بخش چهارم

take a breath. And then for me, my definition of confidence is the willingness to try.

So I feel doubtful all day long about a lot of things, and particularly right now, as you and I are sitting here, there’s a massive new venture that I’m taking on that’s totally new. It’s going to make me put myself out there in ways that I had only ever dreamt about. And it is triggering all kinds of doubt and fear for me and the way that I keep dealing with the body sensations that are getting triggered as I’m on the phone or as I get like I got an email about how I need to pick three different outfits for a video shoot next week in New York.

And I had a pit my stomach. It’s stupid. I mean, I’m capable of picking out outfits. But what it triggered is this is happening and I’m uncertain about what it’s gonna feel like and I’m uncertain about how it’s gonna turn out. And I am concerned about whether or not I’ll get rejected by viewers. And I’m uncertain about and fearful about whether or not I will get rejected by my friends that hear about what I’m doing. And I’m uncertain about whether or not the people I’m working with are going to approve of the three shirts.

And are these the right through?

I’d like. It’s ridiculous. Yeah, but it’s real for me. Yeah. And the things that are triggering me are different than the things that trigger you, but the fears that it triggers, the fear of being rejected and the fear of losing control are the exact same for all of us. And the way that it feels in my body, it’s the exact same as it feels for you. My stomach gets tight, my chest starts to race. My neck gets a rash on it.

My hands get clammy. I’ll start to sweat a little bit if I have to talk through it.

I start crying or I get a lump in my throat. It’s the exact same. Yeah, because it is a survival response, because we’re dealing with fear. So I do the exact same thing that you’re doing, which is I’m going to recognize it. I’m gonna turn the engine off, you know, I’m going to wiggle down into the chair. Like, I kind of wiggle my feet to feel my my feet on the ground to remind myself, okay.

Don’t let the wave go up to your head and have your thoughts hijack you into outer self-doubt, space, fear, not go going there. Yeah, we’re going to stand the ground. And I’m gonna just be like, you know what I often say fucking. Because this shit can be so heavy that I find kind of giving myself a little bit of a. Come on now.

Yeah. Three different insurance and try like, just just move it down the field. Yeah. Yeah. And it works. And I do it all day long because there are always going to be things that trigger me. And you need to start practicing this now, because when you get into business and you launch what you’re going to launch, which you should and you will. The irony is, right before you make the leap, you’re going to feel so out of control because you’re stepping into a new routine and you’re responsible for driving something forward.

And it’s a very different energy than showing up at a job and collecting a paycheck and knowing what’s expected of you and knowing what the routine of the day is. Running your own thing requires you to create those rules and structures for yourself. The irony is, right before you leap, you feel insanely out of control. The second that you start, you will never feel more in control in your entire life. Because you’re in control of everything. Yeah.

And the key attribute that all entrepreneurs have that succeed is we all have a growth mindset. Oh, fuck. But you can change it. You can change it like I’m so happy that you’re laughing because the fix versus growth mindset, it is so well researched. Yeah. And all that a growth mindset is is reminding yourself over and over and over again that it’s about trying. That it’s about effort. And for you, in addition to taking on this physical practice of recognizing fear, rising in your body, turning engine off, settling into your chair and then being like Phuket or whatever your version of it is.

Oh, I like that.

That’s your, isn’t it. Yeah. I want you to hear what I think this is stupid, but it’s going to work. I’ll do anything. Well, no. Not anything good.

I want you to do something. I want you to take on a practice journaling. OK. Where every night before you go to bed or every morning when you wake up. But I think it should be every night before you go to bed. I want you to write down. One thing, if you can think of more, great, but your assignment is every night one thing I want you to write down, one thing that you did today that you’re proud of.

I want you to praise your own effort. I’m really proud of myself for sending that e-mail to so-and-so and doing the work. I’m really proud of myself for putting in the effort and re contacting that designer. I’m really proud of myself for spending two hours today looking at Pinterest boards to try to get inspiration for my dresses. I’m really proud of myself for working on the financial calculations today for my runway, for how long I can work on this before I’ve got to generate income.

I’m really proud of myself for watching old episodes of Shark Tank and doing the work too, because I want you to get into a new habit of instead of beating yourself up in your brain for the stuff you’re not doing and where you aren’t, are recognizing, calling out and acknowledging yourself for the effort that you’re putting in. And as you start to work with people and you start to build a team of interns and you build a group of people that are around you, whether it’s agency support or designers you’re working with.

I want you to build a habit as a businesswoman of praising effort and the people around you. Okay. How do you feel? I feel calm and light. Definitely better than I did before. And also optimistic about the changes that I think I can make you look later. Yeah. What do you think is going to be different going forward?

I think my life is going to be happier and not so much happier one. But I’m hopeful that it will be more of a even happiness that I’m able to know that, OK. Not to be in control all the time and to really change my mindset. In that it’s just OK to try and it’s OK to be. You know, it’s more than OK, you. You’re awesome. And I cannot wait to see your launch. Mother of the dress.

I absolutely love how that coaching session ended, because you can hear the shift in her voice. She seems like she’s in control. She has the tools that she needs. And I cannot wait to see where she ends up. The interesting thing about our conversation is I can’t help but reflect on how incredible it is that one grade on a paper so long ago can make you feel out of control and like a failure decades later. There so many important takeaways from this coaching session with Heather, and I’m going to talk about the major ones now.

If you’re somebody who is incredibly hard on yourself, these takeaways are going to help you immensely if you struggle with perfectionism, literally. Perfectionism is like being a control freak because you’re triggered by fear. And we’re gonna take care of that today. Now, I’m going to talk about the major takeaways from Heather’s session. Now, if you’re somebody who’s incredibly hard on yourself or if you struggle with perfectionism or you’re paralyzed by the fear of failure. These takeaways are going to be extraordinarily helpful to you.

You can start to apply them immediately and they will definitely be game changers. The first step that I want to talk about is that in order to gain control, you must follow your fear. Now, Heather was paralyzed by the fear of failure. What you need to ask yourself is, what are you afraid of? So what am I afraid of? And then ask herself, what do I do when I’m afraid? Now, Heather was afraid to fail.

And what did she do? Well, in any situation where she was afraid that she might fail or get rejected or not know the answer. She literally goes into perfectionism mode. She never puts herself in a position where she might fail or might feel uncomfortable. She waits until she thinks it’s perfect, which essentially means never. And by doing this, by being a perfectionist, she keeps faith control by never, ever, ever putting herself in a position where she’s going to fail.

She focuses on being perfect and that way she doesn’t even have to try. And this started when she was little. You’ll probably remember the story, but just in case you don’t. Here she is describing that first moment of failure. I remember the first time when I was in third grade, I got a 93 on a test. I’m like, oh my God, I’m so screwed up.

I started shaking and because I got to 93, not 100, and my teacher had to, like, take me into the hallway and help me calm down and say it’s always been an issue for me to be perfect.

Yeah. And, you know, here’s the thing about it, it has always been an issue and she’s been doing it so long in response to any situation where she feels afraid that now she’s trapped by it. And so what does she do? Well, just like Dan needed to slow down his busyness. The secret to taking control for Heather and for you is you got to slow down and you’ve got to go and follow that fear that is in your body.

And what I want to do right now is I want to teach you how to be smarter and better equipped to coach yourself through situations where the lack of control and fear that you’re feeling is triggering you to cry or triggering you to freeze or triggering you to feel a pit in your stomach. Because here’s the thing. If you don’t catch the triggers in your body, you will never redirect your mind, ever. It all starts in your body. The second thing that I want to share with you is that the secret to mind control is body awareness.

Feeling out of control begins with your body, not with your mind. You see, fear triggers a physical response in you. The moment you feel exposed and safe, judged out of control, whatever, your body will go on edge. And here’s something really interesting.

Your body reacts to fear and stress before your mind even recognizes that there is a fear or something to be stressed about. And knowing this, that your body reacts first and that the secret to gaining control is through body awareness. This is critical. I want to explain a little bit of research so that you really embrace this idea that the secret to mind control, the secret to getting control of your life starts with following your fear and how it shows up in your body.

You see, there’s this neurologist, an author by the name of Antonio Damasio. And he’s done some incredible research. He’s found that our bodies are designed to sense things around you. And they send signals to you about safety or threats. And your body’s always communicating with you even before your mind reacts to any perceived threats. There was this one study that he did where every single person in the study was given four decks of special cards and with each card the player either won or lost money.

The subjects in the research project were told to turn over the cards one by one from any of the four decks. And what they didn’t know was that the decks were rigged. Two of the decks had higher payouts, but way more severe penalties. And choosing these decks eventually resulted in losses for the participant. The two other decks and lower payouts, but a much greater chance of coming out ahead. So the subjects ended up ahead by choosing from these decks.

On average, it took most participants about 50 to 80 cards to figure out which decks had the greater chance of coming out ahead. Now, here’s where it gets really interesting and why it relates to you. DiMassimo had attached electrodes to Subjects’ Palms and measured the electrical conductance of their skin. I can’t even say that damn word, but it means that he did some sort of research. So, you know, here they are all wired up. And what he found is fascinating.

Okay. What he found is that after drawing only ten cards, their bodies understood which decks were the most advantageous to draw from. And their bodies actually showed signs of nervousness whenever they were about to draw from one of the negative decks. Those signs showed up as increased levels of body electrical activity. So what does this mean?

It means he proved with scientific evidence that bodies figured out what was happening with the decks of cards. Way quicker than the conscious brain did. The body knew 10 cards in it took the brain 50 to 80 cards to figure it out. So why am I getting all excited about some project related to cards? Let me tell you why. Because it proves that this all starts in your body, that when you perceive that things are about to be out of control, when you perceive that you’re about to face rejection, when you perceive that something’s about to fail, your body responds before your mind even has a clue about what’s going on.

You see, most of us wait until our thoughts spiral to try to start and commerce selves. But by paying attention to your body, you can catch it right away. So I want to train you to notice when it happens in your body and to stop it right in its tracks there before your thoughts start to go crazy. That’s when the moment of choice comes, because if you let the feelings stay in your body, your brain will be triggered and now you’ll be trapped.

If you want to get control, we got to get you to read the signals in your body to quiet those signals and to take control. Here’s also why this is important. And here’s more research. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist out of Harvard Medical School. I don’t even know what a neuro imad is. Natoma’s days. I can’t even say it doesn’t matter. I mean, she’s very smart. And her work includes something that she calls the 90 second emotional rule.

Now, I like this because it’s sort of like the five second rule. And it actually relates to the five second rule. But let me explain the 90 second emotional rule. It works like this when you experience negative emotions. Your brain triggers the release of the stress hormone called cortisol. And a quick dose of that makes you more alert and ready for fight or flight on edge response that might follow. But staying in a state of stress and alarm isn’t good for your body.

You know that. So cortisol is released for only about 90 seconds. If you continue to remain in a stressed out state after those first normal 90 emotional seconds, that’s a choice you’re making because cortisol is only released for 90 seconds. So you should only be initially stress for 90 seconds. Once the court is all releases over, it’s no longer an automatic response, which means you have the power to choose something different. But if you don’t catch yourself in those first 90 seconds, your body will stay on edge, stressed out, and you will keep releasing stress hormones, which is really bad for your health over the long term.

But if you can train yourself to catch yourself right away, as soon as you start to feel those sensations in your body, when you go on edge, you’re going to be much more likely to be able to calm your body down, slow things down, get control of your mind during that 90 second window. And that’s going to keep you from escalating. But if you wait until, oh, my gosh, my stomach hurts and now I’m thinking and I’m thinking about failure, I’m thinking about what I should do and I’m starting to feel afraid and you get yourself all jacked up.

Most of those 90 seconds will have passed. Your mind will kick in. And next thing you know, you’ve spiraled out of control and you are the perfectionist freak at this moment. I can relate to this because that’s what I’m like. I want to break down the four step process of how you can teach yourself to tune into your body and catch your emotions during this critical 90 second emotional window. And remember, this isn’t something my made up. This is research from Harvard Medical School.

So, you know, this stuff actually works. They tested this. The first place to start is by paying attention to the changes in your body when you go on edge and feel out of control. And why are we starting with the body? Well, it goes back to the card experiment that I just explained to you, because science has demonstrated that your body experiences fear and nervousness and stress and reads the cues around you way before your mind realizes what’s going on.

So if I can train you to pay attention to what’s going on in your body, we can slow things down and take control before your mind hijacks the situation. It’s this amazing 90 second window that we’ve got to play with. I’m about to teach you how to do it. The first place to start is by paying attention to the changes in your body when you go, quote, on edge and you start to, quote, feel out of control.

You know, I had asked Heather to describe what it feels like in her body when she’s afraid and her body goes on edge. I think when she described it, she used the words when the wave hits. Now, here’s a moment from our coaching session when she was starting to feel on edge and listen to how she describes what’s going on in her body. Because I feel it right now. OK. It’s in my chest. It does come up because when I’m when I feel like I’m getting upset, my throat tightens.

And you’re right. And then once it hits, hits my eyes, it’s like it’s all or. So what is your on edge feel like? I want you to think about that for a minute. Like when you get on edge, when your body goes into a state where it’s alert, where it perceives that maybe the person you’re talking to might be critical, where it perceives that the meeting you’re about to have might not go well.

What does that feel like when you start to feel afraid in your body? Well, for me, the body responds to stress, to nerves, to being on edge can be different based on the situation when I’m in the zone, when my energy goes on edge, because I don’t want to disappoint people. You know what I feel? I feel tightness in my throat and it feels like my throat is literally closing in on me. And I get a rash on my neck and it spreads from there.

And then I start to feel really hot in my cheeks. This would actually happen to me when I was at CNN. So I would be on television at CNN and we would start to have a conversation about a breaking news story. And then, of course, being a commentator, you’ve got a debate with people. And as the debate started to heat up, I would feel my throat closing. I would feel a rash on my neck. I would start to feel it in my cheeks.

You know, my stomach, it doesn’t get hot, but my cheeks. They sometimes turn bright red. And I hated not being able to control the reaction. I can remember half a dozen times in really sensitive breaking news stories where I was so nervous about saying the wrong thing on a subject related to the law or to race or to discrimination. I just so wanted to get it right. I wanted to be perfect that this reaction in my body would happen because I was on edge, because I was trying to be perfect instead of just listening and saying exactly what came to mind.

And I remember a number of times where I literally left the set at CNN and I walked straight to the woman’s bathroom to see how bright my face was because I thought, oh my God, I am looking like a tomato on television right now because my cheeks are elf wango. I mean, they’re like literally burning balls of hotness on my face. And interestingly, I never had a full on tomato face. And maybe that’s thanks to the airbrushed pancake makeup that we wear when you’re on high definition television.

But my cheeks were always flush and I usually had some sort of streaks on my neck. So that physical reaction is real. Now, let’s compare and contrast that to a different time in my life where I’ve felt that fear and on edge feeling in my body. That’s times in my life when I would wake up in the morning and I would be anxious about what the day had in front of me. Now, I wouldn’t wake up and have a tight throat or bright red cheeks, but I would wake up and my chest would be tight.

You know, I used to have these recurring dreams where I was unable to speak. This is like a weird thing to share with you, but it’s really true. I haven’t had this dream in a long time. I hope it doesn’t come back because it used to freak me out. I used to have a recurring dream. And I think that this is part of the body awareness thing, too, where I would be in my dream talking to somebody and all of a sudden I would have a piece of bubblegum in my mouth and I would reach into my mouth to try to pull the bubblegum out of my mouth so I could continue the conversation.

And no joke, I would pull it out and pull it out and pull it out and pull it out and pull it out and pull it on blood.

And it was like that trick that magicians used to do with a scarf where they have one scarf that they pull through their hand. And next thing you know, the thing is like 20 feet long and you’re thinking, where the hell did that scarf come from? I would have this dream where I would be an intense conversations and I would have gum in my mouth. And it was a piece of gum that was like 20 feet long and I just could not pull it out of my mouth.

And I think that it had to do with moments during the day where I felt like I couldn’t say what I needed to say, that my own body was on edge about getting the words out. And the dream was the way that I was working it out subconsciously. And that’s a total aside. I’m not even sure I shared it to you, but probably because you can relate to moments or dreams that you’ve had where your body is trying to tell you something.

Going back to those moments where I would wake up with tightness in my chest, I think that it had to do with the fact that whenever I wake up in the morning and I would have anxiety for me, there’s a heaviness about what I have to face and that’s what the weight on the chest is. And so that’s why I would wake up with this feeling of tightness in my chest. The pressure of it all.

You see, the body is holding on to things. The body is trying to send you signals. And, you know, I don’t know what you’re on edge feels like. Maybe you feel like whether you feel at your throat, maybe you feel tightness in your heart. Maybe your stomach starts to hurt. Maybe your hands tremble. Maybe your eyes start to tear up.

I can always tell when I meet somebody at an event or in a book line when they’re triggered by what I’m saying. And here’s how I know. If you pay attention to somebodies body, you can see them shift from being present to being on edge. And what I notice about people is either their hands start to shake or their face turns red like mine used to, or their cheeks and lips kind of quiver a little bit. But the telltale sign is when somebodies eyes just ever so slightly blink once or twice and start to tear up.

That’s when, you know, there is an emotional response that is heading from the body right up to the brain. And normally what happens when somebody tears up is something is being triggered in their body around fear. And now that body sensation is traveling from the body up to the brain to say, shut up, don’t talk about this. Which is why I always say, what is it that’s upsetting you? And then they start to think because the fear is like, don’t talk about this, and I say it’s OK.

It’s just you and me say it. But it takes two prompts because that’s how fast the body will shut you down and help you try to quiet the fear by staying calm. So, you know, if you’ve been tuning into this, you may already be aware of the way that your body talks to you. But what I want you to do is for the rest of today and this week, just pay attention, pay attention when something in your life makes you uncomfortable or straight up scares you.

And notice, how does it show up in your body? And here’s one more thing as you start to pay attention this week to moments where you feel on edge and you’re like, oh, well, my stomach is turning. Oh, my armpits are sweating. Wow. My throat’s tight, huh? My heart’s racing. Something weird is going on. I don’t want you to freak out. It’s a learning moment. I’m teaching you to read a new language, the language of your body.

I want you to pay close attention to all the physical changes that happen because there is power in learning how to do this. And if you’re like me, you may find that in different situations where different fears are triggered. You may have totally different changes in your body. That’s totally cool. So after you kind of go on this little safari of investigating and looking out for the way your body changes, I want you to observe how the changes in your body happen before your mind catches up.

This step of the awareness sounds simple, but it involves you starting to really slow down and tune into something that normally you ignore because there’s a gap. Remember, we’ve got the 90 second emotional rule from Harvard Medical School that cortisol is going to be in your body for about 90 seconds. That’s why your body’s starting to get agitated in that 90 second window. That’s when we’ve got a chance to take control, because that’s just as long as the cortisol is in your body.

When you feel out of control this week or under stress. Pay attention to the exact moment the physical changes start. And then notice the moment your brain starts to spiral. There’s a gap and you’re going to see it. As you become aware of this gap, you’re going to become more in tune with how important it is to pay attention to it, because what we’re gonna teach you to do is to calm your body. Within that 90 second window, see the old you reacted to the physical sensations.

Oh, my stomach’s upset. My hands are clammy. My throat is tight. My cheeks are fireballs. Oh, my gosh. By letting them wig you out and then your thoughts come along and boom, now you’re spiraling out of control. The new you realizes that feeling triggered doesn’t have to lead to a freak out. It doesn’t have to lead to spiraling thoughts. It’s simply your body reacting to a moment of fear or to a situation that feels a little uncomfortable.

But it doesn’t have to define who you are. And in fact, what we know based on the 90 second emotional rule is that there’s only a 90 second window where your body is designed to freak out after that 90 second window. It’s on you. You’re making a choice based on the thoughts that you’re thinking to stay freaked out.

So as soon as you feel changes physically, I want you to label them. I want you to use a tool that will help you take control of your body’s stress response. If you activate something called the vagus nerve, you can literally turn off your fight or flight stress response. So here are some things that you can do that work that are based on science, that work within that 90 second window that will help you disappear, the stress in your body and get control before your brain checks in and spirals you out of control.

First of all, you’ve got to slow it down. No, we follow the fear. We slow down. You can breathe slowly and you can count to 90. That’s it. You can count backwards from 90. That’s a kind of simple, huh? If you can, you can breathe slowly and get up and walk around. You can do 90 seconds of exercise, like pop down into a plank. I don’t know what kind of psycho would like to do that, but that’s according to the research.

It actually works or this is a great one. You can hug somebody for 90 seconds. Make it somebody you know, because that’s a long, awkward hug.

OK, but if you pay attention to your body, you slow things down. You recognize that your body’s getting all jacked up and agitated or getting on edge. You get the fireball cheeks like I do whatever. Tightness in the chest. You get 90 seconds. Let’s use it. Let’s take control. Count backwards to to count up to nine to get up and walk around a 90. Slow down your breathing. You’re in control. Another thing you can do if you’re at work, ground your feet on the ground, feel your body in your chair and take deep breaths as you pay attention to relaxing your muscles.

I told Heather to wiggle down, like shimmy down in her chair. You can do this, too, because getting physical and getting present to the physical seat that you’re in will ground you in the moment instead of letting your brain hijack you in that 90 second window. And the longer and slower you can make your breaths, the more effective you will be at stopping the stress response in its tracks. This isn’t stuff I made up. This is science.

And now that you understand the science, go a little deeper. The stuff that you feel in your body, the tears, the tension, you just learned how to settle it. So now let’s take a look and see where it came from, because believe it or not, this is where it gets cool, in my opinion. All of this stuff that happens in your body, it’s all just stored memories of fear and times when you felt out of control when you were little.

It’s just a pattern. That’s it. Your body learns these things through life experience. That’s why you do this. Your body remembers stuff. And this is a pattern that was created years ago and by the way, so was your reaction to the fear. The things that you do, that kind of quiet the fear and take control in the moment, fate, control is what I call it. You did that when you’re little. That’s why you’re doing it now.

I can’t stress enough how much the fear you face as an adult is just a memory from childhood. That’s all that it is. And we’re going to start by talking about how these moments, the things that your body remembers that lead to lasting issues later in your life. They don’t have to stem from trauma. The next takeaway takeaway number three is that the little moments can have a lifetime impact. And I want to draw a very important distinction here.

You know, that trauma has a lasting impact. Trauma is when something bad happens to you or is done to you. Trauma makes an indelible mark because your brain secretes stress hormones that lock the memory even stronger than other types of memories. And the hippocampus, your brain remembers trauma this way in order to attempt to never, ever put you in that situation again. It’s like a super memory that gets stored in a totally different way in your brain than just the day to day memories.

Now we’re going to be talking more about trauma in some of the other sessions that you’re going to hear. But right now, I want to point to something that’s really important. If I’m being honest with you, which I try to always be, if you think about Heather’s story and I know Heather is going to listen to this, I don’t mean to insult you, Heather, but there’s nothing really traumatic that happened. I mean, it may have felt traumatic, but if we were to define trauma on a scale failing a test and having parents that were pretty uptight, it doesn’t seem so traumatic.

Right? I mean, it’s easy to be Juggy when you hear somebody else’s story. And I’m being dramatic about this because I think you are doing this to yourself, that you don’t realize the small moments from your childhood that, upon reflection, seem insignificant. But when we look at the way your body remembers it, it was actually terrifying. It was traumatic for your body. So for many of you listening, you know, you haven’t been abused.

You haven’t been seriously harmed in a way that caused trauma. And for that reason, you may be wondering, why would you still have patterns that hold you back if you had a relatively benign or normal childhood? Well, here’s the thing. You don’t have to experience trauma to be paralyzed by fear. You don’t. Every single one of us has had moments that, looking back, seemed like the littlest, most insignificant moment that actually had a huge impact on your life.

And in these moments, we felt feelings that we didn’t like feeling. We felt out of control because of evolution.

Your brain does not like feeling negative emotions. And when you are young. Every, quote, failure can feel like it’s life or death. So in order to protect yourself, you developed coping mechanisms so that you hopefully wouldn’t have to feel so out of control again.

As I explained some examples I bet you’ll be able to see in your own life where you have seemingly small events from childhood that created patterns that you can now see today. And you also say that there’s nothing to smaller, insignificant. Anything can create a lasting impact. So stop thinking only about the big things that happen to you. It’s the small stuff that can create a lasting impact. Just think about Heather. It’s not the big stuff. It was a childhood of living in a household where her parents had such high standards that she felt on edge and she was scared of disappointing them.

Here she is describing what it was like. It was never a light in my in my family. It was always stressful and it still is that way. I think there’s just always this level of expectation of perfection and achievement. And it didn’t even need to be said. It was just always there.

Did that come from your dad or from your mom? From both of them. You see your body. It remembers what it was like to live in that household as a kid. It remembers being on edge all the time and it doesn’t want to feel that way. So you start trying to quiet the fear and avoid the situation. And in her case, be perfect. Just be perfect. And your parents will be happy. Just be perfect and. And maybe it won’t be so serious.

Just be perfect. This is where it developed. It wasn’t even one instance. It was what it was like to grow up in that household. And her body remembers. Now, looking back, Heather can now see many moments when perfectionism became her undoing. You know, she wanted to go to business school because she wouldn’t get a perfect score. She didn’t even study. So that way, when she failed, she knew she hadn’t given her best effort.

She did it when, in her words, she half assed business school and picked the program that, you know, was less selective. She did it when she stopped working on her business plan and stopped pursuing her business because she wasn’t sure if the idea would be a big success. And all of these patterns stem back from the belief that she needed to be perfect. Perfection was an eight year old’s idea of assuming control. And what you now know is that it’s a form of fake control.

I have a instance from when I was a kid, we had to take language in my elementary school and I took French because I was told it was easier than German, which I’m sure that it is. And my parents were angry at me, by the way, because my maiden name is Schneeberger. So they felt that I should be learning German, but that’s a whole nother story. So I took French and I absolutely hated it. Absolutely hated it.

And here’s the thing. I didn’t know at the time that I had mild dyslexia. It is nearly impossible to learn a foreign language once you’re past a certain age when you have dyslexia. It’s hard enough for me to read and speak and write English for crying out loud. So imagine how difficult it was for me to conjugate a verb as a fifth grader with dyslexia. I remember being called on in class and having to read a sentence out loud. And I was tragic, just absolutely tragic.

The worst possible French pronunciation in the world. I’m so traumatized by this event that I even remember the French name that I had because everybody had to have a French name in the class and mine was shown tall.

So I got called on. Why would you need a French name? I don’t understand this, but my name was Sean Tall and Sean Tall got called on to read the sentence and I blew it. Like, I panic when I have to read a sentence in English out loud. So reading a sentence in front of all of my peers in the fifth grade and French was just torture. And I botched it and everybody giggled because it was a very straightforward sentence.

And then the teacher made me read it again, picking apart every word, explaining that this was how not to say these words. I was the example of how not to do something. And you know what’s interesting is that I hated speaking in class ever since. I think it’s one of the reasons why my face would probably turn bright red in any other class. So like any other class that I would be in. This happened all the way through law school.

Those cheeks on fire did not start at CNN. This started in French class when I was in fifth grade. And the fear that I was going to be ridiculed. The fear that I was going to say something stupid. The fear that I was going to say it wrong. I still have a very, very difficult time pronouncing people’s names because there’s a moment right before I’m about to pronounce them where my body remembers being called on in French class and saying something wrong.

And so I have this pause where I’m about to read somebodies name. And if I don’t know for certain how to say it, Lytvyn, Levine, Le Vine, I don’t know. I will panic in that moment. My cheeks will flame up and I will mispronounce it because I will let fear take over. It happens like that. And, you know, the irony is that I’m now a speaker for a living. The irony is that I saw on television for four years because I got control of it.

But my body still remembers it. My body remembers the sensation that oh, moment. I’m about to say this wrong and something bad’s about to happen. Take a deep breath. Slow down. And you’ll be OK. I would literally have moments like that 10 times a day in elementary school. I mean, everybody’s got a moment like that. My business partner also has a story, Mandy. She’s amazing. She was told to be quiet during naptime in preschool.

I can’t imagine why. I just can’t. I mean, if you know Mandy, you’ll realize that she is the last person to be quiet during nap time. But she felt embarrassed and she didn’t want to feel that way again. So she started being quiet in class and didn’t speak up, apprehensive to speak up. And that played out into the future. And so you’re not a weirdo if you have a moment like this. I want you to uncover the little moments.

I want you to uncover the thing that you are afraid of. I want you to uncover follow the fear. What did you do when you felt afraid? Mandy, shut up. I literally developed anxiety about pronouncing anybody’s name because of French class. We do something to cope. So what small moments, especially from the ages of five to 10, stand out in your mind? What happened and what did you feel as a result? And specifically what feelings came up?

I want you to realize that no moment is too small because your body remembers. Now, the second thing you’ve got to realize is that you created a pattern to avoid this feeling, not raising my hand in class, not talking in class was Mandi’s with Heather. It was I just got to be perfect. I just got to be perfect. And you did it because it gave you a fake sense of control. Now, in order to not feel this way again, you’re going to have to figure out what is your form of trying to gain control.

Do you have a habit of quitting? Do you stop trying? Did you become a chameleon so you don’t stand out? Maybe started lying in order to cope. Maybe you became a class clown.

Maybe you became so afraid of feedback that you avoid it like the plague. Maybe you’re the kind of person who became really angry or you started playing the victim. These are all just patterns, honestly. It’s things that you do to deal with the fear that you’re feeling. And then the third thing that I want you to do. You’ve gone into your body, you’ve thought about moments where this began, you thought about the way that you gain fate, control.

And now I want you to start to pay attention to how this pattern exists in your life. Today, you have your own childhood and the way it still sits inside you and influences your life as an adult. And one way to take ownership is by becoming more aware of your emotions and patterns as you express them and especially as you feel them. So this week, I want you to start noticing every time you play out the behavior pattern that stems from that, quote, little thing in your childhood, where you silent.

Where are you clowning around? Where are you lying? Where are you trying to be perfect? And what’s interesting is the more that you pay attention to this, the more you’re going to master it and the easier it becomes to notice how this pattern exists in your life. Today. And then finally, and this comes from all of the science around how you update a habit, because lying is a habit. Perfectionism is a habit. Feeling anxious as a habit, not talking in class is a habit.

Avoiding conflict is a habit. It’s a habit you developed to cope with fear. That’s all that it is. And so what we want to do is we want to substitute a different pattern for the one that you have now, something that empowers you. And then we’re going to create a plan for you to do it. So, for example, if you’re like Mandy and the moment of Be Quiet started your habit of staying silent. I want you to plan in advance when you feel yourself staying silent.

You feel your throat tightening. You feel your chest tightening. And you start playing back into your old pattern. I want you to push yourself to speak up. Yes. You’re going to be afraid. Yes. Your cheeks might go fire engine red like mine do. Yes. You’re going to try to resist that. But want action? Just one member, one brick at a time. You’re going to substitute the behavior. And here’s what’s cool each time you do it.

It gets easier. And as you take action and you see yourself updating these patterns, you’re going to gain control. But it all starts inside your body. And remember, even if your childhood wasn’t traumatic, mine wasn’t traumatic, Heathers wasn’t traumatic. You can still become paralyzed with fear based on things that happen to you as a kid. But now that you know the right tools, it’s easy to get yourself on a path toward new habits. Now, in this next takeaway, we’re going to dive even deeper into the idea that things that happen to you when you were young still affect you today.

And we’re going to look back through the lens of how it affects your self talk. Now, Heather is paralyzed by the fear of failure, and she tries to control that a number of ways. Perfectionism, not trying. And the doozy of beating herself up. In this takeaway, I want to talk to you about how you may be overly critical of yourself as a way to stay in control. Let me unpack this for you. So Heather’s really hard on herself, and you may be hard on yourself, too, when you’re hard on yourself.

It’s a coping mechanism. And what you’re doing is you’re trying to attempt to control how hurt you are by turning to self criticism as a way to stay safe from what you perceive others will find fault in. It’s almost like punching yourself. So somebody else doesn’t punch you. Let me explain. If you were criticized by your mom or your dad, it really hurts. So in order to protect yourself from feeling that hurt, you start modeling that same criticizing behavior.

It’s almost like you’re learning how to brace for impact that way. If you’ve been criticizing yourself when somebody else says something nasty to you, it doesn’t matter because you’re already saying it to yourself. They can’t say anything worse than you already feel. In a warped way, it’s how you exert fake control over that situation. Now you’re in control of the hurt that you feel in a weird way. It’s also how you stay safe. You’re no longer on edge because you’re criticizing your self all day long.

There’s no need to be worried about when it’s coming because it never stops. You’re doing it to yourself over and over and over again. And what happens to any behavior pattern that you repeat? It becomes a pattern. So even when you’re no longer hearing those criticisms from the outside world, you’re still criticizing yourself because it’s become a habit. Let me explain this in the context of Heather’s story. Here she is in the moment during our coaching session where she’s describing how hard she is on herself.

People are like how they’re such a bitch. She. She’s so hard on other people because like, if you would. We. No.

What is it? What is it like to be you? It’s hard, but I know that I work hard on myself like I’m my worst enemy. I know. I know that. I have no one to blame but me. Well, blaming you isn’t working. Yeah. There’s really only one thing that works with this kind of pattern, and that’s a heck of a lot of empathy for yourself. What Heather needs to realize is that she wasn’t always her own worst enemy.

It was a pattern she developed to protect herself from feeling hurt. She felt pressure from her family to be successful, in her words. It was, quote, never like my family. They expected achievement and that put her on edge. And in order to avoid feeling like a failure to her parents, who expected her to be successful and to avoid getting criticized by her mom, Heather started criticizing herself. She was always on edge. So by being hard on herself, she protected herself from her mother’s criticism.

I know it sounds odd, but you can’t believe how common this is. She’s being hard on herself. So her mother wouldn’t be hard on her in order to stay safe. She was constantly looking for what was about to go wrong with her parents. That’s how she maintained control, because she could spot it. She could feel it before it happened. And that takes away the uncertainty. But the problem is, it leaves her on edge. She learned how to be hard on herself from her mom.

And so it’s this pattern that feels familiar, which is why she keeps repeating it. And in a weird way, it gives her control because it’s familiar. But here’s the problem. Even though Heather’s 30 and her mom isn’t the one pushing achievement on her, Heather’s doing it to herself. Beating herself up is a mental pattern that she has to change because it permeates all of her life. It’s like wearing a pair of sunglasses that color everything, Amber.

And it’s all you can see. If you have a negative mindset like Heather does, all you’re going to see is negative. She only sees what’s wrong. She constantly beats herself up. She gets an email at work and she gets a pit in her stomach. She literally views the world through a lens. And that lens is really dark.

And that’s a pattern when you have that kind of mindset, one that’s tied to safety. It’s so important to get rid of it because you tend to put a negative lens on everything. So how do you get rid of this deep-rooted pattern of self-criticism? Well, first, the good news. You can. You can. And it’s pretty straightforward. The first takeaway, when you increase self compassion, you boost your feelings of self-worth and you reduce fear and anxiety.

So the next time you have a negative thought about something you messed up or you didn’t achieve or you didn’t do right, or you immediately start thinking, oh, I suck her, I’m never good enough for us, never works out whatever it is that the darkness that puts you on edge. I want you to respond to your own garbage in your head with a statement of forgiveness. Hey, you tried your best. It’s OK that you messed up.

Hey, I forgive you, Mel, for saying that. For doing that. You know, I was deeply hurt when I said that. I understand why I did it. I forgive myself for it. No one’s perfect. It’s normal to make mistakes. The second thing that you can do is you can create anchor thoughts, fill up your tool box with anchor thoughts that work for you. An anchor thought is just a positive image that makes you happy or excited.

And you can call on them to cut off self-criticism. Maybe it sounds something like I’m not perfect. That’s OK. I’m learning something new every day. Or think about a moment when you did something that you were really proud. And next time you start criticizing yourself, say to yourself, what are you talking about? I do stuff that’s really cool all the time.

Remember that time that I won the race or I wrote that great proposal or helped the old lady with the groceries to the car?

Remember that time and anchor yourself down on something positive. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. Third, here’s a really obvious and simple thing to do. Please, if your negative. Do not hang out with negative people. Misery loves company. OK, and you need a different group of people. Maybe you’re not naturally a cheerleader. Maybe you weren’t raised by somebody that was really happy and positive. Maybe your mom or dad really struggled and they did the best that they could.

But you’ve become a really closed off negative person. Maybe something bad happened to you.

Surround yourself with positive people. They don’t need to be your best friends. They can be colleagues at work. They can be a neighbor.

There is somebody in your life that always makes you feel better. And guess what? Behaviors contagious, whether it’s positive or negative. So if you hang out with negative people, you’re bound to gossip. You’re bound to talk about negative stuff. If you hang out with positive people, that’s bound to rub off on you. And it’s super easy. Here’s the other thing. If you start criticizing yourself. Think of me. All right, just say what what what would Mel say to this person?

What would Mel do if you can’t talk back to the own negativity in your head? Insert my voice and I’ll do it for you. And the research also shows that when you get objective and you think about somebody else, it takes you out of the habit of talking to yourself the way that you do. So those are for super simple things. The main thing is to understand that speaking to yourself in a negative way, criticizing yourself the way that Heather does it is a habit and it’s one that you got to break.

Now, in the next takeaway, I want to talk about a really important theme from Heather’s session, and that is that your fate is not fixed. This is critical. Remember, Heather told me when she was pulled into the gifted program and was always praised for being so smart. And she grew up in a home where there is always an unspoken tension around succeeding of being smart. And I told her that she had a fixed mindset. That moment in the coaching session was lied.

So I want you to listen to the part where we first talk about this. I was pulled out of my elementary school and put into a gifted program. That sucks.

Well, it sucked for more reasons than one. And I’m going to explain the science behind it in a second. And so you go into the gifted program at where everybody’s telling you you’re gifted. And I’m with these kids, this maybe 12 set of kids from elementary school to high school that are super driven, super cutthroat. It was all about grades. After she told me about being put into the gifted program and her reaction to getting a 93 when she was in the gifted program, we jumped in to this idea of fixed versus a growth mindset.

And I explained to her how this happens. And it’s just critical that you also embrace this in your own life. When you’re praised for being smart, you perceive it as a fixed and inherent personality trait, which means for Heather, getting a 93 on her test in third grade crushed her whole identity. Why? Well, the reason why is her whole identity was tied to this idea of being smart. And when you start to fail, when you think you’re smart, what you internalize is that you no longer have any smartness left.

Your whole identity crashes at eight years old. Heather believed a less than perfect grade defined her from that moment on, and it began a pattern of avoiding failure. This is so classic. And it’s what psychologist Carol Dweck have been studying for decades. It’s called a fixed mindset and a fixed mindset. People believe their skills and talents are fixed to traits. And therefore, you can’t change. Oh, I’m just a negative person. Oh, I’m just not athletic.

Oh, I just don’t like to eat healthy. Oh, I’m just not that smart. Oh, I’m just lazy. And guess what? You also believe that talent alone leads to success. And for those very few talented people. Oh, they’re just gifted me. It didn’t require as much work as you know, everybody thinks it did. And the other thing about having a fixed mindset is you do whatever you can to avoid failure because you assume that you don’t have the skills and talents to succeed.

And when you’re always trying to avoid failure, what’ll happen is your self-esteem will start to plummet. You start doubting your ability to live up to your identity of being the smart kid. You don’t even have to be in a gifted program, by the way, to struggle with this. It goes for any talent. I mean, maybe you were praised for having a natural talent in sports. Maybe you were really amazing at Pop Warner football. Whoa. And then all of a sudden, you go to junior high and you’re not running as fast as everybody else.

And then you get to the tryouts in high school and guess what happens to you? You get cut. You know what happens for the majority of people when that happens? They stop playing sports because they assume that their talent has tapped out. That’s a huge mistake, because if you had been praised for working hard, if you had been praised for your effort, instead of being told you were a great football player, you would understand the secret to doing anything, which is it’s all about the work.

So whether you’re somebody that flamed out in sports or art or maybe you were really good at music and then you screwed up at some rehearsal and then you quit. This is prime examples of a fixed mindset instead of picking back up and trying again. You decided. That’s it. I don’t have enough talent. There’s nothing more I can do here. I might as well quit the sport that I love or the instrument that I love or the acting that I love and try something else.

People with a fixed mindset are very afraid to be exposed because you believe that talent and skills are something that you have no control over. And that makes you terrified to make mistakes. So you do whatever you can to avoid failure. And this is exactly what happened to Heather. She said she had asked her way through college exams. She’s put off starting her business. She’s paralyzed by the fear of failure. She assumes she’s not smart enough. Now, the complete opposite of a fixed mindset is a growth mindset.

And this is exactly what you want. And the great news is you can teach yourself how to have a growth mindset. And it’s not that hard with a growth mindset. What you believe is that your talents and skills can grow with time and experience. No duh. Obviously. But somehow we get our heads all wrapped up and freak ourselves out and then we get off track.

But I mean, it’s so obvious. Of course, your talents and skills grow