March 23, 2022 • 35 mins
What scares you about pursuing your dreams? And what’s waiting on the ‘other side’ of your fear? Whether it’s the classic fear of failure, or of climbing your own personal Mount Everest, Eve and Aditi share strategies for combating the perfectionist self-talk that often gets in our way. They are joined by Dr. Brad Johnson and Dr. David Smith, co-authors of ‘Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace’, on how to take risks and change our personal narrative.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Time Out. I'm Eve Rodsky, author of the
New York Times bestseller fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space,
activists on the gender division of labor, attorney and family mediator.
And I'm doctor add Neru Kar, a physician and medical
correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience,
mental health, and burnout. We're here to peel back to
(00:24):
layers around why it's so easy for society to guard
men's time as if it's diamonds, and to treat women's
time as if it's infinite like sands. And whether you
are partnered with or without children, or in a career
where you want more boundaries, this is the place for
you for all family structures. We're here to take a
time out to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, reclaim
(00:49):
our time. Hi d D, how are you high? Eve? Today?
I wanted to start with a story that I tell
about how damn scared I was to record the audio
(01:10):
book for fair Play. Like physical manifestations of stress, you know,
panic attacks, shortness of breath. Anytime I thought about recording
the audio book, typically authors of nonfiction do record their
own audio, and it was something I knew I really
(01:30):
wanted to do some man wanted to conquer, but I
was really paralyzed with the idea. So I kept putting
it off and off, because often I think in the
face of fear, one of the best coping mechanisms that's
probably not the healthiest is procrastinations. So I did that one,
and it wasn't working because every time I think about it,
I'd be like, why do I have that pit in
(01:51):
my stomach? Oh? God, this the audio book I'm thinking about.
It's the back of my head. Often fear for me
sits as butterflies in my stomach, for really tightness in
my chest. I do know that those feelings since being
very early. I remember feeling that first probably is a
kindergartener or earlier in thinking, you know, why is my
(02:13):
stomach always hurt? So I decide to do something about
my fear. I decided to prepare. I start to read
about how people combat fear. Preparation is a really really
important one. One woman, I think she said she gave
her Ted talk over a thousand times to herself before
(02:34):
she actually delivered it. And so my preparation for reading
the audio book was to sign up for a voiceover class. Cool.
That's the beauty of living in Los Angeles pre pandemic.
There are a lot of people here who are trying
to be actors or voiceover specialists apparently, and so there's
lots of classes. So I found one in Burbank, and
(02:57):
I show up for my first voiceover class, and the
people adity were really diverse and interesting. I became friends
with a woman who was auditioning to be a rat
in a new movie or some sort of rodent and
a man who was auditioning to be Charlie the Star
Kiss Tuna apparently that was going to be coming back
(03:19):
as a campaign. And both of these people gave me
really important life lessons, how to project, how to use
soft drama hands when you're talking into a microphone, and
then high drama hands when you want to really emphasize
a point. Rodent lady told me that my job is
(03:41):
gonna be so easy because I get to read my
own words as opposed to Rodent speak, which is obviously
not even English. And the reason why that was so
important to me was because I realized that the preparation,
but we're gonna be talking about the ready set go
for a work of fear being ready, preparing through these
(04:04):
voice over lessons, getting set by having a community of
spiritual friends, which were Charlie the Darkest Tuna and Rat
Woman at that point in my life, and then just
going to go they're ready the set, and then going
immersing yourself, going to the studio, saying those first words
(04:26):
and getting better and better by chapter is what got
me through a time a dity that was really really
stressful and hard. And so I think about those damply lit,
poorly attended p t A meeting style voiceover lessons who
knew how important Charlie the Darkest Tuna would be to
(04:49):
me in my creative journey. But I want to thank you,
Charlie the Darkest Tuna Man and Rat Lady, who didn't
give me releases to use their full names, but I
I'm calling you by that, and we love you and
I'm thinking of you today. It's amazing how something like
writing a book you face so many of your fears,
(05:11):
and you likely had fears when you were writing the
book and doing your research, but you were able to
push through and then when it came time to sharing
it with the world and sharing your work with the world,
even if it was in a studio for an audio
book recording that only you would hear. Initially, it seemed
like something that was insurmountable. And often what we see
(05:33):
with fear is that sometimes it can be a very
legitimate fear of I want to climb Mount Everest, but
I'm afraid to climb out Everest, and that's a truly
legitimate But equally legitimate are these fears that may not
seem scary from the outside, but boys, do they feel
(05:53):
legitimate inside with what's happening with our biology and our
brain and our heart palpitations, that amygdala, that fight or
flight response, And that's the thing that's so fascinating to
me about fear is that the part of our brain
that recognizes fear, the amygdala, which we've talked about in
our very first episode of this podcast. That brain structure
(06:17):
and all of the structures around it called the limbic
system or the reptilian brain. It processes fear the same
way whether you're at base camp of Mount Everest and
looking at the peak and saying I'm going to climb
this mountain or your own personal Everest in your case
recording the audio book, same fight or flight response, same
(06:39):
Amigdala response. And I love the practice that you ascribe
in your book, Ready Set Go, because it really helps
us overcome that a Magdala response. The more you practice
something and visualize it and imagine yourself in the scenario,
it dampens that heightened emotional state because you are truly
(07:03):
facing our your fears. Your brain doesn't recognize something as
imaginary versus real. So when you rehearse scenarios, which is
that woman with the TED talk who practiced a thousand times,
she may have truly to the world only given one
TED talk, but to her and her brain and her amygdala,
she gave a thousand and one Ted talks of already
(07:25):
said go framework. So, if you think about preparation, having
that spiritual friendship, community doesn't have to be a stark
is Tuna man or the actual repetition itself of doing
so for you? What's what piece of the framework. Is
it the preparation that makes fear easier for you? Is
(07:46):
it the community of support or is it the actual
doing and doing and doing the go part? I think
all three are so critical, but at different points. So
early on in the project, at the inception stage, that
first part of thinking about it is the great hurdle.
(08:07):
And then once you have whatever you're afraid of, something
that you've done once or twice and are still afraid
that practice and perfecting, sharing with other people to get
that support and buy in, emotional buy in, and then
ultimately the doing. But it's a process and it can't happen.
You can't go from zero to sixty. You have to
(08:28):
take all of those necessary steps. It also helps to
prime the brain when you take all of those steps,
because you can't just look at everyst and say all right,
I'm ready going to climb. It's a whole marathon. It's
a training and you have to almost train your brain
to overcome the fear. And I think the ready, set,
go mindset and framework helps us to do that. Yeah,
(08:48):
And it's interesting because for me, being able to combine
ready and set a lot is often a way for
me to come to combat fear. Shout out to my
friend Zoe, She's sleeps in bed with me. When I
go on tour, have to give a giant speech. And
I remember after conquering the audio book Fear, the next
(09:11):
one right after that was the first talk I was
giving unfair play it was in Radio City Music Hall.
She had gone to was a kid on many field trips,
but I remember I think it was right after Condoleeza
Rice and right before Diane von first Bour. I was
the only one that was required to do a stand
(09:32):
up ted talk type speech. Everybody else seemed to have
been afforded a nice chair in some sort of panel discussion,
which would have been easier. But I do remember that,
and then having Zoe there, she was my set, and
then the going. Like you said, I probably did feel
like I gave that speech a thousand times by that
(09:53):
time I got up on that stage because I poor Zoe.
She has she probably knows her an Air and Aaron
out there shout out to you. I have two people
who probably know my keynote speech now better better than
I do. Fear is a tricky thing, and there's some
people who have really mastered fear, they still get afraid
(10:15):
and do it anyway, you know. I think about someone
who I really admire, Sarah Blakely, and she talks a
lot about fear and the fear of failure, which is
something that we're going to be talking about later in
our episode, and how her father growing up would always
ask her, so, how did you fail today? And she
had to celebrate her failures and so she didn't have
(10:36):
a fear of failure, so she could try new different
things as an adult. But I think about how we
all have a very distinct and unique relationship to fear,
and it's not necessarily that the fear isn't present for
people who take risks both in their life and in
their work. It's that they figured out strategies, tools, and
(11:00):
mechanisms to have that fear, do it anyway and overcome
a lot of those primal urges to step back into
safety and comfort. So a lot of the strategies that
we're talking about is not necessarily to remove the fear
because fear is naturally an important thing for evolutionary growth.
(11:21):
Fear is a signal of something, and when it's adaptive,
it can be really positive. But when it becomes maladaptive
prevents you from reaching your highest potential, that's when it's
a problem. It's okay to be afraid, but the trick
is to figure out a strategy that's personalized for you
so you can do it anyway, whatever that it is. Yes,
(11:43):
I love that framing. We are not here to tell
you to be fearless. I never understood that word. Do
it anyway, and that's why we're so excited to talk
with our amazing guests, Brad Johnson and David Smith. David
and Brad are co authors of the book Good Guys,
How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace,
(12:04):
a topic that's close to my heart, and we'll be
speaking with them after the break about their book and
their research. So stay with us. We're so excited to
(12:32):
have Dr Brad Johnson and Dr David Smith, co authors
of the book Good Guys, How Men Can Be Better
Allies for Women in the Workplace, with us today. Welcome
Brad and David. Glad to be here, Eve, and add
thanks to you. Great to be here with you. So
before we start talking about fear I would love for
(12:53):
our listeners to know a little bit more about your story.
How did you come into this work. It's such a
fascinating story and I would love for you to share it.
You know, Brand and I started our collaboration on this
topic when we were both teaching at the Naval Academy's
faculty there, and we quickly recognized Nick early on in
(13:13):
our time together that we had a lot of different
kinds of connections in terms of why this work was
important to us, you know, our academic backgrounds and clinical
psychologist and his focus on mentoring relationships. We we definitely
saw where there was different access to different kinds of
important resources. But the other part that I think is
really important is the personal connection to doing this work.
(13:35):
You know, it started early, you know, the beginning of
my career, my Navy career as a pilot. I was
married and still I am married to my wife, who
who also was a nable officer, had a very similar career,
parallel career paths, and of course, you know, we talked
a lot about our experiences in the workplace, but there
were so many differences in terms of how the workplace
(13:57):
was just this very challenging for her compared to me
in ways that that I just didn't understand. I didn't
see it because I didn't experience it in the same
way that she did. And if I was looking for
help I needed a mentor, or if I was looking
for hey, what should I do next? And those kind
of things were just right there at my fingertips. I
didn't have to look very far for her, not as much,
(14:19):
and and so I think her sharing some of those
experiences really got in touch one of my sense of fairness,
but also too with the idea that lots of other
women are experiencing this too, And so a lot of
ways that was that personal experience was also part of
the curiosity and the inquisitiveness that I have around this topic.
(14:39):
And I'll just offer a quick thumbnail that I think
will help you understand my personal narratives. So I I
have a sister. She's a Navy captain, very senior, very successful.
I called her one weekend and she sounded kind of down,
and I said, Shannah, what's going on? And she said, well,
we had this road race with members of the executive team,
(15:01):
and she's the only woman on the executive team. Most
of the men she works with her younger. And I said, well,
what happened on the on this ten k you ran? Well,
I won, And I said, well, that actually sounds great
to congrats and she said, well, I was feeling good
when I crossed the finish line. I felt yeah. And
then all the men started crossing the finish line, and
(15:24):
I could tell they were shocked that I beat them all.
And and then they all started coming up to me
with their own excuse, kind of like, hey, good job, Shannon,
but yeah, my achilles or I was really dehydrated. And
she realized they felt bad about being beaten by a woman.
And then she started internalizing and feeling guilty that she
(15:46):
had run so fast. And I said, Shannon, can you
hear yourself? A dude would never say that, he'd just
be like in your face. And those conversations with my
sister over twenty five years in in really parallel navy careers,
have just piqued my concern, my curiosity, like Dave, kind
(16:09):
of triggered my sense of injustice, I think in some ways.
And that in addition to looking at all the research
showing that women just get less mentoring and sponsoring and
lower quality sponsoring, I think all of that together has
been kind of part of what's instigated my interest. I
would love to ask you about your work with impostor syndrome.
(16:31):
It's something that I have certainly faced in my own trajectory.
I've some of our listeners may be new to tackling
their impostor syndrome. I'd left for you to give us
some of your thoughts on why this happens more to
women than men. I'm so glad you're thinking about this
impostor issue. Dave and I wrote an article in HBRE
(16:53):
on how we can be better mentors for people with
imposter syndrome, and I think if you're really dig into
the research on this, you do find there's a gendered element.
So more people, more women do report having impostor feelings.
But I think what we lose sight of is very
often that is a consequence of the culture or the
context in which they're functioning. It's a culture that gives
(17:16):
them messages that you don't belong. We've never seen a
woman in this role. You're weird, right, and and that
certainly creates cognitions and feelings that I don't belong. I'm
not going to make it. Everyone's watching for me to
make a mistake. Any minute, I'm going to blow it,
and they're gonna show me to the exit. I mean,
the irony is all of us have those feelings. Men too.
(17:40):
Every time we enter a new job, we feel like impostures.
That's just part of the human condition. But when I
hear that from somebody I'm ntoring or I'm an ally with,
I want to focus more on where are those messages
coming from, not is there something wrong with you that
you have self doubt. I want to look at the
context and then begin to devise strategies for pushing back
(18:03):
on that and also changing that context so that those
messages aren't being transmitted to women. I wonder if you
could talk a little bit about how to combat fear
in those situations, meaning whether it's legitimate fear right. I
was reading Katie Kuric's autobiography and she's talking about the
men that dropped their pants when women were entering their offices.
(18:26):
So there could be legitimate fear and trauma of being
a certain way of looking, a certain way of being
a marginalized population in an organization. I like to joke,
you know, women are not really allowed to be loud
and wrong. There's a fear around what if I say
the wrong thing. I am that token, so I'm here
to represent everybody and everything. Even I saw in Whitney
(18:48):
heard when she had her bumble I p O. The
lawyers in her I p O statement that goes out
to potential investors said there's extra risk here because this
is a female founder, and there's market risk because she's
going to be subjected to so much more scrutiny. So
how do you again think about ways to combat your
(19:12):
own fear when there are legitimate reasons why, as you said,
minorities populations would be conditioned to feel trauma from and
have actual reasons to be afraid. There's so many things
we could talk about here. Let me start with the
cognitive or the self talk. I'm such a fan of
(19:32):
all the cognitive therapy work around anxiety. When we have
anxiety about performance or anxiety about being inadequate, one of
the really powerful techniques for combating anxiety in that area
tends to be really watching, identifying, and then tweaking or
managing myself talk. So when I'm saying things to myself
(19:57):
in that context, like I must perform perfectly on this
to represent all women really well and be absolutely flawless. Um.
One of my favorite cognitive psychologist, Albert Ellis, would say,
you're musturbating. You need you need to stop that, or
same with I should I I should be perfect, I
(20:17):
should show up and knock it out of the park
on behalf of all women. He would say, you're shooting
on yourself and you need to stop that. But I
can look at my catastrophic thinking, right, I tend to
bloat out of proportion and say, oh my god, if
I don't show up today and get it perfectly right,
I'm going to be fired, or all women are going
(20:38):
to be cast in a negative light. It's going to
be catastrophic. Let's pull that back and and just check
that what I prefer to do really well. Yes, absolutely,
and that's a legitimate wish. I think we could all
wish that. But would it be catastrophic if I'm not perfect? No?
And so there's some personal work I can do here
(20:58):
with my own self talk and really examine. I'm such
a big fan of what we're telling ourselves, and I
think that wonderful mentor can call this out to or
just a great ally or colleague, kind of like me
with my sister. Right, I can say, Shannon, can you
hear yourself? I mean, no, wonder you're feeling sad or
(21:19):
down on yourself? Are guilty if you're saying that you
shouldn't have made those men feel bad about running so
fast and crushing him in the race. What if we
change that? What if you're narrative was you know I
really performed well, and I feel proud of that, and
how they react to that is really up to them.
So I can twist that narrative a bit. I can
(21:41):
attack the shame too with some behavioral exposure therapy, and
I can do my own personal exposure therapy by putting
myself in a situation where I I know I'm going
to be embarrassed or not get it right, or people
are going to be looking at me, and recognize that
I can tolerate that. It's another cognitive therapy intervention. Again.
(22:03):
Albert Ellis would give his patients assignments like go to
a mall, have a banana on a leash and just
pull it through the whole and everyone's going to stare
at you, and you're gonna feel like an idiot? Can
you tolerate that? Right? And you can if you make
yourself do that. So, if shame is part of it,
(22:25):
or feeling like you're gonna embarrass yourself for others, can
you deliberately expose yourself to some of that and do
it with an attitude of humor so that it becomes
a little less overwhelming when it actually occurs. By the way,
there's a shell servicing poem where this kid wants a dog,
and then he's just carrying his hot dog around on
(22:46):
a piece of string. That's that's what I think. It
also reminds me of Sarah Blakely, who is a very
successful entrepreneur and the founder of Spanks, and she often
talks about her father growing up wouldn't ask her, you know, so,
how did you sick? See today he would ask her, so,
how did you fail today? Tell me all about it?
And so it became the gamification of failure, and so
(23:07):
that sting of failure becomes so much less pronounced. I
love that adity. And you know, when we wrote about perfectionism,
we actually said, hey, if you're mentoring somebody with perfectionism,
give them an assignment to, for example, send you an
email full of typos and then not tell you they're
going to do it right, and then just tolerate. Oh
(23:30):
my god, how's my mentor going to evaluate me with
such shoddy work. Well, give them assignments to do that,
so they come right into exposure with that, and then
they get the experience and it's not going to kill him.
Do you feel that women are more prone to perfectionism
than men? It might be a little question. Yeah, we do,
(23:54):
and there's some of that in the research, and I
think we inherit some of that, I think from the
experiences we have with family members and especially for girls
with their moms, and so that that can be one
place that they learned that. And this again back to
the environment, right, the relationships you have around with people.
But again I think women more likely to be in
those token where they're the minority way more likely to
(24:17):
to be I think susceptible to this. Yeah, and there's
an evidence space note of reality here too. Write you've
heard of the prove it again bias that women encounter.
She representing all women, is more likely to have to
prove over and over again she can do the same job.
And we know that men get the nod on potential
(24:39):
right even if he's never even demonstrated that before. So
there's an element of truth here, of genuine reality that
women are pushed to have more flawless performance. When they
do make a mistake, we tend to remember it more,
especially if there are a minority in the company. So
they have some realistic hurdles here around being under the
(25:02):
microscope and exhibiting flawless behavior. And that gets back to
the fear internal fear of failure. You know, if I
apply for that position or for that advancement, or whatever
the case might be, and I don't have everything and
I fail, it's like again the fear of failure, of
fear of letting down all women out there. That again,
it's it's real. Can we talk about your fears? It's
(25:24):
sort of these meta levels of fear. We're talking about fear,
as we said, in different ways, impostor syndrome, self talk
type fears, things that frees us, legitimate fears and the
context of being, as you said, a token our minoritized population.
But I actually think that even if you didn't have
(25:45):
this whole layer of expertise, I would have still wanted
to come to you. Brad and David say, the military
teaches a lot about fear. I wanted to ask each
of you, what is something that you have learned in
writing all of those articles and read all of your books.
What has most surprised you about your own fears and
(26:07):
how you've gotten over them. Yeah, you know, Eve, in
terms of what has surprised me in my case, the
one that I'll use was terrible fear of public speaking.
I always hated that. I mean, I couldn't stand that.
I avoided it at every turn. And and the irony
(26:28):
is that after a career of being a professor and
speaking constantly, that has been the cure, exposure therapy and
doing it every day. But I can tell you back
in the years when I was avoiding, and I did
that for a long time, I would only speak under duress. Right,
You'd have to almost tie me down to get me
to speak. In those years, I made no progress whatsoever, zero.
(26:52):
And it was really only when I started forcing myself
to do this every day, get up in front of classes,
that I could just feel the angs idy ebbing and
eventually kind of disappearing. I think it's unhelpful to offer
a mastery model, right, Hey, I used to be afraid
of this, and now I've kicked its rear end and
now I have no anxiety. That's so unrealistic. Rather, what
(27:14):
I say is, hey, I'm really doing a lot better
with this. I've learned all these techniques. I really value
exposure because it's been very helpful. But I'll tell you,
if you stand me up in front of a room
of five thousand people, I might still have anxiety, right,
I'm gonna have to deploy all my techniques and it'll
probably go fine, but I'm gonna still feel the anxiety
(27:36):
because I don't want anybody who's listening to me to
think that it goes away. Ever, we're just on a
journey of coping effectively, and I think that's what I've
tried to do. I came into my second career in
a lot of my writing much later in life. Doing
research and theorizing and putting your ideas out there could
be very anxiety producing as well. And one of the
(27:58):
things I learned is that having a mentor or somebody
else who can walk you along and can come alongside
with you to kind of slowly stepped that up. I
think it's helpful too. Has it been nice for you
to do it together? Because I a lot of what
I wrote about in my second book, Around Fear was
that having spiritual friends, however those come along for you
(28:19):
as writing spiritual friends. Did it help to have each other? Yes? Absolutely.
You know, in the military we use the term wingman
a lot, and I think that, I think truly in
this space, Eve, because we're two men, especially older white men,
writing about gender and women's experience, in the workplace. I mean,
(28:40):
we're painting a big target on our chest right when
we go up, and so just to have another guy
up there with you, bumbling along and you know, we're
both stepping in it together and when we get it wrong,
we have to just laugh at ourselves. But it does
help to have somebody there with you kind of walking that.
I love that, But I think it's Brad mentioned there's
(29:02):
also an opportunity to, you know, to have some humor
and maybe something for us. It's often self deprecating humor
around the mistakes we've made, and to be able to
kind of feed off of each other with that. And
then again, I think sharing what you've learned along the
way is really helpful too. I will say, I think
humor is so helpful, and I think you both have it,
which is why you come off so authentically and why
(29:23):
you can be two white men talking about gender. Thank you,
Brad and Dave. You make me laugh. You're super vulnerable,
you have a lot of important things to say, and
we were so happy to have you here. Hi, it's
(29:46):
me Eve. I wrote find your Unicorn Space as a
permission slip for you to reconnect and discover that thing
that makes you come alive without the guilt, without the excuses.
Especially in our all too busy world, making time ourselves
is essential work. It improves our health, our relationships, and
it just might be the antidote to burnout. Join me
(30:08):
on a journey to find your Unicorn space visit unicorn
space dot com. So a DD this week's time out,
I'm hoping our listeners can resonate with the ready, set
(30:30):
go framework for tackling fear. Tell us more ready is
what we were hearing about earlier about preparation. When you
can prepare, things feel easier. Has there ever been a
time where you were on stage or maybe your first
(30:52):
time you're on air, did you prepare to do that?
Because I always feel like things that I can do
on a fly now I can only do in the
fly because I had hours and hours and hours and
hours of preparation the first time that I did that. Absolutely,
I think over preparing is the key when you're first
starting something because it just primes your brain. You know
(31:17):
that doomsday scenario that Brad mentioned, it's so interesting because
it can be very detrimental, but earlier, because we're rehearsing
all of the things that can go wrong, and that
causes a lot of anxiety. But if you're able to
prepare and get ready for it, it gives us a
sense of control and lack of control is one of
(31:38):
our greatest fears. Well, I love that so much, and
so you get you get ready by your preparation, whatever
that means to you. I will say that the reason
why this framework is ready, set, go is because you
don't want to get stuck in preparation over preparing, and
over preparing means you will live in your in your
fear and you will not get to the go part.
(32:00):
So write down a way that you can prepare for
something that you are afraid of. Set so when you
set the way to set yourself up for success, to
go for That third step is really what Brad and
Dave were talking about, which is spiritual friends. Set yourself
(32:20):
up with people around you who can remind you can
do this, who you can do it with. This podcast
a lot less scary because you're my co host. So
think about who can set you up for success, Who
can you bring along on your fear journey, who you
can talk to about your fears. You could do it
with to maybe make it less fearful, the way David
(32:41):
Brad wrote their first book together and finally the last piece.
After getting ready and finding your prep, getting set, and
bringing a spiritual friend along with you, it's time to go.
And go doesn't mean necessarily doing the thing you're afraid of.
The go is doing a thing that will expose you
(33:02):
to what you're afraid of. So prepare, set yourself up
with those friends, and think of a go that can
expose you to that fear. So if it is fear
of public speaking, maybe just sign up for a zoom
(33:22):
where you have to share a story in the group,
a writing class. We have to share your words. Take
a hot dog, tie it on the string and drag
it through them all and explain to people why you're
dragging a hot dog through them all. So I would
ask in time out today, write down a way to
(33:43):
get ready, get set, and then go. So that's today's
time out, and next week we'll be back with our
very last episode of the season, taking all of the
knowledge and advice we've heard so far and bringing it
full circle. Full circle, so you can start thinking about
making a commitment to your creativity, harnessing your special powers,
(34:05):
and thinking about what it means to build an active
legacy for yourself. Thank you for listening to Time Out,
a production of I Heeart podcasts and Hello Sunshine. I'm
Eve Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair
Play and find your Unicorn Space. Follow me on social
media at Eve Rodsky and learn more about our work
(34:27):
at fair Play Life. And I'm Dr add Narucar, a
Harvard physician with a specialty and stress resilience, burnout, and
mental health. Follow me on social media at Dr add
Nerucar and find out more about my work at doctor
a d D dot com. That's d R A d
I t I dot com. Our Hello Sunshine team is
(34:47):
Amanda farrand Aaron Stover and Jennifer Yonker. Our I Heart
Media team is Ali Perry, Jennifer Bassett, and Jessica Kranschit.
We hope you all love taking a much needed time
out of us today. Listen and subscribe to Time Out
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(35:07):
you get your favorite shows. H
Welcome to Time Out. I'm Eve Rodsky, author of the
New York Times bestseller fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space,
activists on the gender division of labor, attorney and family mediator.
And I'm doctor add Neru Kar, a physician and medical
correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience,
mental health, and burnout. We're here to peel back to
(00:24):
layers around why it's so easy for society to guard
men's time as if it's diamonds, and to treat women's
time as if it's infinite like sands. And whether you
are partnered with or without children, or in a career
where you want more boundaries, this is the place for
you for all family structures. We're here to take a
time out to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, reclaim
(00:49):
our time. Hi d D, how are you high? Eve? Today?
I wanted to start with a story that I tell
about how damn scared I was to record the audio
(01:10):
book for fair Play. Like physical manifestations of stress, you know,
panic attacks, shortness of breath. Anytime I thought about recording
the audio book, typically authors of nonfiction do record their
own audio, and it was something I knew I really
(01:30):
wanted to do some man wanted to conquer, but I
was really paralyzed with the idea. So I kept putting
it off and off, because often I think in the
face of fear, one of the best coping mechanisms that's
probably not the healthiest is procrastinations. So I did that one,
and it wasn't working because every time I think about it,
I'd be like, why do I have that pit in
(01:51):
my stomach? Oh? God, this the audio book I'm thinking about.
It's the back of my head. Often fear for me
sits as butterflies in my stomach, for really tightness in
my chest. I do know that those feelings since being
very early. I remember feeling that first probably is a
kindergartener or earlier in thinking, you know, why is my
(02:13):
stomach always hurt? So I decide to do something about
my fear. I decided to prepare. I start to read
about how people combat fear. Preparation is a really really
important one. One woman, I think she said she gave
her Ted talk over a thousand times to herself before
(02:34):
she actually delivered it. And so my preparation for reading
the audio book was to sign up for a voiceover class. Cool.
That's the beauty of living in Los Angeles pre pandemic.
There are a lot of people here who are trying
to be actors or voiceover specialists apparently, and so there's
lots of classes. So I found one in Burbank, and
(02:57):
I show up for my first voiceover class, and the
people adity were really diverse and interesting. I became friends
with a woman who was auditioning to be a rat
in a new movie or some sort of rodent and
a man who was auditioning to be Charlie the Star
Kiss Tuna apparently that was going to be coming back
(03:19):
as a campaign. And both of these people gave me
really important life lessons, how to project, how to use
soft drama hands when you're talking into a microphone, and
then high drama hands when you want to really emphasize
a point. Rodent lady told me that my job is
(03:41):
gonna be so easy because I get to read my
own words as opposed to Rodent speak, which is obviously
not even English. And the reason why that was so
important to me was because I realized that the preparation,
but we're gonna be talking about the ready set go
for a work of fear being ready, preparing through these
(04:04):
voice over lessons, getting set by having a community of
spiritual friends, which were Charlie the Darkest Tuna and Rat
Woman at that point in my life, and then just
going to go they're ready the set, and then going
immersing yourself, going to the studio, saying those first words
(04:26):
and getting better and better by chapter is what got
me through a time a dity that was really really
stressful and hard. And so I think about those damply lit,
poorly attended p t A meeting style voiceover lessons who
knew how important Charlie the Darkest Tuna would be to
(04:49):
me in my creative journey. But I want to thank you,
Charlie the Darkest Tuna Man and Rat Lady, who didn't
give me releases to use their full names, but I
I'm calling you by that, and we love you and
I'm thinking of you today. It's amazing how something like
writing a book you face so many of your fears,
(05:11):
and you likely had fears when you were writing the
book and doing your research, but you were able to
push through and then when it came time to sharing
it with the world and sharing your work with the world,
even if it was in a studio for an audio
book recording that only you would hear. Initially, it seemed
like something that was insurmountable. And often what we see
(05:33):
with fear is that sometimes it can be a very
legitimate fear of I want to climb Mount Everest, but
I'm afraid to climb out Everest, and that's a truly
legitimate But equally legitimate are these fears that may not
seem scary from the outside, but boys, do they feel
(05:53):
legitimate inside with what's happening with our biology and our
brain and our heart palpitations, that amygdala, that fight or
flight response, And that's the thing that's so fascinating to
me about fear is that the part of our brain
that recognizes fear, the amygdala, which we've talked about in
our very first episode of this podcast. That brain structure
(06:17):
and all of the structures around it called the limbic
system or the reptilian brain. It processes fear the same
way whether you're at base camp of Mount Everest and
looking at the peak and saying I'm going to climb
this mountain or your own personal Everest in your case
recording the audio book, same fight or flight response, same
(06:39):
Amigdala response. And I love the practice that you ascribe
in your book, Ready Set Go, because it really helps
us overcome that a Magdala response. The more you practice
something and visualize it and imagine yourself in the scenario,
it dampens that heightened emotional state because you are truly
(07:03):
facing our your fears. Your brain doesn't recognize something as
imaginary versus real. So when you rehearse scenarios, which is
that woman with the TED talk who practiced a thousand times,
she may have truly to the world only given one
TED talk, but to her and her brain and her amygdala,
she gave a thousand and one Ted talks of already
(07:25):
said go framework. So, if you think about preparation, having
that spiritual friendship, community doesn't have to be a stark
is Tuna man or the actual repetition itself of doing
so for you? What's what piece of the framework. Is
it the preparation that makes fear easier for you? Is
(07:46):
it the community of support or is it the actual
doing and doing and doing the go part? I think
all three are so critical, but at different points. So
early on in the project, at the inception stage, that
first part of thinking about it is the great hurdle.
(08:07):
And then once you have whatever you're afraid of, something
that you've done once or twice and are still afraid
that practice and perfecting, sharing with other people to get
that support and buy in, emotional buy in, and then
ultimately the doing. But it's a process and it can't happen.
You can't go from zero to sixty. You have to
(08:28):
take all of those necessary steps. It also helps to
prime the brain when you take all of those steps,
because you can't just look at everyst and say all right,
I'm ready going to climb. It's a whole marathon. It's
a training and you have to almost train your brain
to overcome the fear. And I think the ready, set,
go mindset and framework helps us to do that. Yeah,
(08:48):
And it's interesting because for me, being able to combine
ready and set a lot is often a way for
me to come to combat fear. Shout out to my
friend Zoe, She's sleeps in bed with me. When I
go on tour, have to give a giant speech. And
I remember after conquering the audio book Fear, the next
(09:11):
one right after that was the first talk I was
giving unfair play it was in Radio City Music Hall.
She had gone to was a kid on many field trips,
but I remember I think it was right after Condoleeza
Rice and right before Diane von first Bour. I was
the only one that was required to do a stand
(09:32):
up ted talk type speech. Everybody else seemed to have
been afforded a nice chair in some sort of panel discussion,
which would have been easier. But I do remember that,
and then having Zoe there, she was my set, and
then the going. Like you said, I probably did feel
like I gave that speech a thousand times by that
(09:53):
time I got up on that stage because I poor Zoe.
She has she probably knows her an Air and Aaron
out there shout out to you. I have two people
who probably know my keynote speech now better better than
I do. Fear is a tricky thing, and there's some
people who have really mastered fear, they still get afraid
(10:15):
and do it anyway, you know. I think about someone
who I really admire, Sarah Blakely, and she talks a
lot about fear and the fear of failure, which is
something that we're going to be talking about later in
our episode, and how her father growing up would always
ask her, so, how did you fail today? And she
had to celebrate her failures and so she didn't have
(10:36):
a fear of failure, so she could try new different
things as an adult. But I think about how we
all have a very distinct and unique relationship to fear,
and it's not necessarily that the fear isn't present for
people who take risks both in their life and in
their work. It's that they figured out strategies, tools, and
(11:00):
mechanisms to have that fear, do it anyway and overcome
a lot of those primal urges to step back into
safety and comfort. So a lot of the strategies that
we're talking about is not necessarily to remove the fear
because fear is naturally an important thing for evolutionary growth.
(11:21):
Fear is a signal of something, and when it's adaptive,
it can be really positive. But when it becomes maladaptive
prevents you from reaching your highest potential, that's when it's
a problem. It's okay to be afraid, but the trick
is to figure out a strategy that's personalized for you
so you can do it anyway, whatever that it is. Yes,
(11:43):
I love that framing. We are not here to tell
you to be fearless. I never understood that word. Do
it anyway, and that's why we're so excited to talk
with our amazing guests, Brad Johnson and David Smith. David
and Brad are co authors of the book Good Guys,
How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace,
(12:04):
a topic that's close to my heart, and we'll be
speaking with them after the break about their book and
their research. So stay with us. We're so excited to
(12:32):
have Dr Brad Johnson and Dr David Smith, co authors
of the book Good Guys, How Men Can Be Better
Allies for Women in the Workplace, with us today. Welcome
Brad and David. Glad to be here, Eve, and add
thanks to you. Great to be here with you. So
before we start talking about fear I would love for
(12:53):
our listeners to know a little bit more about your story.
How did you come into this work. It's such a
fascinating story and I would love for you to share it.
You know, Brand and I started our collaboration on this
topic when we were both teaching at the Naval Academy's
faculty there, and we quickly recognized Nick early on in
(13:13):
our time together that we had a lot of different
kinds of connections in terms of why this work was
important to us, you know, our academic backgrounds and clinical
psychologist and his focus on mentoring relationships. We we definitely
saw where there was different access to different kinds of
important resources. But the other part that I think is
really important is the personal connection to doing this work.
(13:35):
You know, it started early, you know, the beginning of
my career, my Navy career as a pilot. I was
married and still I am married to my wife, who
who also was a nable officer, had a very similar career,
parallel career paths, and of course, you know, we talked
a lot about our experiences in the workplace, but there
were so many differences in terms of how the workplace
(13:57):
was just this very challenging for her compared to me
in ways that that I just didn't understand. I didn't
see it because I didn't experience it in the same
way that she did. And if I was looking for
help I needed a mentor, or if I was looking
for hey, what should I do next? And those kind
of things were just right there at my fingertips. I
didn't have to look very far for her, not as much,
(14:19):
and and so I think her sharing some of those
experiences really got in touch one of my sense of fairness,
but also too with the idea that lots of other
women are experiencing this too, And so a lot of
ways that was that personal experience was also part of
the curiosity and the inquisitiveness that I have around this topic.
(14:39):
And I'll just offer a quick thumbnail that I think
will help you understand my personal narratives. So I I
have a sister. She's a Navy captain, very senior, very successful.
I called her one weekend and she sounded kind of down,
and I said, Shannah, what's going on? And she said, well,
we had this road race with members of the executive team,
(15:01):
and she's the only woman on the executive team. Most
of the men she works with her younger. And I said, well,
what happened on the on this ten k you ran? Well,
I won, And I said, well, that actually sounds great
to congrats and she said, well, I was feeling good
when I crossed the finish line. I felt yeah. And
then all the men started crossing the finish line, and
(15:24):
I could tell they were shocked that I beat them all.
And and then they all started coming up to me
with their own excuse, kind of like, hey, good job, Shannon,
but yeah, my achilles or I was really dehydrated. And
she realized they felt bad about being beaten by a woman.
And then she started internalizing and feeling guilty that she
(15:46):
had run so fast. And I said, Shannon, can you
hear yourself? A dude would never say that, he'd just
be like in your face. And those conversations with my
sister over twenty five years in in really parallel navy careers,
have just piqued my concern, my curiosity, like Dave, kind
(16:09):
of triggered my sense of injustice, I think in some ways.
And that in addition to looking at all the research
showing that women just get less mentoring and sponsoring and
lower quality sponsoring, I think all of that together has
been kind of part of what's instigated my interest. I
would love to ask you about your work with impostor syndrome.
(16:31):
It's something that I have certainly faced in my own trajectory.
I've some of our listeners may be new to tackling
their impostor syndrome. I'd left for you to give us
some of your thoughts on why this happens more to
women than men. I'm so glad you're thinking about this
impostor issue. Dave and I wrote an article in HBRE
(16:53):
on how we can be better mentors for people with
imposter syndrome, and I think if you're really dig into
the research on this, you do find there's a gendered element.
So more people, more women do report having impostor feelings.
But I think what we lose sight of is very
often that is a consequence of the culture or the
context in which they're functioning. It's a culture that gives
(17:16):
them messages that you don't belong. We've never seen a
woman in this role. You're weird, right, and and that
certainly creates cognitions and feelings that I don't belong. I'm
not going to make it. Everyone's watching for me to
make a mistake. Any minute, I'm going to blow it,
and they're gonna show me to the exit. I mean,
the irony is all of us have those feelings. Men too.
(17:40):
Every time we enter a new job, we feel like impostures.
That's just part of the human condition. But when I
hear that from somebody I'm ntoring or I'm an ally with,
I want to focus more on where are those messages
coming from, not is there something wrong with you that
you have self doubt. I want to look at the
context and then begin to devise strategies for pushing back
(18:03):
on that and also changing that context so that those
messages aren't being transmitted to women. I wonder if you
could talk a little bit about how to combat fear
in those situations, meaning whether it's legitimate fear right. I
was reading Katie Kuric's autobiography and she's talking about the
men that dropped their pants when women were entering their offices.
(18:26):
So there could be legitimate fear and trauma of being
a certain way of looking, a certain way of being
a marginalized population in an organization. I like to joke,
you know, women are not really allowed to be loud
and wrong. There's a fear around what if I say
the wrong thing. I am that token, so I'm here
to represent everybody and everything. Even I saw in Whitney
(18:48):
heard when she had her bumble I p O. The
lawyers in her I p O statement that goes out
to potential investors said there's extra risk here because this
is a female founder, and there's market risk because she's
going to be subjected to so much more scrutiny. So
how do you again think about ways to combat your
(19:12):
own fear when there are legitimate reasons why, as you said,
minorities populations would be conditioned to feel trauma from and
have actual reasons to be afraid. There's so many things
we could talk about here. Let me start with the
cognitive or the self talk. I'm such a fan of
(19:32):
all the cognitive therapy work around anxiety. When we have
anxiety about performance or anxiety about being inadequate, one of
the really powerful techniques for combating anxiety in that area
tends to be really watching, identifying, and then tweaking or
managing myself talk. So when I'm saying things to myself
(19:57):
in that context, like I must perform perfectly on this
to represent all women really well and be absolutely flawless. Um.
One of my favorite cognitive psychologist, Albert Ellis, would say,
you're musturbating. You need you need to stop that, or
same with I should I I should be perfect, I
(20:17):
should show up and knock it out of the park
on behalf of all women. He would say, you're shooting
on yourself and you need to stop that. But I
can look at my catastrophic thinking, right, I tend to
bloat out of proportion and say, oh my god, if
I don't show up today and get it perfectly right,
I'm going to be fired, or all women are going
(20:38):
to be cast in a negative light. It's going to
be catastrophic. Let's pull that back and and just check
that what I prefer to do really well. Yes, absolutely,
and that's a legitimate wish. I think we could all
wish that. But would it be catastrophic if I'm not perfect? No?
And so there's some personal work I can do here
(20:58):
with my own self talk and really examine. I'm such
a big fan of what we're telling ourselves, and I
think that wonderful mentor can call this out to or
just a great ally or colleague, kind of like me
with my sister. Right, I can say, Shannon, can you
hear yourself? I mean, no, wonder you're feeling sad or
(21:19):
down on yourself? Are guilty if you're saying that you
shouldn't have made those men feel bad about running so
fast and crushing him in the race. What if we
change that? What if you're narrative was you know I
really performed well, and I feel proud of that, and
how they react to that is really up to them.
So I can twist that narrative a bit. I can
(21:41):
attack the shame too with some behavioral exposure therapy, and
I can do my own personal exposure therapy by putting
myself in a situation where I I know I'm going
to be embarrassed or not get it right, or people
are going to be looking at me, and recognize that
I can tolerate that. It's another cognitive therapy intervention. Again.
(22:03):
Albert Ellis would give his patients assignments like go to
a mall, have a banana on a leash and just
pull it through the whole and everyone's going to stare
at you, and you're gonna feel like an idiot? Can
you tolerate that? Right? And you can if you make
yourself do that. So, if shame is part of it,
(22:25):
or feeling like you're gonna embarrass yourself for others, can
you deliberately expose yourself to some of that and do
it with an attitude of humor so that it becomes
a little less overwhelming when it actually occurs. By the way,
there's a shell servicing poem where this kid wants a dog,
and then he's just carrying his hot dog around on
(22:46):
a piece of string. That's that's what I think. It
also reminds me of Sarah Blakely, who is a very
successful entrepreneur and the founder of Spanks, and she often
talks about her father growing up wouldn't ask her, you know, so,
how did you sick? See today he would ask her, so,
how did you fail today? Tell me all about it?
And so it became the gamification of failure, and so
(23:07):
that sting of failure becomes so much less pronounced. I
love that adity. And you know, when we wrote about perfectionism,
we actually said, hey, if you're mentoring somebody with perfectionism,
give them an assignment to, for example, send you an
email full of typos and then not tell you they're
going to do it right, and then just tolerate. Oh
(23:30):
my god, how's my mentor going to evaluate me with
such shoddy work. Well, give them assignments to do that,
so they come right into exposure with that, and then
they get the experience and it's not going to kill him.
Do you feel that women are more prone to perfectionism
than men? It might be a little question. Yeah, we do,
(23:54):
and there's some of that in the research, and I
think we inherit some of that, I think from the
experiences we have with family members and especially for girls
with their moms, and so that that can be one
place that they learned that. And this again back to
the environment, right, the relationships you have around with people.
But again I think women more likely to be in
those token where they're the minority way more likely to
(24:17):
to be I think susceptible to this. Yeah, and there's
an evidence space note of reality here too. Write you've
heard of the prove it again bias that women encounter.
She representing all women, is more likely to have to
prove over and over again she can do the same job.
And we know that men get the nod on potential
(24:39):
right even if he's never even demonstrated that before. So
there's an element of truth here, of genuine reality that
women are pushed to have more flawless performance. When they
do make a mistake, we tend to remember it more,
especially if there are a minority in the company. So
they have some realistic hurdles here around being under the
(25:02):
microscope and exhibiting flawless behavior. And that gets back to
the fear internal fear of failure. You know, if I
apply for that position or for that advancement, or whatever
the case might be, and I don't have everything and
I fail, it's like again the fear of failure, of
fear of letting down all women out there. That again,
it's it's real. Can we talk about your fears? It's
(25:24):
sort of these meta levels of fear. We're talking about fear,
as we said, in different ways, impostor syndrome, self talk
type fears, things that frees us, legitimate fears and the
context of being, as you said, a token our minoritized population.
But I actually think that even if you didn't have
(25:45):
this whole layer of expertise, I would have still wanted
to come to you. Brad and David say, the military
teaches a lot about fear. I wanted to ask each
of you, what is something that you have learned in
writing all of those articles and read all of your books.
What has most surprised you about your own fears and
(26:07):
how you've gotten over them. Yeah, you know, Eve, in
terms of what has surprised me in my case, the
one that I'll use was terrible fear of public speaking.
I always hated that. I mean, I couldn't stand that.
I avoided it at every turn. And and the irony
(26:28):
is that after a career of being a professor and
speaking constantly, that has been the cure, exposure therapy and
doing it every day. But I can tell you back
in the years when I was avoiding, and I did
that for a long time, I would only speak under duress. Right,
You'd have to almost tie me down to get me
to speak. In those years, I made no progress whatsoever, zero.
(26:52):
And it was really only when I started forcing myself
to do this every day, get up in front of classes,
that I could just feel the angs idy ebbing and
eventually kind of disappearing. I think it's unhelpful to offer
a mastery model, right, Hey, I used to be afraid
of this, and now I've kicked its rear end and
now I have no anxiety. That's so unrealistic. Rather, what
(27:14):
I say is, hey, I'm really doing a lot better
with this. I've learned all these techniques. I really value
exposure because it's been very helpful. But I'll tell you,
if you stand me up in front of a room
of five thousand people, I might still have anxiety, right,
I'm gonna have to deploy all my techniques and it'll
probably go fine, but I'm gonna still feel the anxiety
(27:36):
because I don't want anybody who's listening to me to
think that it goes away. Ever, we're just on a
journey of coping effectively, and I think that's what I've
tried to do. I came into my second career in
a lot of my writing much later in life. Doing
research and theorizing and putting your ideas out there could
be very anxiety producing as well. And one of the
(27:58):
things I learned is that having a mentor or somebody
else who can walk you along and can come alongside
with you to kind of slowly stepped that up. I
think it's helpful too. Has it been nice for you
to do it together? Because I a lot of what
I wrote about in my second book, Around Fear was
that having spiritual friends, however those come along for you
(28:19):
as writing spiritual friends. Did it help to have each other? Yes? Absolutely.
You know, in the military we use the term wingman
a lot, and I think that, I think truly in
this space, Eve, because we're two men, especially older white men,
writing about gender and women's experience, in the workplace. I mean,
(28:40):
we're painting a big target on our chest right when
we go up, and so just to have another guy
up there with you, bumbling along and you know, we're
both stepping in it together and when we get it wrong,
we have to just laugh at ourselves. But it does
help to have somebody there with you kind of walking that.
I love that, But I think it's Brad mentioned there's
(29:02):
also an opportunity to, you know, to have some humor
and maybe something for us. It's often self deprecating humor
around the mistakes we've made, and to be able to
kind of feed off of each other with that. And
then again, I think sharing what you've learned along the
way is really helpful too. I will say, I think
humor is so helpful, and I think you both have it,
which is why you come off so authentically and why
(29:23):
you can be two white men talking about gender. Thank you,
Brad and Dave. You make me laugh. You're super vulnerable,
you have a lot of important things to say, and
we were so happy to have you here. Hi, it's
(29:46):
me Eve. I wrote find your Unicorn Space as a
permission slip for you to reconnect and discover that thing
that makes you come alive without the guilt, without the excuses.
Especially in our all too busy world, making time ourselves
is essential work. It improves our health, our relationships, and
it just might be the antidote to burnout. Join me
(30:08):
on a journey to find your Unicorn space visit unicorn
space dot com. So a DD this week's time out,
I'm hoping our listeners can resonate with the ready, set
(30:30):
go framework for tackling fear. Tell us more ready is
what we were hearing about earlier about preparation. When you
can prepare, things feel easier. Has there ever been a
time where you were on stage or maybe your first
(30:52):
time you're on air, did you prepare to do that?
Because I always feel like things that I can do
on a fly now I can only do in the
fly because I had hours and hours and hours and
hours of preparation the first time that I did that. Absolutely,
I think over preparing is the key when you're first
starting something because it just primes your brain. You know
(31:17):
that doomsday scenario that Brad mentioned, it's so interesting because
it can be very detrimental, but earlier, because we're rehearsing
all of the things that can go wrong, and that
causes a lot of anxiety. But if you're able to
prepare and get ready for it, it gives us a
sense of control and lack of control is one of
(31:38):
our greatest fears. Well, I love that so much, and
so you get you get ready by your preparation, whatever
that means to you. I will say that the reason
why this framework is ready, set, go is because you
don't want to get stuck in preparation over preparing, and
over preparing means you will live in your in your
fear and you will not get to the go part.
(32:00):
So write down a way that you can prepare for
something that you are afraid of. Set so when you
set the way to set yourself up for success, to
go for That third step is really what Brad and
Dave were talking about, which is spiritual friends. Set yourself
(32:20):
up with people around you who can remind you can
do this, who you can do it with. This podcast
a lot less scary because you're my co host. So
think about who can set you up for success, Who
can you bring along on your fear journey, who you
can talk to about your fears. You could do it
with to maybe make it less fearful, the way David
(32:41):
Brad wrote their first book together and finally the last piece.
After getting ready and finding your prep, getting set, and
bringing a spiritual friend along with you, it's time to go.
And go doesn't mean necessarily doing the thing you're afraid of.
The go is doing a thing that will expose you
(33:02):
to what you're afraid of. So prepare, set yourself up
with those friends, and think of a go that can
expose you to that fear. So if it is fear
of public speaking, maybe just sign up for a zoom
(33:22):
where you have to share a story in the group,
a writing class. We have to share your words. Take
a hot dog, tie it on the string and drag
it through them all and explain to people why you're
dragging a hot dog through them all. So I would
ask in time out today, write down a way to
(33:43):
get ready, get set, and then go. So that's today's
time out, and next week we'll be back with our
very last episode of the season, taking all of the
knowledge and advice we've heard so far and bringing it
full circle. Full circle, so you can start thinking about
making a commitment to your creativity, harnessing your special powers,
(34:05):
and thinking about what it means to build an active
legacy for yourself. Thank you for listening to Time Out,
a production of I Heeart podcasts and Hello Sunshine. I'm
Eve Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair
Play and find your Unicorn Space. Follow me on social
media at Eve Rodsky and learn more about our work
(34:27):
at fair Play Life. And I'm Dr add Narucar, a
Harvard physician with a specialty and stress resilience, burnout, and
mental health. Follow me on social media at Dr add
Nerucar and find out more about my work at doctor
a d D dot com. That's d R A d
I t I dot com. Our Hello Sunshine team is
(34:47):
Amanda farrand Aaron Stover and Jennifer Yonker. Our I Heart
Media team is Ali Perry, Jennifer Bassett, and Jessica Kranschit.
We hope you all love taking a much needed time
out of us today. Listen and subscribe to Time Out
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(35:07):
you get your favorite shows. H
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