A Reminder - This Isn’t the Time to Let Fear Win
The following blog is the script for my podcast episode of the same title. I hope you enjoy.
I’m Dana, I’m a Wellness and Mindset Consultant. We are here to learn how to revolutionize your relationship within yourself.
And how are we doing that? We are getting unstuck from grief and self-imposed misery. We’re practicing self-kindness, unlearning people pleasing and discovering what we want to do for ourselves rather than what other people want us to do for them.
Let me tell you how you can find more information about working with me and how to get on the waitlist for upcoming courses and all of the things: My website is revolution-within.com, I’m on Instagram @revolution_within31, and you can email me at dana@revolution-within.com.
Okay, let’s get into today’s topic. We’re talking about how not to let fear win, because fear is what divides us. Anyone with any level of reading comprehension can see that in our media today, it’s a convenient weapon of control…and it’s working beautifully. So let’s work on changing that, shall we?
See, when we go on social media and start doom scrolling, it’s really easy to get lost in it. I’ve been doing my best to avoid it, but as an entrepreneur it’s kind of hard to completely abandon social media. I’m building a business here. Writing a book. Started this podcast, I’ll be launching a course within the next couple of months, and in order to build an audience these days you have to be on social media in some way, shape or form.
I find it overwhelming sometimes, so I take breaks from posting. In fact, I took a break last week.
But before I get too far off track from the topic of not letting fear win, let me go into why I’ve gathered you all here today.
In this episode I’m going to explain a process that has been so helpful to me that I’m blown away and I have to share it. Like, it’s really helped me.
I’ve heard it explained in many different variations before, but this week I heard it from Amanda Frances, who is best known as “The Money Queen” - she’s an entrepreneur and business coach here in California who helps women shift their mindset around earning money in their businesses, which is something I’ve been working on for quite some time, and she’s recently become one of my mentors.
I was led to her book “Rich as Fuck” - when I say led to, I mean that energetically - I honestly no longer believe in coincidence. Too many things happen synchronistically in my life now that I’ve turned my focus inward and begun to really focus on becoming kinder to myself. The improvement in my daily life, the chaos in my mind, all of it…it’s significant. And it gets markedly better every month.
Anyway, I listened to Amanda’s book on Audible, and her energy is inspiring. Great book. She offers a lot of really great content, a free app and community that you can join… she’s amazing. I’ve taken a couple of her courses, and here’s where I’m going with this.
Time to talk a little bit about manifestation.
What is it? It’s the process of energetically attracting things to you. More specifically, it’s focusing your thoughts, actions, and beliefs toward bringing a specific desire, goal, or outcome into your personal reality. It’s the basis of The Law of Attraction.
Omg, Dana…what the hell is the Law of Attraction?
Okay, so there was this documentary film called The Secret that apparently came out in 2006 (even though my memory recalls it about five years earlier - like, I swear that whole craze happened before I met my husband in 2005, but whatever), followed by a book, and people just went nuts over it (including me). Rhonda Byrne, the documentary filmmaker and author of The Secret, pulled together a bunch of motivational speakers and writers and interviewed them about the common thread running through their lives…that being The Law of Attraction.
I think Wayne Dyer was in it, I know Lisa Nichols was in it because that’s when I first saw her and I just love her, the author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books Jack Canfield….
Anyway, this law states that basically what your pour your energy and focus into will come into your life.
So if you’re worshipping at the altar of Murphy’s Law, then that’s what your energy will attract. (Murphy’s Law states that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong” for those of you who’ve never heard of it before.)
The three segments of the Law of Attraction are: “Like attracts like,” “Nature abhors a vacuum,” and “The present is always perfect.”
1. “Like attracts like” is pretty self-explanatory, I think. What you are, you attract. If you’re insecure, you’ll attract insecurity. If you’re kind, you’ll attract kindness.
2. “Nature Abhors a Vacuum” - In a nutshell: If you remove the thing that isn’t what you want and leave space for what you do want, it’ll show up.
3. “The Present Is Always Perfect” - This means that everything that happens is supposed to happen. So you can look at something challenging that happens as a tool for learning or you can look at it as “everything sucks and I hate it here.”
This might be the first time or the thousandth time you’ve heard this, but: You are the creator of your own reality. Every blessing and every struggle you have was created by the energy you put out into the Universe.
In the Law of Attraction, it is known that what we focus our attention on grows.
Example: If from the time you wake up in the morning to the time you go to bed at night, you’re complaining about how the barista got your order wrong and the delivery guy put the package right in front of my screen door that opens out, helloooo, instead of where the sign is that I clearly have marked, right here! (Ummm, yeah, that’s me haha) and my feet hurt and my eye itches and these shoes are too tight and and and…
meaning if you’re always talking about and thinking about and focusing your attention on how much everything sucks, then guess what? Everything is going to suck.
If you walk around saying, “I’m sooo tired, OMG I’m so tired today, geeez could I be more tired?” Guess what? You’re gonna be tired.
Words matter. Language matters.
I get it. I’ve been a constant complainer, and it’s a tough habit to break.
Okay, cool cool cool, Dana. So I just have to say things like “I’m rich I’m rich I’m rich” all day long and my bank account will go from in the red to in the six figures, right?
Well. No. There’s a liiiiitttle bit more to it.
It requires a complete energetic and mindset shift.
Mindset shifts are simple. But they are definitely NOT easy. If they were then everyone would do them. Everyone could just repeat mantras for a while and then have completely different lives.
Once you’ve been able to shift your mindset, your energy naturally starts to change. When you’re able to think about something differently, eventually you feel differently about it in your body, too. It typically doesn’t happen instantly, but I suppose it can happen like that for some people.
This is all something that’s really hard to put into words, and it’s only something that you’ll understand if you’ve experienced it in some way, shape, or form in your life.
Okay, example:
Did you ever have a time when you thought you’d never get over someone? Like you’re 15 and your “first love” Jake Green kissed Amy Jones at the kegger in the woods behind Stu Reynolds barn and broke your heart and you cried and cried forever and "Wahhhhh I’ll never love again.”
*Disclaimer - Those are not real people and that’s not a real event, I made that up*
But now you’re 45, it’s 30 years later and you think back on it and laugh that you honestly thought you’d never get over him, because yeah he was cute and a good kisser but also a liar and hello, YOU WERE BOTH 15. Ah, teenage hormones. Memories…light the corners of my mind…ugh. I wouldn’t go back to those days for anything, especially now that I’m raising two teenage boys in the age of the internet haha
Back to the topic. It feels like you become a different person in a sense. Like lifetimes ago you thought you couldn’t stop being heartbroken, but you did: You have a different mindset.
Now. Here’s an energy shift example:
You thought you could never go on vacation alone even though you’ve wanted to go for years…you’ve dreamed of traveling with your own “selfish” desires being the only thing guiding you (they’re not selfish, they’re just as important a everyone else’s, by the way) but you haven’t done it because of either finances or you didn’t want to leave your kids or you didn’t want to hurt your spouse’s feelings or whatever.
But you take some courses and work toward building up your own self-esteem and not relying on external validation, which enables you to release your tendency toward constant people-pleasing, and you muster up the courage to have a conversation with your spouse about it, and to your great surprise he’s supportive.
And then you’re taking that trip and it’s everything you’ve ever dreamed it could be and more and you wondered why you doubted yourself.
And years after that trip you’ve traveled solo many times since, you look back and can’t believe you were ever a person who would have questioned taking that trip in the first place.
That’s living in a different energy.
So if we are walking around being afraid of things, if we’re terrified that we’re going to not be able to afford to feed our families because of the current state of our government, if we’re afraid that there won’t be enough of anything left because all of the food will run out because the president is going to deport all of the undocumented workers and and and—
Remember toilet paper? I mean. Come on.
Now, I’m not saying that those fears aren’t real or aren’t legitimate. It truly is a scary time. These times are unprecedented, and yes, I anticipate a whole lotta “I told you so’s” coming.
But like I said last episode…it’s always a scary time. I’m 52 years old, and I can’t think of a time in history when there wasn’t SOMETHING to be afraid of. There’s always some huge unknown thing on the horizon. But we can be terrified of it, or we can prepare for it as best as we can and focus on the feeling that we want to feel (empowered), not the one we don’t want to (fear).
So. Knowing that what we focus on grows in energy/power, and that mindset shifts aren’t easy but they are simple, here’s what I’m offering to you to think about today.
What if it were simply about deflating the balloon of the big, scary, overwhelming feelings by realizing that nothing is the ONE THING that we CAN’T GET PAST?
That there is nothing we can’t overcome?
That there is no relationship that we can’t get over?
That there is no pain we can’t heal from?
What if this obstacle was created for you to overcome to prove what a badass you are?
Our Creator, the Universe, God, whatever your terminology, didn’t put any challenge in our path to defeat us. They’re put there to teach us and to make us stronger.
You’ve gone through hard things and you’re still alive, right? “But did you die?” No, you didn’t.
Of course it doesn’t feel that way when you’re in it. When you’re in a painful time, when you’ve lost someone close to you or your job or your home, it feels terrible. It feels like it’s never going to end, like this grief or this misery or this heartache is everlasting and the well of despair is endless and aahhhhhh!!
And I’m not asking you to ignore those feelings. At all. Feel them. When they come, lean into them. Let that pain wash over you. Let out a few primal screams in your car. (That’s really cathartic, even if it’ll leave your throat scratchy for a few days. It’s worth it.) Cry until you have no tears left.
I don’t know, maybe I’m the only one who’s gotten trapped in a spiral of really painful emotions for years and years. That’s what depression is at the heart of it. It’s the pile of things not entirely dealt with, those emotions not fully felt, the ones avoided, ignored, swept under the rug because they’ve arrived at an inconvenient time. Pushed down by overeating, over drinking, overspending, overdoomscrolling. Hmmm.
But I know I’m not alone here. I know there are a lot of us out there who get caught in that deep well of agony and, often, numb out with something to make it temporarily feel less intensely agonizing. Because as I’ve talked about in previous episodes, we live in a society that doesn’t benefit from your happiness but from your productivity.
I’ll repeat that. Our society as a whole doesn’t benefit from your happiness…just your productivity. There are ways in which we were left woefully unprepared for adulthood through little to no fault of our own.
Why can’t we be both? Wouldn’t it make more sense to be both? Wouldn’t there be less violence? Or does that not matter?
Spoiler alert: It does matter. Kindness matters. Creating more love in this world absolutely matters.
But to get through those feelings, you have to practice all of this. The only way out is through.
Part One - feel them. You give yourself the space to feel them. I give my clients this exercise: Find a quiet space where you won’t be interrupted; put your phone on do not disturb. Set a timer for 10-15 minutes. This is your time to cry, record an angry diatribe into your voice recorder on your phone, or journal. Scream into your pillow, scream in your car.
It’s your time, so you get to craft it however you’d like. Listen to the saddest playlist that ever did sad. You can listen to Tool and roundhouse kick the shit out of a heavy bag in your garage. The point of this is to begin releasing stored emotions from your body.
This is a helpful exercise to practice if you experience urges to overdo “something” (fill in the blank - eat, drink, smoke, watch TV, play video games) - “over” meaning unintentionally completely zoning out on something for hours without coming up for air and then feeling guilty afterwards.
Part Two - how do you want to feel instead? One thing we tend to get wrong with grief or negative emotions in general is a lot of “make it stop” or “I wish this weren’t happening” or “I don’t want to feel like this”
Okay, so…if we get what we focus our attention on, and we keep focusing on what we don’t want, then what will we get? More of what we don’t want. And that’s the opposite of what we want.
So rather than focusing on what you DON’T want…let’s focus on what you DO want. Get very clear on the emotions that you want to feel after you’re done processing the painful ones. That’ll take us to -
Part Three - once you’ve figured out how you want to feel, practice getting into those feelings. Lean into them.
Keep in mind that this isn’t something that you’ll do once or twice. Again, and you’ll get very sick of hearing me say this, it takes practice, patience, and persistence to get that mindset shift into the energy shift.
So if you’re dealing with a breakup or a loss of some kind and it’s really painful and you just want to feel peace:
Feel the heartbreak - set your timer, do your 10 minutes
Then start figuring out and focusing on what you’d like to feel instead. Relief? Freedom from co-dependency? Peace? Joy? What do you want for yourself now? What would it feel like to have what you truly want?
Imagine yourself a year from now with this feeling, this situation behind you, you’re living your life, maybe you’re in a new relationship or you have an amazing new career or you’re doing the traveling that you didn’t do because that person or thing was holding you back. Envision the things you wanted to do but weren’t able to because whatever it is that’s causing you the pain right now wasn’t allowing it.
That’s focusing on what you DO want. Shifting from that “ahhhh, I don’t want to feel like this anymore” to “how do I want to feel?” to “Yes, this is how I want to feel”
Feel the excitement of the life you’re living…that you’re already beyond this. With practice you’ll start stepping into that feeling more and more easily until you’ll make the mindset shift, the energy shift, and voila…it’s behind you.
But again, practice. You practice your way into it. Like when I was 15 and started piano lessons, my fingers didn’t immediately start gliding out Chopin nocturnes. It’s the same thing with any of this work.
And with enough mindset shift practice, the energy shift is basically muscle memory. It’s like…you can’t get there until you’re ready for it, but when you get there you look back and you think: How was I ever not here? It becomes part of you.
You can also look at everything you go through as something that you were born with the capability to get beyond this. You’ve overcome difficult things before; what makes this any different? What makes this thing THE ONE thing that you can’t overcome? It’s not. You always get through it. You were always meant to. In fact, you’re already beyond it in some other dimension or timeline or whatever.
That’s assuming there are infinite possibilities in the Universe, as is being theorized and is not yet proven but seems to be getting closer to being proven all the time. But this episode isn’t about the multiverse theory…let’s save that for another time.
So…how do you not let fear or grief or anguish become your default setting? How do you keep it from consuming you, particularly in times like these?
Well…you get help. You’ll hire a personal trainer, right? Everybody’s like, oh well, I want to learn proper form and technique so that I can have the greatest bang for my buck, the best effect in the shortest amount of time, so I’ll hire a personal trainer.
Well, why wouldn’t you hire a mindset coach to figure out how to change the way that your mind thinks? Same thing: You can go it alone, or you can hire someone to help guide you and give you the roadmap to get you mindset and energy shifts to happen faster and get you out of the fear, the hyper-focusing on what you DON’T want all the time and moving toward what you do want.
So mindset coaching is personal training for your brain. It’s training yourself how to think differently about yourself. It’s not really therapy. Therapy is going back through deep trauma and healing things.
I did talk about going back to your unconscious stuff over the last two episodes, but that had to do with uncovering micro-traumas that you’re not even aware of that could be the root of your repeating cycles - like if you keep gaining back lost weight or keep going back to drinking after stopping or keep going back to any compulsive behavior that seems to feel “out of your control.”
Those behaviors are like well-worn riverbeds, and if you want to reroute a river, it takes MASSIVE EFFORT. It takes a lot of patience with yourself, lots and lots of self-kindness, compassion, with zero judgement and shame…but those behaviors absolutely can be phased out with coaching.
Coaching is about building your mental muscle…practicing better, empowering ways of thinking about yourself. Just like it’s amazing to be strong and in shape, it’s pretty fucking rad to look in the mirror and actually know the person looking back at you has your back…that you can trust that person. That you feel safe with yourself, that you know you’re not going to keep judging and shaming yourself into submission.
I think everyone could use therapy at certain points in their lives, especially when going through the death of a close loved one or a major trauma. So if you’ve experienced major unhealed trauma and haven’t ever gone to therapy, that’s different. That’s not what I’m taking about here.
I’m talking about training your brain to understand that you deserve to live a life that you truly love. That’s our birthright as humans, and we were convinced otherwise somewhere along the way by outside influences.
You deserve to not be influenced by a media that benefits from keeping you afraid. You deserve to feel safe. You deserve to feel content. You deserve kindness. And you deserve to be kind to yourself.
So, if there’s only two things you take away from this episode, my beautiful dreamers, I hope it’s this: 1) Feel your painful feelings but DON’T DWELL in them, wallow in them, splash around in the pity pool of them. Set your 10 minute timer, feel the feels, then move away from that and into the good feelings that you want to feel.
And 2) if you don’t want to be ruled by fear, don’t focus on it. Focus on what you can control. Prepare what you can prepare and then turn your attention to what you want to see in the world…be that strength, courage, resilience; be it grace, kindness, compassion. Be it joy, silliness, or outright hilarity. Be the change you want to see in the world.
Me? I’m going to keep spreading kindness like a glitter bomb. Thanks for listening. If you have any comments or questions, there’s an option in the show description to text me with your thoughts so please…feel free. Also, it really helps the show to leave a good review (hopefully with 5 stars attached) and share it with everyone you know. I appreciate you, and I’ll talk to you next time. Take care and remember - all will be well.