Evolve Your Relationship with Fear with Dr. Eric Bean
During this Coaching Through Stories episode, host Dr. Eric Bean coaches us on how to effectively manage and eventually overcome a paralyzing pattern of behavior most people have: fear. Discover how you can look at fear from a totally different perspective—something that can lead to growth and joy rather than a feeling that’s triggered by danger, pain, or threats.
Key Points:
- To change your relationship with fear, you need to get clarity on what you’re truly reacting to.
- Part of changing your relationship with fear is shifting your mindset from one of threat to one of opportunity.
- You can practice engaging your fears by getting out of your comfort zone.
Episode Highlights:
- People are much more comfortable choosing the familiar over the unknown.
- While fear is one of the seven universal emotions, it manifests behaviorally and psychologically in several different ways.
- Managing fear is a learned response.
- Generally, without the gift of experience, managing emotions comes down to space.
- It is necessary to create space in between the stimulus that’s creating the fear so you can choose your response.
- Developing the ability to create the space and measure and create your response is critical to high performance and will take some work.
- To change your relationship with fear, you need to get clarity on what you’re truly reacting to.
- The biggest fear of all is the idea that you can’t handle it.
- Part of changing your relationship with fear is shifting your mindset from one of threat to one of opportunity.
- Before you face your fears, examine them.
- Instead of focusing on the worst case scenario, ask yourself what the best case scenario is.
- You can practice engaging your fears by getting out of your comfort zone.
Resources Mentioned:
- HigherEchelon
- Inside Out (Pixar Film)
- The Gift of Fear: And Other Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence by Gavin de Becker
- Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers
- Challenge vs. Threat: The Effect of Appraisal Type on Resource Depletion by Erin N. Palmwood and Christine McBride
- Lazarus and Folkman’s Psychological Stress and Coping Theory
- Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions by Barbara L. Fredrickson
- Google’s Study on Psychological Safety (Project Aristotle)
- Building a Pyschologically Safe Workplace by Amy Edmondson
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