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I’m back! It’s been a minute, but as I explain in this podcast, I took a step back so that I can come back on FIRE! I’ve got a new format, new content, new conversations and new value for you. I explain all this in the podcast and then I dive right in! I talk about the relationship between fear and resistance. As fear dials up, so does resistance. And conversely, I talk about how to minimize your resistance by recognizing and understanding where your fear is coming from.
You can’t be fearless. But, you can push through and even harness fear to move forward
Tamara’s Everyday Innovator style is Risk Taker Experiential. What’s yours?
Sticky Inspiration: Increase fear = increase resistance
Lesson & Action: Don’t be fearless! Instead, learn to recognize where your fear is coming from so that you can push through it.
Connect with me on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn
Join our global Everyday Innovators community on Facebook
Raw Podcast Transcription:
Hello everybody. I am back and I could not be more excited. As you’ve probably noticed, I took a little bit of break from the podcasting world. I wanted to just take a step back from really everything I was doing and think about what was working, what was not working, what I wanted to. What I wanted to do differently, what I was enjoying doing, what you found value in.
And I think with podcasting in particular, it can be very all consuming. And so I really wanted to make sure that the way I moved forward was something that worked for me. and worked for you and the community, and I love you guys and I wanted to just bring you something kind of epic. So I took a little bit of a breather and funny enough, I call it a breather, but in reality, I was crazy busy.
We 2022 just kind of exploded on us with the. innovation quotient, edge assessment or proprietary assessment. As you know, it tells you your everyday innovator style, which helps you build a more innovative mind and and more innovative life and work. And so that kind of took off. So I say breather, but what I really mean is I just wasn’t in front of this little red microphone that I have for podcasting.
But it’s funny because even though technically I wasn’t doing podcasting, I couldn’t let it go. It just was on my mind all the time. And I think when something’s on your mind all the time like that, it is a maybe a sign from the universe or from your own internal North Star that you need to keep at it and you need to keep going.
So for the last couple weeks, I took out my sticky notes and my markers and my, my colored pens, and I mapped out what I wanted the future to look like for the podcast. Like I said, I wanted it to work for you and for me, and not just be something that I was putting out just to put out or to fill the airwaves or try to get my numbers up or, or just, you know, have something that goes on to social media on Tuesdays and Thursdays or whatever.
I wanted something that really, that resonated and. also, you know, I keep saying with me and you and you know, for you, whomever you are out there, I, you know, the people that I know. Listen, I love you guys and I, I wanted it to be something that you walk away going, you know, I learned a little something about myself today, or I, I’ve learned something that’s gonna improve how I live my life and approach my work and get, get to my dreams and my goals and not get stuck in the mud.
That just keeps us all in mediocrity. So that’s what we’re gonna do. And for me, I wanted this podcast to to be something that not just made me happy. Look, we all have work that doesn’t make us happy that we have to do, but I wanted it to be something that lit me up, that made me excited to be in front of the microphone.
And when I mapped out what I wanted to talk about and some of the lessons I got kind of excited. So, very quickly, I’m gonna tell you the format. , and then I’m gonna dive right into it. So I’m not gonna make this a fluff episode. I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna get to it, y’all. So here’s the format. The format is this.
The podcast will have two sections to it. Number one is something I call sticky inspiration. And if you follow me and we’re connected on Instagram or LinkedIn or Facebook or, um, I don’t know, whatever else I’m on, those are kind of the three main ones. You’ll see that I do a lot of sticky note drawings with life and work and, and lessons on them on how to get unstuck and kind of what happens and all that good stuff around kind of moving forward faster and kind of swimming sideways in life as I.
Getting out of that Riptide. That’ll be an episode coming up by the way. So the first section is gonna be called Sticky Inspiration and these sticky notes that I create and I put the picture up on Instagram and LinkedIn and Facebook. So make sure we’re connected there. By the way, I’m sure the links are somewhere in the show notes here.
Make sure we’re connected cuz this is the visual element of what I’m gonna dive into. in the podcast. And like I said, they’re, they’re raw. They’re a little more personal. They’re things that just make me go, oh, I wish somebody had told me that sooner. Like, wow, like, you know, those things when you come across ’em, sometimes it’s a meme, sometimes it’s a video, sometimes it’s something someone says in passing.
It makes you just go, damn, that was good. . Well, these are the things that, where I have those moments and I turn those into sticky inspiration. And of course they’re called sticky cuz you know me, you know I love, love my sticky notes. So, That’s gonna be the first section. The second section is going to be the lesson and the action, and that’s where I’m gonna dive in a little bit and talk about how you can apply it in your world.
So whether that’s personal, professional, work, life, I truly believe that as everyday innovators, which is what we are all about, we’re all about being everyday innovators. People that think differently about what’s right in front of us to create an advantage. , because we’re everyday innovators, we gotta take action.
So I’m gonna dive in in the second part and talk about a bonus lesson or an action that you can take to implement it in your world, across your entire world. So here’s what I love about this everyday innovator and the sticky inspiration and what we’re gonna be talking about in the podcast moving forward.
It’s not in a lane, it’s in your. and your life is your personal. It’s your relationships, it’s your health, it’s your parenting. It’s also work, right? It is your leadership, your colleagues, your culture of work, the goals that you’re trying to go after, all of it. And what I’ve come to really realize about my work, the feedback I’ve gotten from all of you.
Is that the power in all of the stuff that we’re talking about here? That what I’m gonna bring to you isn’t just in one lane, it’s in life. And I think the mistake that I’ve made, just to pull back the curtain here, is I’ve tried to stay a little bit in one lane and that lane’s been a little bit narrow and you guys are over there on the side roads going, Hey, hey, hey, hey.
Tamara over here. Yo, this stuff applies over here. Can you talk about over here too? So took me a little while, but I’m finally listening, so I’m gonna get out of that narrow lane and I’m gonna make it about life because you know what it is. And I found the more that I’ve stepped into being an everyday innovator, the more the other people in this community have stepped into that, the more it impacts everything that they do.
And I love that about it. So I’ve got a little bit off track, which I’ve been known to do, but like I said, two sections. The sticky inspiration. and then the bonus lesson or kind of the way to overcome that or the deep insight, that’s gonna help you have a rich understanding of what we’re talking about.
So what do you say? We dig in. Like I said, I kind of just wanna go for it. Oh, and we’ll release the podcast. I think the plan right now is two days a week, so probably Tuesday, Thursday. But we’ll see how that goes. That part’s a little bit of an experiment. That’s my. and we have more than enough content to do it that way.
And so more, I have more than enough sticky inspiration, I should say, to do it that way. So yeah, let me know what you think. Let in fact, I would love your feedback about all of it. Okay, let’s dive in to the first sticky inspiration. Oh, I get goosebumps thinking about it. I love sticky inspiration. I love my sticky notes.
They’re my life. All right, so today is, is about fear and re. Here’s what I’ve come to realize When I am dealing with someone who is giving me a lot of resistance to whatever it is I’m trying to accomplish, what’s really happening is they’re giving me a lot of fear and that wall of resistance that they’re putting up is more about blocking out and.
Making their fear themselves feel safe than it is about actual resistance to what I’m saying or what I’m trying to get them to say yes to. So it’s less about me and more about them. And people who are driven by more fear show more resistance. I have a colleague who has an employee on her team who she cannot get.
She cannot get this person. To buy into any of the new ideas that the team is trying to implement. Doesn’t matter what it is, not only is it all the reasons wrong, and here’s why it won’t work, and here’s 10 reasons why this is a bad idea. But if they do implement, she finds a way to sabotage every single angle, everything.
She just finds a way. To just poke holes, to slow things down, to make it impossible, to the point where the rest of the team starts to think it’s a bad idea too, because it’s not working. Well, of course it’s not working because she’s throwing up massive resistance and I’m, I’m talking to my friend about this and she’s asking me tomorrow, what do I do about this?
Why is she so resistant? And as we started to dig into it, the light bulb for me went off. That person is so fearful. They’re being driven. By fear. And you know what, I see this in my wonderful kids all the time. So my kids are, I have two boys, they’re 18 and 14, and they’re awesome. I love ’em. And my oldest in particular, like structure, he likes to know what’s happening.
And sometimes when I throw change at him, he immediately throws up resistance. And I get really angry because I’m over here going, um, I’m the parent. I know what’s good for you. Here’s how we should be doing this. and he’s over here like, yeah, well I can’t do that. I can’t do this. This isn’t gonna work, but I have to do that.
And I get frustrated and frustrated and frustrated. And it happened the other day in an argument we were having about budgeting. So just teaching him how to budget, teaching about getting kind of on a payroll, these things that, you know, teenagers need to know as they go into adulthood and off to college.
And I guess it’s the other way around, isn’t it? It should be off to college and onto adulthood. , it’s probably the right path. So I’m talking to him about it and he is throwing up all this resistance and he’s getting super annoyed and all I’m trying to do is help him manage his money.
And then I realized the issue wasn’t the idea I was presenting to him of, Hey, let’s make a budget. Let’s work through things. The thing he was leading with was fear. And the more I kept going, the more his resistance kept building up. Because the fear kept getting greater and greater because I was throwing stuff at him that he didn’t understand, he didn’t know.
So fear, fear drives a lot in people. So when you look at yourself, notice the times that you throw up shade. When you throw up resistance, I bet you the underlying cause of it is fear. Notice the people around. I bet you when you get resistance for them, for your ideas, for what you wanna do, by the way, this can be little things like where you’re going out to eat if you wanna try a new restaurant.
It can be anything from that to, you know, that big idea that you have to, you know, that entrepreneurial business that you want your whole family to get on board with. Fear drives resistance. And I used to think that resistance was this, I don’t know, logical thing of like, you know, that person’s just a nays.
Maybe. Maybe that’s their inclination, but I found there’s a layer deeper to this, and that is fear. So look around you. Hmm. Let me say it differently. Look inside yourself first, then look around, and I think you’ll find as the fear goes up, so does that wall of resistance. And conversely, as the fear goes down, so does the wall of resistance.
And that is your sticky inspiration for the. Now let’s talk about this lesson in action. I want you to take. So in this part, I, I wanna deep dive into fear. This is, uh, something I’ve worked with, with other people and I’ve done a lot in keynotes. Talked about where fear comes from, because I think in understanding where your fear comes from, you can manage it because I, I think in that understanding, we, we understand how to quiet it down a little bit and how to work ourselves through to our higher thinking to say, okay, what do I, what do I really need out of this?
How do I really move through this fear? Here’s the thing about fear that I want us all to understand. First of all, we can’t be fearless. I hate it when people say that. Oh, it drives me bonkers. Be fearless, right? Be a fearless leader. You have to push forward and be fearless. That’s such bs. Here’s the thing, fear is hardwired into us.
As part of the human design, of course it is, because when a sabertooth tiger jumps out of the bushes at us, we need fear. That puts us in motion. So fear is part of our biological design. The challenge is fear today acts in a much more continuous and subtle way. So stress and fear kind of go together.
There’s supposed to be these kind of one shot like huh, and right, and then you’re back down to normal. What’s happened in the world that we’re in today? Because things are moving so quickly because things feel uncertain because we live in this kind of modern boardroom society, right, where everybody’s on computers and answering emails and like things are pinging at us all day long from everywhere.
Because of that fear is now and stress is now constant and a little more, it’s like this insidious thing under the surface. So first of all, don’t worry about being fearless. You don’t need to be people who really push forward, who innovate, who are true everyday innovators, who make those leaps and do those things that we look at them and go, oh man, I wish I could be like them.
They’re so bold. The reality is they’re not fearless. No. They’re just pushing through their fear. They’re managing it, they’re harnessing it. I am afraid all the. All the time. I have fear all the time. I step on stage, I have fear. I have to manage my ex-husband. I have fear. I have to manage my kids. I have fear.
I have to go out in the world and do my thing and and grow my business and talk to you all through a microphone and hope that you like what I have to say. Oh my gosh, there’s so much fear in putting yourself out. And I know through social media, if you look at it, you look at people and go, oh, those are fearless people.
Look at out. They’re living their best lives. Hmm. The ones that I know who are the most real, who I adore as humans, they’re full of fear just like me, but they’re not fearless. But they do push through their fear. And I’d venture to say that we all have a pretty solid understanding of where our fear comes from.
Like what we’re really afraid. So let me give you some examples because this is where I want you to work through it too, for yourself and for the people around you, with your family and your relationships with the people you work with. I found understanding this, by the way, has absolutely helped me in my romantic relationship as well, because I can understand where my person is coming from and what’s going on in their brain and help them through it.
Versus pushing against them as they resist, I wanna resist back, right? As they kind of start boxing at me, I wanna box back. But turns out, when we understand where this stuff comes from, it’s easier to navigate. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about fear number one, fear of being left behind. So that story I was giving you earlier about my girlfriend who’s, who’s leading that team, and she’s got that one person on her team who just, man that wall of resistance is huge.
That person’s fear is of being left behind because if they make those changes, the way she knows how to do her job, the way she likes to run her job, the the thing that makes her stand out and be important in her mind, right? The thing that it validates her knowledge, her elite level, her success. . Well, all that kind of starts to erode in her mind.
Now, I’m not saying that’s true cause I don’t believe it’s true at all. In fact, if she figured out how to change with the time, she’d be even more relevant and she’d have more knowledge and more, I don’t wanna say elitism, but you know, like more of that kind of status. But she’s afraid of being left behind and that fear is what drives her.
Some people have fear because they’re trying to protect their interests, similar to being left behind, but instead of kind of feeling irrelevant, it’s more about. You know, being afraid that you’re gonna take my territory, my credit, um, what I’m known for, what makes me important. So people have a fear of their interest going away, their territory going away.
They have a fear of being irrelevant, which is kind of what I was just talking about. But man, so many people right now feel like they’re on thin ice because things are changing so quickly and how they know to do things and what they know to be true and the skillset that they bring to the world is becoming.
Irrelevant. By the way. You see this one not just in work. You see this in work all the time. All the time. People fear being irrelevant, but you see it in relationships too, where people are afraid of that. If their partner grows, then it’s gonna make them irrelevant. Um, You know, if their partner goes and kind of does some professional and personal development, it’s gonna make them irrelevant.
I saw this in a friend of mine where she kind of went on a journey of doing some personal and professional growth and, and started to expand her, her brain and her thinking and what was possible for her. And her husband’s initial reaction was fear and resistance, because suddenly he thought, well, she’s not gonna love me anymore.
Because now that she’s this new improved person, but what she wanted more than I think was for him to come along for the journey with him in whatever way worked for him. So fear of being irrelevant. You see this in employees and teams all the time, where, you know, technology changes, outcomes change, goals change, job responsibilities change, and people are afraid that what they know isn’t I.
I think people have a fear of being overwhelmed. So like overworked or, or let me say on the work side, a fear of being overworked and undervalued. So, you know, doing more really for less recognition. And whether that recognition is money or verbal or a promotion, whatever it is. But nobody likes to feel undervalued.
And on the personal side, that’s true too, right? We we’re afraid of giving and not getting valued in. Fear, um, comes from confusion and lack of clarity, so we feel muddy, hazy. I’m actually, it’s funny, I’m actually closing my eyes right now as I say this, and I think that’s because, you know, it’s that feeling of just not being able to see your path in front of you clearly, and that creates fear because you don’t know what to do next, right?
You feel scared and you feel overwhelmed. Fear comes from being out of control. So maybe in another podcast I’ll talk about the spheres of control. Influence and out of control. I think we make the mistake of talking about it as you know, there’s what you can control and what you can’t control right in and out of control, but there’s actually a whole gray area about where you can influence.
That’s totally changes the game for people. But Fornell, let’s just talk about that. Fear comes from being out of control, right? When you feel like you don’t have a say in the changes that are happening, when you feel like you know what’s coming at you isn’t something that you can even control. Well, that dials up fear and dials up resistance.
Um, fear of looking like a failure. Fear of the consequences of that failure. Oh, remember I was talking earlier about kind of having to push through fear to even just be back on the podcast again? Well, for me personally, that’s a fear of looking like a failure, not failing. I don’t fear failure. I think it’s part of the process.
There is a little bit of a fear of, oh my gosh, what if you all don’t like what I have to say? What if you think this new direction is stupid? Um, what if nobody listens? What if you are talking about me behind my back saying how stupid I am or how like lame my stuff is, right? And as I’m saying it out loud, doesn’t it sound silly?
Sounds silly. The right people will listen and the wrong people won’t. And that’s okay. But I think we have a fear of that, that failure of those consequences. and that fear of judgment, of looking like a failure. Other people perceiving us as stupid under, um, not worthy, um, not smart, right? All those things early on in my career, I’ll never forget this one meeting I was in and the team was talking.
I was very junior and I remember having a thought about what direction I thought we should take for the business, and I was so afraid of looking stupid. That I didn’t speak up, and the reason this meeting stands out in my memory is it was about a two hour meeting and I had this thought about 30 minutes in, and I just kept quiet.
I just hid behind my notes. At the very end of the meeting, one of the other people on at the table said, Hey, what if we did this? It was my idea. Now, they didn’t steal it from me. They didn’t even know I had it because I didn’t say anything. But I was so afraid of looking stupid that I didn’t say it. That person said it, and kudos to them.
Not only do they get the recognition, but they steered the business in the right direction. So that fear of judgment keeps us from pursuing a lot of the things that we wanna pursue. It puts up that resistance barrier unnecessarily. Here’s the thing about fear. People don’t fear change. People fear being changed.
and that’s where all this kind of root of fear comes from. So my lesson action for you to take bouncing off of our sticky inspiration is think about where your fear comes from. Here’s what I found happens when I think about it. I can actually rationalize my way, not out of it cause we’re not fearless, but.
So, as I keep mentioning, right, I had all this fear around coming back on the podcast, what to do with it. I think part of it’s cuz I took so much time off that I was worried like, will people think it’s ridiculous that I’m jumping back in? Will they think I’m being impulsive and not sticking with it?
Will they think, will they not like what I have to say and the direction that we’ve decided to, I’ve decided to take, right? All of that. But when I sat down with myself, cuz I hadn’t taken action and I waited a little longer than I would’ve. And when I sat down with myself and said, all right, Tamara, like what, what is keeping you from getting this microphone lit up and getting going like I am right now?
And that’s when I realized it was, it was the fear I just listed to you. And when I started to understand like realize that about myself, I could work through it. Cause of course that’s silly. First of all, I have a lot of confidence and a lot of, yeah, I have a lot of confidence in what I do and what I know and what I’m trying to put out in the world and the impact I’m trying to make.
It’s not that I don’t have confidence, of course I do. So why am I letting this fear outweigh the confidence and the joy and the impact that I know I already make in these other areas and bring that into moving forward. But I needed to have that conversation with myself. So sometimes I just think it takes a second to go, why am I resisting?
Where is this fear coming from? Thinking that through and then saying, okay, now I’m gonna take action. It’s a matter of really. Knowing where it’s coming from. Woo. All right, everybody. How is that for a first episode back? I hope you could tell it’s raw. It’s not edited. Maybe to cut out some pauses here and there, but other than that, we’re not editing.
This is pulling back the curtain. As you can tell with some of the stories I shared, I’ll never throw people under the bus. That’s not my approach. I like to build people up. Break them down. But I’m gonna share those stories and I will always, always share my stories, honestly, and as with as much richness as I can to really bring them to life.
So thank you for being here with me. Thank you for being an everyday innovator with me. Hopefully you’ll join our community online so I can connect with you there as well. But hey, do me a favor on our website. Actually two things. One is, if you like this episode, share it. Share it with someone who needs to hear it.
Let’s go further, faster together. So that’s number one. Share it. And then number two, we opened up comments on the podcast, on the website. So you might be listening on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever. But if you go to our website, there’s a comment section. Just put a little comment in there about what you got out of it.
It’d be nice to know. All right, everybody with.
TAMARA OUT