Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Today, I'm getting vulnerable as we dip into a conversation about something I've been struggling with and working on fear. It's a mindset that's plagued me most of my life, well, at least as long as I can remember. And I've brought it to the table today because Roger has kindly asked me to share with you guys how fear shows up in my life. We hope by listening today that you'll not only learn a little more about the mindset of fear, but important, get to experience how impactful it can be when we get vulnerable with our partners and share the things that we are really struggling with.
Hey, we're Kim and Roger, and we're here to show couples how to get the best out of their relationship so they can start living their dream life together.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: We're a West Aussie couple who are living the life of our dreams. We don't entertain the word should. We think about the future as a field of possibilities, and we let joy be our compass.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: We've taken the simple idea of working as a team and applied it to our marriage, and it's been a game changer, allowing us to work out what truly lights us up in life and to go after it together.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: From living in snowy Japan to starting our own house flipping business, we've achieved some big dreams. And most importantly, we feel fulfilled and are having the most fun we've ever had.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Hear conversations from inspiring couples, thoughts from relationship experts, and tales from our own lives as we help you to gain the wisdom and skills you'll need to turn your relationship into a real team.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: These are relationship conversations for real people by real people. So sit back, get comfortable in whatever tickles you pickle, and enjoy living the team life.
So every morning, Kim and I make a French press coffee our toast, and we head out onto our veranda. We look out at the gum trees as the sun's rising, and we talk. And we talk about a lot of stuff. We do our morning mindset, where we ask ourselves a series of ask each other a series of questions to really get the conversation going. And recently, Kim's been talking to me about fear. And I actually said while I was listening, I was like, this is great. I don't quite understand it, but perhaps this is something you could share with our listeners on the podcast, because I'm not sure how this actually works. I'm not sure what you mean by fear. I think I'm taking a bit of a narrow definition of it. But I think this is really important because a lot about relationships isn't just about working on the specific relationship between your partner yourself. A lot of it's about self development and how you can improve yourself and bring your best self to the relationship.
So I'll start off by we're going to do A-Q-A together, and we're going to talk about the topic of fear. I'm really going to unpack and explore that today. So, Kim, thanks for being here today. Can you please explain to our listeners what initially sent you down this rabbit hole? Why fear?
[00:03:03] Speaker A: Well, before I do that, I just want to say quickly, I'm really grateful that you brought this to the podcast. It means a lot to me that this issue that has been, I guess, plaguing me would be the word for quite a few months now, and I have been talking to you about that you would want to unpack that further. And I think that was part of our reasoning today when you had the idea to explore it on the podcast, was really around also sharing what it's like for us when an issue does come up and how we do explore the issue further. It's part of who we are. So I guess, really, people are getting a what do you call it? Spider on the wall.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: Fly on the wall.
Spider on the wall.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: They're getting a fly on the wall.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: Spider catches the fly.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: There you go. It was close enough. They're getting a fly on the wall. Of the sort of questions that you do ask me when things come up, and I ask you when things come up. And I think it's such a beautiful thing and such an important part of a relationship to be interested in your partner's development because it is a big part of who they are. And so you've been supporting me through this, so I just want to say thank you. And I think it's such a beautiful thing what you're doing, what you do do for me when I am working through stuff. And, yeah, people get, I guess, a front row seat to sort of how we go through things. So I'll get back to what your question was, which I think was what.
[00:04:37] Speaker B: Set you down this rabbit hole?
[00:04:39] Speaker A: Thank you.
Okay, so it's been for a few months now that I've been contemplating the idea of fear. And I had this nagging sense in myself.
It's probably at least six months of being unable to get to where I wanted to go mentally, physically, in every sense of my life, because I was holding so tightly onto the reins. And when I really unpacked what that was, why was I holding so tightly onto the reins? The reins for me of life, are like the balance, right? If I hold on tight and I make all the plans and I stick to the plan, then I keep balance in life. And the reason I don't want balance to be lost, because we have quite a challenging life emotionally. Our daughter struggles a lot with regulation. It's part of her being autistic. And so I feel like if I keep the balance, I'll minimize the distress in the household, and that's how we'll manage. But I was all of a sudden becoming aware that I didn't feel fulfilled as a result. This fear of discomfort, this fear of suffering in any way of the household being out of balance, of things going wrong was keeping me from exploring things I wanted to explore, was keeping me from trying things, was keeping me from doing better at the things I already do because I constantly was worrying and had this fear of things getting harder if I did.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: So can you explain that a bit more?
[00:06:31] Speaker A: I guess in a sense, I was finding comfort in the fear, which I know sounds really wild, but it's a funny thing in life, I started to notice that I was using the fear to give me a sense of warmth, a sense of continuity, because it's what I've known. Children that grow up that are quite anxious children, and I definitely had some anxiety as a child often become very aware of the world around them. And we can use words like hyper vigilant, but become very aware of the world around them. And you can become, in a way, addicted to that thought pattern of just checking everything, being scared, staying in that scared state. Because your brain learns that in that scared state, at some point when you were little, it probably protected you from things.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: So when you say comfort, you actually means you feel safe. Right? Because when you said comfort, I was like, oh, what? How could fear be comfortable? But you're saying it's like a safe zone.
[00:07:46] Speaker A: Exactly. It's like a blankie from when you're a little kid. Right. And it takes you to a safe place.
And what happens? Because my brain is so ingrained in going to the safe space of fear, which means being scared of everything, so I can try. And if I stay in a scared state, I'll most likely prevent a bad thing from happening.
When you try to leave that scared state, the brain panics because it's what I know. It's my comfort zone. So even though and this is what I've really been tussling with, even though I want to leave that fear based state, I want to move on. The power of my mind, which has gotten so used to the comfort of living with this fear, is so powerful, it pulls me back in. And it feels almost more uncomfortable to be not almost. It feels way more uncomfortable to step into being fearless than it does to stay in the fear state.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: Just to unpack what you just said there. You're saying that it actually feels like worse. It's more uncomfortable being happy and content and at ease than it does to be scared and afraid.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: Yes. For me, yes, because content and happy are dangerous in my mind. They're something I've really struggled with. Now, people listening to this, I don't want to freak people out, but this is pretty common for people to have thought patterns that once served us, that no longer serve us the same way, but they stay ingrained in our brains. We've worn those patterns out so many times and leaving them is very difficult because they are a sense of safety. So, yes, for me, the thought of trying to take the fear away from the way I think about the future, the thought of trying to move beyond being scared is, to be honest, quite terrifying. For me, it feels like I'm protecting myself from potential harm by staying vigilant and staying fearful. But what actually happens is I'm punishing myself because I'm already living in the possible negative outcomes. I don't live in the joy of the hope or the dream. I live in the safety of the defined fear, the predictable possible problem and the fear that goes with that.
[00:10:36] Speaker B: Right? So this is blowing my mind a little bit because the truth is that in our lives, you are the driver and the dreamer in our lives. Like for our business, your title is the Chief Dream Officer, the CDO, because you always have these big dreams and these ideas that you bring to the table and you're like, come on, Roger, let's go get it. Let's go do it. And I'm like, all right, okay. And I come along because, well, I believe in you. I'm like, yep. Well, if Kim believes we can do it, if she's not afraid, I'm going to follow her.
For me, you're saying this, but the proof in the pudding. We gave up our lives in our white picket fence, in our house and our jobs to move to a ski field, which was a crazy idea and one of the best decisions we ever made. We started flipping houses when we came back to Australia and everyone was like, oh, I wish I could always do that. I dreamed of doing know we started a relationship podcast, which is super scary and you've driven most of this. So I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm finding it a little bit hard how to reconcile how you say you sit in this fear space so much, but at the same time you're the one who, I guess, does such brave things and drives our relationship and our lives and our success so much.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: It makes me emotional hearing that wasn't meant to.
Well, I'm very proud of that person that's a driver and a dreamer. That part of me has grown and grown as an adult. I definitely didn't connect enough with that part of myself, my true self as a younger person, because I just lived even more in this fear mindset. And as I have had more belief, I've been able to live into the parts of me that just bring me so much joy. And I am a big dreamer. I've always dreamed and I am a big driver.
And I wear those badges with pride because they're a cool part of my personality. I think nothing wrong with saying that, but I guess that's the truth of life isn't it. We are complex humans. We're not simple humans. And so we've said this before to people. A great learning in life is that we're not an all this. Nothing in life is it's this or that. Everything in life is this and that. It's like two things. Life is complex and don't pull me up and say oh, there are very rare circumstances where it's this or that because involve death or some sort of heinous crime. Okay? But moving back to day to day stuff two things can be true at once, right? Three things. Four things. That's the complexity and the beauty of life as a human. And I am a complex person and the more I get to know myself and my true self because we get really steered in life by the way we're brought up and the environment we live in into a certain direction that may not be fully aligned with who we are as human beings. Our genetic temperament, makeup. And I think as I have become more and more of myself over the last decade coinciding with our relationship flourishing and all those sorts of things, I no longer feel like in recent times that fear is serving me the way it used to. And you know what? When I think about it, it's probably one of the last bastions of what I would say was like the way I used to operate in the world. It's probably the biggest and last that I've held onto for so long and why I got compelled to make a move on it now I can't tell you exactly except that I knew in my heart about six months ago this word kept coming into my mind fear. Fear, fear, fear. It's all about the fear and I just want to move beyond it.
It is the dreamer in me, the believer in me that wants so much more and my brain never ever stops until it burns out. It's like constantly feeding me ideas and visions and dreams and that's why I have 5000 I don't know, black moleskin notebooks just filled with scrawlings because I need to get it out of my head and I just know in my heart to live my fullest life, to live into the potential of all of the things that I want to do.
Fear will never allow me to fully get there.
[00:15:39] Speaker B: It's really interesting you do say that because you actually do hear from a lot of high performing, very successful people in business, in the arts, in the sciences and they talk about this thing called impostor syndrome where it doesn't seem to matter how successful they get. They always feel like they don't belong in the room, like they shouldn't get there. But funnily enough, there's some thought leaders out there, some psychologists and researchers who actually believe this is almost necessary for success of a lot of these people. Because I guess whether it's that fear or that I'm not good enough that actually drives them to prove themselves wrong. Is this how it shows up for you?
[00:16:31] Speaker A: I think that's how it started for me.
There's definitely a proving of worthiness in the world that was part of where the fear mindset sort of lived. But for me, I don't share that belief that it's necessary to live in a fear state to be your best self. I actually think in my heart, and I'm not fully there yet, my mind hasn't unlearned these patterns fully yet. But I think in my heart, or I feel in my heart, that it is possible to live an even better life in a state of just belief. Right. Like fear serves you until it doesn't. Now, the purpose of fear is to keep us safe. You can't keep yourself safe from everything. You can't avoid businesses failing or relationships blowing up or children getting diagnoses. Those things are going to come whether you like it or not. And to live constantly in that state of fear, it holds you back from pushing out as far as you can into your potential. And so for me, yes, there's an element of I can see for people how fear propels them because they feel like they're not good enough, but that will only ever get them. Like if you had a bar graph, it's only ever going to get you so far. You are never going the full way when you have because what they're saying is self doubt. Self doubt is propelling me. There is no question that belief is more powerful than self doubt. Belief in what you can achieve is what is going to get you to the greatest achievement of your life. And that's where I'm trying to work towards.
[00:18:26] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense because I guess you want to achieve out of a positive mindset as opposed to achieve out of a negative fear based mindset.
Because maybe then if you're always stuck in the fear based mindset, when you do achieve something, it will never be enough because you'll be afraid of what's next. Right, okay. So look, I actually think you've done a pretty good job explaining that there, because the last time we spoke about this, I don't think I quite got it, but I think I've got my head around it now. But I am a bloke, and I do like tangible, real life examples, or maybe that's just my brain, how it works. I like to see how things work in action.
Can you give examples, like some real life examples of how this has impacted you?
[00:19:22] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely.
So let me start with fear of so there's different fears, obviously, that show.
[00:19:31] Speaker B: Up, but more than one.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Fear of failure is a big one.
There's that beautiful little quote that goes around on the Internet a lot, I think it says, but what if I fall? Or but what if I fail?
But what if I fall? Obit, darling, what if you fly and oh God, I literally want The Verge of Tears, because I know it's just a quote, but it's a quote about belief.
And having belief in yourself is really, really hard. So fear of failure is really saying, I don't believe I'm good enough to do it.
I don't believe I have the skills to do it, I don't believe I'm smart enough to do it. I mean, I can't tell you how many times in my life I've said to myself, I couldn't do that, I'm not smart enough.
Which is just crazy.
And when I have those great moments where I am sitting in my own belief and just know that I can do anything, I actually can't fathom that I could ever have thought I wasn't smart enough. I even caught myself saying it the other night. I was watching a Netflix thing and there was journalists and I thought, oh, I could never be a journalist. Far too smart for me.
Of course I could be a journalist. No offense to journalists, but of course I could. In fact, half of journalism is emotional connectivity, understanding humans for the human self, so that you can work to pull the stories out. And that's what I do.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: It's those stories we tell ourselves, isn't it? And I've heard them called invisible scripts before and we can be bound by those invisible scripts. I know for me, fear of failure and it's funny, I'm doing a bit of introspection now, was a big one for me sort of growing up, but I just wouldn't try. I wouldn't try new things. I wouldn't try or I'd get to a point where I thought I was good enough and I was like, well, if I try any harder and I don't succeed, if I don't make the team, well, I couldn't emotionally deal with that. So I was just like, well, what I'm going to do is not try my best, and if I make it, then how good am I if I don't? Well, I didn't try my best anyway, and it definitely isn't a good way to live life. And I haven't been like that for ten plus years now and I know it's changed my life, I reckon.
[00:22:24] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a really lovely one to share. And I've definitely seen that in you, that self belief just grow so much.
So I guess another fear that I've definitely really and this was one that kept coming up for me, that I sort of spoke about at the beginning, was fear of discomfort. And I think when life has been really hard for a period of time, people can get stuck in this fear. If you've been struggling for a long time, you become very protective of downtime, very protective of mental downtime, very protective of spaces where you're not dealing with a lot of discomfort because it is so stressful.
And as a result, you can become really narrow in what you'll do and what you will chase down because you are so worried about discomfort. But the reality is discomfort is everywhere. There's nothing you can do without having discomfort. You can't avoid it. So if you're trying to avoid discomfort, you are going to make life very narrow and it becomes pervasive as well. If you try to avoid discomfort and you make your life more narrow, you start applying the knock on effect is that you start believing that's how life should be and you start applying that narrowness to everything. It was really interesting for me. I spoke very briefly on stories, on Insta straight afterwards after I did that twelve K run recently. And we've said before, we used to run more distance, so we've run marathons, we've run lots of half marathons. So twelve K's doesn't sound like much, but I had knee surgery eight years ago. I've not run that distance for eight years. I had a baby. Since my fitness looks very different these days, and my knee surgery just didn't recover properly. And I kept telling myself pain was not good for me, discomfort was not good for me because I had pushed so hard. And this is where you've just endured so much discomfort, you never want to go back there. And so because I had pushed so hard and run a 45k marathon on a knee that needed a lot of cortisone to get through that and a lot of supportive medication, and I was on everything I could to physically get through that.
I then wanted to avoid discomfort at all costs. So I spent the last eight years not running far. And what I realized was when I went and ran the twelve K's, and I haven't run further than I'm going to say, eight K's tops in the last eight years, so that's another 50% on my biggest run. I ran the twelve k's. I ran it fast, it was a good run. And I realized afterwards I had nothing to be scared of. Did it hurt? Absolutely. Did it hurt way more than I expected? Did I suffer for two days afterwards and thought, my God, am I like 80 years old? Yes, it absolutely crippled me, but I was fine. The point was I could do it. And from that has stemmed this belief. And in the last couple of months I've watched it.
What happens is the counter to the fear. So instead of letting the fear be pervasive and the belief be that keep things narrow, keep things safe, and just let that permeate every part of your life, I've switched to, hang on a second. You can do hard things. And yes, it hurts and the pain is okay. You'll work through it.
[00:25:51] Speaker B: Oh, I love that. So I'm just going to pick you up. I love that you can do hard things again. I just spoke about these invisible scripts, all these stories we tell ourselves, like everything, yeah, they can be really negative, but you can also hack them and use them for you. You went and blitzed your kilometers per minute by almost over a minute. It was epic, considering what you'd done over the last five to eight years. And to come out of that, and maybe you had to prove it to yourself, but now to be able to tell yourself, I can do hard things, that's really powerful.
[00:26:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I absolutely love being able to say that. It's so powerful. If you've lived in the fearful mindset, and if you've let fear really narrow your world as you've tried to keep control and keep safe in your mind, it does really help to know that you can do hard things. And the only way to do that was just do the thing. I really had to get out there and just do the thing and prove to myself that I can do hard things.
And, yeah, like I said, I've taken that. What I've learned from that run, I've taken that and now have taken that belief as well. And that started to permeate other areas of my life. So I guess do you want more fears?
[00:27:15] Speaker B: Yeah, let's give us one more. Give us what they say, your raft of fears. I've got a bag of fears.
[00:27:22] Speaker A: I got a bag.
[00:27:23] Speaker B: I got a list. A rack of fears.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: One that was interesting, that showed up for me this year, was a fear of not fitting in. And I think a lot of women will have experienced this at some point in life, and people call it FOMO, but that's a real thing. That is a real fear based way to live life. And ironically, I don't love going out these days. I'm more of a homebody these days, naturally. But we have this collective sense as humans to belong, to something to fit in. And so at the start of the year, when we set our goals, we said we weren't going to socialize this year very much, which sounds really antisocial, but it's not. We believe you have to say no to something, to say yes to other things. And we have two huge priorities at the moment, our daughter and our business. And so we said they're our focus. For 2023, we will be dropping some of our social stuff. We just will not be very social this year. And what I noticed spring up for me as the year went on, and I would see pictures on in the Internet of people hanging out and things happening, and I would think, I'm not fitting in. I had this fear all of a sudden, like, I don't belong. I'm not fitting in. What's wrong with me? But I had made that deliberate decision not to fit in, and I had to really go back to the table and think about the decision I'd made.
It's a crazy thing, this idea that I have to fit in and do things the way other people do them. And so that fear again in terms of narrowing my world, I want to focus on the two big things we agreed to focus on this year, because they are growing our world massively, massively incomparably to anything else. And yet, had I lived in that fear of I'm not fitting in, I'm not doing what the other girls are doing, I'm not having enough of the catch ups like they are. I'm not focusing on that social stuff the way they do.
I would have missed the opportunity to grow the way that we are deliberately in the areas we are.
[00:29:27] Speaker B: Well, yeah, so that makes sense because fear can really take us off the path for who we really want to be and what our goals are.
From everything you've said today, I think that's really shown me how debilitating this can be and how, even for someone as strong as you, how it can stop you from living your best life, it can stop you from hitting your goals, it can stop you from having your dreams. And I think there's a misconception out there that because women verbalize way more than men and verbalize everything, that they actually let it all out and there's nothing left. But from what I understand with you, and as you said, your 100 mole skin diaries, is that you actually hold so much of what you say out. Might only be like the tip of the iceberg, might only be 30% of what's going on inside, and definitely being a bloke. We keep a lot inside. But I do often feel like on a Friday afternoon, I'll be putting barbecue rub on the burgers and drinking a beer and wondering whether one of the footy players is going to pull out of the team of the weekend. And you'll sit there going, I wonder what this person thinks about me. I wonder if our little one had a good day at school. I wonder what her life's going to be like in five years. I wonder if we're going to have enough money to do the things we want in ten years. I wonder if that pair of pants I bought was any good here. I wonder if I'm good enough or at all within this while I'm just sitting there putting barbecue rub on the burgers. So I think for both our male and female listeners, so that they do understand that these mindsets can impact the relationship, and if you don't open up and share and get curious about each other and you keep this stuff inside, like understanding how you feel about fear today, sweetie. And the other day, when we were actually chatting about it at the front, it sort of just gave me a bit more of an insight into maybe some of the ways that you act or some of the things that you say and some of the way you go about us in our relationship. And I guess that empathy sort of allowed me. To understand more and actually feel better about us and feel better about maybe some of the things I do.
So, yeah, I just like to, at the end, just say, I think it's so important, again, that you're being vulnerable and you're opening up today. Because I think what you're doing is actually by doing that, you might be making this more accessible for some other people listening to this podcast out there who might be thinking the same thing or might be having other thoughts and don't know how to go about dealing with them or managing them.
[00:32:31] Speaker A: Yeah. I think it's a key for me today is definitely the fact that we've had this conversation together publicly, because it is something we do. And I think we said at the start, showing other people how we unpack things together hopefully can help some people or support some people if they're not necessarily doing this yet. And they'd like to be sharing more to see what that can look like. Because you're absolutely right, Roger. For us as a couple, we grow enormously when we understand one another's perspective better. And it builds empathy. Number one, I do make some decisions, and I do have some behaviors that are fear based that you do struggle with. I encroach on things, I get restrictive with things, and it does impact our relationship. And I think having you be in a more empathic standpoint and come at that from the understanding that it's not malicious, it's not me being strategically mean in the relationship.
I'm struggling with that in myself. And it builds your sense of compassion and empathy, which in turn, for me, builds my sense of trust and gratitude to you. So there's these lovely spin offs. Yeah. Anyway, I think it's really powerful having these conversations, and I'm really grateful that we have them. And it is one of those things that, again, can really take a relationship to another level, because that's what vulnerability does.
[00:34:13] Speaker B: Yeah. I think the more information you have about your partner, the better decisions you can make. So instead of being afraid of listening to your partner in their thoughts and feelings, especially if it's about fear, be curious, be open. And the more they open up, the more you find you might get a chance to open up as well.
[00:34:36] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And helping each other to work on these things that you help me to grow in this space and support me now to work on it. And I'm so grateful for that.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: Well, I'm really grateful for you, again, opening up to our listeners today because you have been really vulnerable. And as you said, this is exactly why we do this. Because by opening ourselves up, we hope that it might help some other people, it might provide some accessibility to them, opening up to their partners. And that's what we'll see why we do what we do.
You're amazing. You've just spent quality time on your relationship.
[00:35:12] Speaker A: Feel like you're on a roll. If you want more Living the Team Life relationship insights and conversations, head over to Kimandroge.com, where you can find all the show notes as well as tons of other relationship goodies.
[00:35:23] Speaker B: And if you liked today's episode, please hit subscribe or let another couple where they can find us. It'll make them happy, and it'll make us really happy.
[00:35:31] Speaker A: Until next time, keep on living the team life.
