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Bite-sized chunks of wisdom about self-leadership for you to chew on.
Dealing with Fear, Shame, and Resistance
Episode 5
Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.
Kate Arms:
I want to talk a little bit today about shame, fear, and resistance, and all of the ways that we can get in our own way.
What I have discovered working with a variety of clients is that the ways that we get in our own way are the same few things.
The first is, anytime we try something we haven't tried before, there's fear.
Our brains are wired to, as a default, assume that the status quo is good because we haven't died. This is not rational. It doesn't come from our neocortex, our cognitive processing power. It comes from our emotional mid-brain.
It is necessary to train ourselves into comfort with the process of overcoming this fear.
Most of us have highly developed fear mechanisms and avoidance mechanisms because we had highly attuned childhood responses to situations. The fear, we latched onto it, and it has been reinforced. If we didn't get good skills for managing fear from our parents, we have really old, really bad habits.
The first thing is to recognize that the fear is actually trying to help us. It is saying, "Hey, going into something new here. Let's pay attention because it might be dangerous."
So from your cognitive, rational place, you need to give it some data to help it stand down, because if it can see the evidence, that emotional brain will chill.
What kind of evidence is useful? Analogies to things you've successfully handled in the past that are like what's coming up, acknowledging the skills that you have to adapt to whatever happens in the moment, a backup plan, people that you can call on for help, people who will go with you that you trust.
Often when somebody is launching on a transition that scares them, that they don't have friends to walk through the process with them, that's when they'll get a coach.
My very first coach, I was in the midst of making a decision that I didn't really want to share what was going on inside with me with any of my friends, and I needed companionship on the way because it was too scary to look at it by myself, but I really wanted to look at it. So I hired my first coach.
Also, teaching ourselves, oh, this is what it feels like when I'm trying something new.
Another tool: fear is experienced in the body through adrenaline and cortisol. Excitement is manifested through adrenaline with no cortisol. If you can start asking the question, what am I excited about? The cortisol will stop flooding your system. The fear will decrease.
So, fear can be managed with a bunch of tools. There are others, but those are a few.
Shame stops us revealing ourselves. And the antidote to shame is self-compassion.
Look at the things you're good at, the things you're bad at, the strengths, the weaknesses, and recognize that that is what it means to be human. Welcome to the human race, with strengths and weaknesses.
Ask yourself, if I were my best friend or I were parenting myself and I were a toddler learning through the world, how would I treat myself? And then go ahead and treat yourself that way.
You can train in self-compassion by using a loving-kindness or meta practice from the Buddhist tradition or a practice of doing good things for people, generosity. That happens in all sorts of other traditions.
And then turning that generosity onto yourself.
When shame is in the picture, it is much easier to take care of other people than it is to take care of yourself. But if you are not taking care of yourself and you are taking care of other people to feel good about yourself, they will feel manipulated because they will read that subtext.
They will read that undercurrent of, oh, she's just doing this because it's important to her that she thinks of herself as a nice person.
You are a nice person. Gather evidence of it. Then go out and help people.
The other thing that we do that sometimes is a way we get in our own way is that we just deny or resist or we just don't look at things.
This is often a defence mechanism that we have gathered because we don't want to face what other people say to us, and we need to honor that the part of us that just doesn't want to go there has our best interest and heart. Might not be as skillful as we want to be, might actually be getting in our way, but it's actually trying to protect us.
One of the things that we can do to the part of ourselves that is getting in our way is to say, "Thank you for working so hard to protect me and take care of me, and I got this so you can rest now. You've been working for a long time. Thanks for all your efforts. I got this."
So, fear, shame, and resistance show up all the time. There are tools for working with them, and I've given you a few. I hope they help.
End Theme and Credits:
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To dig deeper into the topics I cover on the podcast, follow me at instagram.com/SignalFireKate or at facebook.com/katearmscoach.
To take this work deeper and learn how I can support you personally as your coach, email me at kate@signalfirecoaching.com to schedule a free consultation.
Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.