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Hi everyone, welcome back to the Conscious Success podcast. So today I wanna dive into the topic of fear because on our path to creating conscious success and redesigning our careers, a lot of fears are going to come up. And ultimately so much of our long-term success comes down to whether we're able, comes down to whether we'll, and ultimately so much of our long-term success,
comes down to whether we're able to tolerate the discomfort of growth and sit with our fears long enough to get the lessons and learnings available. And yet, most of us were never taught how to actually manage our fears productively. We tend to either let our fears totally run our life and limit what we can accomplish, or we just push ourselves to override our fears. And we let our inner critic beat us into submission.
and both approaches are deeply, deeply flawed. For decades of my life and career, unprocessed fears were running the show. They kept me in hustle mode until I ran face first into burnout. And they also kept me from going after the things I truly wanted for my career. It wasn't until I learned how to consciously and productively process my fears that my career started to actually feel fun and energizing. And it was only when I learned
to really process my fears fully that I was able to pursue bigger, scarier goals like starting my own business. So this is what I want to dive into today. We're going to talk about the unconscious approaches most of us default to when it comes to fear and why these approaches don't actually serve us. We're going to talk about why fear is always a productive emotion, even when it doesn't feel that way, and how to actually integrate our fears in a healthy way.
rather than habitually overriding them or heeding them, which are just two sides of the same unconscious coin. So I'm gonna teach you a framework that I use myself and I share with clients, which I call the regulation reset, because the truth is we will never stop feeling afraid. The real power move is not to try to eliminate fear, but to expand our capacity to feel it, learn from it, and move through it.
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so that we can realize our dreams and build careers and businesses that we truly enjoy. So let's get into it. First, I wanna talk about the two approaches that the vast majority of people default to in order to manage their fears, the wounded masculine approach and the wounded feminine approach. So the wounded masculine approach is to attempt to just ignore our fears and push on through.
Fear here is really seen as a problem and a weakness and an impediment to our success. Real men don't feel afraid, right? We should just be brave and fearless. And this wounded masculine approach has really infiltrated our culture, certainly in corporate workplaces, which were largely built by men and are still rooted in patriarchal norms. So we're expected to just be fearless. And if we have fears,
certainly don't name them, don't talk about them or admit them publicly. And if we have fears, certainly don't talk about them or admit them publicly. Just ignore them and override them and do whatever is required of you to be successful. But here's the problem. When we simply override our fears rather than integrate them, we become stuck in an activated state of chronic stress. Our subconscious mind feels unsafe and yet
We ignore it. We begin to live largely in a dysregulated state where we're running on adrenaline and cortisol. And while, yes, we may be able to push ourselves for a period of time, and that can even lead to outwardly positive results, it does not feel good to work in this way. This makes any type of work that we do feel stressful and taxing, and it so often leads to burnout or other chronic health issues.
From this activated state, even if we're taking action, we can't actually think all that clearly or creatively. We aren't able to see the forest through the trees. We're grinding and we're working harder instead of smarter. And we're often not able to identify the most strategic or effortless path. I know this pattern intimately because I defaulted to this for most of my schooling and my career. Whenever I felt scared, I just
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pushed myself harder. I didn't realize that there was any hidden cost. And when I relocated from San Francisco to London while at Twilio to build and run a new sales team across their Nordics and Benelux regions, I pretty quickly realized that I was over my skis and I felt deeply afraid. I was running what we called a Horizon 3 country or team, which essentially meant that it got a fraction
of funding of the more mature regions. I had reps spread across 12 countries in the middle of COVID when we were still in lockdown. And honestly, in that market, our product was subpar, yet the local competitors were extremely strong and were undercutting our prices by a long shot. They were perfectly happy taking telco margins when we were trying to get software margins. And there was just a total misalignment in the region. And I pretty quickly realized that
We were not on track to hit our target. And there were some major issues that we needed to address if the team was going to be set up for success. And yet I felt flooded by fear. But rather than honoring that fear and treating it as a sign that I needed to be a lot more vocal at a higher level about these business challenges, or that I needed to ask for more support from my own manager on how to best navigate them, or even just take a step back
to think more strategically about what problems I was actually empowered to solve, I just attempted to push my fears aside and outwork the problems. I didn't admit to my manager how much I was struggling because as a new leader, I thought he would treat this as evidence that he'd made a mistake in hiring me and that I wasn't cut out for the role and that a more experienced leader wouldn't even find this to be difficult.
And it also led me to just becoming a horrible micromanager, where I attempted to do all the work myself and jump in to quote unquote, save the day, rather than truly empower my team. I lived in a constant state of stress and was running on adrenaline and cortisol until I hit burnout. So looking back now, I can see that this wounded masculine approach to handling my fear was not only terrible for my health,
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but it was very ineffective as a business strategy. In that activated state, I couldn't think clearly or creatively. I couldn't coach or empower my team because I was so afraid of failing and I trusted myself more than them. I was defaulting to try to do each of their jobs for them rather than the actual job I was hired to do, which was to be able to solve these higher level business problems. But because they were new and I didn't know exactly how to solve them,
and that increased the fear so much, I kept going back to these old patterns. Now, unfortunately, I am not alone in this. This is what a lot of high achievers default to when they feel afraid. And while the exact actions we take may look different, the attempt to overcome fear and to just push through it and act like it doesn't exist or make yourself the problem is often the fastest path to burnout.
and it's the slowest path to actual success. So that's the wounded masculine approach. Now the other approach people tend to default to is the wounded feminine approach. Here we treat all of our fears as real threats and things that we should actively avoid or signs that we should stop and quit. We let our fears keep us safe and small rather than discerning why they're truly coming up for us and what.
the conscious and empowered choice would look like. So if we're afraid of missing our business goals or getting a bad performance review, oftentimes the inclination when we're in our wounded feminine is to just quit the job or not fully apply ourselves in case we fail. Whether in corporate or building a business of our own, if some action feels too activating, we look for a different business strategy that doesn't feel so scary or require us to grow.
or we decide to pivot and reinvent our career once again, not from a place of clarity or intentionality and desire, but out of an avoidance of fear. And this wounded feminine approach stunts our growth and our success. We don't recognize that overcoming fear is an expected and unavoidable part of the journey to self-actualization, conscious success, and fulfillment. We avoid that which feels too scary.
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When we avoid that which feels too scary, it only leads to us quitting on our dreams, playing small and falling short of our potential. Any dreams worth having, anything that's difficult to achieve is going to feel scary at times, if not most of the time. Fear is very often not a signal to turn back, but it's a sign that we're growing and doing something that's really meaningful to us. Just this week, I was in a session with a client who's building a fractional consulting business.
and we've done the work to clarify her niche and her business model. She's clear on her offer and the exact problem that she solves her businesses. She's built a website. She has relevant and valuable experience. What she doesn't have is enough leads. So that's the problem we've currently been focused on solving.
And so we've put a strategy in place in order to build more visibility for her to generate more conversations with qualified buyers. Now, one of the marketing strategies we've landed on is to start posting thought leadership pieces to LinkedIn in order to demonstrate her expertise and raise awareness around the problem that she can help businesses to solve. And she also has a very strong network of people that she's built up over decades of
being in business and being super impressive, all of whom she's connected with on LinkedIn. And they want to know what she's up to since leaving corporate. And they would be all too happy to connect her with other people in their network who have the problem that she knows how to solve. But in order for this referral network to be activated, they need to know what she's up to first. She needs to build more awareness.
And so we agreed that LinkedIn was a strategic platform for her to start posting content to. We discussed how to write effective thought leadership pieces, and she was planning to post her first post before our next session. And yet, when the time came, she could not bring herself to post. Between sessions, she did actually spend time writing a piece, but after drafting it, when she thought it was pretty good, she came back to it a couple days later and hated the whole thing.
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Suddenly every take felt obvious or dumb and her mind started to question if LinkedIn was really the right strategy for her at all. And she distracted herself by doing everything else on her to-do list except for the one thing that would actually move the needle on her biggest business problem, bringing in more leads. Does this sound familiar? Because this pattern is so, so common in our careers and in business. And I see some version of this with nearly every client I support.
she was hitting a growth edge. And the answer was not to take the wounded feminine approach and treat her fear like fact and abandon LinkedIn as a strategy entirely before ever posting a single post. The answer was to regulate her nervous system and create enough safety around the fear so that she could really learn what was underneath it and how to keep moving forward towards her business goals. So.
Hopefully from these examples of the Wounded Masculine and Wounded Feminine approach, you can see that both are flawed and not ultimately supportive of our goals and success. Now, before I share the process I guided my client through in our session to be able to really regulate her fears and move through them, I wanna name something really important. And that is the fact that all fears, all emotions for that matter, are productive. Even though we often treat fear as a problem,
or we make ourselves wrong for feeling afraid, fear is actually a part of our biological guidance system. Without it and without other emotions as well, we could not navigate the world effectively. In order for the human species to survive, especially in our hunter-gatherer days, our nervous system needed a highly attuned threat detection system to protect ourselves against a litany of threats, such as a lion entering our camp.
are three times more wired to avoid risk than to pursue reward because our subconscious mind's primary job is to keep us safe, not fulfilled. So feeling fear doesn't mean we're weak, it means we're human, but it also doesn't have to be a blocker to taking action. The unlock is to be able to regulate our nervous system enough to become curious about why the fear is actually arising.
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Is there a real and present threat to our survival that we need to address? Or do we naturally need to create some new safety or reprogram an outdated belief that is causing the alarm to be overly sensitive so that it stops misfiring? Either of those approaches would be productive. Very often when we experience a big fear response where this
fear feels like life or death or the task at hand does. In reality, this is fear.
Very often when we experience a big fear response where the task at hand feels like life or death, when in reality it's just a business problem to be solved, that fear is very often being triggered in response to an unprocessed trauma or old wound. There's a saying that I love that if it's hysterical, it's historical. So when we feel a big wave of fear when it comes to posting something on LinkedIn that feels so intense,
that we're ready to quit, it's usually not because posting to LinkedIn in and of itself is dangerous, but because something in our programming or our past life experiences makes it feel like it is. So let's take the prior example when I was struggling leading that team in London. The fact that we weren't on track to hit our target was hitting my past wound, that it was not safe to be imperfect or to fail or to not know all of the answers.
And it was this misguided belief that was really triggering such an intense level of fear inside me. And we all have programming and paradigms and past life experiences that leave their mark on us. And they often act as bugs in our code. When we become triggered and enter what I call survival mode, our focus narrows and it becomes myopic and self-focused. And we act impulsively out of self-preservation and self-protection.
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and we're way more likely to view others as threats or to view things that aren't actually threats as threats themselves. We aren't able to think strategically or communicate effectively in this state. So if I didn't have that past perfectionist pattern running, I probably could have viewed the challenges in front of me as valid business problems that I needed cross-functional support and I needed to advocate to solve. And I could have determined
a more effective strategy. But the first thing I would have needed to do, and the first thing that all of us need to do any time we feel afraid,
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But the first thing I would have needed to do and that all of us need to do anytime we feel afraid or activated in any way is to regulate our nervous system enough to shift out of survival mode and back into what I call creator mode. From here, we can run a software update to address the bugs in our operating system, in our misguided beliefs that are causing such a high level of fear, or we can actually address the real threat at hand. When we're in creator mode,
We regain the capacity to think clearly and creatively. We're able to be curious and problem solve more effectively. We can take in new information. We can collaborate with others. And we feel safe and empowered enough to take aligned action. So let's talk about how we actually do this through a four step process, which I call the regulation reset. Because anytime we feel a heightened emotion like fear, first,
We need to become aware that we're dysregulated. Then we need to pause and regulate enough to be able to shift out of survival mode and back into creator mode. Then we need to get curious about why is this fear or this emotion coming up? And finally, we need to take a lined action. So let's go through these steps one at a time. So step one is awareness. To start, we need to become aware of the fact
that we're becoming dysregulated and exiting what's called our window of tolerance. We need to understand. We need to bring our attention to what is happening underneath the neck in our body, because our body is always communicating with us our level of regulation through somatic cues. Things like our breath feeling shallow, our heart racing, our body feeling tense instead of relaxed. So.
When we can become aware of this, then we know, OK, there is some activation here that I need to be able to regulate. We also need to become aware of the core emotion that's coming up for us. So that might look like, OK, I notice my breath is really shallow right now and I have a pit in my stomach and my palms are kind of sweaty. I think I'm feeling really afraid. And when we can become aware of that,
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that we're exiting our window of tolerance and aware of the cues that our body is sending us that we're feeling unsafe, then we're able to name the emotion, which creates an opening for us to shift back from survival mode into creator mode.
Cough
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Now in order to actually regulate our nervous system enough to be able to
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Now the next step to be able to actually regulate our nervous system is to meet ourselves with compassion. The etymology of the word compassion literally breaks down to mean to be with and suffering. So self-compassion means to be with our own suffering. When we become aware that we're feeling dysregulated and afraid, rather than push past it or make ourselves wrong for feeling that way, the conscious choice
is simply to be with our own suffering and accept whatever emotion we're feeling as a part of our human experience. It's a part of that biological guidance system, right? So here we might say to ourselves, hey, it's normal to feel afraid sometimes, especially when learning something new or taking on a daunting goal. This step of self-compassion allows for our own humanity without making ourselves and our emotions wrong.
When we say to ourselves, how human of me to feel this way, we often will feel an immediate release. Our shoulders will drop, our breath deepens, and we can feel safe enough to really reenter creator mode. The third step is to become curious about what is coming up for you and what that emotion is trying to teach us until we arrive at a place of clarity. So we really get to sit with the open question of, why am I feeling so much fear right now?
What must I be believing in order for this fear to feel this intense or arise? And is that belief true? Is that supportive? Does it need to be updated, or is there some action in the present that I really need to take? When we're able to be curious, we're able to make the most aligned and empowered choices. We're able to respond rather than to react. So sometimes just shifting into curiosity for a moment,
leads to a wider perspective where we can quickly arrive at clarity. Other times there's more exploration needed before we can arrive at our answer. Very often as a part of this curiosity process as we're seeking clarity, we need to journal on these questions. We might need to talk them out with a coach or a therapist or a friend or partner, or we might need to go gather more information we just might not know enough yet.
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The important thing isn't the speed to clarity. It doesn't have to happen in one moment or one sitting, but it's to stay in the conversation with ourselves and keep seeking answers to that question until the clarity arrives. And then the fourth and final step, once we have clarity, is to actually take the aligned action. So if the emotion is being triggered by an outdated belief, then we have the opportunity to update that belief
to be more aligned and supportive, to essentially address any bugs in our code. So my old belief of asking for help means that I'm failing as a leader and I'm imperfect and unsafe became asking for help is exactly what a strong leader does and thinking strategically with my team is what will actually solve the problem. Or if the emotion is a reaction to a real and present threat that we need to address,
then we have to take the empowered action to address it. So maybe that's having an uncomfortable but necessary conversation with our boss to advocate for more resources or ask for more support and coaching. The aligned action may be an internal one to update that old belief or an external one to look out for our wellbeing, or it may be both. Now, I wanna share one more example of a fear that came up for me really recently and how I actually applied.
this four step regulation reset process in order to move through it. So about a month or so ago, I was in a session with one of my clients who works at one of the biggest, most well-known tech companies. And she was telling me that the company is now enabling everyone on how to use agentic AI and expects them to use AI as their second brain. She shared how the company is now going to be tracking AI adoption as a performance metric. And the message from leadership is essentially,
If you're not adopting AI, your job is going to be on the chopping block. And as she was telling me this, I felt my body contract. My breath became halted, my stomach dropped a little bit, and it became harder for me to actively listen to what she was saying because this little fear-based voice popped in and started saying, wait, wait, wait, you haven't adopted AI as a second brain.
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Like sure, you're using Claude to polish Instagram captions or leveraging it as a more advanced search engine, but you don't leverage AI agents. Like what even is agentic AI? So this old but familiar voice was that of fear. Now, fortunately, I've repeated this process enough times to know now how to respond. I've learned what that activation feels like in my body. So I was able to pretty quickly recognize the sensation and name the fear.
In that moment, while I was actively supporting a paying client, was not the time to get curious about my own fear. But rather, I made an agreement, date, if you will, with the fear later, so that I could get curious about it and move through steps three and four. And then in that moment, I took a few deep breaths and I was able to re-regulate enough to return to presence and to bring my full focus and attention back to my client. Then, when I had more space over the next week or so,
I got curious about this fear and what it was trying to tell me. Was the feeling that I needed to learn AI triggering my old perfectionism wound where I think I need to know everything about everything in order to be worthy? Or was AI something I really needed to pay attention to and commit time and resources to learning? So I journaled on it. I sat with the question. I was at a dinner with a bunch of girlfriends, most of whom who work in tech, and they were talking about how
Everyone at their companies is now vibe coding. And I kept hearing about agentic AI and Claude code everywhere I turned. And it was actually also coming up more in my client sessions with clients asking me about how to best leverage it in their own careers and businesses. So I soon became pretty clear that this fear was coming from the present, not the past. It was trying to get me to wake up and pay attention.
to stop pushing learning AI out to another day or kicking that can down the road. The fear was telling me that it was time to throw myself into being a student and to start enabling myself on this technology. AI isn't going away. It is only accelerating. It's reshaping everything that we do. And the longer I procrastinated or stayed frozen, the further behind I would fall.
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This was not some false paranoia or misguided belief. This fear was actually wisdom. So once I arrived at that clarity, that it was time to turn, to learn and incorporate AI into my business, I considered what aligned actions could I take? How could I go about learning more about agentic AI and really become a power user? What were the options available to me to plug my current skill gap? And as I loosely held these questions in my mind,
The answers started to just present themselves as they so often do. Our brain is always sorting through tremendous amounts of input and data and filtering everything as irrelevant or irrelevant. So as soon as we put some of our attention and energy into trying to answer a question, our brain starts to surface things we would otherwise have deemed irrelevant and moved right past.
So I started reading and engaging with more AI content on Instagram. And almost immediately, the algorithm learned that this was an interest of mine. And I started getting targeted with other AI content and suggested experts to follow. I then listened to a couple of their podcasts. I signed up for a free five-day email course from one who seemed really credible and who
through listening to her on another podcast I trusted and knew I'd enjoy learning from on how to best leverage Claude. And soon after, this same expert announced that she'd be leading a month-long mastermind for non-technical business people who wanted to learn how to train and leverage AI agents. Bingo. It was exactly what I had been looking for. So in that very moment, I made the couple thousand dollar investment to enroll in the mastermind. I freed up time in my calendar by consciously deprioritizing
other things to make space for this over the next month. And within a few weeks of the mastermind, I was vibe coding and building AI agents I never would have previously thought that I was technical enough to build. And the fear had dissipated because I had taken a line action. AI no longer felt unknowable or so scary. It actually started to feel really exciting. And I started to think creatively about all the cool ways I could leverage it in my business and to support my clients to leverage it in their own.
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Now, I'll get more into all that I learned and all the ways that I've been able to integrate AI into my business in another episode. But what I want you to take from this story now is that I didn't make myself wrong for feeling afraid. I didn't override it, but I also didn't avoid it. I worked the regulation reset steps, and then through that, I turned fear into power. Now, this regulation reset process is deep and it is nuanced work.
At first, it will likely feel super wonky and unfamiliar, but the more that you move through these four steps, the more you'll integrate past wounds and you'll reprogram outdated beliefs. And with an updated operating system, it becomes that much easier to trust our emotions and to learn the actions they're trying to get us to take in the present. And the more we then take those aligned actions, the more we create our own safety, return to our empowerment, and are able to realize our goals.
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Okay, let's bring this home and talk about what to do with this new knowledge. Now you understand why both overriding or avoiding our fears is not conscious or supportive. And you understand the purpose behind fear and how it either helps us to update old beliefs that no longer serve us so that we can remain regulated or to pay attention to the actions we need to take in the present. And you have the regulation reset framework.
with the four steps to work through any time you feel afraid, which are awareness, compassion, curiosity until you arrive at clarity, and aligned action. So here's what I invite you to do this week. Start by paying attention. Notice when you become triggered or activated or feel stressed. And rather than pushing those feelings aside or taking them at face value, practice this four step process instead. Become aware of what that activation really feels like in your body.
and try to name the core emotion that you're feeling. Then meet yourself with compassion. Say something like, how human of me to feel this way? Allow yourself to release some of that activation and return to your window of tolerance. From there, shift into curiosity until you arrive at clarity. What is this emotion here to teach you? What must you be believing in order to feel this way? Is that belief valid and helpful for the life?
you're trying to create or the goals you're working to achieve. If not, what might you choose to believe instead? And how might you want to act? And then lastly, take the aligned action. That might look like just practicing that new belief in real time, perhaps by coming up with a mantra to remind yourself as you reprogram your mindset and deepen this new neural pathway. Or it might look like taking some external action in the present to
honor yourself and grow into the person you're meant to be and create the future that you truly desire. If you practice these four steps, you will expand your capacity to spend more and more of your life in creator mode rather than survival mode. It is probably the biggest success unlock you could possibly master. And if you want to dive even deeper into this work, I'm going to link my mini course below that you can grab for only $27.
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where I teach more about nervous system regulation and somatic cues and how do we actually move through our emotions in a productive way. It comes with a bunch of downloadable guides and resources to really be able to integrate this new awareness into your life. So if this is resonating, you can grab that on the link below. And alternatively, if you are someone who has a business idea or is working to build something of your own and you want a safe place to process fears and to move through,
the inevitable fears that come up on the entrepreneurial journey, as well as the strategy and support to keep moving forward, then I invite you to apply for the second Mountain Mastermind, which is going to kick off in October. This is an intimate group container with a maximum of seven women who are all consciously building the life and the businesses that they actually want. And you will have the opportunity to receive personal coaching from me, as well as build in community with other women on the same path.
And if you sign up for the mastermind before the end of this month, you'll also unlock two bonus one-on-one sessions with me. So I'll put the link to that mastermind with all the details that you can find in the show notes as well. As always, thank you for being here. I know your time and attention are the most precious resources that you have, and I am genuinely honored you've chosen to spend them with me today. I hope this episode served you, and I hope you'll apply the regulation reset in your life this week.
I'll see you in the next episode. I'll see you in the next episode. I'll see you in the next episode. I'll see you in the next... I'll see you in the next episode.
