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[00:00:00] Welcome to Wholehearted Coaching: The Podcast. If you're looking for more purpose, more passion, more joy in your life, then you have come to the right place. I am your host, coach and Life Alchemist, Shirin Eskandani. And I have worked with thousands of people showing them how to create their dream lives while also living their dream.

This podcast is where mindset, mindfulness and manifestation meet together. We're going to release limiting beliefs. Put your dreams into motion all while prioritizing your ease, rest and joy. Let's do this love.

Hi love. Welcome to Wholehearted Coaching: The Podcast. This is where we take a deeper dive into my Mindset Monday post, which you can read on Instagram at @wholeheartedcoaching.

Or if you want to go even deeper into this week's episode and get my free weekly journal prompts, sign up for my email list and you'll be able to explore the topics we're talking about in this episode. Even further, you can do that in the show notes or by heading to my website: wholehearted-coaching.com.

And if you're interested in working with me, whether that's one-on-one in one of my group programs or one of my transformational courses, you can head to my website, wholehearted-coaching.com/offerings to find out more. And of course you can also head to the show notes and all of this information will be waiting for you there. All right, love.

[00:01:35] So today's episode is a juicy one. It's going to be a big episode. So I need for you to grab a pen, a piece of paper, a pencil, your favorite journal, open a Google doc, because I'm telling you I am sharing some really big tips and tools and secrets in this episode.

[00:02:02] I am going to be sharing with you. The number one reason why my clients go after their dreams time and again. My one-on-one clients, my group, coaching clients, the clients who do my courses. I am sharing in this episode, how they do it, how they go after their biggest scariest dreams. So love if you are listening to this episode and you're feeling like you need a little bit more motivation, a little more direction, a little more help in achieving that desire that you have been thinking about.

[00:02:36] This is the episode. My greatest wish for all of us. And the reason why I do the work that I do is so that all of us can really be going after what is in our hearts. So in today's episode, you are going to learn how to get out of your head and back into your heart, how to move past the self doubt, the insecurity, the procrastination, the perfectionism, and back to your dream.

[00:03:06] And so you're probably thinking, okay, this sounds amazing. I want to do all of this, but what are we going to talk about in today's episode? What are we discussing love today? We are talking all about fear and I'm going to be teaching you my fear protocol. The fear protocol is a tried and tested true method for navigating your fear.

[00:03:30] It's what I teach my clients to help them get past. All of those voices, those voices that tell them they're not ready. They're not good enough. They don't know what they're doing and allows them to really set their dreams and motion. And there is a really good reason why today's episode is such a juicy one, why we're talking about our dreams and our fear and how we can move past it today.

[00:03:54] I'm opening the doors again to my membership, the alchemy collected. The alchemy collective is a 12 month membership in which you learn how to become the healer and leader of your life. As part of the collective, you get three group coaching calls every month, a monthly private podcast, monthly journal prompts, monthly somatic practices like meditation, breath work and tapping.

[00:04:22] And in the summer things get really spicy in the collective. It's my favorite time, because we focus our energy on your purpose, your passion, and how to make your dreams happen. What I like to do in the collective is move with the seasons. So in the fall and the winter, we're really working on how we can heal ourselves.

[00:04:42] I give you all the tools so that you can become your own healer. And then in the spring and the summer, that's where you learn how to become your own leader. How to trust yourself again, how to name your dreams and go after those dreams in a way that is easy, sustainable, and joy. Love. If you are a fan of this podcast, if you look forward to it every week, the collective is like the podcast, but magnified by 10, by a hundred, you get to do this work with me.

[00:05:13] You get to meet with me and an incredible community of lighthearted and like minded. So the doors to the collective are open until April 29th. If you want to find out more head to whole hearted-coaching.com/alchemy or head to the show notes. And in today's episode, you're going to get a little taste of the work that we do in The Collective.

[00:05:39] So if you get a lot from this episode, which is what I always intend for you to do, that's amazing. But imagine what that could be like. If we do this work together, we meaning you and me love. All right, let's get into this week's mindset. Monday. It reads here is a secret. The people out here doing scary things are doing it despite their fear.

[00:06:06] Not without fear. The truth is the more you do scary things. The more you realize that being afraid is part of the process, but you start to realize that the fear, usually isn't a warning sign. Instead, it's a sign that you're going in the direction of your dream. So I remember when I thought of even starting wholehearted coaching, I looked around me at all these people who have their own businesses who were coaches themselves.

[00:06:39] And I thought to myself, wow. These people are so fearless. Look at them, taking all these risks, being so courageous, doing the damn thing. And I just felt like they must be so different from me that they have some sort of genetic makeup that's different from me, or maybe they didn't experience as much trauma as I did.

[00:07:01] So that's why they felt so comfortable doing these things that were just so incredibly scary. But what I've really come to learn is that no one is fearless. No one is doing scary things and not feeling scared or afraid. What I've come to really understand is that the people out here doing those scary things have learned how to navigate their fear, have learned how to work with their fear.

[00:07:34] And so the more and more fear shows up in their lives. They know what to do. So in today's episode, that's what we're going to be focusing on the fear, how it manifests, what it tries to make us do and how we can overcome that fear. Not by ignoring it, not by running away from it, not by listening to it, but by truly understanding our fear.

[00:08:01] So I want to share with you. So I want to share with you what makes fear so tricky it's that most of us don't really actually understand that we are afraid most of the time, because fear manifests in really interesting ways in ways that we wouldn't categorize as us being scared. We've talked about this in the podcast.

[00:08:25] Fear shows up as procrastination. It shows up as perfectionism. It shows up as in decisiveness deflection, it shows up as self doubt or insecurity. Fear always shows up as resistance. Whenever we resist doing something, especially something that is important or means a great deal to us underlying it is a fear of something.

[00:08:56] So we have to understand that when we procrastinate become indecisive, become insecure, these are all symptoms of our fear. They're manifestations of our fear. But the problem is that instead of most of us seeing this as us being scared, we see this as a flaw, as a personal flaw that we have, we mistake it for our identity.

[00:09:22] So instead of saying, oh my gosh, I'm just really scared. We say, oh, here I go. Being indecisive again, here I go. Being lazy again, here I go. Running away from what I actually want to do again. And again, I really want you to understand, as I say this love, because this is what I see time and again, with. They come to me thinking the worst things about themselves.

[00:09:47] They come to me thinking they're procrastinators that they don't know what they're doing. They're not smart enough. I'm not talented enough. They are just scared and none of us have ever learned how to navigate our fear. I mean, unless we grew up in a very emotionally intelligent household, but like, even then, I don't know.

[00:10:09] Okay. But when we procrastinate, we think it's because we're lazy and we're a mess. We'd never think it's fear when we go back and forth on a decision it's because we think we can never get things right. Or that we can't trust ourselves. We've never labeled this as fear. When we go into Uber, perfectionist mode trying to do everything right.

[00:10:33] We just think, well, this is how I am. And we'd never categorize that as fear love. If there is one thing I want you to take away from this podcast. It's that these are all symptoms of fear. They're not who you are. They're not some sort of character flaw or something you're lacking in. There are just the ways that you have learned how to deal with fear, their coping mechanisms.

[00:11:01] It's because you're just so damn scared. They are the best way that you know how to deal with fear right now, with the knowledge you have, the environment you grew up in and the resources available to you. And today we're going to learn how we can go beyond what we've been taught or haven't been taught.

[00:11:23] This episode is all about you understanding your fear and understanding how you can move through it. Because let me tell you, fear will talk you out of doing the things that you truly want to do, and it will make you point the finger at yourself. It will make you feel so guilty and ashamed. It will make you feel like you have no idea what you're doing.

[00:11:48] Like you don't care about the things that you really care about, and that's not, it love, we need to move beyond that. So let's get into fear. There are a lot of myths when it comes to fear and I want to talk about two of them. And the first one I touched upon a little earlier. A lot of us believe that certain people just don't have fear, right?

[00:12:13] That the people doing big things, taking big risks are immune to fear. And that after a certain amount of success, you're never going to feel fear that you can out success or out accomplish or out achieve that sense of fear that we have. The second myth I want us to look at is that fear is a warning sign.

[00:12:37] That like any fear that we feel in our body is a signal to turn back to yield, to not go forward. So first love you need to understand. No one is immune to fear. I mean, no matter how many goals you achieve, how many successes you have, how many wins you have under your belt, fear never goes away. You just get more comfortable with it.

[00:13:01] Y'all every time I want to do something new, something I've never done before. Something that there's, you know, an element of uncertainty to it. I feel. I feel fear when I launch new programs, I feel fear when I launch a new workshop or I feel fear when I'm about to go do a big public speaking engagement, which has happening more and more now, as we're kind of coming out of our lockdowns, the pandemic, like this month, I have three in-person speaking engagements and I'm like...

[00:13:33] Do I know how to do this? So y'all, I want you to know those people you're looking at and thinking, you know what? They don't have fear. They just never, never feel fear. They they've out success their way out of fear. No, that is a lie. Pema Chodron has a brilliant quote and it reads, we think brave people have no fear.

[00:13:54] The truth is that they are intimate with. Brave people have understood how to be with the fear and go after what they desire. Not because of a lack of fear, but despite the fear, the real truth is that brave people still get scared. They still get that uneasy feeling in their gut. They say phrases like you have no idea what you're doing to themselves.

[00:14:21] They question themselves and their abilities. But they have come to understand that fear. Usually isn't a warning sign. It's most often a sign that they're on the right path and they've learned the tools to navigate through their fear. I've come to understand that whenever fear shows up in my life, it means that I'm on the precipice of something big.

[00:14:45] It means that I'm about to level up and expand into something that I've never experienced before. Fear means I'm doing something new and new things lead to new results, new experiences and new goals. Fear is always a sign that I move in closer and closer to my dreams because the truth is our biggest dreams.

[00:15:09] Hold our biggest fears, the fear of failure, the fear of judgment, the fear of being seen the fear of success, the fear of the unknown. Now here's the truth. And it's an annoying one. And I've said it on the podcast before, but the amount you want to do, something is going to equal the amount of fear that you will experience by going after it, or even thinking about it, or the more you want to do something the louder, the more discouraging fear will be.

[00:15:40] And what brave people have learned to do is to not listen to what the fear is telling them. There's this Buddhist parable. About a young warrior woman who was told by her teacher that she had to go into battle with fear. And she was terrified at the idea, but she knew she had to do it. And at the battle of the young warrior, about three times to fear and said, may I have permission to go into battle with you?

[00:16:09] Fear side. Thank you for showing me so much respect that you ask my permission. And then the young warrior said, how can I defeat you? And fear applied. My weapons are that I talk fast and I get very close to your face. Then you get completely unnerved and you do whatever I say. If you don't do what I tell you, I have no power.

[00:16:35] You can listen to me and you can have respect for me. You can even be convinced by me, but if you don't do what I say, I have no power. And in that way, the student warrior learned how to defeat fear.

[00:16:55] And this story teaches us that we can't run from our fear. We can't avoid it. We have to face our fear head on. We have to see it, acknowledge it and also respect it. And then we have to look at straight in the eyes and question it and not listen to a damn thing. It says, because love, you can not listen to your fear because it will always lead you away from what you most desire.

[00:17:24] So then what do we do with our fear? Right? How do we navigate it? Like the warrior? So this brings us to myth. Number two, when most of us feel fear, we believe it's a warning sign that the fear knows something we don't know, right. That it's wiser than us. Now, fear is not a bad thing altogether. Right? Fear is healthy.

[00:17:44] Fear is natural, but we've gotten away from what healthy fear is. So I categorize fear into two categories, real fear and perceived fear. Real fear is the fear that you have before you go down a dark alley and something in you tells you not to go forward. Perceived fear is the day-to-day fear that we experience, right?

[00:18:09] The fear we have before we send that email, make that call, decide to do that thing. That means a lot to us. And we often confuse real fear for perceived fear. And so when we sense fear, we stop, we yield, we pull back. But instead of pulling back, what I am asking you to do is to get intimate with your fear is to question your fear is to investigate your fear because the truth is fear is trying to protect you.

[00:18:43] It's trying to protect you from the pain of failure, the hurt of disappointment, the pain of rejection. And so it uses all these manipulative techniques to stop you from doing what you want. It makes you believe unkind and untrue things about yourself. It makes you stall and delay and in its pursuit to protect you from pain, hurt and disappointment, it makes you experience all those things because you're not going after what you truly want to go after.

[00:19:12] So the key and navigating fear is facing your fear, honoring your fear and questioning your fear. So I want to teach you my fear protocol. This is how I've been able to change my relationship with fear and how my clients have changed their relationship with. This is how we get shit done. This is how we do scary things.

[00:19:40] This is how we realize our dreams. So the fear protocol is a set of questions that allows you to really face your fear and investigate your fear. So here are the questions. The first thing I want you to ask yourself, when you feel fear is, is the fear I'm feeling real or perceived. Right. So is my life in danger?

[00:20:06] Will I be putting myself or others in harm's way? If yes, then this fear is a warning sign it's wisdom, and you should probably stop if it's not, then you keep going. Now, what I want to tell you about this question of, is it real fear or perceived fear? It sounds really simple. But it takes practice. It takes practice because most of us feel like all the fear we have is real fear.

[00:20:36] So this is something that I really want you to investigate and practice and see what happens. Maybe I want you to just stay with question number one for a while, asking yourself, okay. What does real fear feel like in my body? What does perceived fear feel like? What does real fear say to me, how does it talk to me?

[00:20:58] How does it communicate with me? How does perceived fear talk to me? How does it communicate with me? How does it feel in my body? For me, perceived fear says really unkind things. It makes me feel really anxious and uncomfortable. It puts me in comparison mode. Oftentimes it makes me fixate on timelines.

[00:21:19] So I have all these ways that I now can understand. Okay. This seems like it's perceived fear. Okay. So question number one is the fear I'm feeling real or perceived. If it's real, we honor it. We stop. If it's perceived fear, we go to the second question. The second question we ask ourselves is, is the sleep I'm about to take this decision.

[00:21:43] I'm about to make leading me closer or further away from my dreams, right? So is this thing that I want to do, or I'm about to do, going to possibly take me closer to where I want to be, who I want to become? If the answer is no, then this leap is not the leap for you right now. But if it's yes, we go on to the next question.

[00:22:12] Now, this is where we start to get really intimate with our fear. We get in touch with our fear, just like the warrior, ask the fear what's going on. So grounding yourself, speak to the fear and ask your fear what its biggest fears are. Its biggest worries. And see what comes up. See if you can name those fear specifically, right?

[00:22:38] A fear of failure of making a mistake, a fear of uncertainty. So really becoming aware of what does my fear, fear? What is worrying? My fear. Why is it getting so activated? And so now that you've kind of identified what those fears are. And now we're onto the next step. I want you to take a moment and thank the fear for being so open and honest with you and speak to it with compassion and let it know the reasons why it is safe.

[00:23:15] Perhaps say things to it. Like I got this, you can trust me. I'm going to figure this out. This means a lot to me. And sometimes you kind of have to have a negotiation with your fear. I do this often, you know, I kind of say, okay, we're going to try this. And if X happens, I promise I'll stop. And now we are at our final step.

[00:23:40] Check in and see what your body feels like as you've gone through these steps in these questions. What thoughts are you having? Does it feel safer to take the sleep. If yes, if it does feel safer, if there's a bit of a softening or an opening jump, do the damn thing. Take the step. If it still feels just as scary though, I want you to just keep connecting to the fear until you start to feel a little more safe, a little more soft around the fear, a little more open around.

[00:24:12] So love, this is all about you learning how to be with your fear. The more we create a real authentic relationship with our fear. And I know that sounds so weird, the more it starts to trust us. And the more we come to understand why the fear does the things it does and what is going on, what is deeply, deeply going on this week?

[00:24:38] I encourage you to practice the fear protocol and see what happens. Try it out in a very low stakes environment, a low stakes decision. See what arises for you love, but I am telling you the fear protocol will change and transform your life. And if you're ready to transform your life with me, with me and an amazing community of lighthearted and like minded people, then I really encourage you to join me in The Alchemy Collective.

[00:25:08] The door is closed on April 29th. You can find out more at home. Thank you so much for joining me last week. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend. So close where you last listening. I want you to think that really resonating with you can do this on my task box and as you kind of take a deep breath in until next week and then breathe out.

[00:25:34] So breathing in pause. And out love until next week. I will talk to you then.