71. Fear Can Be Fun

0:00 Hey, what’s up everyone, it’s Jennie Dildine, the LDS mission coach and you’re listening to the LDS mission Podcast, episode number 71. Fear can be fun. Hey, I’m Jennie, the LDS mission coach. And whether you’re preparing to serve a mission, currently serving a returned missionary or a missionary mama like me, I created this podcast just for you. Are you searching for epic confidence? Ready to love yourself and to learn the how of doing hard things? Then let’s go. I will help you step powerfully into your potential and never question your purpose. Again. It’s time to embrace yourself. Embrace your mission, embrace your life, and embrace what’s next. Hey, what’s up, everyone, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. I’m excited to share this episode with you about fear being fun. But first, I want to talk to you about a couple other things that have been going on in our lives. Um, we actually are in full swing with fall here. And this is the time of year where I always think you know, it’d be nice if I could move to Arizona, the days are getting colder, the days are getting shorter. And I always joke with some of my clients who live in California, I’m like, maybe you could just come like rent a bedroom or write in your house where you live so that I don’t have to experience I actually don’t mind fall. So so much. It’s just I know that winter is on its way. We had a super fun weekend. Last weekend, my son who is in marching band, they had a band competition, the district competition, and you can kind of think of it like the state basketball tournament, but it’s for band. And he is the drum major, the guy that like stands up and waves his arms and conducts every buddy. He’s one of the drum majors and they ended up our little school ended up taking first and their division in all categories, which was super fun. And also being the top scoring band of the entire day. And there was like 30 bands that performed that day. I just had such like, I just had so many feelings of like, abundance and happiness. And he is a senior, my son is a senior and I actually I’m just so proud of him and how far he’s come and the amazing human that he’s become. This is sort of the thought that I kept having all weekend and even clearer into this weekend is sometimes things that are hard, turn out way, way, way better than we could have ever imagined. I never would have imagined a scenario where my son would have, like, experience such success and happiness, at least not in this sort of a Realm like you kind of think, Oh, well you win state when you play basketball or when you play football. But it just has been a reason for me to reflect that everybody has a journey. Everyone has something that they’re here to do. And it’s just been really awesome to sort of revel in that and be so proud of him and everything that he and the whole band has accomplished. It was a really, really big deal. So that was super fun. One of the things that I think keeps us right from experiencing really awesome. An epic success, like that is fear. And so that’s why I’ve been playing with this idea a little bit about how fear can be fun. Now, even in those days leading up to my son’s band competition. There was this other school kind of in the valley here, different school district that usually takes first overall. And so my son was a little bit like what if we can’t be as good as them? What if, you know we haven’t, you know, put in as much time as we should have.

4:56 What if What if What if and, and it is interesting to notice that fear is usually associated with questions. So let me give you a tip for that in just a second, but he was experiencing some fear. And what I want to kind of offer to you today is that fear can live on a continuum. So if you think about kind of like a number line, right, go back, clear back to your early math classes. And we’ve got on one end of the spectrum, one type of fear, and a way to describe fear. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we have another way to describe fear. There’s actually like a whole continuum, or a whole array of emotions associated with fear, that I think are interesting to consider. So I just love opportunities on here to help you guys really expand your emotional vocabulary. I think, as humans, we have a pretty limited emotional vocabulary. We kind of think like, Oh, I feel sad, mad or bad or glad. Right. And there’s so many options for ways to think about ourselves and to, to describe our emotions, right. So if we were to talk about a continuum of fear, kind of what I came up with, and there’s, I’m sure many, many, many other ways that we could describe fear. But a couple of the ones I came up with on one end of the spectrum, would be timid. So timid is sort of a really dumbed down version of fear. But if you’re thinking about like, I’m about to be introduced to someone new, I’m going into a new transfer, I am about to meet my new companion, maybe I’m home from the mission, I’m about to show up at a Halloween party, right or a get together or I’m going to be carving pumpkins with some people I’ve never met before, we might be feeling a little bit timid, okay, maybe on the complete opposite end of the continuum, we would have something like terror. And I think a lot of people actually like the feeling of terror. I am not one of those people. Now, when I say feeling, remember, a feeling the way I describe it here on the podcast is just a vibration in your body. So feeling the emotion of timidness or feeling timid is, you know, one, emotion, it’s probably not going to feel super intense, it might just be a little place in your body that you can find and describe with adjectives. Whereas terror I picture as way more intense, that vibration. So in between timid, and terror, I think there’s a lot of other ways that we could describe fear. And I actually think it’s kind of fun to think about it this way. Instead of just saying, I feel afraid. See if you can describe what’s actually going on. Here’s a few I came up with worry. Right? I kind of picture maybe worry is like right in the middle of the two on the continuum, overwhelmed overwhelm, might be more towards terror, anxiety, might be more towards terror, Dread, again, moving down the continuum towards terror. Then we’ve got like apprehension, a little bit after timid maybe kind of moving up the continuum from timidness. Maybe we have an uneasiness. Maybe we have concern. Maybe we’re feeling a little bit of doubt. Or maybe we’re feeling nervous. Nervous, is a feeling that I’m quite familiar with, I get nervous before I speak. I get nervous before I go on a live call, not with my one on one clients. But when I go and do a call and another program that I work in. So all of these are

9:36 just emotions, just vibrations in our body. Now that circle back to the what ifs, and our brain, our lower brain loves to keep asking us questions. It loves to offer us questions because questions kind of keep us stuck and spinning and where we are. So when your brain likes to offer you a question Unlike what if this happens? What if I can’t handle this? What if this is too hard? What if I can’t get everything done? You have two choices in that moment of skills that you can start to apply number one, you can figure out what the thought is, you can change the question into a thought, like, I might not have enough time to do that. Like that thought might create some worry or overwhelm, okay? Or you can just answer the question and kind of give your brain something to chew on. Okay, so what if I don’t get that thing done that I need to get done? Then what? We can just kind of show our brain like, oh, so then maybe I’ll get 50% off on on that assignment. Okay, so then what? So we can just sort of answer the question. And face the fear, we can show our brains like, oh, maybe that wouldn’t so be so bad. So one thing I wanted to talk about here too, with fear, being fun. One of the things that I think prevents us from having fun when we’re experiencing fear is the fear of rejection. And I hear missionaries talk about this a lot. I hear returned, missionaries talk about this a lot. Like, what if I go on this date? And you know, it doesn’t go well? What if the person doesn’t like me? What if we invite someone to be baptized? And they just decide no, that’s not what I want. And then that person rejects you. Another example I have is the My daughter, she’s trying to get her first job. She’s a sophomore in high school, and she’s trying to get her first job. So one of her fears was that she wouldn’t get the job that she would get rejected in some way. So one thing I want you to kind of think about is being willing to feel fear, because one, we’re willing to feel that fear, and go to the job interview anyway, and take action anyway, and invite people to be baptized anyway, and go on the date. Anyway. What’s on the other side of feeling fear, or worry, or overwhelm or anxiety or dread is pretty amazing. And it might be better than you could even imagine. The truth is, we’re not for everyone, and we might interview for a job. And it might not be a good fit, not because there’s something wrong with you. But just because it’s not a good fit. Or someone might say, hey, yeah, I don’t really want to go on another date with you. But not because there’s something wrong with you. But because it’s just not a good fit. I kind of like to think about it with this sort of situation. And what I told my daughter is you’re kind of interviewing them to, you get the opportunity to reject their job offer if you want. So we aren’t for everyone. And it’s okay, if people reject you, that doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong or that something’s bad or that something’s off with you. What’s funny about the fear of rejection, right is that our brains kind of tell us that that means death. And here’s what I mean by that is your brain can’t differentiate between physical pain and emotional pain. And so if someone quote unquote, rejects us, and we have to feel a little bit sad, or a little bit insecure, our brain equates that to actually being thrown out of the tribe or being thrown out of the group and back in the quote unquote, caveman days, that actually did mean death. Because you wouldn’t have food, you wouldn’t have warmth, you wouldn’t have shelter. And that meant that you would not survive the day. So it’s just good to notice like that fear of rejection is kind of like a primal thing. That lower K membrane is always trying to avoid that rejection. But here’s where fear and like holding that fear can get kind of fun. There’s this concept called failing ahead of time. And

14:37 what happens is, we are so afraid of feeling that rejection that we just don’t even try at all. So it’s this idea about the boy who wants to make the basketball team he wants to play varsity basketball and try out for the basketball team. But he’s so afraid of being rejected. He’s so afraid of not making the team that he just doesn’t try at all, he doesn’t even try out. So he doesn’t even give the coaches an opportunity to reject him. What actually happens is he rejects himself. So sometimes we’re so afraid of that fear or that failure, that we don’t even try we, we fail. And we reject ourselves ahead of time. Or think about that girl in your ward. If you’re a returned missionary, that seems a little bit quote, unquote, like out of your league, or whatever, right? We think, Oh, well, she might just reject me, or I’m gonna fail when I asked her out. So I’m just not even going to try. And what we’ve done in the meantime, is we create this failure ahead of time, we don’t even give her a chance to reject us. And we reject ourselves. So this is where this gets fun, is we got to be willing to feel fear. We got to be willing to get rejected. We gotta be willing to fail. And feel all of those emotions like overwhelm anxiety, Dread, terror, apprehension, concern, doubt, timidness, an easy and nervousness. Sometimes I think we see fear, as a red light, like, up comes the fear, we’re sort of like, oh, my gosh, enough, we got to walk the other way. But I want you guys fear become super fun, when we see fear. And that, that doubt in ourselves, that fear of failing that fear of rejection, when we see it as a green light, that little bit of butterflies that you get, you know, when you’re about to do something big, doesn’t mean that it’s not a good thing. In fact, a lot of times that fear might be an indication that you are on to something really epic, that fear those little nervous butterflies, all of that might be an indication that you are about to do something huge, something life changing. And here’s the funnest part of fear, I think, is that the body and our brain won’t even register fear. Unless we sort of believe that what we want could actually happen. So like, if we go back to my example of my son with a marching band, unless he really believed it was possible for them to get first, he wouldn’t be afraid at all. And this is what is super fun about fear is if we’re willing to feel it, if we’re willing to move towards fear, instead of walking away from fear. What’s on the other side. It’s just, like I said, at the beginning of this podcast is way better often than we could have even imagined. So I think a lot of people look at coaches or other people who have a lot of success, right? They think, oh, well, they’re just not afraid. They just don’t ever feel uneasy. They don’t ever feel insecure, they don’t ever feel that self doubt. And what I want to offer to you guys, is that the opposite of this is true. The people who are the most successful, make fear fun. They’re actually willing to feel the fear and keep going and take action anyway. They love when they get these little butterfly feelings, they see it as an indicator that they’re on the right track.

19:18 And that what they want might actually be possible. Like something like in your wildest dreams that you didn’t even know was possible. If you have a little fear when it comes up. And when you think about it. Your brain actually believes that it’s possible. And that is super fun. So, when you feel these nervous butterflies when you feel the fear of rejection when you feel the fear of failure. Okay, I’ve given you a few tools that you can sort of play with in use. Don’t fail ahead of time. Don’t just give up and walk the other way. I pick have this picture of like walking towards the butterflies walk to them. Because usually what’s on the other side? It’s amazing. It’s epic. It’s way better than we could have even thought. So, I had this quote come to my mind as I was thinking about this podcast. And you know, this was just kind of a fun kind of podcast to record right before Halloween, because many of us this time of year especially, go out seeking fear. We not me, again, I think I mentioned this earlier, like, I don’t like the feeling of terror, but many people do and will over the weekend, and on Monday, they will seek out terror, they will go to the haunted corn mazes, they will watch the scary movies. That’s not really my speed, my speed is more like the Haunted Mansion at Disney Land and Disney World. But fear can be fun, and it is fun, especially around Halloween. But fear can be really, really fun. When we’re willing to walk towards it, go through it, take it for the ride along with us and see what’s on the other side. So this quote came up, kind of came to my mind. And it is Marianne Williamson. And it’s in her book, a return to love reflections on the principles of A Course in Miracles, which is another book. So I think this book is kind of her reflections on that book. But I loved this so much. And so it’s really a long quote, but I want to share it with you because there’s so much good here and how fear can be fun. All right. So she says, Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous. Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. You’re playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine. She says as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us. It’s an every one. And as we let our own light shine, she says we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear. Our presence automatically liberates others. Isn’t that so? Good? You guys. So that’s my challenge for you. That’s what I want you to start thinking about is, are you willing to fail? Are you willing to feel the fear of rejection? Are you willing to move through the fear to see fear not as a red stoplight, but as a go as a green light go? Are you willing to walk towards the butterflies knowing that that fear might actually be more about the fact that you are brilliant and powerful beyond measure. So go towards that, go towards what is just wildly awesome, and amazing. On the other side of fear, let’s all be willing to go feel the fear you guys. I hope you have an amazing week. Happy Halloween, and we will talk to you next time.

24:05 Serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints can present a unique set of challenges. And many of those challenges you might not even see coming. So you’re gonna want a unique set of solutions. It’s easier than you think to overcome worry and anxiety serve the successful mission you’ve always dreamed up and navigate your post mission experience with confidence. That is why I created some amazing free goodies that I’m sharing in my show notes. Maybe you’ll want to grab the free training for preparing missionaries, my video course for RMS or maybe you and I should hop on a free strategy call. If you’re ready to take your preparedness to serve or your preparedness to come home to the next level. Then go grab one of those freebies. And in the meantime, no matter which part of the mission experience you are involved in. Just know that Jenny, the LDS mission coach is thinking about you every single day