This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 197 / Fear & Failure (Part 1) with Amy Green Smith

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

FEAR and FAILURE – sounds like a party right? I promise we’ll have some fun with it, and give you actionable tools, but my biggest goal is for all of us to create a new, more productive, more empowered interpretation of fear and failure. Because we had such a great conversation last week I’ve invited Amy Green Smith, life coach, hypnotherapist, speaker, and communication expert to join me again. I appreciate her uncommon style of irreverence, wisdom, and humor! She released episode 500 of her amazing podcast “The Bold-Faced Truth” and then stopped recording, so I’m eternally grateful to her for her time and wisdom in joining me, and stupid excited that we get to release a few episodes with her as a guest on our show! We’ll bring the rest of this conversation on Fear & Failure to you next week… and trust me when I say we’re just getting warmed up. Our brain is a wonderful thing, but it sees what we KNOW as safe and the UNKNOWN as dangerous, so we need to teach our brains that all risk is not the same. You can be scared, and you can be brave. In fact, you need to be scared in order to be brave. Connect with Amy: To inquire about having Amy speak at your next event, visit https://amygreensmith.com Grab Amy's FREE-SOURCES (like how to “Speak Up for Yourself Without Being a Dick” at: https://amygreensmith.com/free       IG: http://instagram.com/heyamygreensmith FB: http://facebook.com/heyamygreensmith LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heyamygreensmith X: http://twitter.com/heyamygreen Like what you heard? Please rate and review  Thanks to our This Is Woman’s Work Sponsor: Head to zenimals.com/NICOLEMKALIL and use my code NICOLEMKALIL to save 10% off your Zenimal!  Whether you’re looking for yourself, your kid(s)/teens, as a gift for someone else - everyone will benefit from more moments of zen!

I'm JJ Khalil and my mom asked me to tell you about my Zenimal and why I love it. It helps me meditate and fall asleep at night and it reminds me that I'm a good kid. I use my Zenimal every day and take it with me when I go on trips. I think any kid you love would like a Zenimal too. If your kids annoy you sometimes and you lose patience, you could use one too. If you want to buy a Zenimal, you you can go to Xenimals.com and use the code NicoleMKhalil to get 10% off. I am Nicole Khalil, Confidence Sherpa, and your host of the This Is Woman's Work podcast.

I call myself a Confidence Sherpa because I want to make it Is Woman's Work podcast. I call myself a confident Sherpa because I want to make it very clear that I'm doing the climb with you. I'm not standing at the summit yelling down advice, nor am I providing commentary from nowhere near the mountain. I'm on it. I'm in it with you and just like you. And while I climb, I like to share what I learn when I learn it. Things like don't step there, you'll cause an avalanche, or don't grab onto that hold, it's actually unstable and bound to let you down. But I'm also hyper aware that my climb may not look the same as yours. Hell, we might not even be climbing the same mountain or even have the same destination. We likely have different equipment or weather conditions. So all of that to say, my goal in sharing what I learn is to

hopefully support you in your climb. And one of the ways that I've done this is through my book, Validation is for Parking, which you can read by getting the physical book or by listening to my, and I put in air quotes, audio book, because rather than doing a traditional audio book, I decided to read and release chapters of my book on this podcast. You can find those by looking for episodes that start with VI4P. And over the last two Mondays, we've covered the topic of people-pleasing because that is something I've learned a lot more about since the release of my book, and I wish I could go back in time and include it as the sixth confidence derailer. And today, we're going to dive deeper into a topic that I do cover in the book, but have

learned new and different things about that I want to share forward with you. The topic is failure, which I identify as a confidence builder in chapter six. But we're going to dive deeper and we're also going to talk about fear. Fear and failure. Sounds like a party, right? I promise we'll have some fun with it and give you actionable tools because my biggest goal is for all of us to create a new, more productive, and more empowered interpretation of both of those things. Our happiness, success, relationships, and opportunities

all depend on it. And because we had such an epically good conversation last week, I've invited Amy Green-Smith, life coach, hypnotherapist, speaker, and communication expert to join me again. I very much appreciate her uncommon style of irreverence, wisdom, and humor. And it's one of those situations that feels very meant to be. She released episode 500 of her amazing podcast, The Bold Face Truth, and then stopped recording. So I'm eternally grateful to her for her time and wisdom in joining me. And I'm stupid excited that we get to release a few of our episodes with her as a guest on our show. Okay, Amy, when we recorded our last episode, when we stopped recording, you and I kind of

had a conversation about failure and a little bit of a different perspective than what I've had. So I've identified failure as a confidence builder, but the reality is failure itself doesn't build your confidence. It's what you choose to do in the face of failure or fear or doubt or mistakes that I believe builds your confidence. Said another way, it's about leveraging that failure and all the other icky emotions and using them as an opportunity to grow instead of an invitation to hide or stop or fold or whatever our instincts might tell us to do in those moments. So all of that to ask, how do you

feel about failure? Do you agree that it could be a confidence builder? Do you have a different take or perspective on it? I'd love to just dive into the concept of failure. Sure. Well, I think, first of all, hi. Hi. Hi. I'm so excited to be playing with you in the podcast space again. This is so fun.

So I think that because I work with so many high achieving women, it is almost like an A to Z jump to get them to befriend failure. And so it's sort of a, oh my God, do you have like an A to M or an A to D maybe? And I think that's different based on each individual. But if you are a type A, high-achieving, accomplishment-focused person, and someone tells you, okay, fail forward, or this is an opportunity for learning, I think that's 100% accurate. And I also think it can be a little hard for folks to wrap their heads around or be comfortable with that. So something that I talk about a lot as it pertains to fear and what actually builds confidence, which I think is exactly what you're saying, just slightly different verbiage, is engaging with fear over and over and over again, but from a place of courage is what leads to confidence. And I think, which is exactly what you talk about. And I think so often we see folks who are confident and we think, oh, they just, they magically never had failure. They magically never had fear. They came out of the womb just being a force to be reckoned with.

And that's really not the case. In fact, I did a podcast series many years ago on imposter complex. And when I was researching it and I was looking at all of these people who, by all accounts, we would deem successful, Michelle Obama, Tina Fey, Meryl Streep, they had all talked about grappling with this fear around being a fraud. And so I thought, okay, what's the distinguishing factor that gets them to this place of, quote, success or feeling confident in their abilities?

And it wasn't that fear was absent. It was that they showed up in that face of fear over and over again, but chose to behave from a place of courage. Because I love to say that courage cannot exist without fear. We have to have it in order to be a courageous individual. But that's sort of the impetus behind how I speak about confidence or how I speak about grappling with failure. But I do think that you and I are very aligned in that way that most of our success stories that we see, I mean, even Edison, how many failed experiments did he have before he invented electricity, right? So there are so many stories of that. Even Meryl Streep talks about how she was told she would never work in Hollywood or in the industry. And you have to bolster your

relationship to failure in that way. So I think for everyone just recognizing that there really is no path to confidence without an element of failure, but also without making friends with fear. Okay. So I think we are on the same page with a lot of things. And I know we both have beef with the word fearless. I always think like we wouldn't need courage or bravery or boldness if there wasn't fear, right? It has to exist. I am not afraid to walk out to my mailbox and get my mail. So it requires zero courage of me to do it. I am afraid of facing rejection or not getting what I want, which is why I need courage to do it. So I guess my question then leads me to how do we practice courage? How do we develop that skill or that muscle so that we can access it more regularly or more readily and with bigger things?

Yeah. So this is a great question. So the first thing that I think we really need to get clear on is are we actually in some sort of imminent danger. And so our body does kick in our fear responses. So I think there are times when there's alarm bells going off in our mind because we actually might be in danger. But the same fear is going to show up when we're on the precipice of just something new because the brain will register, is this something that is known or unknown? And if it is known, it's equated as safe. If it's

unknown, it's equated to be unsafe. So for example, if you have, like we talked about last week, if you have developed a positive association with people pleasing because that's how you stayed safe, your mind now says, this is the safe way for us to operate. So now if you come in with something like, oh, I'm able to have my own agency or autonomy or I can speak up for myself or I can establish boundaries, everything in your body goes, fuck no, we don't know that. We don't know how that feels. Are you sure? Are you sure? And that's where the fear and then the voice of fear, which we'll talk about later, the inner critic comes in and starts to thwart what we are going after. But what we have to recognize is what fear is doing is it's just

saying, hey, bitch, you sure? Is this safe? Right? And so we have to discern quickly in that moment, okay, am I actually getting in my own way because I'm afraid of rejection or I'm afraid of what people might think? Or is my life actually threatened? Am I actually in a little bit of danger? So that's one of the best discerning questions if you're trying to figure out, am I in my own way? Or is this real? I don't know. Will you die? Will you have grave emotional or physical pain? Then we have to start really looking at that. But I too am not a fan of the word fearless. If it meant and if we used it in the way of fearing less, sure. But it's not how we use it. We use it like it's the absence of fear. And to my knowledge, there is only one individual who's ever been chronicled who existed without the fear response.

And it was unbelievably dangerous because she would just walk into the middle of traffic and just nothing registered to her as like, oh, there's a snake. Let me just grab it. Like there was no essence of safety related to the fear response. So unless she's listening, and I doubt that she is, that means the rest of us are going to have to engage with fear from a place of courage. So instead of fearless, I use the term fear optimized. So to optimize something is to make it as useful or as effective as possible. So if we are going to have fear, how can we make sure that we're making it as useful or as effective as possible? And part of that is recognizing that it's here, recognizing I'm not actually in danger. This is just new. So I'm going to behave from a place of courage.

And then that will inform what sort of tools you call upon, et cetera. But yes, not a fan of the fearless. I think a light bulb went off for me when you were talking, when you were saying our brain identifies known as safe and unknown as unsafe. I know I've personally experienced it and every woman I've ever talked to where we either have ourselves or someone we love stay in a situation that isn't working for them is painful, awful, horrible. And I often think it's because it's the pain we know. Yes. I literally just wrote that down. Yes. It's not comfortable, but it's comfortable in that we're used to it or that we know about it. And whatever we would need to do to make our situation or our lives better is unknown at that point.

And so that's why our brain goes unsafe. Yeah. And so what I took away from what you were saying too is the practicing of courage and the checking in with ourselves and identifying that this isn't actually unsafe from the near death or pain experience. But all of that to ask, what are some practical steps that we could take to practice courage in our day-to-day lives? Do you have any examples of test this out, implement this, journal this? Is there anything that we can do to begin to practice courage in a smaller way so that we can then do it in some of those bigger, more important ways?

Yes, absolutely. So the first thing would be the qualifying question that we just talked about. Am I in danger or is this just new? And so that's just sort of your blanket qualifier that you want to check in with yourself about. Another thing that I'm super, super passionate about as far as conjuring that courage is working with the body and working with power posing. I'm sure you're familiar with Amy Cuddy and her research. And if anyone's listening who hasn't heard of her, please Google and find her TEDx talk. Because she wanted to figure out, can we actually conjure courage and stand in confidence if we change our physical body geography? And she found that, yes, we actually can. So it's sort of the old adage of fake it till you make it, which I don't love. Choose it until you become it.

That's my reframe. Choose it until you become it. I love it. We always have all these synchronistic things. I always say, act as though. Act as though. Like if you were to walk into that business or that boardroom or you're walking onto a stage or a business meeting or whatever it is, what would your alter ego, your confidence, your most badass self, what would it show up as in that meeting? And think about that. When I worked in community theater and would do a bunch of acting, I would literally script my thoughts. So not just scripting what I'm saying, but scripting what I would be thinking about as an actor, right? So same thing can happen if you are going into any number of precarious situations. Write down down what do I want to be thinking about?

What would a confident person be thinking about as they're going into this? And I always, I really, really love talking to my fear response. So when, again, when I would do theater, my body would react as though we were about to be attacked by a mountain lion, right? I would get that clammy hands, the racing heartbeat, the dry mouth, really difficult like to focus. Oh my gosh, because my body is going, bitch, we need to run. We need to run.

We're not safe. So instead of the natural trajectory of what your mind does, your mind naturally goes, oh my gosh, what if I could forget my lines? What if they don't like me? What if I trip? What if we occupy the mind with a different real estate? So going in and saying to yourself, oh my gosh, thank you for your response. You think we're in danger. Oh my gosh, you're so precious. You always come to my rescue. You can tone it down. We're okay. And we're going to survive this. We're actually safe. We know exactly what we need to do. And so now your mind is occupied with a different narrative. It's a different story. So

it's a tool that you can use to talk yourself out of that. And that's usually the most applicable when you're noticing physical manifestations of fear, but you can use it in any situation. Like if you see or you hear or sense a negative self-talk, or I also call it negative self-sentiment because not everyone hears literal words, but you have this essence of you're going to fail, you're not good enough, whatever, you can still talk to your fear and go, hey, listen, I know you think we're in danger. This is new. You're right. This is new. And I appreciate that you're on high alert, but we're actually not in danger. We've got this. We're okay. But thank you for coming to my rescue. Liz Gilbert has an amazing quote that she talks about in her book, Big Magic, where she

talks about contending with fear. And she talks about how fear is going to be along for the ride and you are absolutely allowed to have a voice, but you're not allowed to have a vote. And I think that is such a great way to talk about engaging with fear. I hear you. I need to acknowledge you. Because if you don't, it'll amp it up. I think about it a lot. Are you a Family Guy fan by any chance? I'm not, no. Okay. So it's a cartoon show for adults, but they have a baby on there who speaks in a British accent and he's super kind of pretentious and precocious, but he has this scene with the mom where he's going, mom, mommy, mom, mom, mom, mama, mama. I've seen that. It goes on painfully long. And then finally she acknowledges him and

goes, what? And he goes, hi, and then runs away. And that is exactly what's happening with fear. It'll be like, bitch, this is not right. No, no, no, no. Hey, hey, hey, we're in danger. We're in danger. And that's what it feels like when you're getting all worked up and your mind's spinning. But to just acknowledge it and say, hey, what? What are you worked up about? Hey, listen, we're okay. And engaging with it, conversing with it, and can be a really, really useful tool in moving beyond. So I just read Big Magic. And I'm wondering now if you were the one who recommended it to me, because somebody did very recently. So I literally just finished it like a week or two ago. And that and the disconnecting from results

were the two, I mean, life changing takeaways. And I'm going to read it again. But yes, the you have a voice, but not a vote is such an important distinction. And I love everything that you're saying about acknowledging fear, because when we ignore or avoid, it just gets bigger and it permeates every aspect of our being at some point if we don't acknowledge it. What about affirmations or, you know, I think of Mel Robbins, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Are there any other tactics or tools that you have thoughts or opinions or research about? Well, I think one thing that I will use consistently with the women that I work with is something that I call and statements. Because I think so often we think in binary terms. I'm either in fear or I'm confident, right?

I am scared or I'm courageous. And a lot of times they are coexisting. So saying something to yourself like, you are allowed to be nervous and we're going to behave from courage. Something like that where you can speak to yourself where you are acknowledging the pain that you're in. And by the way, you can use and statements for anything. Like, I'm so grateful to have a job and I want more than this. Right? Or I love my parents tremendously and I recognize there was harm that was caused. Because so often we think that it has to be one or the other and they don't

have to be mutually exclusive. So using and working with an and statement I think could be really helpful. Like, I am coming out of my skin right now and I'm going to stand in my own power or and I know I have something to offer or and I'm focusing on what's possible. I think what's so powerful about that too is it's more than likely more true than the binary response, right? I think we live almost always in paradoxes, it feels like. And so it feels paradoxical to say I'm scared and confident. And yet that's probably the most confident you'll be is being both. That's right. And I call that dichotomous emotion. So where you're having – and there are certain studies. I just don't – I'm not aligned with it that say you can only feel one emotion at one time. That might be true as far, if you're getting really granular with it. From

what I understand with emotion researchers, there's not like a major consensus across a lot of different emotional research, but I, I feel like you can absolutely experience more than one emotion at a time, or at least it feels like that, that there's a medley of something that's happening, and sometimes even more than two. And I think acknowledging our capacity for that expanse can really help us be gentle with ourselves. Because we tend to go like, if you're not 100% confident, then why are you not going after it? It's like, no, no, no. Courage cannot exist without fear. I have to have that. And I can choose to show up in a powerful way. Couldn't agree more. And I'm sort of harping on these tactics and digging into it because

something you said early on really resonated with me is we have this interpretation or idea that you get to a point where you're not afraid anymore or where you're so successful that everything goes well and you don't have to contend with failure or any of those things. My experience is the better things go, the bigger the fear. Or like the things that I'm afraid of are bigger today than they were five years ago. And I don't know if that's just a me thing, but this idea that fear or failure is going to go away at any point in time is completely contrary to my personal experience. So I am sort of diving in or harping in on some of these tactics as I need them like today. Yeah. So thank you for going through that. Let's talk a little bit about how we might know where in our lives fear is holding

us back the most. What might we look at or ask ourselves, what could we do to uncover where fear or failure or fear of failure or fear of success or all the fears might be impacting us at the highest level? Yeah. So I'm a huge fan of EQ and emotional intelligence work because I find that how we feel can be such a huge compass for what's going on with us. So when people ask me like, what's your definitions of success? I'm like, it's how I feel. It's feeling expansive and free. It's not monetary. It's not necessarily about items or credentials or anything like that. It's about how I feel. And so I think using our emotions as a barometer, as a compass of either, hey, we need to course correct, we need to change something here, or, ooh, this is good, let's continue down this path,

we can look at our emotions as simply messaging. But so much of the time, we don't do that. If we feel something uncomfortable like fear, like shame, like guilt, overwhelm, those naturally feel overwhelming and naturally feel dramatic. Potent emotions are dramatic as fuck. And so instead of asking ourselves, what is this telling me? What's the message here? We oftentimes jump to a conclusion about our self-worth. We jump to, okay, if I feel shame or if I feel guilt in this one isolated incident, that must then mean that I'm not enough. I'm not worthy. We make this grandiose assessment. And we do the same thing with emotions that feel good. So if we get accolades or attention or love or support from somebody, we go, oh, okay, this feels good. I feel

happy. I feel supported. That must mean I'm worthy of love. When really those things are not tethered at all. They're simply fleeting messages that come through an emotional current. So the same is true for contending with fear, which fear absolutely is an emotion, but it's sort of like emotion on steroids because it's also a motivating factor. It's a part of our primitive response to stress. So it has quite a bit of power over us. But if we're able to see in any given situation, if I'm feeling, for example, if I'm noticing that I'm feeling really anxious or I'm feeling overwhelmed or I'm feeling frustrated with stuff that's happening in my work world, I might sit with that and instead of going, well, if only my boss wasn't an asshat. No.

Let's sit with the emotion. Let's sit with – name it. Noticing and naming what is this emotion. Okay. Frustration, overwhelm, angst. And then going, what is this emotion. Okay, frustration, overwhelm, angst. And then going, what is this telling me? This might be telling me I need a break. This might be telling me I'm afraid of speaking up about what I need from my boss or my co-parts or my workplace.

So usually there's some kind of fear that's tethered to an uncomfortable emotion. It can also be the case when you feel something fantastic, like you get really applauded for a job you did in your family, let's say. Let's say you handled hosting something and you did a really, really great job and you're getting all sorts of positive feedback, you might then take that emotion and go create that conclusion of, okay, this must mean that I'm only valuable if I'm serving others. And then a fear comes in of like, what will they think if I don't overachieve or take care of everybody else? If we were to unpack that emotion and just go, what is this telling me? Instead of jumping to the conclusion, it might be that I enjoy impact, that I have a value around

impact, or that I'm totally extroverted and I love being around energy of my family, right? So analyzing what you're feeling, what is the message, as opposed to jumping to some sort of cataclysmic decision about your self-worth. So what I'm hearing is, and it lines with my experience and belief as well, is that very rarely the thing that we're afraid of. It's the thing that's underneath the thing. It's the belief or the fear or the, you know, so the example of I'm maybe not afraid of, I could have fear about communicating my need to a boss who is an asshat, but my fear underneath it is that I'm not worthy of being treated well, or in my personal life, I often fall back onto the fear of being too much for people, or that I need to prove myself in order to be worthy of any sort of love or appreciation. There's often something underneath.

Yes. So there's the surface fear and then there is a deeper fear. Any thoughts or reactions on that? Absolutely. And it's funny, I call this the surface issue versus the root issue. And I usually talk about it in the realm of relationships. Like we want to nitpick someone for, you know, something they said, but really what it's about, the root is I don't feel respected in this relationship. I don't feel like it's

equitable, et cetera. So almost always we can look at a surface issue and find a root cause beneath it, something that's – and usually what it is is whatever is the surface, the root issue is how we feel about the surface issue, right? So if it's I'm going in for an interview, that's the surface issue. I'm not really afraid of the interview. The root issue is I feel worried about how I'm going to be perceived, if they're going to like me, if they think I'm overbearing, what do they think about women in the workplace, blah, blah, blah, right? So that is more advantageous to nail down because then you can tweak your tools and you can better assess what you might need in any given moment. I know in doing some research prior to our conversation,

you have a house metaphor. Would that fit in anywhere here? Oh my gosh. It's directly applicable, especially with what I was talking about with the emotions. And a lot of this is relative to our self-worth because when we feel an uncomfortable emotion, we then say, that must mean I'm not worthy. I'm not enough. I'm not lovable. So the house metaphor is one to kind of anchor you into your worthiness despite what you might be feeling, whether it's fear or anything else. So the idea is this, that you are essentially this house and you've got all your intricacies. There's no one else like you.

And you've got some rooms that you'll let everybody see. And then you've got some shit under the bed or in closets that you don't really want anybody to see. But you have your own value, your own worth as this home. And then there are people who are going to come along and they might leave a giant pile of shit on your doorway, right? And that's like experiencing rejection, criticism, someone breaking up with you, being passed over for a promotion. All of those things feel like shit, right? But it's up to us if we're going to bring

that stuff into our house and pollute our value, or are we going to say, wow, that sucks. That stinks. That sucks to be rejected or to be broken up with. But I'm currently not accepting any piles of shit into my house. And so again, it lends itself to the concept of emotional intelligence. How do I emotionally regulate? How do I acknowledge, okay, here's what I'm feeling. This is really uncomfortable. But really watching the conclusion that we make. Just the situation sucks, but I don't suck. And then conversely, there are going to be folks who come along and drop off a beautiful gift on the porch of your house. Maybe it's a gorgeous vase. And that is like emotionally experiencing love, adoration. You get the promotions.

Somebody tells you they love you, whatever. The feel good emotions. And then again, not making the conclusion of, oh, okay, now my house is now worthy. No, no, no. It is that feels good. I enjoy that. So you are welcome in my home, but I am worthy with or without the compliments. I'm worthy with or without the rejections.

And that piece of emotional intelligence, I think, is unbelievably paramount to the human experience. Figuring out that just because I feel like I'm not enough doesn't have to mean that I'm actually not enough. Emotions are not facts, y'all. They're not facts. Beliefs are not facts. That's why we have to have faith around them. So whatever you have adopted as true, like, no, it's true that I'm not enough. It's true that I can't speak up for myself. That is not a fact. That is a belief and beliefs are malleable. So that's a little reframe of thinking about your human experience of emotion outside of what you make that mean about your self-worth.

Love that analogy because nobody's property value has ever gone up because of a vase. And it aligns with what I often say all of those feel-good emotions as it relates to confidence is icing on the confidence cake, but not the cake itself. Because the cake is who we are and what we build and create internally and all the other stuff. Yes, it feels good. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's just not what brings you confidence. It's icing on the cake. Okay, friend, I'm going to jump in here because I think you see where this is going. My mind is blasting and I'm recognizing there's no actual way that we can fit all this good content into one 30-ish minute episode. So rather than

going really long, I'm going to cut in, close us out, and we'll bring the rest of this conversation on fear and failure to you next week. And trust me when I say we're just getting warmed up. If you want to find and follow Amy, and you really should, or if you're looking for an incredible speaker for your next event, visit amygreensmith.com. She also has some great free resources on her site, like a workbook called Speak Up for Yourself Without Being a Dick, which I might consider gifting to a few people that I know. Anyway, I'll close out by saying that our brain is a wonderful thing, but it sees what we know as safe and the unknown

as dangerous. So we need to teach our brains that all risk is not the same and you can be scared and be brave. In fact, you need to be scared in order to be brave. Embracing the and. That is woman's work.