Just As Well, The Women's Health Podcast - How To Stop Fear Holding You Back

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Starting point is 00:01:46 goals that matter most to you. This week, we're doing a little mindset maintenance, looking at fear specifically, and what you can do to ensure it doesn't take up more room at the table than it needs to. I'm talking not about the kind of fear you get when you jump, you know, you need that. I'm talking about the worry and fear and anxiety that you're not good enough. The stuff that can build and build and build and hold you back in many ways, no matter what your goal. From not going for the goals you want because you're so fearful of failure, to being so fearful that the success you've accumulated is so fleeting and ready to be snatched away from you at any point, that you keep chasing success but never allow yourself.

Starting point is 00:02:28 to recognise it and to enjoy it. It's the type of fear that if it gets both hands on the wheel can drive you towards overwork, burnout and a total disconnection for the meaning, purpose and happiness in your life. My guest on today's episode calls this a thief, one whose techniques are so cunning and sneaky that she's written a whole book aimed at helping you put fear back in its place

Starting point is 00:02:53 and achieve your goals. She is Dr. Piper Grange, a doctor of sports, psychology and a world-leading culture coach who's hired by the sporting and business elite to help them edge in front of the competition. As head of people and team development at the Football Association, she worked closely with Gareth Southgate's England team for the World Cup in 2018. What a summer that was. Here she tells us why working on your fear is such an essential step in achieving success and perhaps even more importantly, that sense of satisfaction that you get when you achieve your goal. She's got plenty of tactics too. I really hope you enjoy this episode. Let's

Starting point is 00:03:31 get stuck into it. Dr Piffa Grange. Hello. Hi. How are you doing? I'm doing good. Thank you. Welcome to going for goal. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Our mission is to help people to achieve their health goals. And as a sports psychologist and culture coach, this must be your total bread and butter. It's such interesting. And very niche job title. Could you let me know how you came to be doing what you're doing? Yeah, it is very niche. I sometimes wonder how I got here myself. I started in Australia 23 years ago or something. I finished a doctorate in applied performance psychology. And the first job I got was working with the AFL Players Association. And I was charged with setting up the

Starting point is 00:04:24 psychology services for AFL players, Aussie rules players and their families. So it wasn't the kind of, you know, how to keep, how to maintain your attention while you're kicking the ball. It was the stuff of life like relationships and depression and drugs and alcohol and injuries and all sorts of other, you know, things that any of us might encounter. So I really started off, I guess, therapeutically. And I think that's very much guided my journey to be super person centric rather than performance centric.

Starting point is 00:05:01 And after sort of five years or so of that, I recognised that I really was very interested in the environments that people performed in, not just the performer themselves. And so I started to work on culture and I just coined that, I made that up completely the title of culture coach because it just describes what I do. I coach the culture in my own business in Australia and then in the last few years across LA and now in England, that's been sort of bread and butter work for me to work on the system that promotes somebody's well-being or somebody's best outcomes performance-wise. As I understand it, you apply this kind of formula that you have in elite sports, but also in

Starting point is 00:05:44 kind of business environments. Yeah, you know, really elite sports and business environments have got quite a lot of commonality, obviously difference too, but. culture is something that relationship based, we make it every day. It's based on, you know, what choices we make in the moment day after day that become habits, that become culture, what ideas and beliefs run the show and what the leaders do and the sort of habits that form underneath the leader. So that applies whether you're talking about a football team or any kind of business. Probably what our listeners would be most familiar with is that you were, you were working with the England team, right, during the 2018 World Cup, which I think was,

Starting point is 00:06:32 I think probably the most positive experience that fans had in an international tournament for a very long time. You know, sometimes when we're in base camp in Russia, it was like, we're missing all the fun. Everybody at home seems to be. be having an absolute ball. Why is it so important to focus on kind of people and feelings and emotions? Yeah, great question. I think I would say that if the culture isn't strong, it's, you know, feelings, emotions, et cetera, is at odds with the idea of what it takes to perform. But if the culture is really strong, you can understand that there is this sweet spot in between great culture and strong performance discipline. And that's,

Starting point is 00:07:18 where we all really want to be. But if we can't have emotion in there, if we can't have a sense of sort of, you know, the whole human, the whole person in there, then we're just missing so much of the richness and the potential and the, you know, the possibility of a person, their willingness to go and take good risks, their sort of feeling of being shoulder to shoulder

Starting point is 00:07:43 with their teammates, you know, in a way that is protective and things, it lets you think, I'm going to put all of myself out there and it's going to be, you know, whatever will be will be, but I'm going to give it everything. You know, I think if you don't have

Starting point is 00:08:00 humanness in the middle of that sort of environment, it can become quite clinical and robotic and mechanical. And not only is that it doesn't have the right tone and energy for great performances in my view, it's not very fulfilling and that's the sort of essence of the book really that you know we want to be able to have experiences where we're performing that don't have to mean that we have to feel fearful or full of doubt or we have to save the enjoyment for later. Absolutely. And as you mentioned the book there is your new book, Fearless,

Starting point is 00:08:38 Win at Life Without Losing Yourself is out, is published by Vermilion and is out now. And within this book, you really home in on, you know, one of those forces that can affect people's chance of going for their goals. Because so in this book, then, you look at, you look at one of those potential barriers and something that we might see as a barrier of fear. Why did you choose to focus on it? You know, fear was something that I had seen time and time again in a pattern. with all of the performers from all sorts of different walks of life that I'd worked with over

Starting point is 00:09:20 20-something years. It was probably about 10 years ago, actually, that I really started to notice the patterning. And I would see people who from outside looked like the absolute epitome of success. They had all of the silverware or medals or, you know, the brilliant job or the status symbols and anybody else looking from outside thinks, oh, that person's really made it. But actually, I noticed that for some people, the more they achieved, the more fearful they got about losing it. And they became or maybe never grew out of that feeling of being like a sense of emptiness and a sense of never being, they're never being enough. You're never feeling good enough, never feeling like you had enough or you'd achieved enough

Starting point is 00:10:07 or you'd ticked off enough things from your list this week. And there was this sort of screaming sense of inadequacy and not good enough that I just saw in so many performers time and time again. You know, it might manifest as perfectionism. It might manifest as sort of aloofness and need to stay separate. It might be seen as, you know, being super critical of self or others. But at the heart of all of that was fear every time. So it seemed reasonable to me that the sensible thing to do was. learn how to work with fear, learn how to help people express, see and express and face their fear.

Starting point is 00:10:47 You really don't want to talk about fears, do you? It's kind of like the ugliest, most shameful, like buried part of your, I don't know, it's one of those emotions that it involves being so vulnerable. Fear is a very natural phenomenon when we're, you know, you see, you hear something rustle in the bushes if you're out for a run and you jump out of the way before you've even put thought to it. That's sort of like a natural, instinctive fear response. And we wouldn't want to be without that early warning system. But we're not very good at turning it off when it comes up as worry and when it comes up as sort of, you know, worry about not being good enough. If we don't do that, if we don't find that courage to be honest and to sort of step into that vulnerability to find our

Starting point is 00:11:38 authentic self and to say out loud, I am worried about you knowing this about me. I would feel terrible shame if this was exposed about me. Like imagine the freedom that comes from not having those things hidden about yourself. And even if it's only you or you and your loved ones that you're exposing that fear to or excavating that fear and seeing it truly, you actually get to work on the right stuff. You know, if you can find that courage to say, what would I be most afraid of people knowing about me? How can I show up with all of my flaws and just be imperfect and human? And, you know, the power in doing that is phenomenal. But yes, it takes vulnerability. And vulnerability is a very, very underrated and valuable character trait or habit to get into.

Starting point is 00:12:37 You've worked with both men and women at the absolute top of their game. Do you think fear impacts, you know, different genders differently? I think that fundamentally fear affects us the same way. But we're perhaps socially conditioned or acculturated to express it differently. The idea of being tough and invulnerable, I think, think it's particularly strong for men, not being willing to say, I'm worried about this or I'm scared of this or, you know, I'm afraid that I won't be good enough. I think that men's ability to express openly is it can be quite challenged. And I also think that has a big consequence

Starting point is 00:13:25 on mental health. And, you know, it's not that that isn't the same for women, but at least for women, they may feel more open to expressing it with each other at least. fundamentally fear and fear of not being good enough comes up for all of us. Yeah. At the real seat of being human. It's something that we're all going to have to wrestle with. Yeah, definitely. So you've been talking about so how fear is,

Starting point is 00:13:53 working with your fear is so essential to kind of finding success and being the most successful you can be. Is it almost because then you stop expending energy on that fear or you stop it defining. Like, how do you get from A to B? I think that really the advantage of doing the work isn't about whether you will be successful. It's about whether you can taste your own success,

Starting point is 00:14:20 whether you can experience your own success positively. There are many, many people who have, you know, who are successful, but that still don't feel the fulfillment and the joy that they thought they might with their success. So I think the lead, from A to B is about can you feel it? Can you relish and enjoy and feel fulfilled by your success? Fear is a thief. It'll steal all our joy if we let it and if we give it too much elbow room at the

Starting point is 00:14:52 table. So, you know, the idea is to turn it down and have it in the place and the shape you want it in in your life so that you can get on with enjoying yourself more. And ambition, you know, ambition or passion. They're wonderful things, particularly passion. But, you know, what is it directed at? You know, if it's just about increasingly sort of continuing to climb the ladder and achieve and, you know, have more things on your resume and more having your Instagram page looking fantastic, you know, if it's starting to feel hollow to you to do those things, that's the

Starting point is 00:15:33 time to step back a little bit and think about what are you putting your passion and your energy to and how purposeful is it for you what's your return on that you know is because goals achievements all fine in and of themselves but when we are so absorbed so self-absorbed sometimes with doing those things and we don't have any meaning outside of ourselves any sense of deepening our relationships any sense of community any sense of like our social impact and what we want to achieve in the world, it can become pretty hollow and it can absolutely, I personally think that really contributes to burnout. Do you think it's important, especially now, to be able to learn how to work with your fear

Starting point is 00:16:20 in order to show up and enjoy the good bits of life that they very much still are? Yeah. It's a great point. And, you know, the last line of the book is life is just this moment. And there's a couple of things I want to say in response to this. One is that, you know, the more we can just keep putting our feet on the ground and coming back to today. And, you know, now, rather than feeling like we're in a free fall into the future and it's an ambiguous future and all of the well-laid plans that we had don't look very peachy right now. and that's just a that's just a landscape for fear and anxiety if we allow it to be come back to now

Starting point is 00:17:06 come back to the things that serve you and the things that make you feel connected and you know and protected today and they're going to be around relationships around purpose around surrender around laughter around passion you know that They're the things I talk about in the book as the, what to replace fear with. And bring that back into your day without having to forecast what this is going to look like in the autumn or beyond that. Because we just can't know and we haven't faced something like this before. But the second thing I would say is that remember that we are tremendously adaptive as a species. You know, we have a capability to adapt very, very strongly.

Starting point is 00:17:55 And I use the example in the book of the mimic octopus, you know, so when the culture around us is giving us drip feed messages of fear and negativity, we very quickly take that shape, like a mimic octopus, just takes the shape of the environment it's around. And I think it's a really important message right now is let's not overadap to the fear. You know, there's a lot of unknown. There's a lot of fear stimulus. what do we need to do to turn it down, come back to today and not over adapt. So the smart adaptations, like wearing a mask and washing your hands, definitely do those, changing some of your social engagements, for example. But there are adaptations that are perhaps too far as well of like isolation and breaking

Starting point is 00:18:49 your connection and spending three more hours on the screen each day. you know, things that we know take us closer to that burnout. So be careful not to over adapt into the fear culture because the stimulus that we're getting is really high, not just from the virus, but from the news and the negativity and the constant maybe that's going on all the time. And then, you know, life is just this moment. So how can you, how can you bring yourself back to what helps you flourish today? what helps you feel fulfilled today and connected today because that's what that's that's that's where we are that's where we are in life and that's where we are as a human species and that's where we can best support each other with with linked arms if we can stay keep our minds in today as much as

Starting point is 00:19:42 possible so many good reasons to kind of do this work on kind of putting your fear in its place now i want to look at how we do this because It sounds amazing. But it would be great if you, and you go into your techniques at length in the book, and it would just be really great if you could share. You could share some of those with our listeners. Well, the two types of fear that I talk about in the book, we've got the in the moment fear, and that's the stuff that we can use techniques for.

Starting point is 00:20:13 So I'll talk about that first. When you are just having one of those moments, one of those days where you can really feel that your fear is high and that you're just, you know, not at your finest and you feel like you need to do something with it. It might be right in the moment, say you've got a conversation coming up that you're anxious about or, you know, a performance at work or something like that, or it might be just, you know, your mood in the day. There's three sort of umbrella techniques that I talk about in the book as being useful. You can rationalise, which is to basically take yourself through a process of looking at the evidence

Starting point is 00:21:01 that you have in front of you of what circumstances are and how big a problem they actually are so that you can shed and get rid of the stuff that's not very useful or necessary, that's wasteful emotion and concentrate only on the stuff you genuinely need to prep for or fix. right so you know in a the example i use in the book is if you're if you're feeling um if you're on an aircraft and there's turbulence you know your mind can start running wild about what happens next in from a fear perspective right and the rationalization is to yeah the rationalization is to sort of say you know um okay what what are the facts here what's a like you know the likelihood of a problem is negligible. The pilot knows what he's doing. I've got my seatbelt on. This has happened a thousand

Starting point is 00:21:50 times on a thousand flights I've been on before. Nothing to worry about. There's no need to worry yet, right? That's great rationalisation. So you can use that technique. You can use what I call processing, which is much more in the genre of mindfulness practices or meditation. Particularly, there's nothing quite like a cool, deep breath to allow your body to slow back down with your mind. your body to lead your mind to slow back down. And any of those processing practices that might be mantras or affirmations are just coming back into a settled state. All of those sort of practices are very valuable for dealing with fear as it just pops up

Starting point is 00:22:33 and smacks you one in the face. And the other thing you can do is distract. So let's say distraction is useful where you can't control anything else. So let's say you've got a big performance review with your boss in five hours. And you really don't want to waste those five hours and allow all of your precious energy to be zapped by what might happen in that review. So then distracting is a very valuable technique at that point. And that can range from the use of music or any other sort of mental engagement that says, I'm just going to park that and come back to it later. And that's very valuable when you

Starting point is 00:23:18 when you basically can't adapt in any other way. So they're the sort of technique-based things that you can do. And there's a heap of questions in the book that help people sort of get to that, you know, get to understand what might work for them on the in the moment fear. The other kind of fear, the not good enough fear is it was a bit longer. This is this is sort of transformational work because it's about genuinely shifting a perspective on life and on you in life. So this isn't something you can do right now in the, you know, it's something you can start today, absolutely, but it's not something that will be fixed by this evening. So, you know, the overarching method I talk about there is to see face and replace.

Starting point is 00:24:07 And this is about genuinely looking under the bonnet of what your, afraid of, as we spoke a little bit about earlier. And, you know, what is the worst thing that could be exposed about me? Where is this fear triggered? How am I, you know, how am I manifesting this fear in my life? And then we look at when we face it, we look at what it's costing you, what it's holding you back from. And, you know, particularly in terms of relationships, in terms of opportunities. And then the whole raft of examples that I give to replace fear are then a personal choice about what might fit for you. So you might feel at this moment in time, you know what? I think I want to dial up my sense of purpose outside of my goals and my to-do list and my

Starting point is 00:25:03 personal sort of ambitions in life. I want to dial up purpose. So I'm investing in other people for a bit. I'm investing in the world around me. And that can be just enormously protective around fear. Or you might say what I need is a bit more of a laugh. What I need is to just release, have a sense of connection and have some girlfriends around me. And I'm just, you know, I haven't got enough joy and vibrancy in my life. And to laugh is enormously protective against fear as well.

Starting point is 00:25:38 So there's a heap of those in the book that sort of show you what you might replace it with, but first you have to do the excavation and see it and face it. When it's... The new Bimo V.I. Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks. More points. More flights. More of all the things you want in a travel rewards card.

Starting point is 00:26:02 And then some. Get your ticket to more with the new Bimo V.I. Porter Mastercard. and get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bemo.com slash V-Iporter to learn more. You and you, or you and your fear, that takes a lot of discipline, doesn't it? Would you suggest people do it on like a weekend?

Starting point is 00:26:27 Should people have a whole day? Is this something that maybe people can do in bite-sized chunks? How should people think about working this into their life? kind of work about not good enough fear and seeing it and facing it is not more to do. It's not about blocking off pieces of time necessarily and, you know, forcing yourself into a self-examination. It's actually the opposite. It's about uncurling.

Starting point is 00:26:56 It's about letting go of some stuff and seeing what emerges. It's about allowing your rich and wonderful imagination back in. It's about listening to what you're dreaming about. you know, talking to other people in rich, wonderful conversations about how you feel, but not forcing them, not like an appointment with self or other, but an intention to go and engage in this exploration. And that's why I say it's not a quick fix. It's a little bit messy for some people.

Starting point is 00:27:29 Some people it's not. It's just an illumination, you know, and it's wonderful. But it's an intention to go and explore yourself. And you know what, it might take a year. And that's fine. So what? If that's a shift in your mentality that then serves you for the rest of your life, that's a year well spent. The task is in the first stuff around in the moment fear. That's technique. This is soul. How important then is kind of physical exercise and maybe things like meditation or how important are these kind of activities that get your, that kind of wind your brain down a little bit in being able to kind of like access that place?

Starting point is 00:28:11 They're really important, but you know, they're very different for everybody. For some people, the sort of sense of going and having a run or exercising is very, and obviously you get a good hit of endorphins and happy hormones thereafter, you know, that's neurotransmitters, it feels great. So it may be something like that, but I would caution as well that, if that feels like a task and you've added something to your list rather than created space, that's not the right thing. So for some people it's actually a slowdown, not a speed up or a distract, you know, something else to sort of add to your list. It's the, you know, am I brave enough to create some space, you know, and your psyche will do the work for you. It will present you if you,

Starting point is 00:29:01 if you have an intention to go and consider fear and you go and get yourself a coffee and a journal and sit and let's see what comes out. Let's see what your pen has to say about it or, you know, I'm just going to go hang out with my best friend and tell her that I'm thinking about what I'm afraid of and see what happens. You know, so less plan in it and more emergent, imaginative, slow down. stuff and you'll find tremendous richness in there. The problem is usually we don't slow down for long enough because we're on that big burnout treadmill. And I think it's really important, too, to not approach this as something terribly wrong.

Starting point is 00:29:45 Because, you know, we're all, we all are driven by fear. Fear is present in all of us. It's a matter of degree. So, you know, when you can, when you can sort of say, this is something I'd like to explore. This is something that has quite a lot of room at my table. I'd kind of like to give it a little bit less. And you approach it from that perspective rather than, I need to fix this. It's a problem.

Starting point is 00:30:10 You know, because you immediately go into that sort of cause and effect and sort of mechanical zone. And I'm saying, let's open up the space a little bit to explore this and see what comes up. And I'm so interested to know because so much of this conversation, it could be, it feels like something that maybe you, you could, you would have with maybe a spiritual guru or something that you'd hear about on like a yoga retreat. And I'm finding how, so obviously you're working with some of these people who are, I imagine lots of real alpha types if they're elite sports people and elite business people.

Starting point is 00:30:50 How do they respond initially to kind of some of this stuff? And what would you suggest for someone who's listening and going, hang on, I like my goal setting, I like my A to B, I like to do this. How would you, what it would be your cell to them in order to kind of soften and let some of this stuff in? I would just say, you know, it's okay to experiment with other ways. You don't have to be, you know, you don't have to sort of do the whole spiritual yoga retreat thing just to explore how your psyche is doing. You know, it's just a good, you know, it's just a good, check in for any of us and you can do it your way. So that's why in the book there are, I describe it as a set of ideas that can help somebody

Starting point is 00:31:40 discover for themselves rather than a strict method must follow it this way. It's a set of ideas that inspires somebody to explore and have a closer look because it's different for all of us. But yes, alpha, alpha types, sometimes, especially when I talk about interoperation, especially when I talk where intimacy, there can be a few raised eyebrows. But one thing I know sort of 25 years in is, you know, we're all pretty much the same underneath. So before we go, I just want to ask you the same thing that we do at the end of every episode, which is basically if you, so this goal of this episode, we're talking about kind of really

Starting point is 00:32:21 facing your fear and stopping this fear from holding you back. if there's one thing you want people listening to know about this goal, about how to achieve it, what would it be? If there were one thing, I think it would be to understand how much agency you have to change your experience of fear. So, you know, it happens, it's real, it will pop up, but you have way more agency and control than you think you do, whether it's in the moment or not good enough fear. the pens in your hand. So, you know, I would love people to have, there's a brilliant quote by the poet Hafiz

Starting point is 00:33:03 and he says, Fear is the cheapest room in the house and I would love for you to have better living conditions. So, you know, cute. It's gorgeous, isn't it? But yeah, it depends in your hand. So you're in way more control. You have way more agency than you think. You just need to learn how.

Starting point is 00:33:21 Marvelous. What a lovely point to end. Dr. Pippa Grange, thank you so much for coming on to going for the goal. Thanks so much everyone for listening. That was an episode with Dr. Pippa Grange. Her new book, Fearless, How to Win at Life Without Losing Yourself, is out now. And you should definitely go check it out. If you like what you're listening to, remember to rate and review on Apple Podcasts and subscribe wherever you get your podcast so you never miss an episode. And if you've got a goal in mind that you want our experts to help you achieve, all you need to do is drop us a message on Instagram. We're at Women's Health UK and just stick your name and whatever goal you want to achieve at the start

Starting point is 00:34:02 and your goal could be the subject of a future episode. That's all from me. I'll be back next week. Thanks everyone for listening. Bye.

Just As Well, The Women's Health Podcast - How To Stop Fear Holding You Back

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