00:00

Hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 252, "How to Courage Up in the Face of Fear." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale, and I'm your host for Intentional Living.

00:22

Well, hello there, everyone, welcome to the podcast today. I want to start off today just by thanking you for being here and thank you for sharing this content with people that you know would also enjoy this kind of discussion and thank you for your reviews and for the sweet notes that I get. That makes a huge impact on me. I do this because I love the content. The content has changed my life for the better. When I look back at the me of 10 years ago I just don't even recognize any part of who she was and how she was responding. And I get it. I'm compassionate to her because I know that she was doing the best she could, but boy, the life I'm living now is just so different and it's because of these tools. And I feel very honored to get to be able to share this content with you and hopefully it's helping you to step up into more intimate relationships with yourself, with other people in your life, and also with God. It's making a big difference for me. So thanks for being here.

01:28

All right, we are talking today about how to courage up in the face of fear. So while working with my coaches last week, I uncovered a circumstance in my life where I have been acting from a place of fear and it's been super interesting to see how my brain has been responding from fear without my conscious awareness. Like all this was going on and I had, I mean I knew that there was a circumstance that I'd been working through, but didn't realize it was based in fear. And these thoughts in my brain have had me not showing up the way that I would want. I have not been speaking up in a way that honors myself the way that I want to. And because of my fear in this arena, my brain has been going into protective mode, which for me awakens a past pattern of thinking that I'm not supposed to rock the boat and in order to obey the rules I need to play small and I need to be quiet. I don't need to have an opinion. So just to lay any fairs, this has not been with my husband. Mostly I've gotten really good at speaking up and acknowledging my wants and needs with him, and to me. But anyway this is why I've been thinking about fear and why I want to address it to you today. And also for me. Because this gives me a chance to dive deeper into my own fear in this circumstance and understand it more and know how I want to move forward. So as with any good talk I'm probably going to get more out of this than you do. It's going to help me clean up a lot of my own thinking about it.

03:02

So fear is interesting because when we break it down, fear is just a feeling and yet it is so easy to let that feeling be so in charge of so much. We allow fear to keep us from showing up as we truly are. We allow fear to stop us from pursuing our dreams. We listen to fear when it tells us we're not smart enough or strong enough and so we don't move forward. We succumb to fear when we believe it's telling us that we're not worthy of love or valuable as a person. And yet fear is just a feeling. It's a vibration in our body that can feel uncomfortable. Fascinating, isn't it, that we can allow a feeling to determine so much of what we do. In fact, we can actually allow the feeling of fear to paralyze us, to keep us from moving forward.

03:53

Fear is actually a primal emotion. It comes in very handy sometimes. It's not always the villain, just to be sure. Fear is very important when you're being chased by a bear in the forest. It's what gets us moving away as quickly as possible from that bear. And in other truly precarious, more day-to-day life situations, fear protects us from danger. And it even warns us of potential danger. It's part of the survival instinct that we have as humans and we're really grateful for it. When we are in real danger, it's an amazing thing that serves us very well. Fear does tend to cross the line, however. Sometimes fear shows up when there really isn't anything to be afraid of. Fear can show up when there is perceived danger but no real threat. For example, so many people say that they have a pretty solid fear of speaking in public. Here's something fascinating when we look at that fear. These people actually speak in front of people every day. Generally, it's not the fear of speaking as much as it is the fear of others judging us or the fear of not doing a perfect job and being embarrassed or we're making the sheer number of people mean something because what happens when others judge us or we get embarrassed? We have an uncomfortable feeling. So in this instance, we are actually fearing the uncomfortable feeling. The same thing applies if you're in a newish relationship and you're afraid to be the first person to say, "I love you." It's not that you're afraid of saying the words, because you've probably done that hundreds of times before. It's the emotional repercussions if the words or sentiments are not reciprocated. We're afraid of feeling rejection. When we look at many of our fears as being fearful of feelings rather than of things, it can make fear a little more manageable.

05:59

So I love that Brooke Castillo from the life coach school says that she's so successful because she's willing to feel any feeling. She doesn't let the fear of feeling a difficult emotion keep her from doing something. Fascinating thought, right? It's the fear of emotions that keeps us from going into what we often want to do. I'm also starting to realize that learning how to overcome my fears actually creates freedom because fear causes us to freeze. We stop moving. We don't do the things we want to do because of fear. Fear holds us back from growth, either because it will tell us that we don't know what to do or because it will tell us that it won't work out, that we will fail. And many of us have a huge fear response to failure. Fear comes from a place of our primitive brain seeking to protect us. But in reality, it puts us in a padded cage, a place where we feel safe from perceived dangers. But ultimately, we are stuck and unable to create what we want to create in our lives. Fear protects us from failures. But in so doing, it also prevents us from creating success. Fear assures that we remain ignorant, that we don't learn and grow and move forward.

07:24

I recently read somewhere that the scriptures have an admonition to "fear not" 91 times. Why would God plead with us so many times to fear not? What does not have to do with our purpose and progress here in life? When I think about God's plan for us, that we come to earth in order to learn and grow, to learn to trust and live by faith, to become more like Christ in every way, it makes sense works against this plan. Giving into our fears keeps us from acting in faith, from learning to draw upon the powers of God and stepping into our possibility. But I also love the idea that without fear, we wouldn't have courage. And courage is one of the greatest qualities I believe we can develop. If we're fearing not, we're stepping into courage. So maybe what God is really telling us is to courage up.

08:26

Last year, 2022 was a very busy year for me dealing with fear. This was the year that I got married, that I quit teaching middle school, that I started my coaching business full-time, that I moved from Utah to Indiana, that I hiked Machu Picchu. And here's a fun fact, my word for the year 2022 was courage. Every one of those things required a lot of courage. All of them required tha,t although I felt fear, I summoned and stepped into my courage. Sione and I only dated for three and a half months, long distance even, before we made our engagement official. And the whole weekend I was thinking that I would wait until after I was married to put in my school notice that I was leaving because I was still teaching school. I knew I'd be moving to Indiana over the summer and yet I was feeling a lot of fear about putting in my notice. You know, what if it didn't work out? What if ...just so much going on in my head about giving up a job. So my first day back to school after that weekend I just kept thinking about how I was letting my fears dictate my behaviors by waiting to put in my notice until we were officially married. And if I really believed that Sione was my person, if I had faith that God had brought him into my life, which I believe He did, if I truly believed in my ability to create the kind of relationship that I wanted with Sione, then I felt I needed to courage up and put in my notice. And by the end of my first day back I had submitted my notice to the district and emailed my principal. I just knew that I needed to exert that faith, that I needed to move forward with the faith to make things happen.

10:22

Now, would I have gotten married if I had waited to put in my notice? Almost assuredly, but I feel that stepping out of the fear zone and into the courage zone solidified my decision to me and to Sione and also to God, letting Him know that I had made a strong decision. It was a courageous declaration of my decision. So was I scared? Absolutely, I was scared. What if I quit a teaching job that I really enjoyed and then it didn't work out and I had to find another job that I didn't enjoy so much. It was the change that was scary, the commitment to the change. Those thoughts absolutely all crossed my mind, but I chose to refocus my thinking all day about what I wanted and where I was headed rather than on what could go wrong. I also intuitively knew that to be all in, I had to be all in. I had to let go of my fears. My faith in God's guidance, my faith in Sione, and my faith in myself helped me to step into the courage necessary to put it all on the line and last year was an incredible year of growth for me in so many ways.

11:41

So in preparation for my Better Relationships mastermind that I'm teaching right now, I had the participants and myself go back and listen to podcasts 183 called "Taking Risks and Becoming." If you haven't listened to that one, go back and check it out. It's a pretty great podcast if I do say so myself. So this one was recorded the last week of 2021 and I talked about how the last two years had been my biggest years of growth to date. I was dating Sione at the time. He was my 90-day number three man and he was my last. I was having a tough time imagining that I could grow more in one year's time than I had in

those two years because they had been such big years of growth, and even in that I said that I've hit a point the previous year where I was like, "you know, I can't imagine growing as much this next year." And yet there was a lot of fear. But I stepped out of it so much that year and I made courageous decisions and 2022 ended up being an even bigger year of growth for me than the previous two.

12:53

So the question arises, how do we courage up in the face of fear? For the record, I don't always courage up, but I've gotten pretty good at it. Sometimes I do let my fears overtake me and I hold myself back from growth and possibility. But when I do step into courage and when you step into courage, what makes us do it? What makes us look fear in the face and still make a move? I really think that it's by learning to focus on the courage rather than on the fear. We move toward what we are looking at and when we are looking at our fears, that's all we can see and that's the direction we go. When we are looking at what we want on the other side of fear, we can dig deep and courage up.

13:39

I love the phrase that James E. Faust taught when he said, "let us not take counsel from our fears." Isn't that great? Don't let fear make your decisions for you. Fear is not your counselor. Fear is not the person to take advice from. Your primitive brain will absolutely defer to fear because it is seeking to avoid pain and conserve energy.

14:07

And doing something scary seems like it's going to bring us pain and it's going to take a lot of energy. And your prefrontal cortex seeks to tap into courage because that's where the growth and the understanding and the learning occur. And courage is an attribute that we develop. Here's an amazing thing about courage that I touched on just briefly, but I want to mention again. We wouldn't have courage without fear. We wouldn't need courage without fear. So fear is part of that necessary 50-50 of life that we talk about. Fear is the impetus for creating greater courage. And courage is what creates our future lives. Robin Sharma in his book "The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari" says this, "courage allows you to run your own race. Courage allows you to do whatever you want to do because you know that it is right. Courage gives you the self-control to persist where others have failed. Ultimately, the degree of courage you live with determines the amount of fulfillment you receive. It allows you to truly realize all of the exquisite wonders of the epic that is your life, and those who master themselves have an abundance of courage." I love this idea that the amount of courage that we live with determines the amount of fulfillment that we receive in our lives. Growing into our possibility where we'll find the greatest happiness, the greatest fulfillment, absolutely requires courage because our possibility is sometimes scary to us. I have always loved this quote from Marianne Williamson and it says, "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who might be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." So this courage that we grasp onto, blesses not only our lives but blesses the lives of the people around us.

17:05

I have found that sometimes what I really fear about something that I'm anticipating is the responsibility that I will need to take on after I grow and become. I'm afraid of what stepping into my light will require of me. I find the possibility of accessing courage to be so much easier when I am focused on what I really want in my life. And I really do want growth and progression even if it comes with more responsibility. So when I can keep my eye on the prize, I can summon my courage much easier than if I'm keeping my eye on my fear. It took a lot of courage for me to start dating again after 24 tough years of marriage and being single for five years and being really happy being single. But I kept my eye on my goal of really wanting to have a deeply emotional and intimate relationship. So rather than focusing on all the potential difficult dating situations that would assuredly come, and they do, I promise you that, I chose to focus instead on what I felt it was possible for me to create. And especially after Mr. 90-Days number one, I realized how sweet and wonderful a relationship could be like. I had no idea before then. And then I for sure knew that I did want to get married. And I knew that through coaching, I now have the tools and the ability to use those tools to create the emotionally intimate relationship that I felt was possible. Realizing that fear would keep me from my goal, from ever getting what I decided that I wanted, gave me the courage to make decisions and move forward. Les Brown says this quote, "if you're not willing to risk, you cannot grow. If you cannot grow, you cannot be your best. If you cannot be your best, you cannot be happy." I am my happiest for sure when my growth game is strong. And that means I have to courage up and overcome my fears.

19:20

And again, when my focus is on my fears, they grow and grow in my brain until they feel insurmountable. When I focus on my goals, where I want to go, that grows and grows in my brain until I have the courage to make a move in that direction. Couraging up makes me feel alive. It's like it awakens sleeping parts of my soul that have been waiting for the right stimulus in order to emerge. I become a different person with each part of me that awakens. If I can overcome the fear and find the energy that courage creates and move on it, it grows me into facing my next fear with even greater courage. I start to develop more and more courage and more and more mental control over my fearful thoughts. Does fear ever go away? I would guess not because I think that if the fear goes away, so does my ability to develop my courage. Fear is a necessary part of our journey and it is a built-in process of our primitive brains. So it probably never will go away, but we can learn to manage our fear by not focusing on it.

20:37

I was working with a client this week who has a fear that she is a huge failure and will continue to be so. We talked about how when those fearful thoughts occur, she doesn't need to dwell on them. She doesn't need to keep thinking about where they come from and why they keep popping up. She doesn't need to do thought models on them and analyze all the things. So here's an example of what that looks like. So sometimes when I'm driving down the road and I see two runners coming toward me, my brain thinks, "if I just turn my wheel, I could take those two runners out." Okay, so now to be clear, this isn't anything I would ever do. And it's so far off track for me that I just miss the thought and go on. But I bet a lot of you have had similar kinds of thoughts, right? But we just don't dwell on it. I don't start judging myself for having the thought and think that I need to go repent and I don't beat myself up for thinking something like that. I don't go home and do thought models to figure out how it would play out. I don't hire a counselor to try and figure out what in my past could have created such a thought. I just think, "weird," and move on. And then I completely forget about it until I'm searching for an example for the podcast like this, right?

21:48

We can train ourselves to do the same thing with our fears. Our brain says, "that seems really scary." And we can just think, "yep, and I do scary things." And we can keep moving on in the direction that we want to go. Focus on where you're going rather than on the fear. When I was a missionary in Georgia over three decades ago, thank you very much, there was a morning that I got up and we had this huge spider in our bathroom. I mean, it was big and it was hairy, right? And those to me just kind of creep me out. And I've never liked them. But had I just grabbed the broom or a shoe or something and immediately gotten rid of it, I would have been fine. I'm completely capable of doing that. I had done that in the past. I can do things like that, right? But I stood there in the doorway and I thought about that spider and how it would probably jump on me, and get stuck in my clothing, and start crawling all over my body...and the more I thought about my fear of the spider, the bigger the fear got. And the bigger it got and the bigger it got until my companion came out of the bathroom and I was standing there in tears. Literally my fear of that little spider paralyzed me and I was too freaked out to do anything. I was so focused on the fear. Fear runs awry and leads to panic That is kind of what fear of fear is. I was definitely in panic mode and I've since learned that I want to move on my fear quickly. Otherwise, my brain will run away with creating all sorts of stories about what could happen and I chicken out. It becomes overwhelming and feels insurmountable.

23:44

So just a quick summary. Recognize the fear. Believe that it's okay to feel fear. It's totally normal to feel fear. In fact, fear helps us develop the amazing attribute of courage. We are going to feel fear. It's part of how it works. Fear will always be there. It's okay. And it's okay to acknowledge the fear and go, "oh, there's some fear." And it might even help to figure out what you're really afraid of. Very often we're just afraid of another feeling. That concept alone may help you get your thoughts in check regarding your fear. Maybe you're just afraid of being embarrassed. Maybe you're afraid of feeling vulnerable. Right? Find the feeling that you're afraid of before and then just move. Don't pick up that fear and hold it and pet it and feed it and coddle it. Just acknowledge it and then move in the direction you really want to. The courage will come if you focus on your goal rather than on the fear.

24:56

Courage up, my friends. There is an amazing you and an amazing life on the other side of your fear. And we are meant to grow and progress and move forward. And we do that when we summon courage. Remember courage is the opposite of fear. Right? Courage is when we move on it rather than get paralyzed by the fear. This is part of growing up, my friends. And I love it so much, this middle-aged gig. Pretty darn awesome, if you ask me. I love this stage of life. There are things available to me now because of my maturity and because of my experiences that were not available into to me in my twenties and thirties. And I'm so grateful to be where I am. And I'm glad, glad, glad to be where I am in my life. And so happy to have you here with me.

25:59

If you would love some personal help for me and want to talk about one-on-one coaching, I would love to chat with you about whether it would be a good fit for you or not. You can go to my website tanyahale.com. You can click on the "free consultation" tab at the top and there you have access to my calendar. You can find a time that works for you and we can sit down for about 30 minutes and chat about your situation. We can chat about how coaching can help you and get you set up. I do have some openings in my schedule right now, so it's a great time to, um, it's always a great time to figure out things so that you can clean up your life and show up more the way that you want to and courage up to do some tough, tough inner work. And this is work, but it is work worth doing. I promise you. Okay. So if you're loving this, please share it with someone. If someone came to your mind as you were listening today, feel free to hit the over a text message that quick and that easy. And if you have friends that like this kind of content, I love chatting with friends about podcasts that we listen to and coming together and discussing concepts that we've learned while listening to other podcasts. So take an opportunity to share this with your friends. And so you can talk about it and discuss it. That's going to do it for me this week. I wish you all the best. Have a terrific one and I will see you next time. Bye.

27:37

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.