You’re Shoulding All Over Yourself (Don’t Let Fear Get the Best of You)

time as if it's infinite like sands. And whether you are partnered with or without children, or in a career where you want more boundaries, this is the place for you for all family structures. We're here to take a time out to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, reclaim our time. Hi d D, how are you high? Eve? Today? I wanted to start with a story that I tell about how damn scared I was to record the audio book for fair Play. Like physical manifestations of stress, you know,

panic attacks, shortness of breath. Anytime I thought about recording the audio book, typically authors of nonfiction do record their own audio, and it was something I knew I really wanted to do some man wanted to conquer, but I was really paralyzed with the idea. So I kept putting it off and off, because often I think in the face of fear, one of the best coping mechanisms that's

probably not the healthiest is procrastinations. So I did that one, and it wasn't working because every time I think about it, I'd be like, why do I have that pit in my stomach? Oh? God, this the audio book I'm thinking about. It's the back of my head. Often fear for me sits as butterflies in my stomach, for really tightness in my chest. I do know that those feelings since being very early. I remember feeling that first probably is a kindergartener or earlier in thinking, you know, why is my

stomach always hurt? So I decide to do something about my fear. I decided to prepare. I start to read about how people combat fear. Preparation is a really really important one. One woman, I think she said she gave her Ted talk over a thousand times to herself before she actually delivered it. And so my preparation for reading the audio book was to sign up for a voiceover class. Cool. That's the beauty of living in Los Angeles pre pandemic.

There are a lot of people here who are trying to be actors or voiceover specialists apparently, and so there's lots of classes. So I found one in Burbank, and I show up for my first voiceover class, and the people adity were really diverse and interesting. I became friends with a woman who was auditioning to be a rat in a new movie or some sort of rodent and a man who was auditioning to be Charlie the Star Kiss Tuna apparently that was going to be coming back

as a campaign. And both of these people gave me really important life lessons, how to project, how to use soft drama hands when you're talking into a microphone, and then high drama hands when you want to really emphasize a point. Rodent lady told me that my job is gonna be so easy because I get to read my own words as opposed to Rodent speak, which is obviously

not even English. And the reason why that was so important to me was because I realized that the preparation, but we're gonna be talking about the ready set go for a work of fear being ready, preparing through these voice over lessons, getting set by having a community of spiritual friends, which were Charlie the Darkest Tuna and Rat Woman at that point in my life, and then just going to go they're ready the set, and then going immersing yourself, going to the studio, saying those first words

and getting better and better by chapter is what got me through a time a dity that was really really stressful and hard. And so I think about those damply lit, poorly attended p t A meeting style voiceover lessons who knew how important Charlie the Darkest Tuna would be to me in my creative journey. But I want to thank you, Charlie the Darkest Tuna Man and Rat Lady, who didn't give me releases to use their full names, but I I'm calling you by that, and we love you and

I'm thinking of you today. It's amazing how something like writing a book you face so many of your fears, and you likely had fears when you were writing the book and doing your research, but you were able to push through and then when it came time to sharing it with the world and sharing your work with the world, even if it was in a studio for an audio book recording that only you would hear. Initially, it seemed

like something that was insurmountable. And often what we see with fear is that sometimes it can be a very legitimate fear of I want to climb Mount Everest, but I'm afraid to climb out Everest, and that's a truly legitimate But equally legitimate are these fears that may not seem scary from the outside, but boys, do they feel legitimate inside with what's happening with our biology and our brain and our heart palpitations, that amygdala, that fight or

flight response, And that's the thing that's so fascinating to me about fear is that the part of our brain that recognizes fear, the amygdala, which we've talked about in our very first episode of this podcast. That brain structure and all of the structures around it called the limbic

system or the reptilian brain. It processes fear the same way whether you're at base camp of Mount Everest and looking at the peak and saying I'm going to climb this mountain or your own personal Everest in your case recording the audio book, same fight or flight response, same Amigdala response. And I love the practice that you ascribe in your book, Ready Set Go, because it really helps

us overcome that a Magdala response. The more you practice something and visualize it and imagine yourself in the scenario, it dampens that heightened emotional state because you are truly facing our your fears. Your brain doesn't recognize something as

imaginary versus real. So when you rehearse scenarios, which is that woman with the TED talk who practiced a thousand times, she may have truly to the world only given one TED talk, but to her and her brain and her amygdala, she gave a thousand and one Ted talks of already said go framework. So, if you think about preparation, having that spiritual friendship, community doesn't have to be a stark is Tuna man or the actual repetition itself of doing

so for you? What's what piece of the framework. Is it the preparation that makes fear easier for you? Is it the community of support or is it the actual doing and doing and doing the go part? I think all three are so critical, but at different points. So early on in the project, at the inception stage, that first part of thinking about it is the great hurdle.

And then once you have whatever you're afraid of, something that you've done once or twice and are still afraid that practice and perfecting, sharing with other people to get that support and buy in, emotional buy in, and then ultimately the doing. But it's a process and it can't happen. You can't go from zero to sixty. You have to take all of those necessary steps. It also helps to prime the brain when you take all of those steps, because you can't just look at everyst and say all right,

I'm ready going to climb. It's a whole marathon. It's a training and you have to almost train your brain to overcome the fear. And I think the ready, set, go mindset and framework helps us to do that. Yeah, And it's interesting because for me, being able to combine ready and set a lot is often a way for me to come to combat fear. Shout out to my friend Zoe, She's sleeps in bed with me. When I

go on tour, have to give a giant speech. And I remember after conquering the audio book Fear, the next one right after that was the first talk I was giving unfair play it was in Radio City Music Hall. She had gone to was a kid on many field trips, but I remember I think it was right after Condoleeza Rice and right before Diane von first Bour. I was the only one that was required to do a stand

up ted talk type speech. Everybody else seemed to have been afforded a nice chair in some sort of panel discussion, which would have been easier. But I do remember that, and then having Zoe there, she was my set, and then the going. Like you said, I probably did feel like I gave that speech a thousand times by that time I got up on that stage because I poor Zoe. She has she probably knows her an Air and Aaron

out there shout out to you. I have two people who probably know my keynote speech now better better than I do. Fear is a tricky thing, and there's some people who have really mastered fear, they still get afraid and do it anyway, you know. I think about someone who I really admire, Sarah Blakely, and she talks a lot about fear and the fear of failure, which is something that we're going to be talking about later in our episode, and how her father growing up would always

ask her, so, how did you fail today? And she had to celebrate her failures and so she didn't have a fear of failure, so she could try new different things as an adult. But I think about how we all have a very distinct and unique relationship to fear, and it's not necessarily that the fear isn't present for people who take risks both in their life and in

their work. It's that they figured out strategies, tools, and mechanisms to have that fear, do it anyway and overcome a lot of those primal urges to step back into safety and comfort. So a lot of the strategies that we're talking about is not necessarily to remove the fear because fear is naturally an important thing for evolutionary growth. Fear is a signal of something, and when it's adaptive,

it can be really positive. But when it becomes maladaptive prevents you from reaching your highest potential, that's when it's a problem. It's okay to be afraid, but the trick is to figure out a strategy that's personalized for you so you can do it anyway, whatever that it is. Yes, I love that framing. We are not here to tell you to be fearless. I never understood that word. Do it anyway, and that's why we're so excited to talk

with our amazing guests, Brad Johnson and David Smith. David and Brad are co authors of the book Good Guys, How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace, a topic that's close to my heart, and we'll be speaking with them after the break about their book and their research. So stay with us. We're so excited to have Dr Brad Johnson and Dr David Smith, co authors of the book Good Guys, How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace, with us today. Welcome

Brad and David. Glad to be here, Eve, and add thanks to you. Great to be here with you. So before we start talking about fear I would love for our listeners to know a little bit more about your story. How did you come into this work. It's such a fascinating story and I would love for you to share it.

You know, Brand and I started our collaboration on this topic when we were both teaching at the Naval Academy's faculty there, and we quickly recognized Nick early on in our time together that we had a lot of different kinds of connections in terms of why this work was important to us, you know, our academic backgrounds and clinical psychologist and his focus on mentoring relationships. We we definitely saw where there was different access to different kinds of

important resources. But the other part that I think is really important is the personal connection to doing this work. You know, it started early, you know, the beginning of

my career, my Navy career as a pilot. I was married and still I am married to my wife, who who also was a nable officer, had a very similar career, parallel career paths, and of course, you know, we talked a lot about our experiences in the workplace, but there were so many differences in terms of how the workplace was just this very challenging for her compared to me in ways that that I just didn't understand. I didn't see it because I didn't experience it in the same

way that she did. And if I was looking for help I needed a mentor, or if I was looking for hey, what should I do next? And those kind

of things were just right there at my fingertips. I didn't have to look very far for her, not as much, and and so I think her sharing some of those experiences really got in touch one of my sense of fairness, but also too with the idea that lots of other women are experiencing this too, And so a lot of ways that was that personal experience was also part of the curiosity and the inquisitiveness that I have around this topic. And I'll just offer a quick thumbnail that I think

will help you understand my personal narratives. So I I have a sister. She's a Navy captain, very senior, very successful. I called her one weekend and she sounded kind of down, and I said, Shannah, what's going on? And she said, well, we had this road race with members of the executive team, and she's the only woman on the executive team. Most of the men she works with her younger. And I said, well,

what happened on the on this ten k you ran? Well, I won, And I said, well, that actually sounds great to congrats and she said, well, I was feeling good when I crossed the finish line. I felt yeah. And then all the men started crossing the finish line, and I could tell they were shocked that I beat them all. And and then they all started coming up to me with their own excuse, kind of like, hey, good job, Shannon,

but yeah, my achilles or I was really dehydrated. And she realized they felt bad about being beaten by a woman. And then she started internalizing and feeling guilty that she had run so fast. And I said, Shannon, can you hear yourself? A dude would never say that, he'd just

be like in your face. And those conversations with my sister over twenty five years in in really parallel navy careers, have just piqued my concern, my curiosity, like Dave, kind of triggered my sense of injustice, I think in some ways. And that in addition to looking at all the research showing that women just get less mentoring and sponsoring and lower quality sponsoring, I think all of that together has

been kind of part of what's instigated my interest. I would love to ask you about your work with impostor syndrome. It's something that I have certainly faced in my own trajectory. I've some of our listeners may be new to tackling their impostor syndrome. I'd left for you to give us some of your thoughts on why this happens more to women than men. I'm so glad you're thinking about this

impostor issue. Dave and I wrote an article in HBRE on how we can be better mentors for people with imposter syndrome, and I think if you're really dig into the research on this, you do find there's a gendered element. So more people, more women do report having impostor feelings. But I think what we lose sight of is very often that is a consequence of the culture or the context in which they're functioning. It's a culture that gives them messages that you don't belong. We've never seen a

woman in this role. You're weird, right, and and that certainly creates cognitions and feelings that I don't belong. I'm not going to make it. Everyone's watching for me to make a mistake. Any minute, I'm going to blow it, and they're gonna show me to the exit. I mean, the irony is all of us have those feelings. Men too. Every time we enter a new job, we feel like impostures.

That's just part of the human condition. But when I hear that from somebody I'm ntoring or I'm an ally with, I want to focus more on where are those messages coming from, not is there something wrong with you that you have self doubt. I want to look at the context and then begin to devise strategies for pushing back on that and also changing that context so that those messages aren't being transmitted to women. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how to combat fear

in those situations, meaning whether it's legitimate fear right. I was reading Katie Kuric's autobiography and she's talking about the men that dropped their pants when women were entering their offices. So there could be legitimate fear and trauma of being a certain way of looking, a certain way of being a marginalized population in an organization. I like to joke, you know, women are not really allowed to be loud and wrong. There's a fear around what if I say

the wrong thing. I am that token, so I'm here to represent everybody and everything. Even I saw in Whitney heard when she had her bumble I p O. The lawyers in her I p O statement that goes out to potential investors said there's extra risk here because this is a female founder, and there's market risk because she's

going to be subjected to so much more scrutiny. So how do you again think about ways to combat your own fear when there are legitimate reasons why, as you said, minorities populations would be conditioned to feel trauma from and have actual reasons to be afraid. There's so many things we could talk about here. Let me start with the cognitive or the self talk. I'm such a fan of

all the cognitive therapy work around anxiety. When we have anxiety about performance or anxiety about being inadequate, one of the really powerful techniques for combating anxiety in that area tends to be really watching, identifying, and then tweaking or managing myself talk. So when I'm saying things to myself in that context, like I must perform perfectly on this

to represent all women really well and be absolutely flawless. Um. One of my favorite cognitive psychologist, Albert Ellis, would say, you're musturbating. You need you need to stop that, or same with I should I I should be perfect, I should show up and knock it out of the park on behalf of all women. He would say, you're shooting

on yourself and you need to stop that. But I can look at my catastrophic thinking, right, I tend to bloat out of proportion and say, oh my god, if I don't show up today and get it perfectly right, I'm going to be fired, or all women are going to be cast in a negative light. It's going to be catastrophic. Let's pull that back and and just check that what I prefer to do really well. Yes, absolutely, and that's a legitimate wish. I think we could all

wish that. But would it be catastrophic if I'm not perfect? No? And so there's some personal work I can do here with my own self talk and really examine. I'm such a big fan of what we're telling ourselves, and I think that wonderful mentor can call this out to or just a great ally or colleague, kind of like me with my sister. Right, I can say, Shannon, can you hear yourself? I mean, no, wonder you're feeling sad or

down on yourself? Are guilty if you're saying that you shouldn't have made those men feel bad about running so fast and crushing him in the race. What if we change that? What if you're narrative was you know I really performed well, and I feel proud of that, and how they react to that is really up to them.

So I can twist that narrative a bit. I can attack the shame too with some behavioral exposure therapy, and I can do my own personal exposure therapy by putting myself in a situation where I I know I'm going to be embarrassed or not get it right, or people are going to be looking at me, and recognize that I can tolerate that. It's another cognitive therapy intervention. Again.

Albert Ellis would give his patients assignments like go to a mall, have a banana on a leash and just pull it through the whole and everyone's going to stare at you, and you're gonna feel like an idiot? Can you tolerate that? Right? And you can if you make yourself do that. So, if shame is part of it, or feeling like you're gonna embarrass yourself for others, can you deliberately expose yourself to some of that and do it with an attitude of humor so that it becomes

a little less overwhelming when it actually occurs. By the way, there's a shell servicing poem where this kid wants a dog, and then he's just carrying his hot dog around on a piece of string. That's that's what I think. It also reminds me of Sarah Blakely, who is a very successful entrepreneur and the founder of Spanks, and she often talks about her father growing up wouldn't ask her, you know, so, how did you sick? See today he would ask her, so, how did you fail today? Tell me all about it?

And so it became the gamification of failure, and so that sting of failure becomes so much less pronounced. I love that adity. And you know, when we wrote about perfectionism, we actually said, hey, if you're mentoring somebody with perfectionism, give them an assignment to, for example, send you an email full of typos and then not tell you they're going to do it right, and then just tolerate. Oh my god, how's my mentor going to evaluate me with

such shoddy work. Well, give them assignments to do that, so they come right into exposure with that, and then they get the experience and it's not going to kill him. Do you feel that women are more prone to perfectionism than men? It might be a little question. Yeah, we do, and there's some of that in the research, and I think we inherit some of that, I think from the experiences we have with family members and especially for girls with their moms, and so that that can be one

place that they learned that. And this again back to the environment, right, the relationships you have around with people. But again I think women more likely to be in those token where they're the minority way more likely to to be I think susceptible to this. Yeah, and there's an evidence space note of reality here too. Write you've heard of the prove it again bias that women encounter. She representing all women, is more likely to have to prove over and over again she can do the same job.

And we know that men get the nod on potential right even if he's never even demonstrated that before. So there's an element of truth here, of genuine reality that women are pushed to have more flawless performance. When they do make a mistake, we tend to remember it more, especially if there are a minority in the company. So they have some realistic hurdles here around being under the microscope and exhibiting flawless behavior. And that gets back to

the fear internal fear of failure. You know, if I apply for that position or for that advancement, or whatever the case might be, and I don't have everything and I fail, it's like again the fear of failure, of fear of letting down all women out there. That again, it's it's real. Can we talk about your fears? It's

sort of these meta levels of fear. We're talking about fear, as we said, in different ways, impostor syndrome, self talk type fears, things that frees us, legitimate fears and the context of being, as you said, a token our minoritized population. But I actually think that even if you didn't have this whole layer of expertise, I would have still wanted to come to you. Brad and David say, the military

teaches a lot about fear. I wanted to ask each of you, what is something that you have learned in writing all of those articles and read all of your books. What has most surprised you about your own fears and how you've gotten over them. Yeah, you know, Eve, in terms of what has surprised me in my case, the one that I'll use was terrible fear of public speaking. I always hated that. I mean, I couldn't stand that.

I avoided it at every turn. And and the irony is that after a career of being a professor and speaking constantly, that has been the cure, exposure therapy and doing it every day. But I can tell you back in the years when I was avoiding, and I did that for a long time, I would only speak under duress. Right, You'd have to almost tie me down to get me to speak. In those years, I made no progress whatsoever, zero.

And it was really only when I started forcing myself to do this every day, get up in front of classes, that I could just feel the angs idy ebbing and eventually kind of disappearing. I think it's unhelpful to offer a mastery model, right, Hey, I used to be afraid of this, and now I've kicked its rear end and now I have no anxiety. That's so unrealistic. Rather, what I say is, hey, I'm really doing a lot better with this. I've learned all these techniques. I really value

exposure because it's been very helpful. But I'll tell you, if you stand me up in front of a room of five thousand people, I might still have anxiety, right, I'm gonna have to deploy all my techniques and it'll probably go fine, but I'm gonna still feel the anxiety because I don't want anybody who's listening to me to think that it goes away. Ever, we're just on a journey of coping effectively, and I think that's what I've tried to do. I came into my second career in

a lot of my writing much later in life. Doing research and theorizing and putting your ideas out there could be very anxiety producing as well. And one of the things I learned is that having a mentor or somebody else who can walk you along and can come alongside with you to kind of slowly stepped that up. I think it's helpful too. Has it been nice for you

to do it together? Because I a lot of what I wrote about in my second book, Around Fear was that having spiritual friends, however those come along for you as writing spiritual friends. Did it help to have each other? Yes? Absolutely. You know, in the military we use the term wingman a lot, and I think that, I think truly in this space, Eve, because we're two men, especially older white men,

writing about gender and women's experience, in the workplace. I mean, we're painting a big target on our chest right when we go up, and so just to have another guy up there with you, bumbling along and you know, we're both stepping in it together and when we get it wrong, we have to just laugh at ourselves. But it does help to have somebody there with you kind of walking that. I love that, But I think it's Brad mentioned there's also an opportunity to, you know, to have some humor

and maybe something for us. It's often self deprecating humor around the mistakes we've made, and to be able to kind of feed off of each other with that. And then again, I think sharing what you've learned along the way is really helpful too. I will say, I think humor is so helpful, and I think you both have it, which is why you come off so authentically and why you can be two white men talking about gender. Thank you,

Brad and Dave. You make me laugh. You're super vulnerable, you have a lot of important things to say, and we were so happy to have you here. Hi, it's me Eve. I wrote find your Unicorn Space as a permission slip for you to reconnect and discover that thing that makes you come alive without the guilt, without the excuses. Especially in our all too busy world, making time ourselves is essential work. It improves our health, our relationships, and

it just might be the antidote to burnout. Join me on a journey to find your Unicorn space visit unicorn space dot com. So a DD this week's time out, I'm hoping our listeners can resonate with the ready, set go framework for tackling fear. Tell us more ready is what we were hearing about earlier about preparation. When you can prepare, things feel easier. Has there ever been a time where you were on stage or maybe your first time you're on air, did you prepare to do that?

Because I always feel like things that I can do on a fly now I can only do in the fly because I had hours and hours and hours and hours of preparation the first time that I did that. Absolutely, I think over preparing is the key when you're first starting something because it just primes your brain. You know that doomsday scenario that Brad mentioned, it's so interesting because it can be very detrimental, but earlier, because we're rehearsing all of the things that can go wrong, and that

causes a lot of anxiety. But if you're able to prepare and get ready for it, it gives us a sense of control and lack of control is one of our greatest fears. Well, I love that so much, and so you get you get ready by your preparation, whatever that means to you. I will say that the reason why this framework is ready, set, go is because you don't want to get stuck in preparation over preparing, and over preparing means you will live in your in your fear and you will not get to the go part.

So write down a way that you can prepare for something that you are afraid of. Set so when you set the way to set yourself up for success, to go for That third step is really what Brad and Dave were talking about, which is spiritual friends. Set yourself up with people around you who can remind you can do this, who you can do it with. This podcast a lot less scary because you're my co host. So think about who can set you up for success, Who can you bring along on your fear journey, who you

can talk to about your fears. You could do it with to maybe make it less fearful, the way David Brad wrote their first book together and finally the last piece. After getting ready and finding your prep, getting set, and bringing a spiritual friend along with you, it's time to go. And go doesn't mean necessarily doing the thing you're afraid of. The go is doing a thing that will expose you to what you're afraid of. So prepare, set yourself up with those friends, and think of a go that can

expose you to that fear. So if it is fear of public speaking, maybe just sign up for a zoom where you have to share a story in the group, a writing class. We have to share your words. Take a hot dog, tie it on the string and drag it through them all and explain to people why you're dragging a hot dog through them all. So I would ask in time out today, write down a way to

get ready, get set, and then go. So that's today's time out, and next week we'll be back with our very last episode of the season, taking all of the knowledge and advice we've heard so far and bringing it full circle. Full circle, so you can start thinking about making a commitment to your creativity, harnessing your special powers, and thinking about what it means to build an active legacy for yourself. Thank you for listening to Time Out,

a production of I Heeart podcasts and Hello Sunshine. I'm Eve Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair Play and find your Unicorn Space. Follow me on social media at Eve Rodsky and learn more about our work at fair Play Life. And I'm Dr add Narucar, a Harvard physician with a specialty and stress resilience, burnout, and mental health. Follow me on social media at Dr add Nerucar and find out more about my work at doctor a d D dot com. That's d R A d

I t I dot com. Our Hello Sunshine team is Amanda farrand Aaron Stover and Jennifer Yonker. Our I Heart Media team is Ali Perry, Jennifer Bassett, and Jessica Kranschit. We hope you all love taking a much needed time out of us today. Listen and subscribe to Time Out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. H