178: Stop Trying to Out-Logic Your Fear: The Nervous System Shift Every Leader Needs

urgent, has to happen now, like there's no other way forward, and then

hindsight look back and kind of wondered if it was the correct one, or

maybe you said yes to something because you felt like you should, even

though deep down you knew that it wasn't really aligned with your goals

or with your values.

By the end of today's episode, you will know three signs that your

actions are fear driven, what inspired action and truth and love and value

based action feels like in your body, and how to rebuild trust in yourself

through nervous system science.

Today we're talking about how to discern fear driven actions from those

clarity, a place of somatic intelligence, When fear, urgency, and self

doubt take over, it can create patterns in your life that make it really

difficult for you to trust yourself and make decisions that feel correct in

the long run.

And then we end up in these spiraling bouts of anxiety where we don't

feel like we can trust ourselves with our decisions. We're worried about

what will happen in the future. So we overthink and we worry and we get

concerned and we, Ruminate, become obsessive and compulsive. And

we compare ourselves to other, and we can end up in really

dysregulated, almost oppressive like states.

And we want to give up. However, there are some really clear telltale

signs that you are taking action from fear and therefore causing long

term, I think of it as like pain towards yourself, and there are clear signs

to feel in your body, sensations you can feel to tell you that you're

identifying inspired action.

And we're going to talk about how you can develop this skill to identify

everything. And I'm not over exaggerating when I say that. This is a skill

that you will see happy, successful leaders and entrepreneurs have. And

it is a skill that you can learn.

Unfortunately, it's a skill that we, we kind of are born with, but then we

lose contact with it. And fortunately you can practice it. You can master

it. You can learn it. I learned this skill a lot when I was experiencing a lot

of anxiety and OCD like tendencies. I had complex PTSD and I would

just find myself like overthinking all of my choices.

I was trying to get things perfect. I was trying to make the right decision

or I would like rush, rush to say yes to something because I was scared

of disappointing someone else or not being valuable or missing out on

something. And my body had It had kind of trademarks of these

My period was, painful and I felt on edge a lot of the time. There were so

many moments where I made quote unquote the right choice. You know,

that thing that you do on paper, you're like, Oh yeah, that makes so

much sense. But I could feel like this weird kind of tinge in my belly. And

at the moment, at that moment, I just felt that I was nervous.

I was like, Oh, well, it makes sense to be nervous because the big

decision and the people around me were like, yeah, this is a good

decision. You should do it. And I would speak to them and talk to them

and get their advice. But I couldn't like shake this feeling. In hindsight, I

can see that it was because the decision was I was about to it was

actually about to cause me a lot of pain and my or whatever you want to

call that, knew that it wasn't really the best for me.

But I didn't have the clarity on that feeling, and I certainly didn't have the

conditioning, telling me that I needed to achieve these things that I knew

would be painful. Over time, I, entered into the practice that I will share

with you when I do teach in the academy of understanding where these

decisions make.

And I started to notice patterns where when I would make a decision out

of this one feeling in my body, which I understood was related to fear,

and I'll share those three signs later on, almost 100 percent guaranteed

that that would not turn out well. However, when I made a decision out of

my values or about of another, what I would call inspired action,

everything turned out really well and I would enter in kind of like this flow

state.

Over time, I learned how to do this, but at the beginning I couldn't even

sit with my body for 20 seconds. So no matter where you are at in your

journey, you can learn it too. When we look at the underlying pattern, we

our nervous system. Our nervous system perceives and thinks that there

is some type of threat, whether that be that we are rejected or we're

going to fail, or we're going to be abandoned, or we're going to lose

something important to us.

And it activates a stress response inside of the body. There are many

signs of this, but the three that I tend to look out for that I see are

extremely common, especially in people who are entrepreneurs or

solopreneurs or leaders is urgency, feeling like you must act now or

something bad will happen.

Perfectionism, obsessing over making the right decision or getting the

right decision, particularly to avoid some type of criticism. And over

giving. Saying yes to things because you're worried that somebody will

think that you're selfish or it'll be like, well, what will they say if I do

They're like, what will the people say? These patterns are survival

mechanisms and they're developed in response to that primal part of our

body that wants to keep us accepted and respected by the tribe. Then

they're reinforced by all of our past experiences where we were criticized

and it was really painful.

Or we didn't act quickly enough and therefore we lost something.

Whether that be like, I didn't act quickly enough on the sale and I lost

money. Or I didn't act quickly enough on that thing and I lost the

deadline. Or I lost my boyfriend when I was a kid because somebody

else asked him out or something like that.

Without a doubt, they protected, protected you at some point. But then

we grow out of these and we no longer need them anymore, but our

body still holds them. And so they, their patterns are reinforced and they

almost a compulsion to make choices that end up draining our energy

and pull us further away from our goals.

Now there's a lot of science behind that and we go into in different

episodes, but we'll keep it simple for now. However, when we look at

aligned decisions, they come from a very, very grounded space. I read

an expert about this inside of my book called semantic intelligence for

success. And without giving you a lot of kind of a spoiler, this is a really

large part of having

We need action. Success comes from inspired action, which leverages

your instinct, your somatic intelligence, and it creates opportunities that

response because they want to feel comfortable or convinced that it's

safe before taking action.

So they try to trick themselves into believing things will work out. And

they wait to feel comfortable or convinced before doing anything. You

can't out logic your fear. It's futile and it's exhausting. Fear and

apprehension are primal nervous system responses to uncertainty and

threat. They're going to happen.

However, when you take inspired action, even when it's risky, You

actually teach your body through an embodied experience that what it

thought was dangerous isn't actually as dangerous as it, as it thought it

didn't die. It did the thing and it didn't die. And that fear begins to lose

kind of its, its hold on you, making future actions easier.

So it's about feeling safe enough that you can take the leap, that your

And we can address this through a skill of recognizing fear in your body

and discerning whether that fear is driving your actions. This is an

extended version of something called interoception, which is the ability

to sense the internal signals from your body like tension, tightness or

unease or emotion.

So for example, you might have a thought, ah, I'm going to do something

at the same time you have that thought, you might notice a tightness in

your chest, a fluttering in your stomach or a shallow breathing. And then

emotion might be this connect, might this, this sensation be connected

to, you might find that it's fear.

However, if you're acting from somatic intelligence, inspired action and

alignment, you might notice a sense of calm or groundedness. Maybe

there's an energy lifting up from your feet up, up, kind of feel like an

activated energy. There's nervousness, there's excitement, but there's

an overall sense of calm.

You can kind of ask yourself, what might this be connected to? And you

might find that it's connected to peace and maybe peace is kind of your

signature of success. I see you. Pursue that. We're going to be covering

the nitty gritty of this interoception practice inside of the Academy, which

is launching, in January and February.

So please stay tuned for more tools on how to build that skill, but it is the

first place you can be again. And once you catch yourself in that fear

saw it. That's amazing. That's half of the work. Then breathe and

address the dysregulation. If you're experiencing fear, you're

experiencing some level of dysregulation.

So what do you need to feel safe? Cultivate that safety inside, which is

once again, another skill that we learn inside of the academy. And like I

said, you're not going to feel 100 percent safe. There might still be

apprehension and skepticism. Inside of the book, we talk about why this

is actually very important.

But then reorient back and start rebuilding, trusting yourself through very

small steps. The nervous system science of rebuilding trust is taking that

little leap of faith, not dying, seeing that you're okay, recalling

consciously and unconsciously that you are and teaching your body that

you can do hard things and that you can trust yourself.

every single day that is a bit of a stretch. That is not impossible, but that

reinforces the new patterns, beliefs, and stories that you are integrating.

So that might be setting a boundary with a client and not taking

responsibility for their results.

It might be giving yourself permission to wait before deciding something,

even if it means you miss out or you think you're going to miss out. And

each of these small steps reinforces to your nervous system the ability

that it can access somatic intelligence and it can experience success as

a result.

Remember, the ability to discern fear in your body isn't something that

you are expected to have. It is a skill that you develop and that you

master and that you practice. The more you practice, the easier it

becomes to trust yourself. to find well being and to experience success

You can keep an eye out for the Academy launching later this month

and you can go to episode 163 called Stop Healing to Fix Yourself,

which is highly recommended, particularly if you find yourself in like

perfectionistic, patterns of personal development.