voices beyond our control, or so we think. Let's get started with my story. If you haven't listened to it in the past, I'll just tell you a short version now. You can go back and listen to one of the previous episodes where I talk about my story, how I ended up with debilitating performance anxiety. So this resulted in me, in the short story, changing my major away from vocal performance to arts administration. And that changed the course of my life for 15 years. I was not a nervous performer as a kid. I was encouraged to share my gifts of singing, piano, and flute. And if you want to know more about that, go listen to my TED Talk. Um, go to NancyBos.me. It's right on the front page. There were little seeds that were planted when I was a kid that made me realize that I might not always get love and support for my music making, like when my schoolmate Susan told me that I sounded weird. And those moments made me realize that singing meant more. There was, I don't know, more on the line than just sound flowing out of my mouth, than just emotion pouring forth from me. These little stories made me realize that other people's judgment was part of the formula of putting my voice out there, and that maybe there was a right and a wrong way to do it. But that's something that has to be learned. The real defining moment where this switched from a heightened state of readiness known as excitement to nervousness was at a piano competition when I was 10 or 11. And when my hands were sweaty and I rubbed them together, an adult standing near me said, "Oh my dear, you must be nervous." I had not really put it together that sweaty hands and elevated heart rate was this negative thing called nervousness. I would've just probably called it sweaty hands and an elevated heart rate, or maybe excitement. There were other traumas that really piled on top of this, and these influences from my community were huge. But there were other influences as well. There was my parents. There were issues that came up with my parents around judgment or other shocking type of incidents around singing. Mostly they were supportive, but a few things that they did started to plant these seeds of fear and doubt. And then there was the understanding from my ancestry that life is about hard work, using your brain. The person who's seeking attention for themselves, they are simply wrong. They need to seek the glory in their hard work and their hands. Kind of a Methodist way of doing things. I was raised as a Lutheran. And especially the arts, just icing on the cake, not something that we're meant to do for life. And all this added up to me having such debilitating performance anxiety as vocal performance major that I couldn't sing in the weekly small group classes without my heart racing and my breath being bound up and my throat getting tight and my knees shaking. And these were all symptoms of how my subconscious sabotaged my performance in a negative way. Because when I was singing, I didn't know any of this. I just knew that I was freaked out. When it was time for me to perform singing or flute or piano, I didn't know why my hands were sweaty, my heart was racing, my breath was shallow, my knees were shaking, my gut was maybe misbehaving, and I just wanted to go home and go to bed, just avoid the whole thing. I knew this was what was happening to me, but I didn't know why. I knew that this could be lumped together in a general state of fear, but I didn't know why I had that fear. The problem that causes fear is what we need to seek out and destroy— the core, the truth. Treating the symptoms of fear doesn't work. I'm going to give you an example of something completely unrelated. This is an example of a hole that I had in my wall. Now, I put the hole in my wall because I was trying to figure out if I could put a doorway in this one particular spot, a doorway that would help me get into my office here without disturbing people in the hallway outside. In other words, a secret door in the closet. I wanted this. So a friend came over with the tools that I needed. We cut a hole in the wall And sure enough, there's a ventilation pipe in that wall. I can't put in my secret door. Not gonna happen. So, okay, fine. But you know what? I've now got a hole in my wall. This is probably not okay. And on top of that, this hole is letting cold air in because it seems to be directly just open to the crawl space under the house, and it's wintertime. So I've got this hole in my wall that I need to fix. All right, I've got a problem. The core of the problem is the hole in my wall. So how does that relate to what we're talking about? I've got a problem of fear. The core of my problem is the personal stories that were causing that fear, these little traumas from my background that were sneaking up in my subconscious. Hole in the wall, stories in my background. What do I do about the hole in the wall? The next thing that I do is I start watching YouTube videos about how to repair the wall. I'm gathering my knowledge. That was step 2. First is recognizing it and realizing that the hole is not going to go away unless I do something to fix it. Second is learning how to fix it. Third step, going to Lowe's and buying a hardware store and going and buying what I need to, to patch the wall. Okay, great. Now I have the tools that I need. Fourth step is actually doing the work. I'm embarrassed to say I have not done this yet. This will be happening probably tomorrow. So those are the 4 steps: realizing there's a problem, researching how to fix it, getting what you need to fix it. And in the case of the performance anxiety or the fear or whatever it is that's holding you back, realizing that you've got this problem— fear is not the problem, fear is a symptom. You have to get to the problem. Then learning how to fix it. Getting what you need in order to fix it, which might be coming to one of my small group courses. It might be going to a therapist or a hypnotist or doing the work on your own. And then the fourth thing is to rebuild the wall even better than it was before, because I'm an artist, I want to make it look better. And in the case of the fear and the performance anxiety, you can actually empower those memories to give you strength moving forward. You can make this negative memory that's been freaking you out into something that actually serves you even better in the future. Now, maybe that's hard to understand right now, and I also understand that it might sound like I'm saying that if you believe in yourself, everything's going to be fine. Just believe in yourself. It's not that easy. We know it's not that easy, but there is a formula here, and that formula is that the fear plus the excitement of the event— those two things together cause nervousness or anxiety. We've got the trauma, the fear, and then we've got the excitement that I've got this trained voice that people has told me is beautiful, and, and I've got music that I want to share I've got a message that I'm excited to put out. I've got the fear, I've got the excitement. Those two friction working against each other create this incredible fighting energy that comes out as stage fright or performance anxiety. It shows up in the physical symptoms in our body. Now, if either of those two pieces is missing from the formula, then there's no nervousness or worry. For instance, If I were to entertain the idea of jumping into a frozen lake at New Year's, number one, I would be scared that it would suck. I mean, this is not going to be fun, and I'm not going to be excited because I don't actually think I'm going to be a better person by jumping into a frozen lake on New Year's. Okay, no problem. I am not nervous about this. There's no anxiety because it's not going to happen. On the other hand, pretend that I'm going to jump out of an airplane with a parachute, which I actually really want to do. I know that jumping out of an airplane with a parachute is going to empower me. I know that it's going to be an amazing experience seeing the earth from up there, being out in nature. Oh my gosh. And then the, the skill and the finesse to do it well and to land. Very exciting. However, along with that excitement, I have fear for my life. Like, people don't always survive this. So there, there is justified nervous tension. All right, so that's our formula. We've got the cause of fear and we've got the cause of the excitement. They come together and they fight. And the energy that they produce, that conflict in the brain, is what shows up in the physical symptoms of performance anxiety and stage fright. So what can we do? We can take away the fear. We can eliminate the fear. And if we can turn that fear into excitement, all the better. That just enhances everything. So if you are scared of rejection or negative judgment, if you're scared of breaking some unwritten rule of don't seek glory for yourself, if you're scared of potential damage to your status, to your ego, if you're scared of making a fool of yourself, or you're scared of what people will think, if you're scared that you're not good enough— those are things that are symptoms of whatever caused them. You were not born with those feelings. Those feelings were instilled in you by someone else, by the culture, by your ancestry, by your community, by your family. Those stories created the fear. So we look at those stories, we look at those stories, and we Look at the fear. We lean into it. We lean into— this is step 1, by the way— we lean into the emotion, the negative emotion. We feel it. We feel that pain and suffering for as long as it takes, maybe a minute, maybe 2 minutes, probably not more than that though. After that, after you've looked into that fear and looked at the pain that it caused, the story, the characters, who was involved. Then it's time to analyze what was involved with them causing that pain. Did they mean to? Was it a misunderstanding in your immature brain? Was it the child in you that wasn't equipped with the executive function required in order to process this in a logical way? But now, now as an adult, you can look look back and go, oh, well, I was a kid, I didn't know better, I didn't understand, so let me forgive me and neutralize this negative emotion. Is it someone who was actually themselves wounded and damaged and had been wounded and damaged by others, and they were just continuing that process with you? If so, perhaps you can even find sympathy for that person, and you might actually find love for that person. In that case, you've enhanced the memory. But your job right now is just to neutralize it. Just understand it from a logical perspective. Pretend you're the therapist looking at this, this, this story with your client and helping them neutralize the emotion. The third step is to try to be grateful for it. And this is the step— well, I should say the second step, the one of neutralizing— that can take time. That can take a half hour, an hour, that could take 3 hours in meditation to neutralize that. It could take you 1 minute depending on your abilities, the size of the story, how deep the damage is. And the third step is to be grateful for that story. It has made a difference in your life. I changed my major from performance to arts administration, and you know what, that was actually a gift. That was actually a gift in many ways that I can be very grateful for. I won't even begin to list all the awesome things that did happen to me during those 15 years that I wasn't singing. And also, perhaps it empowered me now to be more grateful and passionate about my singing and my speaking, because I realized that it hasn't always been available for me, so I need to go for it, right? So that's, that's me finding gratitude for a negative situation. There are gratitude practices you can apply. The one that I recommend is that you inhale and exhale for a minute or two. Every time you inhale and every time you exhale, you say thank you. You say thank you for that event that caused you to have trouble. You say thank you for that event that showed you that somebody else was damaged or wounded or hurting, that you're able to now forgive them in your mature brain. And perhaps for some of my clients, they can't even find gratitude for the person, but they can find gratitude for the knowledge that they will never do this to anyone else. So we've figured out the problem, we've learned how to fix it. We've gone to the hardware store to get the tools that we need. That's what we just provided. And then we go to work. We go to work. We take action to solve the problem. These are the ways to lay the foundation to then build your new training on. Now, this isn't the solution. You won't instantly be completely confident because— and this is where the just believe in yourself is, you know, way too simple. Okay, fine. Now you've disarmed all these fears. Maybe you've found 3, 4, 5, 12 fears that you could go to the source and disarm the source and maybe even make them to a positive. So you've got all these good feelings now, you've got this understanding of what happened, but your body, your heart and your gut and your mind are still trained for the negative response. So it takes time, it takes exposure, It takes doing it over and over, but it takes doing it over and over as the empowered person, as the person who goes, you know what, my knees are shaking. Oh wait, I know why they're shaking because this happened to me and that's bullshit and it isn't part of my life. It isn't part of my future. So, so fine, my knees might shake right now, but I'm not afraid. I'm not freaked out. I just have extra energy and excitement. I'm gonna use it, right? You do that mental trick over and over again until you have a new channel for this. And then it really helps if you have somebody who believes in you and who has the authority to tell you that you're nailing it, you're killing it, this is awesome, great work, keep doing what you're doing. When you have that cheerleader who has your back, that's one of the final pieces in moving forward in your performance anxiety. But that first piece, the thing you have to do to make the fear not the problem, but the fear is a symptom of the problem, and you've got to find the source, the source of that fear, and disarm it. Once you've done that, then all those other good things can happen. So that is the power of reframing your narratives, of telling your story, of disarming your subconscious saboteurs. If you want more of this, you can find— I offer small groups on this. I offer small group courses They run 5 weeks. There's no continuing expectation. It's just a place where you, with a few trusted individuals, dig deep on your own stories and figure out how to reframe them. You're welcome to join me for one of those. Just go to NancyBos.me and look under courses, and you'll see when the next one is available. I, I hope that you do this work. You don't have to do it with me. You can do it with a therapist. You can do it with good friends who understand and are going through the same thing, maybe. You can do it yourself, but, uh, do it because you are a shining light. You have a purpose, you have a reason in this world for showing up and being awesome, and you need to get out of the way. This flawed human that we live in, these stories from our past, they need to be put to work for your greater purpose, for the passion that you can share, for the ways that you can change the world. So please do this work. The upcoming episodes are going to give examples of other people who have done the work and, and how they've done that, what their journey is, so that you can learn from them. And I'm interviewing experts, experts in hypnosis, experts in trauma healing, and other amazing people who can really show you the path to DIY this to some degree. Thank you for joining me today and be well. Bye-bye for now.