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Everyone has a different relationship with the concept of fear; our own lived experiences shape what kind of role it plays in our lives, as well as how large that role is. Regardless of where on the spectrum we fall with fear, the one thing all we humans have in common is that, fear can all too easily become a destructive force in our lives if we're not careful.
The challenge, of course, is that (in the heat of those moments) imagined fears can feel all too real. Fear doesn't come from nowhere, right? We learn to be afraid – right or wrong – through life's trials and tribulations, millennia of biological programming as humans, and (in some cases) real-life traumas that can take years to work through.
⚡ Related: The Power of Language to Shape Our Destiny
In some cases, the fear we experience in our lives can come from traumatic experiences or relationships that can take years (even decades) to acknowledge, understand, and overcome. I'll be honest, as I share in this episode, fear is something I struggle with for this precise reason.
Before you know it, those moments of crippling doubt and paralyzing anxiety can transition like lightning from a temporary dance with an imagined boogeyman that we move through, to a self-destructive halt in our lives – keeping us confined to "the devil we know," the "default" state that keeps us from truly living. Instead of moving forward, we succumb to fear-driven stories that keep us trapped.
This deeply personal and nuanced topic is an important one to have, which is why we knew we had to talk about it. The path each of us walks with fear is a deeply personal one, with certain fears sometimes easier to overcome than others. Let's at least take this first step together, as one.
Questions We Explore
- When was the last time you were afraid to a degree that resulted in self-sabotage or complete paralysis?
- How would you define your relationship with fear today?
- One of my favorite things George says about FEAR is actually an acronym: "False Evidence Appearing Real" – and we talk about what that means!
- Why is it important for us to understand how easy it is to succumb to fear?
- While there are obviously nuances to how everyone should approach fear in their own lives, based on their experiences, what are some of the ways in which you address bouts of fear in the moment when they come up?
- Why is the language we use to talk about fear to ourselves so important to moving through fear?
- How does trauma factor into this discussion, where more than simple self-talk exercises are required to move through the fear traumas can create?
Creators and Guests
What is Beyond Your Default?
What Is Beyond Your Default? "Everyone keeps telling me I should be happy, but I'm not." “I feel stuck.” “I have a calling, but where do I start?"
Right now, you have a choice. You can continue living within your default norms, playing it safe, clocking in and out every day, and scraping by to achieve what's supposed to make you happy hopefully. Or you can choose to accept the challenge of living beyond your default. Stop wishing to live your "best life” and start living your best life. Success leaves clues. And they're waiting for you to discover them.
Here's the other thing that I need to unpack is that pain, we always or many times, I'm trying to stay away from absolutes on this. We many times paint pain as bad, but pain isn't actually always bad. Many times pain is where it equals the most growth in our life. So this thing about fear, and it's good because we're trying to not lean into pain because we wanna be comfortable. And now I want you to hear the words that just came on my fear and pain and comfort because the deep end of the pool that I need to unpack is you use the words manage your demons.
George B. Thomas:Manage your demons. And I want everybody listening to this podcast to realize that generational demons is a real thing. If your grandpappy or your grandma had an issue with x y z, more than likely your parents have a problem with x y z, more than likely you're gonna have a problem with x y z, unless you take off the blinders, unless you see those people that you're supposed to admire, supposed to respect, and see them for who they are in all of their traits and then decide to and this is a word that we're using a lot this episode, choose which ones to be and which ones not to be. And by the way, if you focus on, I'm never gonna be that, I'm never gonna be that, you're probably gonna be that.
Liz Moorehead:Welcome back to another episode of Beyond Your Default. I am Liz Morette, and as always, I am joined by George b Thomas. George, how are you today?
George B. Thomas:I'm doing absolutely wonderful. I could say that I'm fearful of this episode, but I am not fearful of this episode. I'm actually interested and excited to see where we go. I know there's you and me, and there's this topic, and I also know that I feel like I have turned myself into a person who may think about fear a little bit differently, a little bit weirdly, but I'm excited to see where we go as a duo on this topic.
Liz Moorehead:I'm really excited about this as well. And one of the things I am gonna say, though, and and I would encourage you and our listeners to think about it this way. Even if you think about something differently, I would say let's make it a beyond your default rule that we don't pass judgment on how we interpret and experience the world. None of us do things weirdly when it comes to that perspective. Right?
Liz Moorehead:We're all just showing up every single day with our own unique fingerprint of experiences, perspectives, point of views. I'm in the same boat as you though. I'm very interested to see where today's conversation goes. And as you mentioned or teased a bit, we're gonna be talking quite a bit about fear today. Fear is something that has come up numerous times throughout our by the way, first 10 episodes.
Liz Moorehead:We're recording our 11th today. How does that feel?
George B. Thomas:It's crazy. That's time flies.
Liz Moorehead:I love it. But over the past 10 episodes, fear is something that has come up as a cause, as an effect, as a looming little boogeyman. But I think the thing we have to keep in mind and let's start setting the table for today's conversation. Right? Everyone has a different relationship with the concept of fear.
Liz Moorehead:And our own lived experiences shape what kind of role it plays in our lives, whether that's big or small. Insidious and everywhere are only showing up in pockets, specific pockets of our lives. But regardless of where on the spectrum we fall with fear, the one thing all we humans have in common is that fear can all too easily become an unchecked, destructive force if we're not careful. The challenge, of course, is that in the heat of those moments, imagined fears can become all too real. They can feel real even if they aren't real.
Liz Moorehead:But fear doesn't come from nowhere, right? We're not just sitting here torturing ourselves. We learn to be afraid throughout our lives, right or wrong, through life's trials and tribulations. There's also millennia of biological programming as humans, and in some cases, people experience real life traumas that can take years to work through and deprogram. And this is something we are going to be digging into a bit today is that how people end up in a space where fear can sometimes disrupt, or in other areas, control their lives.
Liz Moorehead:It's a nuanced discussion. It's not always a straightforward. So, I wanna clear to the listeners today, this is going to be a nuanced discussion that takes into account different ways in which we end up with fear boogeymen haunting our lives. Because before you know it, those moments of crippling doubt, the paralyzing anxiety, it can transition like lightning from temporary to something that puts a self destructive halt, a stop in our lives. And that's where we're gonna begin our conversation today.
Liz Moorehead:Fear is the thing that confines us in a prison of the devil we know, that default state that we're always trying to get out of so we can truly live. So George, I wanna open up today's conversation by asking you a question. When was the last time you were really afraid? And when I say really afraid, I mean, in a way that made you potentially self sabotage or come to a complete halt mentally.
George B. Thomas:So I do wanna answer the question, but I do wanna be careful too because as I was kind of listening to Wax Poetic on the intro, My brain was fighting what I was hearing, and not that any of it was wrong, but I literally was like, why are we giving it as much power as we're giving it? Why does it have to be years? Why can't it be months when we're even working through, like, trauma? Why do we allow fear to be this thing that we put on replay in our lives versus, like, dealing with it and then dismissing it? I'm sure we'll talk about that later.
George B. Thomas:Well, here's the thing. There are again, it's really weird, but there are few times in my life that I can say I was fearful to this line of self sabotage or complete paralysis. Now what I will tell you is there are times in my childhood with the way that I grew up that I can say that I was, you know, paralyzed with fear, whether it be, you know, getting in a fight with a bully and being afraid because I didn't actually even at a young age, I didn't wanna damage anybody. I didn't wanna hurt anybody, but to have to stand up for yourself and to get in those mix were actually fearful for me. Even kind of understanding that the men in my life, it was the walk it off, brush it off, like, don't be a pansy, like and I love both of, you know, my father figures and my grandparents, but it was just a different it was a different day and age than we live in now.
George B. Thomas:And, like, life was tough. We lived through kind of a a tough life, and so there were times when I was younger that I was fearful. Heck, even when I was married, you know, there was a time in my life where I took action that I shouldn't have taken out of anger, and I was literally afraid that I was gonna lose everything that I had in that moment in time, and that was paralyzing and fearful. And and I'm talking about full body fear. But these things, the way that I grew up, the way that I kind of reached a point in time where I was like, oh, enough is enough.
George B. Thomas:After that, it's really hard to kinda go into a certain thing, but I was able to think about this. I was able to, like, okay. I've gotta force myself to think about this. And I think one of the things that I wanna unpack is it was very hard to think about this because it was uncomfortable in bringing back up that fear to actually understand it and relive it to be able to talk about it. Now the first thing I wanna do is is I actually want to break down the 2 ways that you went in this question.
George B. Thomas:It sounded like one question. It actually was very sneaky. It was 2 questions because you said to a degree that resulted in self sabotage or complete paralysis, which is, by the way, 2 totally different things. Now on the self sabotage, what I wanna share is it depends on who you ask, And what I mean by that is there was a time when I worked for Marcus Sheridan at the sales line, and we got acquired by Impact Brand and Design, the company that you used to work for, company that I used to work for.
Liz Moorehead:That's how we met.
George B. Thomas:That's how we met. And here's the funny thing is I went from a team of 4 to, like, a team of over 45, and I was very uncomfortable, and I would even say I was fearful in where I fit into that scenario, and I jumped ship. I waited 3 months. I made sure my team got onboarded properly, and I jumped ship. Now can I say that I was self sabotaging myself at that moment?
George B. Thomas:It's very hard for me to tell myself that, but maybe. But I know for sure there were several human beings that thought he's self sabotaging the success that he could have in these walls. I'm fine with that, and I may have done that, but I was still able to grow even past or through if it was self sabotage. The other thing that I wanna jump in here with is this complete paralysis. And there was a time where I was like, yeah.
George B. Thomas:That's probably the most scared I've been in a long time, and it was on a family vacation, believe it or not. We had gone to Tennessee. We had rented a cabin in the mountains of Tennessee, and we went to go do this local attraction. The only problem is to get to this local attraction, you had to do this ski lift up this mountain. And now as a child, here's what's funny.
George B. Thomas:I did ski lifts all the time because I skied, but there was snow, and there was this false sense of security if I fell off the lift like the snow would whatever. The older I get, the more I realize if I fall, it's gonna hurt, and I'm deathly afraid of heights, like, to a extreme, and we'll probably talk more about this and roller coasters and different things in life. But we're on this family vacation, and we had to do this ski lift to get up to the actual thing. And the line was long, and I think this is why it sunk in my brain because it took so long for us to get through the line that I was just, like, sweating the whole time of, like, I gotta get on this thing. And there were ones that were, like there was a bar that held you in, and then there are ones that you could sit in and close the door.
George B. Thomas:And I was like, well, I'm definitely going in one that you can close the door because that's a little bit more secure. But the one with the bar, heck no. And here's what I think allowed my fear to be even more as I knew that if I chickened out, I could have hopped in like a vehicle, and they were driving some people up the mountain. But, like, I didn't wanna look like a chicken in front of my kids even though my kids knew I was scared as all get out. So I did it.
George B. Thomas:But then when we got up to the main attraction, what's fun is it was actually like this thing where you could do things in the trees. And so I went through this massive fear factor of getting on the ski lift to then be in the middle of these, like, boarded bridges looking down at the ground and was like, I can't move right now. My body was frozen out of the fear of heights. Now I was able to push through it and get through, but, like, I had to juke my brain. Like, I had to fake myself out and not look down, but just look like, you know, almost like a foot and a half, 2 foot in front of me where I couldn't see through the boards, and it looked like it was a solid walkway.
George B. Thomas:And so, like, there's a couple things in there. 1, I had to fake myself out. That's gonna be an interesting in conversation as we move forward. Perception of others and yourself to if you are self sabotaging is gonna be an interesting conversation, but those are definitely 2 pieces where I was able to tie back my life to kind of this question. But, again, that doesn't happen that much anymore because of some things that I have purposely put in place to try to navigate and move through things that could come back up, could replay through my brain, could continue to be things that would drive fear in my life.
Liz Moorehead:I wanna dig more deeply into what you were just talking about. You made a couple of comments at the start about the longevity of fear, how long it takes to move through it depending on certain backgrounds. We'll definitely get to that. But for right now, I wanna stick to this point because you've brought us up to this interesting juncture where I just wanna understand now, how do you define your relationship with here in your life? What does it look like now?
George B. Thomas:Yeah. So I'm always battling, and I do feel like it's a battle, but I'm always battling to put it in its place. And there's this really cool quote. So Seneca the younger was a stoic, and that's probably a whole another conversation that we should have on a podcast at some point of stoicism. But there's this quote, we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
George B. Thomas:And I love that because fear is real. I would not sit here on a podcast and say it's not real. Like, it is a real thing, but most times, the stories we internalize, they're not. So there's the thing that happens, which, you know, it induces anxiety, and it induces stress, the fear. Right?
George B. Thomas:But then it's the story that we tell ourselves about that moment or it's the stories that we tell ourselves leading up to that moment that many times, again, are just internalized stories, not necessarily what did happen or what will happen. Like, we've all heard that story of, like, somebody comes in, robs a store, and they get the feedback. Dude was 65, x y z, a b c, and then come to find out he was, like, 5 foot 4. But, like, people just don't remember, like, the right stuff when it happens. And so most fear I've realized, especially in my life, I'm speaking of myself right now, most fear is a moment in time, but it's not a reality that should live on forever.
George B. Thomas:And, again, we'll dig into that later because there's literally a saying that I have embraced that you either love or hate, by the way. Because I've actually asked people. When I say this, does it unlock your brain, or do you think this sucks?
Liz Moorehead:Let's go ahead and talk about it. Let's go ahead and share it. That's where I was going next. Let's talk about it.
George B. Thomas:Well, before we do that, though, I wanna draw the line because I want people to realize they have a choice. And in this episode, I definitely wanna talk about good fear, and I wanna talk about bad fear. Because, usually, fear is just looked at as, like, it's potentially a negative thing, but there are good ways to harness it, and there's bad ways to let it be in your life. So I definitely wanna talk about that. But one of the things that I have kind of drawn a line in is I try I try.
George B. Thomas:Keyword here, try. Because I could say, I do this. Listen. Absolutes are probably not a good thing when you're talking about emotions in life, but I try to refuse to listen to the voice of fear. My kids know I hate roller coasters.
George B. Thomas:I hate roller coasters. Again, it's the fear of heights, But I've pushed myself multiple times to get on roller coasters to push my brain out of the fact that I'm going to die if I sit in that seat.
Liz Moorehead:And I don't die, by the way. I always end up
George B. Thomas:at the end. I always get off. Everybody's, like, laughing and having fun, and I'm like, victory. I just did that. But that's the thing.
George B. Thomas:If it's this battle internally that I have to not listen to the voice of fear, and I have to confront it, I have to face it, and I have to attack it. And what I would say for the listeners is you can have those choices to, like, this thing makes me fearful. Snakes, spiders, heights, whatever it is. Historical trauma, again, we'll get into that later. You have the choice to confront it, face it, and attack it, and figure out a plan to get after it.
George B. Thomas:Now diving into the saying that works for me but might not work for everybody is this idea of the word fear itself, f e a r. And for me, what this equals and what I've played in my brain to help me get past this, because, by the way, I used to be afraid to get on stage. I was afraid to start my first podcast. I was afraid to step in front of a camera. Like, I have had fearful things that I've had to battle through.
George B. Thomas:I've been afraid to die, by the way, but
Liz Moorehead:I don't wanna go in
George B. Thomas:like, I don't wanna make this that heavy of a story, but, like, I have literally been afraid. Like, I'm gonna die. I'm I'm going to die today. But what I want the listeners to know is fear, f e a r. For me, I've internalized, and it's a thing that I'll put in repeat in my brain when I find that anxiety showing up, when I find that fear showing up, when I find any emotion that is kind of directly related to this thing that we historically call fear or, like, a negative energy, and that's false evidence appearing real.
George B. Thomas:Because here's the thing. Most times, especially in my life, I've never feared things in the past. I've always feared things as they were coming up or as I was going through them, like, microseconds before or, like, in Tennessee, what felt like 5 hours to get through line to get on the ski lift. It's only in the things that are coming that I am fearful other than, by the way, my wife and kids love to scare me, but there's a difference between shock and scaring than what I'm talking about today, and that's fear that is disabling you in life, that is keeping you from going in the directions that you need to go.
Liz Moorehead:I love that. You know, when I'm thinking about this, though, this is where I think we might have a good opportunity to slide back into some of the conversation that you started earlier about. How long does it actually take to work through some of this? Could this be months versus years? And this is where, George, you and I are gonna have to diverge.
Liz Moorehead:In some cases, it's years. It's simply not months, and and here's why. This is actually an area I have struggled with throughout most of my life, and I say that with the knowledge that well, not knowledge. It's fact. I'm turning 41 next month.
Liz Moorehead:So this is Hey.
George B. Thomas:There you go.
Liz Moorehead:You know, whatever. And I'll just you know, you've always been radically candid with our audience, so I'll do the same. I grew up in a very physically, verbally abusive household with my mother. She was an incredibly beautiful and intelligent woman who just could never manage her own demons. And I was her only child, and it's just that's how that that played out.
Liz Moorehead:And it was something that echoed in different ways as I grew up and throughout my entire life. And here's where it gets a little bit tricky. When you are working through that kind of trauma, you can all too easily be going through the motions. Right? I was seeing a therapist.
Liz Moorehead:I was seeing a trauma counselor. Like, these were present forces throughout my life, both thanks to my dad and then just also personally as I was covering it throughout my life. But often, we do not realize when you're coming from a trauma based background what the implications are going to be because every single myself where myself where it actually took me years to actually understand how it was influencing my life. And the reason being is this, is that there's always that joke. Right?
Liz Moorehead:The first step is admitting we have a problem. Sometimes we don't understand the implications of those problems. So if we wanna take this even a step further, I have been working through and seeing marked progress throughout my life as I've made the choice to do the work, embrace counseling, really try to move through this so I can break what is a generational cycle in my family. Like, my mother didn't just end up that way. And I decided, like, that's not who I'm going to be.
Liz Moorehead:This isn't just about fixing myself. It's about changing the story of my family going forward. I always thought that was something in the past until very recently I found out I was in an abusive relationship again. And so something that was very much the past suddenly became the present. And so a new fear emerged.
Liz Moorehead:Oh, my God. Even when I'm doing the work, am I doomed? And that's where we get into these interesting little narratives. Right? And, again, my story is unique.
Liz Moorehead:The stories of our listeners are unique. But sometimes, we need to admit we have a problem, but sometimes we need to be a bit more open minded about what that problem is. Because these challenges tend to manifest in different ways. And you bring up a good point by the way that I wanna point out. We have a tendency to over inflate the importance of fear in our lives but I think we also tend to forget that fear is an important feeling.
Liz Moorehead:Like we demonize it to the point of like, if you feel any kind of fear ever that is bad. No. Fear is what keeps us from dying or getting eaten by dinosaurs. Like, that's the whole reason fear exists. Right?
Liz Moorehead:It is meant to keep us from getting killed or to repeat something that has caused us pain in the past. We're trying to protect ourselves. That's where this fear comes from. But we have to understand, a, that if we have these challenges in our lives, and b, we have to acknowledge. It's kinda like when we look at clients who come to work with us.
Liz Moorehead:Right, George? It is so important that they don't know what they don't know and they know it, but that's why you show up to work with consultants like us. The same thing is true in terms of a healing path when it comes to fear and trauma because at some point, you have to make a choice about who you're going to be. And this is where I do start to fall in line with you a little bit, George. I disagree that we can simply say by the way, this isn't to say that you were implying that we'll just go see a therapist in a few months, bada bing bada boom, fierce gone.
Liz Moorehead:I think it's just a bit more of a winding path because depending on someone's history, you don't know how windy that path is going to get. However, I think at some point, we all have to make a choice about who we're going to be. And you have to make a choice to run at those walls full speed ahead and say, okay. If this counselor isn't working, why isn't it working? Why does this keep showing up?
Liz Moorehead:Being brutally honest with ourselves about how these things are manifesting in our lives because that was the thing that I controlled that I ignored for a really long time. I ignored the red flags. I ignored the fact that I was repeating these same cycles. Like, here's the unsexy thing that I'll share with you and our listeners, George. It is something I've said only to a few people.
Liz Moorehead:I can sit here and be devastated that I ended up in an abusive relationship, but I walked into it. And I thought that was okay. And what does that say about the mindset I showed up with? So that's where I think we have to start having these conversations is that it gets a little bit tricky. But I think to your point, fear isn't always bad.
Liz Moorehead:Fear is like we would like to not explode or get eaten as cavemen. Right?
George B. Thomas:Yeah. It's funny. You just served up a whole plate of, like, and now I need to unpack some of that because my brain was going absolutely nuts. So and I'm gonna start at, like, the kind of lighthearted and funny stuff, and then I'm gonna get into the serious stuff. Listen.
George B. Thomas:There are no more dinosaurs or saber toothed tigers in the world. Okay? So, like, that part of your brain, at some point, can be put to bait. Now do I know that some of the listeners might live in Detroit, New York City, Boston, whatever, and there is a different type of something that you have to pay attention to for safety? Absolutely.
Liz Moorehead:Sabertooth, they do crimes.
George B. Thomas:Do I understand that, heck, even in my own little town, in my own little house that I have people who have fears of people being the wrong kind of people and doing the wrong kind of things? Absolutely. Like, I have to understand that, but there is no dinosaurs. There are no saber tooth tigers. And so at some point, this should be a switch that just flicks on and quickly off when you can feel that you might be in a scenario or surrounding in which you need to pay attention to that.
George B. Thomas:Now here's the other thing that I need to unpack is that pain, we always or many times, I'm trying to stay away from absolutes on this. We many times paint pain as bad, but pain isn't actually always bad. Many times pain is where it equals the most growth in our life. So this thing about fear, and it's good because we're trying to not lean into pain because we wanna be comfortable. And now I want you to hear the words that just came on my fear and pain and comfort because the deep end of the pool that I need to unpack is you use the words manage your demons.
George B. Thomas:Manage your demons. And I want everybody listening to this podcast to realize that generational demons is a real thing. If your grandpappy or your grandma had an issue with x y z, more than likely your parents have a problem with x y z, more than likely you're gonna have a problem with x y z, unless you take off the blinders, unless you see those people that you're supposed to admire, supposed to respect, and see them for who they are in all of their traits and then decide to and this is a word that we're using a lot this episode, choose which ones to be and which ones not to be. And by the way, if you focus on I'm never gonna be that, I'm never gonna be that, you're probably gonna be that. And instead of focusing on what you don't wanna be out of the mix, you need to focus on what you do wanna be, which is the negative of what you don't wanna be because we are what we focus on.
George B. Thomas:We are what we focus on. Okay? Now here's the thing, and I'm sure I'm banging into, like, possible other podcast episodes. But, Liz, you even mentioned, you know, a therapist. I think going to therapy is great.
George B. Thomas:If you need somebody to talk to, a therapist, your pastor, whoever, my best friend that you can actually trust is great, but here's the crux of the problem. Many people aren't managing those demons at all. They're walking around with blinders on. Many of them are just blatantly ignoring them. Some people are working on them, but one thing that I see that a lot of folks don't do is they're not replacing them.
Liz Moorehead:I'll take a book out
George B. Thomas:of, like, if you're trying to quit smoking, what do they tell you to do? Replace it with something else. My father actually replaced it with sunflower seeds. I've seen people replace it with carrots. I've seen people replace it with something else.
George B. Thomas:That trauma, those historical demons, the thing that you're trying to not be or get away from, what are you taking in your life and saying, when I feel this way, I'm gonna replace it with this. When I wanna act this way, I'm gonna replace it with this. And here's the thing, and then I'll just we can move forward from this, but I totally had to, like, unpack these things. The reason that I was able to recycle recycle recycle youth fear until it actually got me to a point in a as an adult that I made a really bad decision out of anger was because I was comfortable in that place. I was comfortable in anger.
George B. Thomas:We gotta push against, because, again, we talked about there's good fear, there's bad fear. We're gonna talk about that. There's good comfort, and there's negative comfort. And sometimes we're more than willing to be like pigs in mud and just sit in what is our negative comfort because it's comfortable, and it's hard.
Liz Moorehead:It's not necessarily that it's comfortable. Let's dig into this a little bit here because you brought up a number of good points and things that I feel like you articulated better than I could. Let's go back to a couple of things. Number 1, it's not comfortable. It's safe, and it's no.
Liz Moorehead:Yes. Think about the book Atomic Habits that I'm sure a lot of our listeners have read because that's a lot of the type of audience that we speak with. It's all about the known neural pathways. It's the path of least resistance. It's the known.
Liz Moorehead:And when we think about it particularly from the trauma perspective, knowns even when they're terrible, are safer than something unknown. However, the big light bulb moment in my life is something that you just touched upon. What made this change? When I realized I have a choice, I'm either gonna let my trauma define me and let it be the thing where I'm always like, but this is a thing that happened to me. And I wasn't necessarily going around and, like, advertising.
Liz Moorehead:This is what happened to me. This is my childhood. This was my upbringing. This were no. At some point, you have to make the decision to put it behind you.
Liz Moorehead:At some point, you have to decide you're the artist behind your own masterpiece and accept that you are the one in charge of your life and life is not happening to you. There are going to be circumstances outside your control. Some of them can be excruciatingly painful, last for years. Maybe it's just a one momentary trauma thing. But at some point, you have to make the choice to move forward.
Liz Moorehead:But I love what you said about the pain piece and how sometimes pain can be good. There's this incredible video that I will put in the show notes for this. And there is a rabbi who talks about lobster. I think I've shared this with you, George. Lobsters, I think a lot of people think their shell grows with them as they get older and that's actually not the case.
Liz Moorehead:Their shells are very rigid. So periodically throughout their lives, they'll start feeling a lot of pain and that pain is a signal to them. I love lobsters. Thank you for being a literal metaphor for growth. They then go under a rock, hulk through their shell, and grow a new one.
Liz Moorehead:And the rabbi in this video talks about the fact, thank goodness, those lobsters aren't humans because the moment it would start feeling pain, we would ship it off to a hospital, give it a bunch of Vicod and a Percocet and treat the pain as a negative instead of being like, my dude, you just need to go under a rock and bust through. It's temporary. It's painful. But you will be fine. I think the point that we're making here, and I love that you brought it back to this, is that I say this as someone who defolates a lot of time, energy, money, volunteer hours to causes that are rooted in my upbringing.
Liz Moorehead:And at some point y'all, we make a choice about who we're going to be. We make the choice about whether or not we're going to let these things define us. Are we always going to be the people who say, but this thing happened to me? And I'm not trying to diminish what has happened to other people, but at some point, we make the choice about what defines us and what doesn't. Now, George, I wanna pivot the conversation here momentarily.
Liz Moorehead:You said to me once something that I want to dig into a little bit more. You said to me that when you succumb to your fear, you're choosing your head over your heart. What does that mean?
George B. Thomas:Yeah. So it's interesting. I don't think I've ever been fearful in the middle to lower part of my body. It's always, like, neck up where I feel like fear lives for me.
Liz Moorehead:Did you peek at the chart we're gonna talk about later?
George B. Thomas:So the chart was very interesting to me. I did peek at it. I actually had a holy crap moment because and by the way, what Liz is talking about is we're gonna talk about a chart, like, where anxiety shows up, where fear shows up, like, on a body level. And so I always felt like but I didn't really have a eloquent way to show it until this podcast and the show notes that people can go to. Because I always just felt like it was, like, the top of my chest to my head is where fear would always live, and it would never get down into my heart or my core.
George B. Thomas:And so, Liz, when I talk about this though, where I go with that is I know that my heart, my core, I've worked really hard to manufacture that as the creative system of love. It is where the cylinders are going full bore to this principle of life that I believe, and that is love yourself, love others, put love into the world. You reap what you sow, so sow love, like, kindness, and that's so bundled up in what I would call the middle chest and heart area that I always kind of felt like fear couldn't get there. This is not your home. Your home is up there in the head that is like talking to yourself that has the negative narrative going on.
George B. Thomas:And I feel like many times as I've gotten older, my brain, my head has been the last frontier that I have had to conquer. Because I know if I can conquer my brain, if I can conquer my fears, if I can conquer that inner voice, now all of a sudden, I can get real good at keeping myself accountable, going for those walks, not allowing negative talk, doing actual, like, headspace meditation type things, building an actual dope routine that one can be proud of, understand shutting the door to negative fear, opening the door to good fear if I can tame that frontier. And so the saying for me was always just this thing of, like, there's one place in my body where fear exists and that I, right now, would say it calls its home, and that is my brain, my head. I never go, oh, shoot. My fingers are scared right now.
Liz Moorehead:Oh my gosh. My ankle my ankle is scared right now. Like, no. My right metatarsal is terrified.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. To get that. That's not what happens. Right? It's literally the information of my entire being goes and just fries out for the time period in which I let it fry out.
George B. Thomas:And, again, I use the words let it because I am deeply rooted in the choice, and I also have this weird thing about my brain where I think of it less of this thing that can do what it wants to do randomly because I've programmed myself in a way to think of my brain with switches. Turn that off. Turn that switch off. We don't need that room to be lit up. Like, let's just go nope.
George B. Thomas:Shut the door. And some people, I don't know if they have that thought process yet because it's just like all these things are firing, and there's no control, and there is no compartmentalization in there yet. Maybe it's because they haven't thought about it that way or maybe it's because they don't wanna do that. But for me, I literally have this thing where this is the place where fear lives, and now since I know that I've and I'll use the word trapped. I don't know if that's the word I wanna use, but now that I have it trapped there, now that I can see it, now that it's not this mystical thing that's hiding from me.
George B. Thomas:I know where you live. I know who you are, and now I can start to take care of you in the way that you need to be taken care of. This quickly leads me into the conversation of, like, good fear versus bad fear, Fear behind us instead of fear in front of us, things like that.
Liz Moorehead:I love what you said there because here's how I described it once to a friend of mine. You remember the book Traction by Gino Wickman. Yeah. Right? Okay.
Liz Moorehead:And for those of you in the audience who haven't heard of it, it's just a book that outlines an operating system of how to run a company, particularly in the startup culture. And one of the things that they talk about are these 2 very distinctive roles that exist within a company. Often called the CEO and the COO, but really it's about the visionary versus the the integrator. So the CEO and the visionary, that's where, like, you're talking about your big picture strategy. What is the vision for the future and what's possible?
Liz Moorehead:Then you have the integrator. Right? Your COO. They're responsible for, like, okay, visionary. How are we actually gonna get this done?
Liz Moorehead:How do we take this big picture pie in the sky thing and turn it into day to day tactics? Are we sure this isn't gonna bankrupt the company? Things like that. The way I always like to think about it, instead of my brain, is my inner cupcake, my intuition, because that's what I call my intuition. Right?
Liz Moorehead:Some people call it source. Some people call it divine. Some people call it intuition. I'm like, it is a baked good that lives somewhere near my stomach. So with my inner cupcake, my intuition is my CEO.
Liz Moorehead:It is the thing that sets the vision COO. And in some cases, it's gonna be like, great. We've done this before. This is the plan. These are the logistics.
Liz Moorehead:And then sometimes, it's gonna kick up what you just said. Right? It's gonna turn into this little thing where it's like, but one time we got hurt in 6th grade, and it was very scary, and I don't wanna and you gotta tell it to me. Your job is not to set the vision. Your job is to help me get to the vision that I set.
Liz Moorehead:The other thing I wanna mention here that I think is really, really powerful, and it kind of speaks to what we're talking about, is that this map of where fear lives in the body. So, a friend of mine who is a trauma therapist, I was having these feelings that I didn't know how to articulate. And she's like, well, what is it that you're feeling? And I said, I don't know. I can't tell if I'm happy.
Liz Moorehead:I can't tell if I'm excited. I can't tell if I'm afraid. Because physiologically, excitement and nervous energy and fear can often feel the same. So she shows me this chart. And fear and anxiety tend to be feelings that center very deeply in your upper chest.
Liz Moorehead:It is radiating, but it often does extend it to your arms, your legs, or your head. And she said, if you're feeling it right here, you're likely dealing with fear and anxiety. And that really flipped the switch for me. I noticed if I started having thoughts that originated as a response to feelings in this upper chest area, that was fear talking. That was not my intuition.
Liz Moorehead:That was not logic. That was me having a fight or flight response. And I will tell you for our audience, that is a great way. If you suddenly feel a surge of feeling that makes you very uncomfortable and it's centered mostly in your upper chest, you really want to be thinking about, is this a fear response? Likely, the answer is yes.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. It's interesting. I want people who are listening to this to go to the show notes because the interesting thing for me was how akin, surprise, fear, anxiety, but then also the map of disgust. Those four things, if you look at this, like, kind of heat map, if you will, it's very interesting to me how they're kind of aligned with each other. And what's really interesting is if you look at this heat map and the reason I'm bringing this up is because we probably need to do a whole episode about anxiety, dealing with anxiety, like, what truly is anxiety.
George B. Thomas:It almost looks like if you look at the heat map that anxiety would be more detrimental to one's bodily ecosystem than fear is. Like, it is lit up like a freaking Christmas tree. Anxiety versus fear is a little bit more tamed down, but definitely check that out. Liz, it's interesting because, again, we talk about lit up. I did just now, and I want us to be careful because, again, green is go.
George B. Thomas:Red is stop. Red is bad. We use a red pen to, like, edit things. This heat map is in reds and yellows. So I wanna be careful that we state, yes, this is how your body might react, but it could react this way to good fear, or it could react this way to bad fear.
George B. Thomas:We're not saying these heat maps are showing here's what bad fear is. We're just saying here's what fear looks like or you might feel in your body.
Liz Moorehead:So talk to us about good fear versus bad fear. We've teased this quite a bit. Talk to us about that.
George B. Thomas:So good fear, healthy fear. If used right fear can be a direction, a motivator, a GPS to go away from things or go towards things. Not always running away from these, but going towards something or away from something. If you fear or you feel that sense of fear, how do you make this work for you versus working against you? Fear can open things instead of always thinking it that fear is closing your life.
George B. Thomas:Because many times we fear me heights, so I don't do ski lifts, roller coasters. Like, it's closing the possibilities in my life, but how can I use that fear to push me in a direction that actually opens my life because I refuse to listen to the voice of fear? When we talk about good fear too, one of the things that's really interesting here, if you do a search for good fear, like on YouTube or whatever, you're gonna find that it goes right into the spiritual realm of things. Like, you'll start seeing pastors preaching messages and what the scripture says about fear and all that. And so I definitely wanna dip my toes back into, like, something that I found very interesting as I was unpacking this and growing through it and even researching for this podcast.
George B. Thomas:Couple of things. 1, good fear. Right? Fear of the Lord. And, again, I'm not saying you have to be religious, but if you were to lean into something that was like, hey.
George B. Thomas:That would be a good fear. Fearing a greater universe, fearing a god potentially that created you, whoever you call that god, it's a good thing to fear because it's like listen. I would fear Hulk Hogan. I would fear Muhammad Ali. These people are bigger.
George B. Thomas:They're stronger. Obviously, the universe is bigger, stronger. God is bigger
Liz Moorehead:stronger. When I have to go meet with my accountant.
George B. Thomas:The government is bigger. Right? But here's the thing, Proverbs 1533. Fear the Lord is the instruction for wisdom. Now if we think about wisdom, it's the ability to understand one's brain and make wise choices based on things that we've learned along the way.
George B. Thomas:So it's very interesting that fear could be the instruction for wisdom, which actually then we can get this reciprocal kind of thing happening with the wisdom that we're using to get rid of the fear that we have inside of our brain, but it goes on to say, and before honor comes humility. Now, Liz, you know me. I'm always about the happy, helpful, humble human. As soon as I saw fear of the Lord and wisdom and honor and humility, I was like, I love this verse. One more that I'll throw out here, then I wanna dive into negative fear.
George B. Thomas:The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. Instruction. Nobody wants to be a fool. We don't wake up in the morning and be like, I wanna be a fool today.
George B. Thomas:So there is a good fear. Another good fear is if there were dinosaurs, if there were Another good fear is if there were dinosaurs, if there were saber tooth tigers, if there are in your community people that you should be watching out for, places you should be staying away from. Those are good fears. Now when we think about bad fears, it's unhealthy. And what's interesting is as I think about this, I start to think about the word doubt.
George B. Thomas:Doubting ourselves, doubting others, doubting the structural integrity of a roller coaster, doubting the fact that we can stay upright, not fall 1,000 feet, or doubting the fact that the spider is probably more scared of us and the snake's more scared. Like, just this word doubt. But here's the thing. What's interesting is we've talked a little bit about goals on this podcast, and I bumped into this TED Talk by Tim Ferris. And I was like, oh my gosh.
George B. Thomas:And he talks about like, we always wanna define our goals, but Tim Ferriss talked about defining your fears. And he had this framework that I would beg the listeners to maybe dive in and look for the TED Talk, but he he had this framework where he talked about define, prevent, and repair. And what was cool is define was, like, define the worst case outcomes. I'm afraid of rollercoasters. What's the worst case scenario?
George B. Thomas:I'm right. This thing blows up. I die. Okay. That like, that's a really bad worst case scenario, by the way.
George B. Thomas:But then prevent. Well, what's the possible solutions? When's the last time this thing had a maintenance check? Is my seat belt buckled? Do I know where I'm going if I were to die anyway?
George B. Thomas:Okay. I've done the possible solutions to this problem. And, of course, I'm kind of waxing funny with the fact that I'm afraid of of heights here. But repair then, know your what ifs. Right?
George B. Thomas:Now my what ifs in this scenario couldn't be like, well, I'm going to fly away to safety because I'm not Superman. But in a real world, how can you define? How can you prevent? How can you repair? And then he had this one little other piece that he talked about, the benefits.
George B. Thomas:We're really bad at understanding or thinking about the benefits of pushing through the fear or what we feel is gonna go wrong, but what are all the positives once we get to the other side of that? And if you can define, here's my fear, here's how I would try to prevent that fear, Here's how I can repair it, and here's the benefits if I make it through it. That to me was like a dope mental unlock of defining your fears instead of just defining your goals along the way of your
Liz Moorehead:life. You know, you hit on 2 things there that I wanna really double click on. Number 1, really getting clear on the language we use to talk about fear. Because I think if this is true and I think we've touched upon this in other episodes. The language we use to talk about ourselves is so incredibly powerful.
Liz Moorehead:And it goes beyond just the ideas of these are the stories that we tell ourselves and da da da da. But if you are constantly talking about things in highly negative terms, all you will look for is evidence of the negative. You will never look for evidence of the positive. The other thing you noted there actually leads me to what I would say is our final question today, George. And it's a bit of a trick question, and I promise to answer it as well, so you're not the only one on the hot seat for this.
Liz Moorehead:How often have your worst fears turned out to be true?
George B. Thomas:So this might be the last question, but I do have one thing that I wanna, like, wrap up with at the very, very end of this.
Liz Moorehead:Of course.
George B. Thomas:So here's the thing. It's not gonna be a long winded answer, the question. Almost never. Almost never. Like, I'll have this fear, and then I'll get to the other side of it.
George B. Thomas:And I'm like, well, that was nothing like I thought it was gonna be. That wasn't even as painful as I thought it was gonna be. That wasn't the response that I was gonna get from someone. Now I will tell you, I can't say never because one of the things that I always wanted to do from a very young age was I wanted to be married, and I wanted to have a family. We're talking, like, 16a half, 17 years old.
George B. Thomas:I was already thinking about wanting to be married and have a family. One of my biggest fears in life I've never talked about this, one of my biggest fears was actually that I would end up being divorced. I literally said at a young age that I'll never get divorced because listen. I'm one of a kind, ladies and gentlemen. They broke the mold.
George B. Thomas:My mom and my dad had me, and now I have the pleasure, the joy of having a mom and a dad and a mom and a dad. You can make that sense. Like, I hate the word stepmom and stepdad. I have 2 moms and I have 2 dads. I'm very blessed in that.
George B. Thomas:And by the way, all of them are still alive, which I'm very blessed with that, and so I get to have these relationships. But when I was younger, in my younger brain, I was like, well, I don't wanna be like that, which now there's traits that I wanna be like. I pick the different ones from all of my moms and all of my dads. Right? But I don't wanna be like that.
George B. Thomas:And I got married, and I got divorced. I was like, oh, my worst fear came true. One of my other fears is that my kids would end up like me. Now what I mean by that is that they would end up being high school dropouts. Because if I could go back and change anything in my life, well, I wouldn't change it.
George B. Thomas:But that's usually the thing that I would have told people. Hey. If I could go change something. And I wanna dip into why I said, don't ever say I don't wanna do that or I don't wanna be that or don't focus on the thing that you don't want it to be. Focus on the thing that you want it to be is because all of my kids, pretty much all of my kids, 2 out of 4, maybe even 3 out of 4, struggled with school.
George B. Thomas:And so I always felt like I was on this, like, teeter totter of, like, oh, crap. They're gonna be me? And that was another one of my biggest fears. Now not the truth. Right?
George B. Thomas:There's diplomas. They're through school. They're all young adults at this point. Now they're on this journey of becoming whatever they become with the resources and brain and education that they put inside themselves. But that was, like, 2 sticky places in my life where, like, biggest fears and are they gonna come true?
George B. Thomas:Are they not gonna come true? Like, oh my god. Like, what I want the listeners to understand is I understand the wasted time of worry, the wasted time of worry based on fears that could, did, could, maybe not happen. Alright. You said you'd answer this, so I'm super curious.
Liz Moorehead:I have the same answer. Well, yeah, almost exactly identical. I have, like, a 99.9% failure rate when it comes to predicting the outcomes of my own life, particularly when the predictions I'm making are from a place of, you know, a place of fear.
George B. Thomas:Yep.
Liz Moorehead:And I think that's something I want our listeners to remember and ask yourselves. How often have you been right about the worst case scenario? Also, my favorite thing too is the instances, those rare occasions in which the worst possible what if I don't get that job? What if what if I also get a divorce? Same thing.
Liz Moorehead:And I was raised Catholic. You didn't do that. Like, you didn't do it. There has never been a situation which I wasn't glad about the outcome. Never.
Liz Moorehead:Now to be fair, when we're talking about broken bones, physical harm, this is a horse of a different color. But the fear we're talking about today, the stuff, the little fear prisons that we build in our brains, often, the thing that we actually fear is not an outcome. It's having to sit with uncomfortable feelings. And the moment you can actually master that, the moment things become wildly more possible. And I'm not saying that from a place of having mastered it.
Liz Moorehead:There are times where I still drive heave into a little mental paper bag, and I'm still baby stepping. I'm still doing the work. But I would challenge everybody listening to ask yourself, how good are you at predicting the worst case scenario failures in your life? Now, of course, there gonna be ones that come out of nowhere where you're like, f. That was a big ass failure.
Liz Moorehead:But you survived. You didn't explode. And what was the good that came out of it? I had the same thing. I left college, and what you said there is, like, oh, I would have come back and changed that.
Liz Moorehead:Well, actually, no. I wouldn't go back and change anything. That's what happens. At some point, the thing that was catastrophic that we allowed it to define us for years becomes the thing that was the gateway to greatness, the gateway to the what is possible that we could have never dreamed. Now, George, you mentioned you wanna leave our listeners with something today.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. It's funny when you use the word gateway, Liz, my brain went immediately to, oh, shoot. If they haven't checked out the episode on finish lines that are actually starting lines, That almost dovetails into the conversation that we had there. So here's the thing. One of the things I wanna make sure that we cover is next time you get into a place of fear, I want you to understand what I'm gonna do, and maybe this will work for you.
George B. Thomas:When I get in a place of fear moving forward, there's really three things that I'm gonna do and a mind set that I'm gonna challenge myself to have. And, of course, you guys and gals out there already know, like, I have this program that I run false evidence appearing real. This is a little bit different than this or different than that. So the first thing, when I run into fear moments moving forward, the first knee jerk reaction that I wanna program or force myself into is question it. Why?
George B. Thomas:Why am I fearful of this? Why am I feeling this way? Why is this happening right now? I wanna question that moment in time, and if I can ask why questions, like, 3, 5, 7 different directions around it, I start to understand it a little bit more because once I understand it, now I start to weigh it. Meaning, is this a, like, deep level of fear, light level of fear?
George B. Thomas:Is this a saber tooth tiger, or is this the fact that you're 2 foot off the ground on, like, a box or something? Like, where are we at here? And then the third thing I wanna do is understand the power of avoiding it or diving into it. So it's question it, it's weigh it, and it's understanding if it should be avoided or dove into. And what I mean by avoided or dove into is the mindset that I really wanna go into is understanding should this fear be behind me and be a force pushing me through life, pushing me through the discomfort, pushing me into the places that I actually need to be on stage, on roller coasters, living a full life, whatever it is, or is it the fear that should be in front of me because it's designed to stop me from bad situations in life, whatever those might be.
George B. Thomas:But instead of just fear being a stopper, fear being the thing in front of me always, I wanna have that choice, and I literally wanna program myself to be able to say behind me or in front of me in these moments that I've questioned and weighed the situation that is causing fear in my life in those moments.