228 : Discover your Fear Fantasy

The Corporate Yogi Podcast

Intro Teaser

Today I want to tell you about Kate and her Fear Fantasy. She was an IC at a large mortgage company, had been there for years, she worked hard, harder than her colleagues and at most times harder than her boss. And every year when it was time for her performance conversation, she would pump herself up to have a conversation with her boss. She knew she deserved the promotion, BUT she was consumed by the fear, potential rejection and judgment she thought her boss would have waiting for her if she brought it up. This perceived fear consumed her and held her back from getting what she truly deserved. Welcome to Kate’s Fear Fantasy.

INTRO:

Hey, thanks for tuning in to the Corporate Yogi podcast, I’m your host Julie Zuzek. This pod is YOUR dedicated time for growth, developing practical tools to use with your team and other relationships and to learning deeply about who you are and what makes you tick! Because you are a brilliant and powerful being and I want you to invest more time reflecting on WHO are being, not just WHAT you are doing. Doing is awesome, but BEING, well that is where the magic happens and what makes you truly feel fulfilled. You’re going to love this episode on Fear Fantasies and discovering whether or not you have one. So here’s a look at what you’re going to learn today

1 – In the first segment I’ll explain exactly what a Fear Fantasy is

2 – Then in the second segment I explain how they are so paralyzing

3 – And in the last segment I’ll share how to overcome your Fear Fantasy, so it doesn’t completely keep you stuck

So get out of your head, into your heart and let’s dive right in, shall we.

SEGMENT 1

Fear fantasies are stories we create that allow us to stay small and stay stuck. They justify us not acting and allowing our fear to be greater than our desire. I want to start by telling you a story about Kate and her Fear Fantasy about asking for a promotion. You see, Kate was in her role for years. She was an IC at a large mortgage company and had been there for years. She worked hard, so very hard, harder than her colleagues and at most times even harder than her boss. And every year when it was time for her performance conversation with her boss, she would START with the same excited thoughts running through her head. This is the year that I am ready for a promotion. I know I’m ready, I deserve it, I can do the work and I’m ready to break through to the next level. And yet every year, no matter how much she pumped herself up, she never actually went through with it and initiated the promotion with her boss. She never had the conversation with her boss about getting promoted, or if she did, it was watered down and lacklustre and she didn’t even really try. She was consumed by the fear, potential rejection and judgment she thought her boss would have waiting for her if she brought it up. This perceived fear consumed her, and she held onto it so tightly. This was her Fear Fantasy. It’s as if the disappointment of being stuck and not asking for what she wanted became more familiar and more comfortable to her, it was part of what kept her stuck. Fear fantasies are normal and more common than we think. It’s so easy to spot them in other people and call them out, but when they’re our fear fantasy, they feel real and all consuming, we don’t feel like we have any other options.

Common fear fantasies happen around promotions and career, around pitching or sharing an idea in a meeting, around asking for people to be our champion or advocate on our behalf. It boils down to advocation on our own behalf or asking someone else to advocate for us. As leaders it’s so easy and second nature for us to champion our team members, but when it comes to self-promotion, we often struggle, and haven’t always built the same muscles.

So, coming back to Kate, it took us months of coaching to excavate through her fear fantasy and start the conversation process with her boss. And that’s the thing with a Fear Fantasy, it isn’t just a one-off thought of what might happen, it’s a long range committed narrative that we create about how we are convinced things are going to play out in a negative way for us, and we’ll be rejected. Some of the scaffolding she created to hold up the story was that her boss didn’t actually believe she was ready for promotion, and that if she was put in that role she wouldn’t actually be able to handle it. Logically she knew she was ready, but as part of her story she had created so much self-doubt over the years, that the self-doubt took over and she couldn’t move forward to action. So, part of our work together was to schedule conversations with her boss and make sure those conversations happened. I urged Kate to find a mentor internally who could help her pursue this promotion. I also had her talk to other colleagues who had recently been promoted and find out what it was like in their new roles. Basically, we started to find her evidence all around her that this was possible, which would propel her to take action and chip away at her Fear Fantasy. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t an easy path, it took many conversations, but in the end Kate was successful with her promotion and has been happily in her new role for more than a year now.

This leads me to another conversation with a client and another fear fantasy where we discussed his desire to leave his current job and find a new role in a different industry that is more aligned with his core values and passions in life. How exciting to claim this vision and really be clear on what he wants and do what he is passionate about. Great, so I dive into starting to help him create an action plan, and he presents with a long list of reasons why he can’t actually dive into this dream right now, aka a fear fantasy. Some of the excuses include that people are going to laugh at him and poke fun because he doesn’t actually have experience in that new industry and he’s not actually qualified. So as much as he really wants to start working there, he’s made up a story telling himself he can’t because other people’s opinion of him, dominate his actions. And the last example I want to share of a fear fantasy is a client who is a big picture thinker and a brilliant problem solver. Every year she wants to pitch her boss and his team a resourcing solution to face the same issue that comes up. She knows the problem, sees the problem, and has run all the numbers. But every time she envisions herself as the person speaking up to fix it, she pictures everyone just laughing at her and not taking her seriously. Why would she put herself out there if no one is really going to hear her, and people will just mock her? Each of these stories are fear fantasies playing out and they’re all examples of how we hold ourselves back from reaching our full potential because we have made up a story about how a specific scenario will play out and how that will make us look. We’ll share an idea, and people will shoot it down. We’ll talk about our future career plans, and people won’t take us seriously. We’ll put ourselves out there to share our dreams, but people will just laugh at us. It’s as if we have fully scripted the entire scenario, and how it will play out for us, and we haven’t left any other wiggle room for different scenarios to happen. This is why Fear Fantasies are so dangerous. And I want to share one more fear fantasy before we wrap up this segment. And I’m going to actually contradict myself here slightly, because what I’ve been saying is that Fear Fantasies are irrational and if we name them, they won’t come true. Well, I would be wrong if I said they never come true. Sometimes they do come true, and this is an example of when one of MY fear fantasties came true. When I left my last full time gig 12 years ago I created a fear fantasy that my old colleagues making fun of me for starting my own business and becoming a coach. I had no experience, I only had marketing expertise, and I was worried they would make fun of me for that. And guess what? They did. They did make fun of me. And guess what else? I survived. This played out about 2 years in, and one of them revealed to me that they often watch what I post on LinkedIn and make fun of what I’m doing. Full stop. That is the end of the story. It shows more about how small minded they are, and petty, and the fact that they told me to my face probably means there’s a little bit of jealousy there. So to wrap up here, Fear Fantasies are real, they hold a lot of power, sometimes they come true and sometimes they don’t. But we must never, ever, ever, allow them to dictate our life.

SEGMENT 2

So why are fear fantasies so dangerous? Well quite simply they put us on a very challenging one-track mind about how a scenario will play out, and they don’t give us room to see other options or for things to play out in a different way. We end up making stories about other people, how they see us and quite often this includes limitations. It also takes away our ability to wonder and play out other scenarios. Too often we get tied down in our own limitations of our mind, and our Fear Fantasy becomes a way for us to stay stuck in our one-track mind. We’ve created this story, we’ve told it over and over so many times in our head, we’re almost invested in it all playing out. Almost to the point, that if it didn’t go our way, we would be disappointed in it not playing out the familiar way. Yes even catastrophizing something can be a comfortable and welcome thing, because it gives us a sense of knowing and being right. Familiarity for us is a positive thing,if it is negative or if it is positive. But bottom line, Fear Fantasies must be tackled. This concept of a Fear Fantasy is very similar to Upper Limiting that Gay Hendricks talks about in his book called The Big Leap. Here’s how he sees it. He names it the Upper Limit Problem: it’s our tendency to sabotage ourselves once we exceed the artificial limit that we place on ourselves. All of us have an internal thermostat that sets an upper limit for the levels of success, love, creativity, happiness, and well-being that we allow ourselves to enjoy. Once we exceed this limit, we tell ourselves “This is too good to be true” or “I can’t possibly have it all”. We unconsciously sabotage ourselves and fall back within our self-imposed limits. Our internal thermostat sets an upper limit for the levels of success of love, creativity and happiness we allow ourselves to enjoy. Once e we exceed this limit, we unconsciously sabotage ourselves to fall back within our self-imposed limits. To understand how to tackle the upper limiting, or self sabatogue, we must understand that there are 4 underlying fears or beliefs behind it. #1 - Feeling flawed and unworthy of success #2 - Fear of disloyalty and abandonment #3 - Fear of the burdens from success, and #4 - Fear of surpassing others. Such fears are so damaging because we believe them to be true. Once you’re aware of where they come from and how they affect you, it reduces their power over you. It’s like shining a light to dispel the darkness.

Once you recognize your inner fears and self-imposed limitations, you can learn to spot when you’re “upper-limiting” yourself. Pay attention to the following ways that you might be choking off your flow of positive energy.

SEGMENT 3

How do we destroy our Fear Fantasies? Well, there are 5 Steps to Crushing your Fear Fantasy. Step 1 is to make it conscious, make it real and know that it is there. Only then can we start to take the power out of it. It’s like having an invisible enemy. If we don’t really know about our Fear Fantasy, it’s going to be pretty hard to tackle and dismantle it. Step 2 is to acknowledge that it was us that created the Fear Fantasy. Then we can have a little more compassion for ourselves in this situation, and also feel a little more empowered to destroy the Fear Fantasy. Step 3 is to imagine different outcomes or scenarios play out instead of the fear fantasy. Imagine how it is going to feel like when you do conquer your fear fantasy. What will be possible? Who will you be? Step 4 is to talk to someone who can help us reveal exactly how irrational the fear fantasy is. This could be your coach, a mentor, a colleague or a friend. So long as it is someone who is going to respect how you feel and not make you feel wrong through this process. We just want them to help get us out of our own way. Step 5 is to look for outside proof that this isn’t our destiny. Who do we know around us, either in the company or at another organization who has beat this kind of situation? What risks did they take and how were they rewarded? Before we wrap up here about Fear fantasies I want to leave you with 3 truths about about fear fantasies. #1 – the longer we hold onto them and keep them to ourselves, the stronger they become. Deep down, we know that the fantasy is ridiculous, so our Saboteurs step in here and protect it so that no one can dismantle it. The 2nd truth I mentioned earlier, sometimes Fear fantasies actually do come true – as in the case of my example of my old colleagues. I worried they were making fun of me, and they were. Did it destry me? No, I truly felt sorry for their sad little lives. And just to be crystal clear, because I consider myself a pretty classy person and not a trash talker. This incident played out with only 2 of my previous colleagues, no one else was involved. And quite frandly most of my previous colleagues were actually supportive of what I created and were proud of me. And the 3rd truth about a Fear Fantasy is that they’re reinforced by the RAS, the reticular activation system. Which means, if we work really hard to find evidence that something is true, we’re going to find it. The RAS explains why when we’re in the market to buy a white Tesla, that is literally all we can see around us is white teslas. Where your attention goes, energy flows and your thoughts literally become things. OK let’s wrap up this segment by giving you a summary of the 5 Steps to Crush your Fear Fantasy. Step 1 is to make it conscious, make it real and know that it is there. Only then can we start to take the power out of it. It’s like having an invisible enemy. If we don’t really know about our Fear Fantasy, it’s going to be pretty hard to tackle and dismantle it. Step 2 is to acknowledge that it was us that created the Fear Fantasy. Then we can have a little more compassion for ourselves in this situation, and also feel a little more empowered to destroy the Fear Fantasy. Step 3 is to imagine different outcomes or scenarios play out instead of the fear fantasy. Imagine how it is going to feel like when you do conquer your fear fantasy. What will be possible? Who will you be? Step 4 is to talk to someone who can help us reveal exactly how irrational the fear fantasy is. This could be your coach, a mentor, a colleague or a friend. So long as it is someone who is going to respect how you feel and not make you feel wrong through this process. We just want them to help get us out of our own way. Step 5 is to look for outside proof that this isn’t your destiny.

WRAP UP

OK it’s time to wrap up this episode on discovering your Fear Fantasy. How has this been for you? Has it been a real eye-opening episode? Have you learned a lot about the fears that have held you back? Do you feel like you’re not able to spot fear fantasies in yourself and in others now? Did my story about Kate resonate with you? Did you like hearing about my fear fantasy where 2 of my colleagues were making fun of me? As always, if you’re inspired by the content today, please share this episode with a friend, colleague or on social media. You can also subscribe to this podcast on my website at thecorporateyogi.com. If you want to book a time to chat with me directly, to discuss fear fantasies or coaching in general you can find my booking link on LinkedIn or Instagram @thecorporateyogi. And as always, remember, that any fear, especially a fear fantasy, or resistance you hold inside of you, is simply just your greatness in disguise.