October 7, 2025 • 49 mins
Are your fears standing in the way of your greatness? It’s time to grow a pair and leap into courage with Episode 172 of the DYL Podcast! Join host Adam Gragg and legacy coach Sherman Orr as they tackle the real monsters under your bed—fear of flying, public speaking, awkward conversations, and everything in between.
Uncover the secrets of Exposure Therapy and discover why baby steps, bold moves, and even a brush with a tarantula can shatter the chains of anxiety. Laugh along as Adam and Sherman share hilarious (and sometimes harrowing) stories of personal growth, embarrassing moments, and surprising breakthroughs. You’ll hear real-life strategies to crush perfectionism, face discomfort head-on, and finally take action on that ONE thing holding you back.
Stop avoiding. Start deciding. Listen now to learn how to embrace your fears, ignore the voice of doubt, and walk away with a game plan for courageous leadership—whether you’re running a business, leading a team, or just conquering your next high school reunion.
It’s raw, it’s real, it’s wildly relatable. Hit play and decide your legacy today!
Shatterproof Yourself Course (Decide Your Legacy’s free course)
https://courses.decideyourlegacy.com/shatterproof-yourself
3 Foolproof Ways To Motivate Your Team: 3 Areas to Focus on as a Leader
https://decideyourlegacy.com/how-to-create-positive-productive-workplace/
7 Benefits of Being Courageous
https://decideyourlegacy.com/7-unexpected-benefits-to-facing-your-fears/
4 Ways You’re Demotivating Your Team: And What You Can Do About Each One
https://decideyourlegacy.com/5-things-that-make-work-suck/
10 Ways to Encourage People: How to Break The Invalidation Tendency
https://decideyourlegacy.com/one-big-relationship-mistake-most-people-make/
How to Make Good Decisions: 14 Tools for Making Tough Life Choices
https://decideyourlegacy.com/make-good-decisions-part-1/
00:00 Critique of Mental Health Practices
05:48 Facing Fears for Mental Health
07:04 Recognizing and Overcoming Triggers
12:55 Tackling Leadership Fears Incrementally
16:15 Growth Through Intentional Listening
17:23 Step-by-Step Parachuting Preparation
21:42 "Overcoming Networking Anxiety"
25:14 Encouraging Willingness in Children
27:00 Facing Fears After Setbacks
30:23 "Effective Exposure Therapy Guidance"
36:15 "Overcoming Fear Imperfection"
37:54 Quick Reactions Hinder Transformation
42:31 Overcoming Fear Through Engagement
43:47 "Breakthrough Strategy for Team Meetings"
48:13 Take Action for Lasting Change
SUBSCRIBE for more inspiring conversations on leadership and personal growth!
Connect with us: https://courses.decideyourlegacy.com/
Be sure to check out Escape Artists Travel and tell them Decide Your Legacy sent you!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
So it's the NFL football season. John Madden coached the Los
Angeles. Well, actually the Oakland Raiders for a period of time.
Something fascinating about John Madden. He won. Well, one. I mean, he
won. He won a Super bowl in 1977. They beat the Vikings. But he would
not fly on an airplane. No. And he
ended up having this van that he would go to all the
(00:22):
games. He was a famous announcer for a long period of time. He. One of
the best. I mean, lots. Everybody knows John Madden. I mean, you know him because
of the video games. And also he was great coach.
Great. He was actually a player. But why did he not fly?
He, he was on a really bad flight
and he, he felt isolated and he just
decided that after that bad flight in 1979, which
(00:45):
he. That was after he stopped coaching. He quit as a coach in
1978. He. He decided he'd never fly again. Just determined to never
fly again. And now there's a lot of things that
aren't great in your life when you don't face your fears.
We're going to talk about that today in this episode of the Decide youe Legacy
podcast. Courage Over Comfort. Growing a pair.
(01:08):
Yes. I'm going to tell you why I'm calling it that later on
when we do coaching with businesses, we get to see fears come out.
Now, people have fears that may seem irrational to us,
(01:29):
yet they're very rational to them. Somebody can be afraid of giving a performance
evaluation, being open with other people, having a
conversation, even giving feedback, having an awkward
conversation, you know, one that you don't feel like you're totally prepared for. Letting go
of perfectionism. Going to your high school reunion can be a fear.
There's a fear of flying that people can have fear of public speaking. Those are
(01:51):
some of the common ones. Today in this episode,
I'm going to share with you a therapy
called Exposure Therapy that has very good empirical evidence that helps. It
helps people. And I'm excited about this episode. One reason I'm
excited is this is a fun topic where people can get results right
away if they start creating a plan to do some things, to face stuff in
(02:13):
your life. And leaders have to face things in order to grow. There's no way
actually of doing it, of growing, unless you're going to face something. The moment you
recognize something is triggering you, there's a fear there, gives you great evidence.
So. And as you go in this episode, I'd really, if you find it helpful
at the very end, listen all the way through. You're going to find some really
Helpful tools. That's my guarantee to you if you listen all the way through. Now,
we've had some kind of cool breakthroughs recently. We had almost
(02:36):
2500 downloads last month, the best month ever of the podcast,
2470 to be exact. And at the end of the episode,
give us a rating and review, Share it with a friend, spread the word
so it continues to grow and help more people. That's what happens when you give
it a rating and review on Apple or Spotify. Other people pick it up. It
comes up naturally in the feeds, and that's happening right now. It's getting momentum
(02:57):
and I need your help because you guys listening most likely in the next week
or two, are faithful followers who are already engaged,
already find it valuable. That's gonna help it more, reach more people.
And to start, there is a lot of crap in the
therapy world. You know, I've been a licensed mental health professional for over 25
years, and I've seen, I see good stuff
(03:19):
and I see a lot of crap as well. I see stuff where it isolates
people from. It, divides families. So, for example, I was a
speaker at an event not too long ago,
and one of the people that was at the event, it was all mental health
practitioners, so they were psychiatrists, psychiatric ARNPs,
nurse practitioners, therapists, psychologists, a big group of people, you know, and I
(03:42):
was, I was a speaker. And afterwards there was a
discussion, we had small breakout group discussions, and a person
shared how they were not going to
share with parents some really significant, important information
that the child had shared with them as the therapist. And
it just rubbed me really the wrong way. And then they were defensive about it,
(04:04):
you know, so. And there's this elitist mentality, like we know better than
a family. So I'm all about the family. I mean, the family is the unit
that is the foundation of society. We need to
build other people up, we need to build marriages up, we need to build parent
child relationships up. There's a lot of brokenness there. There's way too much fatherlessness,
there's way too much divorce. I mean, these are big problems. So. But today,
(04:27):
I pretty much believe none of you are going to disagree with the
usefulness of this specific type of therapy, this
modality called exposure therapy. And exposure therapy, it
gradually exposes a person to a fearful stimuli
in a safe and controlled environment. Now, it doesn't mean you're going to engage in.
It doesn't mean you're going to want to do this. It doesn't mean it's going
(04:47):
to be fun, but it's going to be practical enough that you can walk away
and say, as a leader, I can, I can take action. That's going to help
me grow. Right. And today's episode, I have a guest.
His name is Sherman Orr and he's been on a couple other episodes. I think
you're going to find him extremely helpful and insightful. He's a legacy coach. At Decide
Decide your legacy, an insightful leader is going to share his life experiences as well.
(05:08):
And I'm Adam Gragg. I'm a family therapist and I'm a legacy
coach. So I founded Decide youe Legacy in 2012. At Decide youe
Legacy, we help businesses and leaders live courageously. So this
goes right hand in hand with it. So anybody listening that's been a
client, heard us speak in past, gone through one of our online courses like
Shatterproof or Tune it for Life, you already know this stuff. It's gonna be a
(05:29):
refresher, but you're gonna find it very fun and helpful today as well.
With the illustrations. I have real client illustrations I'm gonna share. And by
the end, as you go through this content, you're going to be
thinking of an area of your life where there's a fear
as a leader that you're probably not facing and create a plan. You're going to
get to devise a plan. As I share plans as examples of what we
(05:51):
would give a client to engage in to face the fear that they
have every episode. I like to share something that I have am
struggling with that I took at least a small little step or didn't
take a small little step. So both Sherman and I are going to share something.
And what comes up for Sherman is. I'm just kidding.
What comes up for me is the reason we want to share a fear
(06:15):
we've faced or tried to face, maybe it didn't go well. Is that I don't
find much more important to your mental health than being willing to step into those
scary things. And much more damaging than avoiding, avoiding and getting no
new evidence, not seeing that I can actually approach something differently and have success.
So when I am an anxiety triggering
social situation, sometimes I'm having a conversation and something will
(06:38):
remind me of a bad experience. So I had,
I can have a. I and I did, you know, I had an experience
where I, I saw,
I had, I was exposed to a triggering
situation. It was not, it was not. It was like
sometimes, sometimes people can remind me of somebody else. So I.
(07:01):
It's kind of, kind of weird. But if. If I can recognize it in the
moment. So there was. There was a situation that triggered me based
on interactions that I've had with my mom that had been discouraging and another
situation that wasn't with my mom, and I love my mom, but it triggered me
in a certain way, and I was. I was able to not run from it
and actually engage it. And I have to go into a lot of detail to
(07:22):
explain, but. But I was able to recognize the fact that this wasn't the situation
I was in. It was just reminding me of a situation in the past,
and that led me to feeling encouraged
afterwards because I stuck with it. Yeah. So actually, I
think back to incident that occurred to me when I
was very young. And of course, in grade school, there's
(07:44):
folks who are bullies and whatnot. And I remember being held
by a bunch of guys over the
stairwell into a deep, dark hole,
and I. It's just scared to live in daylights out of me.
And from that day forward, I have been afraid of heights.
Okay. And so I've just made a commitment that
(08:06):
I am going to try to overcome it. I still remember, oh, many
days ago, many years ago, I went to Paris, and I went to the top
of the Eiffel Tower, and it was just glorious seeing all of Paris, France.
And as I started walking closer to the edge,
my feet stopped moving. I. I don't think I got close, and there's a
(08:26):
nice fence around it, but I probably couldn't get closer
than four feet to that fence. And I was like, this is good
enough. All right? And it stuck with me my whole
life. I'm still there. I do take some
attempts. So that was why the invitation to go skydiving is.
Is not as exciting to you? No. Well, you know, it's partially related
(08:49):
to this fear of. Yeah, it's. It's. I get you. Yeah. I.
I've done some other things that. Okay. But so we.
We've been talking about doing a staff and client skydive
day for a while, and I've challenged Sherman to. To
do it, and if he doesn't at least go out and cheer us on. And
then maybe he would do it at another point, but maybe not. It's fine if
(09:10):
you don't. It's fine if no one has to do anything like that, of course.
But if that's actually a good example that we can discuss
today, how I would devise a plan for somebody that said, you know, I really
want to skydive, but I'm terrified of It. Or how I would devise a
plan for somebody. How we would devise a plan for someone with a fear of
flying. So we'll give you some examples of that. So my struggle here is
(09:30):
that my mind goes to mush when I'm triggered by certain fears in my life.
They generally are relational, related to embarrassment or rejection, and. And I can't
think straight. It goes fight, flight, freeze mode. I freeze a lot of times.
I don't have anything to say. I lose my creativity. And there's a real, real
science to that because when you're in danger, you don't need to be creative. You
need to be protective because you have legitimate danger. Your brain is very efficient.
(09:51):
It's. It conserves energy. You know, blood flow goes
to the. When you're in a fight, flight or freeze mode,
it goes to. Away from. It goes to the extremities where you can fight, you
know, and it goes away from internal organs. Believe it or not, your breathing actually
increases. There's certain biological. Certain things that happen when you're afraid
that are. That are predictable, really. So breathing deeply is a
(10:13):
great practice because it goes. It's the opposite of having a
fight, flight or freeze response. And so.
Got any stories about your struggles here? More? Yeah, actually.
So I'm. I sometimes I'm a jokester with people in
very, very subtle ways. And so one time, one of the
schools I was at, the kids kept bringing it in
(10:37):
wolf spiders. Just about this time of year, wolf spiders are
everywhere, and they are trying to find some place to live.
Well, they would capture them, put them in a terrarium, and then they would
die within a week. So I thought to be nice to these poor
kids, I'd go buy them a tarantula.
And so I went to the pet store and I walked in and said, I
(10:59):
want to buy a tarantula. And she said, okay, sure,
it's $20. And just out of the blue, I just said, well,
you know, how do I know if it's a male or female? And she
said, looked me bold in the face and said, well, if it lives
for a year, it's a male. If it lives for 20
years, it's a female. Mr.
(11:21):
Fuzzy has been alive for the last seven years now. All right?
So I'm also, as most people, terrified
of spiders, especially big spiders
like the rose tarantula I bought. And the
teacher, though, to get back at me, said, well, since we know it's a
female, you are the one who gets to clean out the cage.
(11:43):
So it was my job to clean out the terrarium. So
I was like, oh my gosh, I have to capture the spider, put it in
another terrarium, clean it out and then
let her back out again without her
biting me. And I,
it took me probably a month to get to a
(12:05):
point where I could put her in another container, take her
out and then clean out the cage. Are
you less afraid of doing cleaning the cage now than you were when you first
tried? Oh yeah. I did it every year for the next seven years. So you've
done it multiple times since then? Got better and better at it. Yeah.
So. So three principles on
(12:27):
that relate to exposure therapy. So basically three principles for you as a
leader that if you're going to face something, you're afraid to give performance review.
That's a real situation like that I had to deal with, with the leader recently.
Or you're afraid to have a meeting and run it because you think
it's going to just kind of go haywire. People are going to just, you know,
or you're, you're, you're fearful of having a conversation with your
(12:48):
sibling that is calm because you believe that you're going to
blow up or you're going to shut down, you're going to have that fight flight
or freeze. So you today as you're listening to this, identify something
as a leader that you're putting off, you're holding off on, you're not facing. And
as we go through this content and these three big principles
and you're going to unpack it yourself and create an action plan as we go.
(13:10):
So first principle is you take baby steps. One of the
reasons people are terrified about some
phobia in their life is because they are going all
or nothing. They're going from A to Z. So they're thinking if they're
afraid of spiders that in their mind, if they were honest with themselves, they're
picturing themselves getting bit by a spider or actually being in a room
(13:32):
covered in spiders or being involved being locked
in a closet with spiders. You know, it's with, with a million spiders.
I mean it's this extreme right type
perspective that causes the fear. And we find
ways to help people break it down into manageable
steps that will incrementally these baby steps incrementally
(13:55):
expose them to this specific fear. For example,
somebody's afraid of public speaking, another common fear. Yet they want to
excel in their career and they realize which this is really true that public
speaking is often a very valuable
necessary leadership skill. You have to
have it as a leader. Especially in today's world, you have to. Have it as
(14:17):
a leader. And you will never be. You will. You will
never be replaced. I mean, it's. It's a very. It's a
valuable skill that can never be replaced by, I don't believe by AI in any
way. Because if you speak, you're connecting like a
good book is connecting with somebody. It's a great art. If it's not
created by the human soul involved, then it doesn't connect people. That's
(14:39):
what art does. Art. Art connects people as they engage it. It
breaks down barriers. We can all admire it or not admire it, but
we can still appreciate it together. So you'll be never. You'll never be
replaced because you can speak from the heart and, and you're. You're touching
as you do something courageous. AI could never replace that because
we. It's a. It's an internal. It's like an aspiration. We,
(15:02):
we can't replace certain human characteristics that involve connection.
So what I would do with someone, public speaking, for example, is we would break
it down into 10 steps. We'd say. We'd say,
okay, well, what is on a scale 1 to 10?
A 10? 1 is. 1 is very little fear or a very
marginal amount of fear. And 10 is just absolute terror. You know, I could never
(15:24):
even even think about doing that. So with public speaking, it could be, you know,
speak to 5,000 people for an hour
on a topic that I'm not. You're not even really passionate about. I mean, that'd
be. Hopefully you would never do that as a speaker, and you probably never would,
because why would you speak on something not passionate about? But I mean, it could
be this terrifying thing. But now what would be a one? Well, it could be
(15:44):
just reading an article on public speaking skills
and 10 tips, although that might not terrify you. For somebody that
wants to move towards being a better speaker, that could actually be scary
for them. And then we, as. We don't judge them on that. We want to
make sure that we're creating a plan that they can look at and say, yeah,
that's pretty scary, but it's not that. Public speaking to 5,000 people.
(16:06):
And so step two could be watching a TED Talk and then actually
taking notes on what is this speaker doing that seems
to be helpful and engaging to the audience. So listening with
intentionality for the purpose of growing as a
speaker. Step three could be writing down a list of illustrations
from your own life that could be helpful
(16:28):
events to somebody else and connect information to
other People. Step four could be make a list of life
experiences that are kind of embarrassing that you wouldn't want to share necessarily, but could
be helpful. And then you create this plan. I mean, it could go to
the point where you volunteer to speak to your
team on a topic that relates to the team
(16:50):
that you're passionate about. Yeah, you're passionate about, and then you go from there.
So I'm putting you on the spot, Sherman, but what would you
devise as a plan if someone came to you as their coach and said, you
know what I want? I've wanted to do it since I was a kid, but
I'm terrified of heights. I was on a bad, turbulent flight like John Madden, and
I don't ever want to be on a flight again, but I want to skydive
before I die. And. And they're. They're 65 years old and they have.
(17:14):
And they have a health issue that is threatening
their life, but they want to do it before they die. So what steps would
you tell them incrementally to take? I would. First off,
with your first rule here, our first principle is what baby
steps do we need to take? So maybe the first baby step
is getting
(17:36):
him to an airplane, walk around an airplane, go to
an airport, look at things, check things out.
Then maybe the next step, watch some videos on people that are doing
some parachuting, see how much fun they're having,
engage those kind of things, and just slow steps. And I would really
(17:57):
coach that person to say, what do you think the next step would
be? That would really get you there. That might be another help.
And. And I know that, like, oftentimes when they do parachute
jumps, they'll train you on a ladder first.
And so, okay, let's get up to the top of the ladder and we're going
to jump into a pit, whatever it happens to be, and
(18:20):
keep working. Incremental, incremental steps, baby steps
that you are taking. Little wins that you can grasp.
And you would be surprised how much this
already happens in people's lives, yet they have not identified it as
exposure therapy. A good example is, is parents
whose kids are afraid to eat certain foods because they look
(18:42):
strange or because they were told they were gross.
Or a parent who has a child that's afraid of a dog.
Oh, yeah, because they went to school. Maybe some kids were talking about
dogs being bad. Or maybe they have a parent because our parents do
inheritance, environmentally inherit. I would say they
inherit our fears. So we have to be careful because if we're really negative as
(19:04):
parents about tomatoes. You know, there's a good chance that. Because you
have this tomato phobia, which. I have a very good friend named Donovan who has
a tomato phobia. He really does. And. And I. I tease him
about it, but he literally. Because he had a bad experience with tomatoes. And anyway,
let's not go there. It is funny. And he may be
listening because he. I'll have to tell him. But. But yeah, you. You start to
(19:27):
develop a plan. And if somebody. I'll give you another example here. So somebody's
afraid of being open with other people
because as a child, let's say they. They were open about their
struggles and they were invalidated. You know, get over it. Don't be a wuss. Like,
get over it. And. Or their siblings did that, or they were teased and made
fun of. Like, maybe you were. They were hit. They hit. They held you over
(19:50):
a high space, right. Threatened you and
they thought it was fun. And some kids would just bounce back from something like
that. But other kids, depending on the situation and how
trapped they felt and their maturity level could be
scarred by it. So. And you were impacted by it.
And so let's say it's. They want to be more vulnerable. And I
(20:13):
talked to a client just even today about this. So what steps would we take?
Interestingly enough, things can be
with this whole. I mean, vulnerable is probably not a great word. I would
say available. How can you be available to other people? Be open. Be open to
other people because they're afraid to be open. Why? Because they've been hurt in the
past. So what? Step one could be just,
(20:35):
you know, and I did this today, actually, it was interesting because step one can
be to apologize. And that really not a huge deal, but it
could be just to apologize. Step two can be to
say no to somebody when they are pushing you to do something with them. And
you don't want to like, hey, let's go out to lunch. And you're like, no,
I'm going to stay. I want to eat my own lunch. I made lunch, and
I'm going to stay. And they are afraid of doing that. That's being open with
(20:58):
somebody. Step two, I mean, three can be to tell somebody that
they did something really good, you really appreciated their help. And you may not think
that is vulnerable as a listener right now, but that can be vulnerable to somebody
else. So don't judge. I mean, things that are open can be very different.
Step four could be do something intentionally embarrassing. I mean, legally
intentionally embarrassing. You know, so you're intentionally
(21:20):
going up to somebody in a coffee shop and saying, hey, what do you read?
They're reading a book. And you're like, hey, what are you reading and how is
it? And you know when you do that, that automatically you can already predict
that you're going to feel very much embarrassed by doing that because
you know you've done something before and it just is terrifying to you. But you
go ahead and do it. That's really cool thing. And then step five could simply
be do the opposite of how you're feeling in a situation socially. So you feel
(21:43):
like going and you know, hanging out at the. It's
a corporate event and it's a networking event and you feel like being the
guy who goes and talks to his coworkers. You feel like. Cause you're, you're safe
with them, but you do the opposite, which would be not talk to your coworkers
and talk to somebody else. Right. So you just go. If you're bothered by
something, that's a really great thing for you to do is if you recognize that
(22:04):
you're bothered by something, you should ask yourself,
first of all, you know what's really bothering me about this? Because
there's something about the situation that's bothering me about this. And then what would
I do here if I wasn't bothered? And then be honest with yourself enough to
say that I would do this and this. And then that's very different than what
you normally would actually do. So you do the opposite of what you would do
(22:26):
when you're bothered. So you as the listener, think about ways you could start
devising a step up plan.
Starting with the lowest hanging fruit, the least terrifying
actions, the ones that are still scary, and then going to the one that actually
is the result that you're looking for. So ultimately you had a fear of flying.
We'd get on a plane and fly to Denver, you know, and I've done that.
(22:46):
I seriously have done that with clients in the past. So done things
and I love that part of my job is we get to go and do
the scary things that they're so go. They're afraid of public speaking, you know, so
I, I will go. We will go and actually participate and be there
to help them out, make super cool fun stuff. Like it's one of the things
I love about coach and the whole it's like the actionable
(23:07):
let's go out and do it kind of stuff. So the second key
principle is ignore your feelings. That's going to sound contradictory.
Yes, I am a therapist and I'm telling you to ignore your feelings. Now, I'm
not telling you to ignore your feelings in all situations. I'm telling you to ignore
your feelings in situations that are highly triggering
to the extent that they're dictating what your behavior is going to be.
(23:28):
Ignoring does not mean acknowledging. Ignoring does not mean being
aware. Ignoring does not mean saying something
is real or not your feelings are real. They're just not reality.
Right. In that specific situation. So when my mom, at one
point, my. Believe it or not, like, yeah, I had this happen, so my mom
told me to grow a pair. She did.
(23:51):
And she did it. And I was. It was exactly what I needed to hear
from my mom. Thanks, mom. She told me to grow a pair. And I was
struggling emotionally and I was struggling with
challenges related to my divorce situation. And I was just
at my wit's end and it was like, you know, hey, you. You
got to deal with it. You got to face things. You can handle it. We
believe in you, we love you, that kind of thing. And I got not.
(24:15):
I have. I just said, you got it. You got to step up. You got
to step up. Yeah. It doesn't, it doesn't invalidate the feelings. The feelings
are there. Yeah. But you can't be steeped in those
feelings. Don't just sit there in that feeling because
you're not going to take that first or the second or the third baby step.
Absolutely. You're going to go ahead and do it anyway. You're going to feel the
(24:37):
fear and you're going to step into it. You're going to do it anyway, and
you're going to realize that as you do it, which is this. Facing things
incrementally. That's when you get the evidence to realize you can handle more and more
and more and you'll be energized by it. I mean, I promise you that. I
promise you it's like the results of somebody
that can. First of all, the first step is willingness.
(24:57):
Okay? So you. You will not do any exposure therapy without
willingness. No one's going to force you to fly, and you're going to overcome the
fear. In fact, it's going to get worse. If I. If I decided just out
of the blue because you came to me saying, I have a fear of flying,
I want to get over it, and I kidnapped you and put a bag on
your head and threw you on an airplane. And we. And I said, you're going
to do this, you know, whatever. I would make the problem worse. There has to
(25:19):
be a level of Willingness. But that does not mean you can't be a creative
parent who can manipulate in a healthy way to
encourage willingness. All right, so you can do that. Because
I have actually paid my daughter to introduce herself to
people and I've actually paid my daughter to do things like have
a conversation with her teacher when she was afraid and she became willing
(25:41):
because I was able to convince her that the benefit was greater. This is when
she was much younger. The benefit was really great in the process. And I don't
regret doing that stuff because I feel like it built in courage. Built
courage into her. Right. And for your first example, you
go back to John Madden. He started driving to his different
gigs in a van and by the end and he never faced
(26:03):
his fear of flying. And what did he end up with? He
ended up driving a huge bus everywhere. His fear,
actually, it's a great metaphor for his fear. It got bigger
and bigger and bigger. And more expensive and more expensive and
then it limited his opportunities. It's interesting that his flight was in
1979. He quit coaching in 1978.
(26:26):
So I wonder if that impacted him taking another head coaching
job. That could have very easy. It could have very easily because
maybe he. I can't imagine being a head coach of a football
team and actually not, because whenever he was a head coach of a football team,
which he was the head coach of the Raiders for a decade, I can't imagine
you not flying when you're the head coach
(26:47):
football team. I can't because you getting to games and sometimes you have a Thursday
night game and a Sunday game, you got to fly. I mean, so. And they
could be different parts of the country, so. But I don't know, that'd be interesting
to see. And I'm not.
Fears are real, man. I mean, they're scary. So now for, for us
as coaches, if somebody gets in a car accident, I'm going to encourage them to
drive as soon as they're in, have the health to drive,
(27:10):
to not wait in the process. Or if they had a heartbreak
with a, with a gal and they say, I'm never going through that
again. No, I would say, hey, let's figure out, do you want to be married
again or do you want to find somebody to have a romantic relationship with? I
would say, well, let's find a way that if, if you can
at least be around women, you know, and interact. If it's
(27:31):
a man, obviously, if it's a woman, be around, at least be around some good,
healthy, quality people, you know, go to church a Singles group, be around some people
that you can interact with. You can start getting evidence that you're.
This is not reality. This is not reality. It's real. Because you have the feeling
of reject. You want, you don't want to go through it again, but it's not
your reality because there's a lot of people who would not
(27:52):
reproduce that situation for you. Right. So here's the next question, is,
are you always going to be able to do it? Are you always going to
be successful in your baby steps? Are you
always going to be? The answer to that question is yes, if you go
take the first baby step, which is willingness. And the
plan is devised in a way that's realistic.
(28:14):
Okay, yeah. Yes. Well, and this is great because
there is a famous experiment that indicates the reality of this.
So. And well, famous. It's famous in my head because I
just read the book that told me about this experiment. But it is interesting
because I, we had a conversation about it where people have a terror. They're
actually terrified of spiders in this, in this experiment. And what they do is they,
(28:37):
they first of all agree to be in an experiment. Willingly saying
to this group of. I believe it was psychologists, I'm not sure what university,
but it was, I'm sure some reputable. It
was, is in a reputable book. I mean the book's called, is called the Power
of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath. And they're researchers who write, they're
journalists. I trust their journalistic integrity. So. But
(28:59):
they, they have these people willing to go through
an experiment to overcome their fear of spiders, of tarantulas. Spiders,
but spiders. Big tarantula. Right, right, yeah, yeah, good.
I mean, I mean in some countries they probably eat tarantulas. That would be an
interesting thing. And that's a different type of fear than being in the room and
actually eating one. Although that could be like taste 10, like eat
(29:21):
a tarantula. So. But if you.
So in this experiment they all agreed and then at first
they were trying to see how close they could get to the tarantula's cage and
nobody could get within 10ft of the cage. And then they had
this 14 step plan that they agreed to follow. And step one
was go and
(29:44):
just be 5ft from the tarantula's cage. Okay. They can go ahead and do that.
You know, in step two is to actually put your hand on the tarantula's
cage. It's like a glass terrarium. So it was a barrier, you know, and then
step seven was, I think guide the tarantula with a. With a
paintbrush. Like, touch it with a paintbrush, you know? And then
step 10 was, like, actually hold the tarantula with a really thick
(30:06):
leather glove. And then eventually step 14 in this
specific experiment was they would actually hold the tarantula on their bare
palm. And of all these people who willingly. With the
support of this team. And that's really crucial because you have a supportive team. I
wouldn't recommend you try this on your own. So these are people who understand
how to guide someone through exposure therapy, which is crucial. I would not say that
(30:28):
everyone could do it if they have the willingness, if they didn't have the right
people devising the right plan with them. But that's not to say that you
can't devise your own plan. I would just encourage you to get some feedback on
it from a trusted friend. Do you think I could do this? Or to talk
to a coach or talk to a counselor and get some feedback on it? And
then 100% of the participants that were willingly participating,
(30:49):
they actually were able to hold the tarantula in their hand, and they were actually
able to do it a year later, 100% in this specific case. So
kind of a cool thing, but that's. Step one is you got to grow a
pair. And first of all, when you start taking the baby
steps, it's going to trigger emotions. When you grow a pair, you're ignoring your feelings.
You know, this is not just for men. I know. It's for men and women.
(31:10):
All right. So we figure out a way, and
we have the willingness, we have the power to ignore our emotions
in the situation and do the next right thing. We're in control. Yeah.
And for some fears, there's no reason to actually do
anything to deal with that fear, because they're rational fears. They're
a rational fear. To actually have a pet
(31:33):
possum that has rabies, that's not a good example, because possums don't have rabies.
But to actually have a fear of a dog with
rabies is not something you should ever overcome.
Right, Right. It's just not something to have a fear of being
locked in a. In a porta potty for a
week by your. By people, you know,
(31:56):
with bungee cords is a pretty healthy fear to have. You're probably never going to
have it, but it's. You know, you don't want to have that happen. No. Because
you would die. So. Okay. That. Those are rational fears. We're talking about
irrational fears in this situation. So you Ignore your feelings. And one of my
favorite quotes of all time, Carl Hume. Where your fear is, there lies your
tasks. So think about that, man. You got fears. Fears are a blessing.
(32:17):
And this again sounds contradictory. So ignoring your feelings does not
mean admitting you have them. It does not mean you admitting you. But you're ignoring
them in the moment. You're not even letting them drive you. My
family would say and has said at times that, Adam, you're too sensitive.
Adam, you're too sensitive. You know, but what they're doing is invalidating me because
what I'm talking about in those situations is just an uncomfortable topic that I'm actually
(32:39):
bringing it up. Right. And I guess I can't, I'm sure I can be
too sensitive. I mean, I have, I have challenges emotionally at times, but
they also tell me good things like grow a pair. Now, a grit called a
book called Grit by Travis Bradbury addresses this pretty well. And it's
another good book. It does a lot of research on people that have grit. So
endurance, they're willing to push through, do some stuff. So there's some principles out of
(33:01):
that book that helped me. And I do have this on a one page handout
that my, my personal coach gave me one time actually, front and back. And
so a couple of those things. People have grit when they, when you have,
you know, you have grit when you, you have to, to have grit, you have
to fight when you already feel defeated. You have to learn to delay
gratification. That's ignoring your feelings, right?
(33:23):
Absolutely. You have to make mistakes, look like an idiot, and then
try again without flinching. Interesting. Try
again even though you look like an idiot. You mess up, you fess up, you
try again. That's a big deal. That's grit right there. You
have to lead when no one else actually follows. It takes grit to do that
because your emotions are going to be telling you something very different. You're not leading
(33:45):
well or you're making a mistake or listen to all these people. But you have
to lead at times when no one else will actually follow you. You have grit
when you, you, you have to be the kind. You have to be kind to
people who are rude to you. Interesting stuff who are actually mean and
nasty. And you, and you are kind. Doesn't mean you're not assertive. It doesn't mean
you're not firm. Doesn't mean you're not saying, I have a boundary here,
(34:05):
but you're being kind. And candor is kind. Interesting.
Candor is actually kind. So the third principle
Which I find for me personally is the most
encouraging of all of these principles is to expect
yourself to fail. Expect yourself to be in
situations as you go through this exposure process, as you
(34:28):
ignore your feelings, to fail to make mistakes, for it
to be sloppy for you to go and say and decide to lead a meeting
or go through one of these steps and it not go very well. Expect it.
So you're prepared. That's what we're talking about is you can do things to
prepare yourself to be courageous in advance. Right, Exactly.
That's what you have to. That preparation is part of that first baby step.
(34:50):
And maybe step seven is doing that preparation and getting in
there and doing it. Because like you say, and
that's really what my first question is, is that really
don't worry, it's going to be sloppy. You should expect
to fail, especially on big issues, on big fears that have
controlled you for a long time. But that
(35:12):
doesn't mean you don't take that next little step. You don't want to be frozen
there. Yep. Here's what happens when I. So over the years
with clients, one question I'll ask is like what's your biggest fear?
What are you most afraid of? And, and then leave them with that. And they'll
say, well, what do you mean? What do you mean? People do that. They always
want me to elaborate on these questions, these open ended questions. They want me to
(35:34):
elaborate and I don't elaborate. And that really makes them uncomfortable because they are
wanting me to give them something that they can grasp as maybe that should be
my biggest fear. What have you seen in me? But no, I want them to
sit with it and think because when you think you lose a part of your
brain that's not emotional, it's rational. You go much deeper. You go much deeper
because you're not emoting. I mean that's the primitive brain. You know, the lizard brain
(35:54):
is like the amygdala, you know, the dubraga. Oblonglady. No,
maybe that's, maybe that's wrong there. Don't. I'm not, don't quote me on that. But
you start to think and then they identify something as they think. Like that's a
fear. You know, I'm, I'm afraid of being embarrassed. I'm afraid of rejection. I mean
I'm afraid of isolation. I'm afraid of dying. I'm afraid of. It could be
something specific. And when they
(36:16):
go through that process, then
they're able to identify something that they're afraid of and it's like,
okay, now, now what I do with that, you know,
so. And I don't give them exactly. And don't tell them exactly what to do.
But people will often want to not
fail again at something as driving
(36:39):
them towards this fear that they have. So something bad has happened and, and they
don't want it to actually happen again. They don't want it to be in that
situation again where they're going to feel that feeling again. And that's really
crucial to identify. But if you go and say, yeah, you know, I'm going
to, I'm going to do this thing and this fear is
holding me back, I've identified that it's actually holding me back in some way and
(37:01):
it's okay that I step into it and I don't do it perfectly, and I'm
not going to do it perfectly. And they're giving themselves permission in advance to be
uncomfortable and awkward and have those strong feelings and to ignore them. Super
powerful distances yourself from that specific situation. It's
like you're able to externalize it and it's not you any longer.
It's not you any longer. But I would. It's really crucial thing to be able
(37:22):
to admit and say, hey, I'm afraid of that. I'm afraid of this. I'm afraid
of rejection. I'm afraid of failure. I'm afraid of having a bad relationship again. I'm
afraid of having a bad co worker that could be
whatever to me again, like the one in the past. I'm afraid of it. It's
very crucial because there's power in that externalization of whatever that
fear is. So how are, how are you? How do you. Well,
(37:43):
the point I. One point I was going to make though, about that actually is
when somebody's really quick to say, I'm not doing that,
or they're really quick to say, I don't have a fear here, I don't have
a fear there. Or if, if they're, you know, talking about
leading, let's say a meeting with their team, and they're like, no, I'm not going
to do that. No, I'm not going to. I'm not going to do that, then
what I hear there often is they're not willing to even think about
(38:06):
it with their prefrontal cortex. It's very emotional because they're so quick.
It's better to say if they can pause for a second and
then regroup, then I have a lot more confidence that there's not like
an issue that's being avoided in that situation, because our job as
coaches is to go to the core where people are held back, so they're facing
that and then they can have long term change, long term transformation. So that
(38:28):
quick reaction is often crucial. So
if they do a self assessment and they're quickly saying, this is all
great, I'm doing fine here, I'm doing fine there's, it's like, okay, you
know, you're not thinking here. And I don't necessarily, I can't
necessarily tell them, you know, well, you're wrong, but
right. You're not being, yeah. Honest in yourself. Reflect, you know, how's it going as
(38:50):
a parent? Well, it's great. It's perfect. You know, everything's great. You know, how was
your childhood? And if anybody's honest with themselves, they're gonna have
something that they can share that probably wasn't the best about their childhood.
And it doesn't mean they didn't have great parents, but that
really, they're just, they're putting a caveat to everything. It's like, it's like there's,
there's some reason they have to justify how things are okay. And they're not going
(39:11):
deeper, but that depth is how people grow because then they're facing the stuff that's
holding them back. You got to go deeper. Yes. And I, I actually, I love
my, I hate to say it, I love my example of the tarantula,
because I can use another example here, is that
it took me a while. I, I failed several times in trying to
clean out that cage and open, take the lid off because they can jump and
(39:33):
all these things. And also, you should know, unless you've had a tarantula from
as a baby, you're not to touch them, you're not to carry them
because they have to be used to humans from the very beginning. If they are,
you can hold them and all that good stuff. So I knew this guy was
not used to humans, and so I was afraid of all those things, but I
slowly got over it. And then at my
(39:55):
house, I went to the backyard the other day and
I noticed this black quarter sized
spider right at the water where the spigot is.
And it was a black widow spider. Oh, wow.
Yeah. And I saw as soon as she sensed my movement, she
(40:15):
went back behind a little electrical box that is literally
three inches from that spigot that I had to turn on.
Ah. And so I was like, dang, that's kind of cool. I didn't
see these very often when I was young and. But I Was able to reach
down and not have that fear that she was gonna jump out and
bite me. Okay, turn it on. But
(40:37):
I mean, if I hadn't faced that fear with that trench a long time ago,
I would have, I would have had to call my neighbor to come over and
turn on the water. Ah, but.
And that would have, that would have, that would
have been a reminder of something to face
continually. Yeah, that's pretty. So I
(40:59):
gotta share a couple things with you here. In closing,
people don't admit
to themselves when they're afraid. And that
is where I'm a big fan of talking about stuff and being open. So if
you think of when you're available to life, when you're open to
life, you're gonna see opportunities that you didn't see before.
(41:22):
You're gonna see employees that,
that are the best employees that you turn down because you weren't open.
You're gonna see, you're gonna get stuck in like, in like rules.
You're gonna see, you're gonna get stuck in these isolating
things. Like people are distant from others that have differing opinions of them
(41:43):
because they're afraid. And you could incrementally. I was
talking to my friend this morning who's a politician and
he's a fairly well known person in the area where we live here.
And so we were just talking about how there's so much fear.
Like he was going to interact with somebody and
(42:03):
they had this perception of another person. They were going to have a group
conversation with differing political opinions. And he was sharing
with me that the other person described the
third party as being hateful. And I thought there,
there wasn't a chance for dialogue because we were already demonizing
and we were distant. And so those fears isolate people.
(42:25):
They cause resentment. Resentment is driven by fear. I don't want to hurt, get hurt
again. So I'm going to resent them. I'm going to hate. And we have a
society right now that scares me in a way because we sense
people's distance at a greater and greater level. Yet we as an
audience, we can. If our fear is to engage people and to have
conversations, we have to be the ones that go first. And that's going to trigger
(42:45):
a fear in us. But we can start the dialog and we can engage. And
so that may not be, that's one example right there. But I was talking to
another client recently and he has a fear of being open with people and it
impacts his leadership at times. And so we started to create a plan
incrementally but one thing he identified in the process is that he has this
fear of reading out loud. And he's been in business meetings where he
(43:07):
has to read something out loud. He's a very articulate guy. He's a very smart
guy. I didn't realize how much of a fear that
was. Like, In a scale 1 to 10, it was probably firing somebody,
which can be terrifying to someone else. Could be like a 10, you know, but
for him, that would probably be like a three. And reading out loud was like
a nine. I mean, very terrifying. Wow. Yeah. And he reads to his
(43:28):
kids and he says that in itself is uncomfortable as well. And I said, well,
what's that all about? He made this connection. It was an aha moment. He said,
well, I had a parent growing up who was hypercritical of me and my
reading, and I had some challenges with reading. And I go back there emotionally, I
believe, is what he said. I believe to this place when I was a kid
where I guess really criticized. And he made that connection. It was like a huge
(43:49):
breakthrough. I mean, I felt like this was like a game changer. You know, I'll
share this with the whole team. I was going to. It's like, well, I got
to remember this. And even I said, can I, can I share it in the
podcast? Cause it was so, so, so relatable, you know, and part of his
plan was that he's a leader of a division of a. Of a company, is
that he's going to do some teaching at the beginning of meetings, like, do some,
some reading at the beginning of meetings on content that can be helpful for the
(44:11):
team and to be able to share it. And again, he's really articulate,
but that's very highly triggering. He's available to his team, available to criticism,
available to being sloppy. I mean, available to actually messing up. So if you're going
to work on a public speaking for, you have to be available to the fact
that it could be kind of messy, it could be kind of not going as
well as you want, and we can, we can make progress.
(44:31):
I'm so excited for you today. Again, like,
so excited for you to face your fears. I mean, it energizes me to hear
stories about what you have done. If you're creating a plan, share it with us.
Share it with us. Respond to the, to the video. Respond in the comment
section. Be really great to hear your example there. And, you know, we hear
some common examples from famous people, I think oftentimes. I know, I know
(44:52):
you were talking. You're sharing one with me that you hear a lot about how
you face things incrementally. I don't know if you want to share that, Sherman. The
one. Yeah. Well.
Which one? Oh, the one about Michael Jordan. Yeah. So actually
you think about some of the, like you said, the famous people. We know them
because they're famous and we think everything was just
(45:14):
roses and flowers for them. But
most people probably don't know that Michael Jordan was cut from his
sophomore basketball team. Wasn't that
good. But what did that do?
The fear of getting cut again, he didn't stop.
It just inspired him to work all the harder. And there's a
(45:37):
great quote I love from him actually. It's like they're
asking about how great you are, Michael. And he goes, you know, in my life
you have to recognize I've missed 9,000 shots
in my career. I've lost 300
games and on 26 separate occasions
I was entrusted to take the game winning shot
(45:59):
and I missed them. I have failed over and over again,
but I didn't ever stop.
And that's why I succeeded. The fear of
being a failure as a basketball player, I mean, it could have very easily
ended many other great people's careers. But he was one who
was faced that fear, got back up on
(46:22):
that horse and kept riding. Yeah, and that's a big example.
I like, I don't like the famous examples nearly as much as the real world
examples personally because I can't relate to that as much because he's had a lot
of talent as well, but, but the talent developed out of him not giving
up. And so he just had this, this real persistent. The
current. Yeah. So we get to see, as coaches, we get to see the little
(46:43):
things people are doing. They're not. Little things are big, they're huge. I mean, I
find them to be incredibly inspiring. Whether that's somebody talking for the first time about
trauma they have in their life, whether somebody for the first time actually stepping out
in a leadership role and leading and going against their feelings. Someone
actually becoming an engaged parent or husband and
mending relationships that are broken with their family. I mean, I got to see
(47:04):
just this week family relationships restored and engagement
and communication just improved. And that gives me so
much hope. And they all did the same process. They were willing to be exposed,
expose themselves to more and more of that thing that they actually fear. And so
that's my hope for you, the listener. You can be just like my client who
can start reading out loud more to his team. So what's it going to be
(47:26):
for you today? I mean, how are you gonna do this? So the principles to
follow, exposure therapy. Exposing yourself to your fears so you can become better and
bigger leaders. So take baby steps, small steps, little wins.
Ignore your feelings. Grow a pair right there. And then number, that's number two. And
then number three, Third principle, expect to fail. Be prepared for that as well. So
check out this content, Shatterproof yourself. It's this course that
(47:46):
we have made that I've made for you. It's on seven small steps to a
giant leap. These are all mental health principles. If you found this helpful, you're gonna
find that even more helpful. And if you it's free. You go through it in
25 minutes. It's got a worksheet that you fill out, seven
actionable items. You can apply it right now, this weekend, today, by the end of
the day, you could do something. You're going to make progress if you go through
(48:07):
that content. So based on this content challenge for you, what was
most helpful and inspiring for you? You're going to devise a plan to face that
fear. Are you going to take that first step of that plan? Are
you going to talk to a friend about a fear? Are you going to admit
to yourself that this is holding you back professionally by having this fear of public
speaking, by having this fear of leading, by having this fear of running a meeting,
by having this fear, this perfectionistic mentality about when I do
(48:29):
things and not letting it go? What are you going to do? 80% of long
term transformation is action. You're doing something different. You're
facing something and 20% or less is insight.
You gained insight today. Now what are you going to do with it? To decide
means that you're eliminating other options. And your
legacy is the impact that your life is going to have on, on
(48:51):
other people. Live the day, live today.
Live the life today that you want to be remembered for 10 years after you're
gone. You decide your legacy. Sherman, you decide your
legacy. Troy, you decide your legacy. Nobody
else. I appreciate you greatly and I'll see you next time.
So it's the NFL football season. John Madden coached the Los
Angeles. Well, actually the Oakland Raiders for a period of time.
Something fascinating about John Madden. He won. Well, one. I mean, he
won. He won a Super bowl in 1977. They beat the Vikings. But he would
not fly on an airplane. No. And he
ended up having this van that he would go to all the
(00:22):
games. He was a famous announcer for a long period of time. He. One of
the best. I mean, lots. Everybody knows John Madden. I mean, you know him because
of the video games. And also he was great coach.
Great. He was actually a player. But why did he not fly?
He, he was on a really bad flight
and he, he felt isolated and he just
decided that after that bad flight in 1979, which
(00:45):
he. That was after he stopped coaching. He quit as a coach in
1978. He. He decided he'd never fly again. Just determined to never
fly again. And now there's a lot of things that
aren't great in your life when you don't face your fears.
We're going to talk about that today in this episode of the Decide youe Legacy
podcast. Courage Over Comfort. Growing a pair.
(01:08):
Yes. I'm going to tell you why I'm calling it that later on
when we do coaching with businesses, we get to see fears come out.
Now, people have fears that may seem irrational to us,
(01:29):
yet they're very rational to them. Somebody can be afraid of giving a performance
evaluation, being open with other people, having a
conversation, even giving feedback, having an awkward
conversation, you know, one that you don't feel like you're totally prepared for. Letting go
of perfectionism. Going to your high school reunion can be a fear.
There's a fear of flying that people can have fear of public speaking. Those are
(01:51):
some of the common ones. Today in this episode,
I'm going to share with you a therapy
called Exposure Therapy that has very good empirical evidence that helps. It
helps people. And I'm excited about this episode. One reason I'm
excited is this is a fun topic where people can get results right
away if they start creating a plan to do some things, to face stuff in
(02:13):
your life. And leaders have to face things in order to grow. There's no way
actually of doing it, of growing, unless you're going to face something. The moment you
recognize something is triggering you, there's a fear there, gives you great evidence.
So. And as you go in this episode, I'd really, if you find it helpful
at the very end, listen all the way through. You're going to find some really
Helpful tools. That's my guarantee to you if you listen all the way through. Now,
we've had some kind of cool breakthroughs recently. We had almost
(02:36):
2500 downloads last month, the best month ever of the podcast,
2470 to be exact. And at the end of the episode,
give us a rating and review, Share it with a friend, spread the word
so it continues to grow and help more people. That's what happens when you give
it a rating and review on Apple or Spotify. Other people pick it up. It
comes up naturally in the feeds, and that's happening right now. It's getting momentum
(02:57):
and I need your help because you guys listening most likely in the next week
or two, are faithful followers who are already engaged,
already find it valuable. That's gonna help it more, reach more people.
And to start, there is a lot of crap in the
therapy world. You know, I've been a licensed mental health professional for over 25
years, and I've seen, I see good stuff
(03:19):
and I see a lot of crap as well. I see stuff where it isolates
people from. It, divides families. So, for example, I was a
speaker at an event not too long ago,
and one of the people that was at the event, it was all mental health
practitioners, so they were psychiatrists, psychiatric ARNPs,
nurse practitioners, therapists, psychologists, a big group of people, you know, and I
(03:42):
was, I was a speaker. And afterwards there was a
discussion, we had small breakout group discussions, and a person
shared how they were not going to
share with parents some really significant, important information
that the child had shared with them as the therapist. And
it just rubbed me really the wrong way. And then they were defensive about it,
(04:04):
you know, so. And there's this elitist mentality, like we know better than
a family. So I'm all about the family. I mean, the family is the unit
that is the foundation of society. We need to
build other people up, we need to build marriages up, we need to build parent
child relationships up. There's a lot of brokenness there. There's way too much fatherlessness,
there's way too much divorce. I mean, these are big problems. So. But today,
(04:27):
I pretty much believe none of you are going to disagree with the
usefulness of this specific type of therapy, this
modality called exposure therapy. And exposure therapy, it
gradually exposes a person to a fearful stimuli
in a safe and controlled environment. Now, it doesn't mean you're going to engage in.
It doesn't mean you're going to want to do this. It doesn't mean it's going
(04:47):
to be fun, but it's going to be practical enough that you can walk away
and say, as a leader, I can, I can take action. That's going to help
me grow. Right. And today's episode, I have a guest.
His name is Sherman Orr and he's been on a couple other episodes. I think
you're going to find him extremely helpful and insightful. He's a legacy coach. At Decide
Decide your legacy, an insightful leader is going to share his life experiences as well.
(05:08):
And I'm Adam Gragg. I'm a family therapist and I'm a legacy
coach. So I founded Decide youe Legacy in 2012. At Decide youe
Legacy, we help businesses and leaders live courageously. So this
goes right hand in hand with it. So anybody listening that's been a
client, heard us speak in past, gone through one of our online courses like
Shatterproof or Tune it for Life, you already know this stuff. It's gonna be a
(05:29):
refresher, but you're gonna find it very fun and helpful today as well.
With the illustrations. I have real client illustrations I'm gonna share. And by
the end, as you go through this content, you're going to be
thinking of an area of your life where there's a fear
as a leader that you're probably not facing and create a plan. You're going to
get to devise a plan. As I share plans as examples of what we
(05:51):
would give a client to engage in to face the fear that they
have every episode. I like to share something that I have am
struggling with that I took at least a small little step or didn't
take a small little step. So both Sherman and I are going to share something.
And what comes up for Sherman is. I'm just kidding.
What comes up for me is the reason we want to share a fear
(06:15):
we've faced or tried to face, maybe it didn't go well. Is that I don't
find much more important to your mental health than being willing to step into those
scary things. And much more damaging than avoiding, avoiding and getting no
new evidence, not seeing that I can actually approach something differently and have success.
So when I am an anxiety triggering
social situation, sometimes I'm having a conversation and something will
(06:38):
remind me of a bad experience. So I had,
I can have a. I and I did, you know, I had an experience
where I, I saw,
I had, I was exposed to a triggering
situation. It was not, it was not. It was like
sometimes, sometimes people can remind me of somebody else. So I.
(07:01):
It's kind of, kind of weird. But if. If I can recognize it in the
moment. So there was. There was a situation that triggered me based
on interactions that I've had with my mom that had been discouraging and another
situation that wasn't with my mom, and I love my mom, but it triggered me
in a certain way, and I was. I was able to not run from it
and actually engage it. And I have to go into a lot of detail to
(07:22):
explain, but. But I was able to recognize the fact that this wasn't the situation
I was in. It was just reminding me of a situation in the past,
and that led me to feeling encouraged
afterwards because I stuck with it. Yeah. So actually, I
think back to incident that occurred to me when I
was very young. And of course, in grade school, there's
(07:44):
folks who are bullies and whatnot. And I remember being held
by a bunch of guys over the
stairwell into a deep, dark hole,
and I. It's just scared to live in daylights out of me.
And from that day forward, I have been afraid of heights.
Okay. And so I've just made a commitment that
(08:06):
I am going to try to overcome it. I still remember, oh, many
days ago, many years ago, I went to Paris, and I went to the top
of the Eiffel Tower, and it was just glorious seeing all of Paris, France.
And as I started walking closer to the edge,
my feet stopped moving. I. I don't think I got close, and there's a
(08:26):
nice fence around it, but I probably couldn't get closer
than four feet to that fence. And I was like, this is good
enough. All right? And it stuck with me my whole
life. I'm still there. I do take some
attempts. So that was why the invitation to go skydiving is.
Is not as exciting to you? No. Well, you know, it's partially related
(08:49):
to this fear of. Yeah, it's. It's. I get you. Yeah. I.
I've done some other things that. Okay. But so we.
We've been talking about doing a staff and client skydive
day for a while, and I've challenged Sherman to. To
do it, and if he doesn't at least go out and cheer us on. And
then maybe he would do it at another point, but maybe not. It's fine if
(09:10):
you don't. It's fine if no one has to do anything like that, of course.
But if that's actually a good example that we can discuss
today, how I would devise a plan for somebody that said, you know, I really
want to skydive, but I'm terrified of It. Or how I would devise a
plan for somebody. How we would devise a plan for someone with a fear of
flying. So we'll give you some examples of that. So my struggle here is
(09:30):
that my mind goes to mush when I'm triggered by certain fears in my life.
They generally are relational, related to embarrassment or rejection, and. And I can't
think straight. It goes fight, flight, freeze mode. I freeze a lot of times.
I don't have anything to say. I lose my creativity. And there's a real, real
science to that because when you're in danger, you don't need to be creative. You
need to be protective because you have legitimate danger. Your brain is very efficient.
(09:51):
It's. It conserves energy. You know, blood flow goes
to the. When you're in a fight, flight or freeze mode,
it goes to. Away from. It goes to the extremities where you can fight, you
know, and it goes away from internal organs. Believe it or not, your breathing actually
increases. There's certain biological. Certain things that happen when you're afraid
that are. That are predictable, really. So breathing deeply is a
(10:13):
great practice because it goes. It's the opposite of having a
fight, flight or freeze response. And so.
Got any stories about your struggles here? More? Yeah, actually.
So I'm. I sometimes I'm a jokester with people in
very, very subtle ways. And so one time, one of the
schools I was at, the kids kept bringing it in
(10:37):
wolf spiders. Just about this time of year, wolf spiders are
everywhere, and they are trying to find some place to live.
Well, they would capture them, put them in a terrarium, and then they would
die within a week. So I thought to be nice to these poor
kids, I'd go buy them a tarantula.
And so I went to the pet store and I walked in and said, I
(10:59):
want to buy a tarantula. And she said, okay, sure,
it's $20. And just out of the blue, I just said, well,
you know, how do I know if it's a male or female? And she
said, looked me bold in the face and said, well, if it lives
for a year, it's a male. If it lives for 20
years, it's a female. Mr.
(11:21):
Fuzzy has been alive for the last seven years now. All right?
So I'm also, as most people, terrified
of spiders, especially big spiders
like the rose tarantula I bought. And the
teacher, though, to get back at me, said, well, since we know it's a
female, you are the one who gets to clean out the cage.
(11:43):
So it was my job to clean out the terrarium. So
I was like, oh my gosh, I have to capture the spider, put it in
another terrarium, clean it out and then
let her back out again without her
biting me. And I,
it took me probably a month to get to a
(12:05):
point where I could put her in another container, take her
out and then clean out the cage. Are
you less afraid of doing cleaning the cage now than you were when you first
tried? Oh yeah. I did it every year for the next seven years. So you've
done it multiple times since then? Got better and better at it. Yeah.
So. So three principles on
(12:27):
that relate to exposure therapy. So basically three principles for you as a
leader that if you're going to face something, you're afraid to give performance review.
That's a real situation like that I had to deal with, with the leader recently.
Or you're afraid to have a meeting and run it because you think
it's going to just kind of go haywire. People are going to just, you know,
or you're, you're, you're fearful of having a conversation with your
(12:48):
sibling that is calm because you believe that you're going to
blow up or you're going to shut down, you're going to have that fight flight
or freeze. So you today as you're listening to this, identify something
as a leader that you're putting off, you're holding off on, you're not facing. And
as we go through this content and these three big principles
and you're going to unpack it yourself and create an action plan as we go.
(13:10):
So first principle is you take baby steps. One of the
reasons people are terrified about some
phobia in their life is because they are going all
or nothing. They're going from A to Z. So they're thinking if they're
afraid of spiders that in their mind, if they were honest with themselves, they're
picturing themselves getting bit by a spider or actually being in a room
(13:32):
covered in spiders or being involved being locked
in a closet with spiders. You know, it's with, with a million spiders.
I mean it's this extreme right type
perspective that causes the fear. And we find
ways to help people break it down into manageable
steps that will incrementally these baby steps incrementally
(13:55):
expose them to this specific fear. For example,
somebody's afraid of public speaking, another common fear. Yet they want to
excel in their career and they realize which this is really true that public
speaking is often a very valuable
necessary leadership skill. You have to
have it as a leader. Especially in today's world, you have to. Have it as
(14:17):
a leader. And you will never be. You will. You will
never be replaced. I mean, it's. It's a very. It's a
valuable skill that can never be replaced by, I don't believe by AI in any
way. Because if you speak, you're connecting like a
good book is connecting with somebody. It's a great art. If it's not
created by the human soul involved, then it doesn't connect people. That's
(14:39):
what art does. Art. Art connects people as they engage it. It
breaks down barriers. We can all admire it or not admire it, but
we can still appreciate it together. So you'll be never. You'll never be
replaced because you can speak from the heart and, and you're. You're touching
as you do something courageous. AI could never replace that because
we. It's a. It's an internal. It's like an aspiration. We,
(15:02):
we can't replace certain human characteristics that involve connection.
So what I would do with someone, public speaking, for example, is we would break
it down into 10 steps. We'd say. We'd say,
okay, well, what is on a scale 1 to 10?
A 10? 1 is. 1 is very little fear or a very
marginal amount of fear. And 10 is just absolute terror. You know, I could never
(15:24):
even even think about doing that. So with public speaking, it could be, you know,
speak to 5,000 people for an hour
on a topic that I'm not. You're not even really passionate about. I mean, that'd
be. Hopefully you would never do that as a speaker, and you probably never would,
because why would you speak on something not passionate about? But I mean, it could
be this terrifying thing. But now what would be a one? Well, it could be
(15:44):
just reading an article on public speaking skills
and 10 tips, although that might not terrify you. For somebody that
wants to move towards being a better speaker, that could actually be scary
for them. And then we, as. We don't judge them on that. We want to
make sure that we're creating a plan that they can look at and say, yeah,
that's pretty scary, but it's not that. Public speaking to 5,000 people.
(16:06):
And so step two could be watching a TED Talk and then actually
taking notes on what is this speaker doing that seems
to be helpful and engaging to the audience. So listening with
intentionality for the purpose of growing as a
speaker. Step three could be writing down a list of illustrations
from your own life that could be helpful
(16:28):
events to somebody else and connect information to
other People. Step four could be make a list of life
experiences that are kind of embarrassing that you wouldn't want to share necessarily, but could
be helpful. And then you create this plan. I mean, it could go to
the point where you volunteer to speak to your
team on a topic that relates to the team
(16:50):
that you're passionate about. Yeah, you're passionate about, and then you go from there.
So I'm putting you on the spot, Sherman, but what would you
devise as a plan if someone came to you as their coach and said, you
know what I want? I've wanted to do it since I was a kid, but
I'm terrified of heights. I was on a bad, turbulent flight like John Madden, and
I don't ever want to be on a flight again, but I want to skydive
before I die. And. And they're. They're 65 years old and they have.
(17:14):
And they have a health issue that is threatening
their life, but they want to do it before they die. So what steps would
you tell them incrementally to take? I would. First off,
with your first rule here, our first principle is what baby
steps do we need to take? So maybe the first baby step
is getting
(17:36):
him to an airplane, walk around an airplane, go to
an airport, look at things, check things out.
Then maybe the next step, watch some videos on people that are doing
some parachuting, see how much fun they're having,
engage those kind of things, and just slow steps. And I would really
(17:57):
coach that person to say, what do you think the next step would
be? That would really get you there. That might be another help.
And. And I know that, like, oftentimes when they do parachute
jumps, they'll train you on a ladder first.
And so, okay, let's get up to the top of the ladder and we're going
to jump into a pit, whatever it happens to be, and
(18:20):
keep working. Incremental, incremental steps, baby steps
that you are taking. Little wins that you can grasp.
And you would be surprised how much this
already happens in people's lives, yet they have not identified it as
exposure therapy. A good example is, is parents
whose kids are afraid to eat certain foods because they look
(18:42):
strange or because they were told they were gross.
Or a parent who has a child that's afraid of a dog.
Oh, yeah, because they went to school. Maybe some kids were talking about
dogs being bad. Or maybe they have a parent because our parents do
inheritance, environmentally inherit. I would say they
inherit our fears. So we have to be careful because if we're really negative as
(19:04):
parents about tomatoes. You know, there's a good chance that. Because you
have this tomato phobia, which. I have a very good friend named Donovan who has
a tomato phobia. He really does. And. And I. I tease him
about it, but he literally. Because he had a bad experience with tomatoes. And anyway,
let's not go there. It is funny. And he may be
listening because he. I'll have to tell him. But. But yeah, you. You start to
(19:27):
develop a plan. And if somebody. I'll give you another example here. So somebody's
afraid of being open with other people
because as a child, let's say they. They were open about their
struggles and they were invalidated. You know, get over it. Don't be a wuss. Like,
get over it. And. Or their siblings did that, or they were teased and made
fun of. Like, maybe you were. They were hit. They hit. They held you over
(19:50):
a high space, right. Threatened you and
they thought it was fun. And some kids would just bounce back from something like
that. But other kids, depending on the situation and how
trapped they felt and their maturity level could be
scarred by it. So. And you were impacted by it.
And so let's say it's. They want to be more vulnerable. And I
(20:13):
talked to a client just even today about this. So what steps would we take?
Interestingly enough, things can be
with this whole. I mean, vulnerable is probably not a great word. I would
say available. How can you be available to other people? Be open. Be open to
other people because they're afraid to be open. Why? Because they've been hurt in the
past. So what? Step one could be just,
(20:35):
you know, and I did this today, actually, it was interesting because step one can
be to apologize. And that really not a huge deal, but it
could be just to apologize. Step two can be to
say no to somebody when they are pushing you to do something with them. And
you don't want to like, hey, let's go out to lunch. And you're like, no,
I'm going to stay. I want to eat my own lunch. I made lunch, and
I'm going to stay. And they are afraid of doing that. That's being open with
(20:58):
somebody. Step two, I mean, three can be to tell somebody that
they did something really good, you really appreciated their help. And you may not think
that is vulnerable as a listener right now, but that can be vulnerable to somebody
else. So don't judge. I mean, things that are open can be very different.
Step four could be do something intentionally embarrassing. I mean, legally
intentionally embarrassing. You know, so you're intentionally
(21:20):
going up to somebody in a coffee shop and saying, hey, what do you read?
They're reading a book. And you're like, hey, what are you reading and how is
it? And you know when you do that, that automatically you can already predict
that you're going to feel very much embarrassed by doing that because
you know you've done something before and it just is terrifying to you. But you
go ahead and do it. That's really cool thing. And then step five could simply
be do the opposite of how you're feeling in a situation socially. So you feel
(21:43):
like going and you know, hanging out at the. It's
a corporate event and it's a networking event and you feel like being the
guy who goes and talks to his coworkers. You feel like. Cause you're, you're safe
with them, but you do the opposite, which would be not talk to your coworkers
and talk to somebody else. Right. So you just go. If you're bothered by
something, that's a really great thing for you to do is if you recognize that
(22:04):
you're bothered by something, you should ask yourself,
first of all, you know what's really bothering me about this? Because
there's something about the situation that's bothering me about this. And then what would
I do here if I wasn't bothered? And then be honest with yourself enough to
say that I would do this and this. And then that's very different than what
you normally would actually do. So you do the opposite of what you would do
(22:26):
when you're bothered. So you as the listener, think about ways you could start
devising a step up plan.
Starting with the lowest hanging fruit, the least terrifying
actions, the ones that are still scary, and then going to the one that actually
is the result that you're looking for. So ultimately you had a fear of flying.
We'd get on a plane and fly to Denver, you know, and I've done that.
(22:46):
I seriously have done that with clients in the past. So done things
and I love that part of my job is we get to go and do
the scary things that they're so go. They're afraid of public speaking, you know, so
I, I will go. We will go and actually participate and be there
to help them out, make super cool fun stuff. Like it's one of the things
I love about coach and the whole it's like the actionable
(23:07):
let's go out and do it kind of stuff. So the second key
principle is ignore your feelings. That's going to sound contradictory.
Yes, I am a therapist and I'm telling you to ignore your feelings. Now, I'm
not telling you to ignore your feelings in all situations. I'm telling you to ignore
your feelings in situations that are highly triggering
to the extent that they're dictating what your behavior is going to be.
(23:28):
Ignoring does not mean acknowledging. Ignoring does not mean being
aware. Ignoring does not mean saying something
is real or not your feelings are real. They're just not reality.
Right. In that specific situation. So when my mom, at one
point, my. Believe it or not, like, yeah, I had this happen, so my mom
told me to grow a pair. She did.
(23:51):
And she did it. And I was. It was exactly what I needed to hear
from my mom. Thanks, mom. She told me to grow a pair. And I was
struggling emotionally and I was struggling with
challenges related to my divorce situation. And I was just
at my wit's end and it was like, you know, hey, you. You
got to deal with it. You got to face things. You can handle it. We
believe in you, we love you, that kind of thing. And I got not.
(24:15):
I have. I just said, you got it. You got to step up. You got
to step up. Yeah. It doesn't, it doesn't invalidate the feelings. The feelings
are there. Yeah. But you can't be steeped in those
feelings. Don't just sit there in that feeling because
you're not going to take that first or the second or the third baby step.
Absolutely. You're going to go ahead and do it anyway. You're going to feel the
(24:37):
fear and you're going to step into it. You're going to do it anyway, and
you're going to realize that as you do it, which is this. Facing things
incrementally. That's when you get the evidence to realize you can handle more and more
and more and you'll be energized by it. I mean, I promise you that. I
promise you it's like the results of somebody
that can. First of all, the first step is willingness.
(24:57):
Okay? So you. You will not do any exposure therapy without
willingness. No one's going to force you to fly, and you're going to overcome the
fear. In fact, it's going to get worse. If I. If I decided just out
of the blue because you came to me saying, I have a fear of flying,
I want to get over it, and I kidnapped you and put a bag on
your head and threw you on an airplane. And we. And I said, you're going
to do this, you know, whatever. I would make the problem worse. There has to
(25:19):
be a level of Willingness. But that does not mean you can't be a creative
parent who can manipulate in a healthy way to
encourage willingness. All right, so you can do that. Because
I have actually paid my daughter to introduce herself to
people and I've actually paid my daughter to do things like have
a conversation with her teacher when she was afraid and she became willing
(25:41):
because I was able to convince her that the benefit was greater. This is when
she was much younger. The benefit was really great in the process. And I don't
regret doing that stuff because I feel like it built in courage. Built
courage into her. Right. And for your first example, you
go back to John Madden. He started driving to his different
gigs in a van and by the end and he never faced
(26:03):
his fear of flying. And what did he end up with? He
ended up driving a huge bus everywhere. His fear,
actually, it's a great metaphor for his fear. It got bigger
and bigger and bigger. And more expensive and more expensive and
then it limited his opportunities. It's interesting that his flight was in
1979. He quit coaching in 1978.
(26:26):
So I wonder if that impacted him taking another head coaching
job. That could have very easy. It could have very easily because
maybe he. I can't imagine being a head coach of a football
team and actually not, because whenever he was a head coach of a football team,
which he was the head coach of the Raiders for a decade, I can't imagine
you not flying when you're the head coach
(26:47):
football team. I can't because you getting to games and sometimes you have a Thursday
night game and a Sunday game, you got to fly. I mean, so. And they
could be different parts of the country, so. But I don't know, that'd be interesting
to see. And I'm not.
Fears are real, man. I mean, they're scary. So now for, for us
as coaches, if somebody gets in a car accident, I'm going to encourage them to
drive as soon as they're in, have the health to drive,
(27:10):
to not wait in the process. Or if they had a heartbreak
with a, with a gal and they say, I'm never going through that
again. No, I would say, hey, let's figure out, do you want to be married
again or do you want to find somebody to have a romantic relationship with? I
would say, well, let's find a way that if, if you can
at least be around women, you know, and interact. If it's
(27:31):
a man, obviously, if it's a woman, be around, at least be around some good,
healthy, quality people, you know, go to church a Singles group, be around some people
that you can interact with. You can start getting evidence that you're.
This is not reality. This is not reality. It's real. Because you have the feeling
of reject. You want, you don't want to go through it again, but it's not
your reality because there's a lot of people who would not
(27:52):
reproduce that situation for you. Right. So here's the next question, is,
are you always going to be able to do it? Are you always going to
be successful in your baby steps? Are you
always going to be? The answer to that question is yes, if you go
take the first baby step, which is willingness. And the
plan is devised in a way that's realistic.
(28:14):
Okay, yeah. Yes. Well, and this is great because
there is a famous experiment that indicates the reality of this.
So. And well, famous. It's famous in my head because I
just read the book that told me about this experiment. But it is interesting
because I, we had a conversation about it where people have a terror. They're
actually terrified of spiders in this, in this experiment. And what they do is they,
(28:37):
they first of all agree to be in an experiment. Willingly saying
to this group of. I believe it was psychologists, I'm not sure what university,
but it was, I'm sure some reputable. It
was, is in a reputable book. I mean the book's called, is called the Power
of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath. And they're researchers who write, they're
journalists. I trust their journalistic integrity. So. But
(28:59):
they, they have these people willing to go through
an experiment to overcome their fear of spiders, of tarantulas. Spiders,
but spiders. Big tarantula. Right, right, yeah, yeah, good.
I mean, I mean in some countries they probably eat tarantulas. That would be an
interesting thing. And that's a different type of fear than being in the room and
actually eating one. Although that could be like taste 10, like eat
(29:21):
a tarantula. So. But if you.
So in this experiment they all agreed and then at first
they were trying to see how close they could get to the tarantula's cage and
nobody could get within 10ft of the cage. And then they had
this 14 step plan that they agreed to follow. And step one
was go and
(29:44):
just be 5ft from the tarantula's cage. Okay. They can go ahead and do that.
You know, in step two is to actually put your hand on the tarantula's
cage. It's like a glass terrarium. So it was a barrier, you know, and then
step seven was, I think guide the tarantula with a. With a
paintbrush. Like, touch it with a paintbrush, you know? And then
step 10 was, like, actually hold the tarantula with a really thick
(30:06):
leather glove. And then eventually step 14 in this
specific experiment was they would actually hold the tarantula on their bare
palm. And of all these people who willingly. With the
support of this team. And that's really crucial because you have a supportive team. I
wouldn't recommend you try this on your own. So these are people who understand
how to guide someone through exposure therapy, which is crucial. I would not say that
(30:28):
everyone could do it if they have the willingness, if they didn't have the right
people devising the right plan with them. But that's not to say that you
can't devise your own plan. I would just encourage you to get some feedback on
it from a trusted friend. Do you think I could do this? Or to talk
to a coach or talk to a counselor and get some feedback on it? And
then 100% of the participants that were willingly participating,
(30:49):
they actually were able to hold the tarantula in their hand, and they were actually
able to do it a year later, 100% in this specific case. So
kind of a cool thing, but that's. Step one is you got to grow a
pair. And first of all, when you start taking the baby
steps, it's going to trigger emotions. When you grow a pair, you're ignoring your feelings.
You know, this is not just for men. I know. It's for men and women.
(31:10):
All right. So we figure out a way, and
we have the willingness, we have the power to ignore our emotions
in the situation and do the next right thing. We're in control. Yeah.
And for some fears, there's no reason to actually do
anything to deal with that fear, because they're rational fears. They're
a rational fear. To actually have a pet
(31:33):
possum that has rabies, that's not a good example, because possums don't have rabies.
But to actually have a fear of a dog with
rabies is not something you should ever overcome.
Right, Right. It's just not something to have a fear of being
locked in a. In a porta potty for a
week by your. By people, you know,
(31:56):
with bungee cords is a pretty healthy fear to have. You're probably never going to
have it, but it's. You know, you don't want to have that happen. No. Because
you would die. So. Okay. That. Those are rational fears. We're talking about
irrational fears in this situation. So you Ignore your feelings. And one of my
favorite quotes of all time, Carl Hume. Where your fear is, there lies your
tasks. So think about that, man. You got fears. Fears are a blessing.
(32:17):
And this again sounds contradictory. So ignoring your feelings does not
mean admitting you have them. It does not mean you admitting you. But you're ignoring
them in the moment. You're not even letting them drive you. My
family would say and has said at times that, Adam, you're too sensitive.
Adam, you're too sensitive. You know, but what they're doing is invalidating me because
what I'm talking about in those situations is just an uncomfortable topic that I'm actually
(32:39):
bringing it up. Right. And I guess I can't, I'm sure I can be
too sensitive. I mean, I have, I have challenges emotionally at times, but
they also tell me good things like grow a pair. Now, a grit called a
book called Grit by Travis Bradbury addresses this pretty well. And it's
another good book. It does a lot of research on people that have grit. So
endurance, they're willing to push through, do some stuff. So there's some principles out of
(33:01):
that book that helped me. And I do have this on a one page handout
that my, my personal coach gave me one time actually, front and back. And
so a couple of those things. People have grit when they, when you have,
you know, you have grit when you, you have to, to have grit, you have
to fight when you already feel defeated. You have to learn to delay
gratification. That's ignoring your feelings, right?
(33:23):
Absolutely. You have to make mistakes, look like an idiot, and then
try again without flinching. Interesting. Try
again even though you look like an idiot. You mess up, you fess up, you
try again. That's a big deal. That's grit right there. You
have to lead when no one else actually follows. It takes grit to do that
because your emotions are going to be telling you something very different. You're not leading
(33:45):
well or you're making a mistake or listen to all these people. But you have
to lead at times when no one else will actually follow you. You have grit
when you, you, you have to be the kind. You have to be kind to
people who are rude to you. Interesting stuff who are actually mean and
nasty. And you, and you are kind. Doesn't mean you're not assertive. It doesn't mean
you're not firm. Doesn't mean you're not saying, I have a boundary here,
(34:05):
but you're being kind. And candor is kind. Interesting.
Candor is actually kind. So the third principle
Which I find for me personally is the most
encouraging of all of these principles is to expect
yourself to fail. Expect yourself to be in
situations as you go through this exposure process, as you
(34:28):
ignore your feelings, to fail to make mistakes, for it
to be sloppy for you to go and say and decide to lead a meeting
or go through one of these steps and it not go very well. Expect it.
So you're prepared. That's what we're talking about is you can do things to
prepare yourself to be courageous in advance. Right, Exactly.
That's what you have to. That preparation is part of that first baby step.
(34:50):
And maybe step seven is doing that preparation and getting in
there and doing it. Because like you say, and
that's really what my first question is, is that really
don't worry, it's going to be sloppy. You should expect
to fail, especially on big issues, on big fears that have
controlled you for a long time. But that
(35:12):
doesn't mean you don't take that next little step. You don't want to be frozen
there. Yep. Here's what happens when I. So over the years
with clients, one question I'll ask is like what's your biggest fear?
What are you most afraid of? And, and then leave them with that. And they'll
say, well, what do you mean? What do you mean? People do that. They always
want me to elaborate on these questions, these open ended questions. They want me to
(35:34):
elaborate and I don't elaborate. And that really makes them uncomfortable because they are
wanting me to give them something that they can grasp as maybe that should be
my biggest fear. What have you seen in me? But no, I want them to
sit with it and think because when you think you lose a part of your
brain that's not emotional, it's rational. You go much deeper. You go much deeper
because you're not emoting. I mean that's the primitive brain. You know, the lizard brain
(35:54):
is like the amygdala, you know, the dubraga. Oblonglady. No,
maybe that's, maybe that's wrong there. Don't. I'm not, don't quote me on that. But
you start to think and then they identify something as they think. Like that's a
fear. You know, I'm, I'm afraid of being embarrassed. I'm afraid of rejection. I mean
I'm afraid of isolation. I'm afraid of dying. I'm afraid of. It could be
something specific. And when they
(36:16):
go through that process, then
they're able to identify something that they're afraid of and it's like,
okay, now, now what I do with that, you know,
so. And I don't give them exactly. And don't tell them exactly what to do.
But people will often want to not
fail again at something as driving
(36:39):
them towards this fear that they have. So something bad has happened and, and they
don't want it to actually happen again. They don't want it to be in that
situation again where they're going to feel that feeling again. And that's really
crucial to identify. But if you go and say, yeah, you know, I'm going
to, I'm going to do this thing and this fear is
holding me back, I've identified that it's actually holding me back in some way and
(37:01):
it's okay that I step into it and I don't do it perfectly, and I'm
not going to do it perfectly. And they're giving themselves permission in advance to be
uncomfortable and awkward and have those strong feelings and to ignore them. Super
powerful distances yourself from that specific situation. It's
like you're able to externalize it and it's not you any longer.
It's not you any longer. But I would. It's really crucial thing to be able
(37:22):
to admit and say, hey, I'm afraid of that. I'm afraid of this. I'm afraid
of rejection. I'm afraid of failure. I'm afraid of having a bad relationship again. I'm
afraid of having a bad co worker that could be
whatever to me again, like the one in the past. I'm afraid of it. It's
very crucial because there's power in that externalization of whatever that
fear is. So how are, how are you? How do you. Well,
(37:43):
the point I. One point I was going to make though, about that actually is
when somebody's really quick to say, I'm not doing that,
or they're really quick to say, I don't have a fear here, I don't have
a fear there. Or if, if they're, you know, talking about
leading, let's say a meeting with their team, and they're like, no, I'm not going
to do that. No, I'm not going to. I'm not going to do that, then
what I hear there often is they're not willing to even think about
(38:06):
it with their prefrontal cortex. It's very emotional because they're so quick.
It's better to say if they can pause for a second and
then regroup, then I have a lot more confidence that there's not like
an issue that's being avoided in that situation, because our job as
coaches is to go to the core where people are held back, so they're facing
that and then they can have long term change, long term transformation. So that
(38:28):
quick reaction is often crucial. So
if they do a self assessment and they're quickly saying, this is all
great, I'm doing fine here, I'm doing fine there's, it's like, okay, you
know, you're not thinking here. And I don't necessarily, I can't
necessarily tell them, you know, well, you're wrong, but
right. You're not being, yeah. Honest in yourself. Reflect, you know, how's it going as
(38:50):
a parent? Well, it's great. It's perfect. You know, everything's great. You know, how was
your childhood? And if anybody's honest with themselves, they're gonna have
something that they can share that probably wasn't the best about their childhood.
And it doesn't mean they didn't have great parents, but that
really, they're just, they're putting a caveat to everything. It's like, it's like there's,
there's some reason they have to justify how things are okay. And they're not going
(39:11):
deeper, but that depth is how people grow because then they're facing the stuff that's
holding them back. You got to go deeper. Yes. And I, I actually, I love
my, I hate to say it, I love my example of the tarantula,
because I can use another example here, is that
it took me a while. I, I failed several times in trying to
clean out that cage and open, take the lid off because they can jump and
(39:33):
all these things. And also, you should know, unless you've had a tarantula from
as a baby, you're not to touch them, you're not to carry them
because they have to be used to humans from the very beginning. If they are,
you can hold them and all that good stuff. So I knew this guy was
not used to humans, and so I was afraid of all those things, but I
slowly got over it. And then at my
(39:55):
house, I went to the backyard the other day and
I noticed this black quarter sized
spider right at the water where the spigot is.
And it was a black widow spider. Oh, wow.
Yeah. And I saw as soon as she sensed my movement, she
(40:15):
went back behind a little electrical box that is literally
three inches from that spigot that I had to turn on.
Ah. And so I was like, dang, that's kind of cool. I didn't
see these very often when I was young and. But I Was able to reach
down and not have that fear that she was gonna jump out and
bite me. Okay, turn it on. But
(40:37):
I mean, if I hadn't faced that fear with that trench a long time ago,
I would have, I would have had to call my neighbor to come over and
turn on the water. Ah, but.
And that would have, that would have, that would
have been a reminder of something to face
continually. Yeah, that's pretty. So I
(40:59):
gotta share a couple things with you here. In closing,
people don't admit
to themselves when they're afraid. And that
is where I'm a big fan of talking about stuff and being open. So if
you think of when you're available to life, when you're open to
life, you're gonna see opportunities that you didn't see before.
(41:22):
You're gonna see employees that,
that are the best employees that you turn down because you weren't open.
You're gonna see, you're gonna get stuck in like, in like rules.
You're gonna see, you're gonna get stuck in these isolating
things. Like people are distant from others that have differing opinions of them
(41:43):
because they're afraid. And you could incrementally. I was
talking to my friend this morning who's a politician and
he's a fairly well known person in the area where we live here.
And so we were just talking about how there's so much fear.
Like he was going to interact with somebody and
(42:03):
they had this perception of another person. They were going to have a group
conversation with differing political opinions. And he was sharing
with me that the other person described the
third party as being hateful. And I thought there,
there wasn't a chance for dialogue because we were already demonizing
and we were distant. And so those fears isolate people.
(42:25):
They cause resentment. Resentment is driven by fear. I don't want to hurt, get hurt
again. So I'm going to resent them. I'm going to hate. And we have a
society right now that scares me in a way because we sense
people's distance at a greater and greater level. Yet we as an
audience, we can. If our fear is to engage people and to have
conversations, we have to be the ones that go first. And that's going to trigger
(42:45):
a fear in us. But we can start the dialog and we can engage. And
so that may not be, that's one example right there. But I was talking to
another client recently and he has a fear of being open with people and it
impacts his leadership at times. And so we started to create a plan
incrementally but one thing he identified in the process is that he has this
fear of reading out loud. And he's been in business meetings where he
(43:07):
has to read something out loud. He's a very articulate guy. He's a very smart
guy. I didn't realize how much of a fear that
was. Like, In a scale 1 to 10, it was probably firing somebody,
which can be terrifying to someone else. Could be like a 10, you know, but
for him, that would probably be like a three. And reading out loud was like
a nine. I mean, very terrifying. Wow. Yeah. And he reads to his
(43:28):
kids and he says that in itself is uncomfortable as well. And I said, well,
what's that all about? He made this connection. It was an aha moment. He said,
well, I had a parent growing up who was hypercritical of me and my
reading, and I had some challenges with reading. And I go back there emotionally, I
believe, is what he said. I believe to this place when I was a kid
where I guess really criticized. And he made that connection. It was like a huge
(43:49):
breakthrough. I mean, I felt like this was like a game changer. You know, I'll
share this with the whole team. I was going to. It's like, well, I got
to remember this. And even I said, can I, can I share it in the
podcast? Cause it was so, so, so relatable, you know, and part of his
plan was that he's a leader of a division of a. Of a company, is
that he's going to do some teaching at the beginning of meetings, like, do some,
some reading at the beginning of meetings on content that can be helpful for the
(44:11):
team and to be able to share it. And again, he's really articulate,
but that's very highly triggering. He's available to his team, available to criticism,
available to being sloppy. I mean, available to actually messing up. So if you're going
to work on a public speaking for, you have to be available to the fact
that it could be kind of messy, it could be kind of not going as
well as you want, and we can, we can make progress.
(44:31):
I'm so excited for you today. Again, like,
so excited for you to face your fears. I mean, it energizes me to hear
stories about what you have done. If you're creating a plan, share it with us.
Share it with us. Respond to the, to the video. Respond in the comment
section. Be really great to hear your example there. And, you know, we hear
some common examples from famous people, I think oftentimes. I know, I know
(44:52):
you were talking. You're sharing one with me that you hear a lot about how
you face things incrementally. I don't know if you want to share that, Sherman. The
one. Yeah. Well.
Which one? Oh, the one about Michael Jordan. Yeah. So actually
you think about some of the, like you said, the famous people. We know them
because they're famous and we think everything was just
(45:14):
roses and flowers for them. But
most people probably don't know that Michael Jordan was cut from his
sophomore basketball team. Wasn't that
good. But what did that do?
The fear of getting cut again, he didn't stop.
It just inspired him to work all the harder. And there's a
(45:37):
great quote I love from him actually. It's like they're
asking about how great you are, Michael. And he goes, you know, in my life
you have to recognize I've missed 9,000 shots
in my career. I've lost 300
games and on 26 separate occasions
I was entrusted to take the game winning shot
(45:59):
and I missed them. I have failed over and over again,
but I didn't ever stop.
And that's why I succeeded. The fear of
being a failure as a basketball player, I mean, it could have very easily
ended many other great people's careers. But he was one who
was faced that fear, got back up on
(46:22):
that horse and kept riding. Yeah, and that's a big example.
I like, I don't like the famous examples nearly as much as the real world
examples personally because I can't relate to that as much because he's had a lot
of talent as well, but, but the talent developed out of him not giving
up. And so he just had this, this real persistent. The
current. Yeah. So we get to see, as coaches, we get to see the little
(46:43):
things people are doing. They're not. Little things are big, they're huge. I mean, I
find them to be incredibly inspiring. Whether that's somebody talking for the first time about
trauma they have in their life, whether somebody for the first time actually stepping out
in a leadership role and leading and going against their feelings. Someone
actually becoming an engaged parent or husband and
mending relationships that are broken with their family. I mean, I got to see
(47:04):
just this week family relationships restored and engagement
and communication just improved. And that gives me so
much hope. And they all did the same process. They were willing to be exposed,
expose themselves to more and more of that thing that they actually fear. And so
that's my hope for you, the listener. You can be just like my client who
can start reading out loud more to his team. So what's it going to be
(47:26):
for you today? I mean, how are you gonna do this? So the principles to
follow, exposure therapy. Exposing yourself to your fears so you can become better and
bigger leaders. So take baby steps, small steps, little wins.
Ignore your feelings. Grow a pair right there. And then number, that's number two. And
then number three, Third principle, expect to fail. Be prepared for that as well. So
check out this content, Shatterproof yourself. It's this course that
(47:46):
we have made that I've made for you. It's on seven small steps to a
giant leap. These are all mental health principles. If you found this helpful, you're gonna
find that even more helpful. And if you it's free. You go through it in
25 minutes. It's got a worksheet that you fill out, seven
actionable items. You can apply it right now, this weekend, today, by the end of
the day, you could do something. You're going to make progress if you go through
(48:07):
that content. So based on this content challenge for you, what was
most helpful and inspiring for you? You're going to devise a plan to face that
fear. Are you going to take that first step of that plan? Are
you going to talk to a friend about a fear? Are you going to admit
to yourself that this is holding you back professionally by having this fear of public
speaking, by having this fear of leading, by having this fear of running a meeting,
by having this fear, this perfectionistic mentality about when I do
(48:29):
things and not letting it go? What are you going to do? 80% of long
term transformation is action. You're doing something different. You're
facing something and 20% or less is insight.
You gained insight today. Now what are you going to do with it? To decide
means that you're eliminating other options. And your
legacy is the impact that your life is going to have on, on
(48:51):
other people. Live the day, live today.
Live the life today that you want to be remembered for 10 years after you're
gone. You decide your legacy. Sherman, you decide your
legacy. Troy, you decide your legacy. Nobody
else. I appreciate you greatly and I'll see you next time.
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