We all experience fear. But some fear is sneaky and can really get us stuck, even if we’re not aware of it. In this Halloween episode, Janine and Shannon discuss the way fear is often at the root of perfectionism. And we get into strategies for letting it go.
Discussion topics include:
- Janine’s antipathy for Halloween
- The St. Louis Halloween tradition (it involves jokes)!
- The fact that kids like to be scared
- Shannon’s scary (and hilarious) haunted-house ride in Paris
- The physiology of fear
- How are brains can’t tell the difference between scary things we’re thinking or physically threatening things
- How fear figures into perfectionism
- One strategy for letting go of fear: Asking yourself “What’s the worse that can happen?”
- Another strategy: Allowing yourself to feel fear until it’s gone (it often lasts less than 90 seconds)
- Becoming conscious of your fears
- How fear enters into decluttering —and strategies for letting go of it
- How getting past fear is like running through an invisible dog fence
- Doing a deep dive to handle the fears that underly perfectionism
- A key question about fear, “Is it true?”
- Looking at fear from a rational place to pull apart the threads that prevent you from taking action
- The question to ask yourself when you’re stuck (Shannon asks it regularly)
Here’s the video of Shannon and her kids after their scary experience on the haunted-house ride
Links
- Janine’s 2009 blog post We all have fear
“Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” That’s a great quote.
When Shannon kept asking Janine “Why?” it reminded me of a coach’s recommendation that I take whatever was holding me back from doing something and keep asking Why until I got to the heart of the matter. When I said “Because then I mattered” about my childhood, I immediately thought, “Oh, Jesus.” I think when you get to invoking the Lord’s name, you have gotten to the center.