Overcoming Fear & Building Psychological Fitness – with Andrew Flack | #4

Welcome to Unleash youh Impact Unlock Others, a podcast about inspiring leadership.

We hope to bring you grounded wisdom, stories from real leaders and leave you feeling inspired.

Let's dive in.

So welcome to Unleash youh Impact Unlock Others, the first of our Voices of.

Leadership series where we interview people with.

Very interesting backgrounds and some expertise we want to tap into.

Now many of us will engage in a form of physical exercise to get ourselves a healthy body.

My passion is tennis and I would play tennis every day if I could.

Now, being good at tennis requires you to focus on four main physical fitness, technical ability, tactical awareness, and a healthy mindset.

The latter is especially important if you're trying to perform optimally in a stressful environment.

How many of us though, focus on psychological exercise?

How many of us use that to achieve our optimal performance state?

Surely a healthy and productive mindset can be developed in the same way as a healthy body and mental fitness will help us deal with challenges, increasing our ability to navigate challenging situations and reduce the risk of stress and burnout.

My guest today is business owner and leadership development expert Andrew Flack.

Andrew qualified as a sports and performance psychologist.

He's an executive coach, an accredited EMDR psychotherapist, and he's very interested in the psychological factors that enable people to perform at their best.

For the last 20 years, Andrew has helped professionals overcome their psychological blocks and find untapped resources and skills to increase their effectiveness and reach the levels of performance they aspire to.

Andrew's view is that the principles that govern physical fitness also apply to mental robustness.

His idea is at the heart of the innovative 4 Ways Performance Programs that he teaches and he uses those four lenses of strength, stamina, flexibility and balance as a template for developing mental performance.

Today's interview focuses on the fears that hold us back and prevent us from reaching the performance levels we aspire to.

Now, let's be honest, everybody experiences fear whether we recognize it or not.

It's a fundamental part of being human because our brains are wired to spot danger.

In my conversation with Andrew, we cover various topics including self awareness and the roles that plays in identifying and addressing our fears, the origins of the fears, where do they come from, and the difference between subconscious and conscious fears.

We discuss common fears that everybody experiences and more importantly, what can we do to manage them.

Andrew is a talented, spiritual, purpose driven leader whose experience of working with senior business leaders and professionals both in sport and the arts means he has a wonderful range of insights into the world of mental well being and psychological fitness.

I've Known Andrew for over eight years now and admired his work at close range as he supported the development and the delivery of Zentano's programs.

I hope you enjoy his absorbing wisdom and the insights he shares as much as I have.

So Andrew.

Morning, how are you?

Hi Dave.

I'm fine, thank you.

I'm really looking forward to this conversation with you today to tap into your expertise on mental well being and mental fitness.

How did you discover your love of all things psychology?

How did you explore the topics of fears and how they impact our performance?

Can we just give some people listening a bit of a flavour of who you are, where you came from and how you've got a passion for this?

When I was doing my A levels my big dream in life was to be a painter.

Okay.

I really wanted to paint and buildings.

Or.

Be an artist.

Yeah, Canvases and.

Oh wow.

But I didn't get much support in that.

I did end up going to art college for a year and at the end of that period of time when you study art in this country you basically go and do a, what they call a foundation course.

So you, you learn a bit about all of the kind of art careers, the possible careers which being a fine artist is one of them.

And I got quite easily put off by one of my tutors who said you haven't really kind of got what it takes.

Foolishly I decided that he must be right because he was a person in authority.

And so I took that as sort of gospel and did photography instead.

And I was reasonably successful as a photographer.

I mean I worked on some quite big campaigns, some quite big shoots and when you're doing that kind of work you're basically in charge of quite large groups of people.

You know, there's models, there's makeup artists, there's art directors, there's assistants, technical people and each project is a kind of quite intense short term piece of business if you like.

So it's got a big, you know, there's an end that you need to achieve in a very short period of time.

So it's quite intensive and quite stressful.

So even though you were persuaded by someone's comments that you may not be good enough to be a fine artist.

Yeah.

You didn't have the same self doubts about being a good photographer?

No, because I could see that my photography was quite good.

Just so happened that it wasn't what I wanted to do.

So it was a bit unfortunate in a way but I did reasonably well with that.

But I began to realise that the sort of further I Got up the ladder.

The bigger the campaigns I was doing, the more stressed I was getting about getting the outcome right for the client.

Right.

You know, there was some self doubt in there about my ability.

So there was some, you know, some of the, what I call the not good enough stuff lurking in the background.

Bit of imposter syndrome creeping in, bit of that.

Even though the evidence was contrary to that, you know, I was winning awards and things and you know, doing quite well with it.

I never quite got to the very top of the profession.

So there's a.

There's a lot of rejection in something like that.

So basically what happens is there's a project that needs to be done, an advert that needs to be made, a poster that's needed for the tube or an album cover or whatever it might be.

And the people who are responsible for putting that together call in various photographers.

And it's a bit like going for an audition if you're an actor or something.

There's a lot of rejection.

Yeah.

And I didn't necessarily deal well with the rejection.

I got a bit down with the rejection and I found this sort of concept of taking my work out to agencies and art directors and stuff and trying to sell myself a bit soul destroying.

Yeah.

Because I didn't really have the confidence.

And then.

So what I did was I did an NLP course which I think is a much maligned set of ideas and concepts.

NLP is neuro linguistic programming and it came about in the sort of 70s and purports to sort of have an understanding about how people work at a kind of neurological level and a set of tools that might help you ameliorate some of those like confidence issues and what have you.

I really enjoyed that course.

I think it's like I said, I think, I think serious NLP is really, really worth looking at.

Yeah.

But it does have, it does have a bit of a reputational problem.

For what reason?

Well, because people have, I think, have traditionally seen it as quite a powerful set of tools and seen it as a quick fix and a way to manipulate other people with language and communication and stuff.

So what I did wasn't like that at all.

And I just got quite fascinated by the whole idea then of psychology and what makes people tick through self reflection.

Looking at myself and thinking about what it was that had got me into that position where I wasn't feeling confident necessarily in my ability at this point.

How self aware do you feel now looking back that you were?

Because obviously we always say in Zentana, you Can't change what you're not aware of.

Yeah.

Just sort of talk about your self awareness at that point.

Now you're looking back at it from afar.

At that point I had none.

The only thing that I was aware of was that there was this kind of stress response to certain sort of triggers.

Yeah.

So I was aware of that at that level, but I didn't really know why that was or what was happening internally.

I didn't have the awareness.

Right.

I didn't have the ability to sort of examine my thinking and question it.

I just sort of went with the emotions.

Yeah.

And the emotions were uncomfortable and pushing me towards avoiding things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because we.

One of the things that human beings do is avoid discomfort.

Yeah.

I guess the function of fear is to avoid what are potentially dangerous situations.

The more reflective I got, the more I'm not going to go into my details of my sort of troubled past.

But the more I realized where the sort of patterns had begun.

I'd learned some quite unhelpful things about myself, I think, from quite an early age.

How common is that, do you think?

Because, you know, everyone has different growing up experiences.

Some people have some quite traumatic ones, some less so.

But how much do you think that is applies to all people?

That we've got stuff in our background that might cause us issues later on.

So in terms of the development of self.

Yeah.

What I call self relations, which is internally, maybe even subconsciously, my relationship with myself and who I see myself to be and my kind of constructed reality.

We'll talk about that a little bit later.

What a constructed reality is.

Yeah.

Basically rule of thumb is that traumatic experience can create problematic patterns, whereas good sort of relational experiences create positive, affirming sort of patterns in a person.

So is that to say.

So someone like me who's had a death of a parent when I was quite young, who's had a bit of bullying at school.

I experienced this.

Also my biological father leaving really early as well.

But I had a fantastic grandfather who did exactly what you said.

Very supportive, very loving.

That those good relationships can sort of overcome some of that traumatic stuff, can they?

To a certain extent.

Right.

How you process those events.

Yeah.

Whether the relationship with your grandfather was powerful enough to sort of cancel out the painful stuff.

Yeah.

But it would have all had an impact, no?

Undoubtedly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So most of us have got something then in our background.

Yes.

Most of us are not born self aware.

We have to develop self awareness.

Yes.

And this NLP experience was a big turning point for you, was It.

It was the beginning of something.

It created a kind of fascination with how people work.

Almost like the mechanics of it, which is something that I became very interested in.

I've got two areas that I really focus on.

One is trauma.

Yeah.

Which is when the.

Those maladaptive early experiences have a devastating effect on a person's life and performance.

What are the elements of, psychologically speaking, a great performer.

What do they do that the rest of us feel like?

Thanks so much.

Well, I'm hoping today we're going to learn some of your knowledge on that.

We're all performers in the workplace.

Of course we are.

Yeah.

So before we get into that.

Yes.

Could you define what you mean by self awareness?

Because I think in terms of understanding our fears, that's probably quite an important topic to just be clear about.

What we mean by self awareness.

And what does that mean from your perspective?

Some of it is about just acknowledging that previous experiences do have an effect.

So we're building our personality, our self, our sense of self from a very early age.

You know, one of the things I often talk about is the fact that there's extraordinary numbers involved here.

But a baby is born with 100 billion brain cells.

Wow.

And each of those brain cells can make a number of connections.

I think of it as the equivalent of sort of bytes of information.

Yeah.

That the brain can use over a lifetime, if you like.

Yeah.

There's 100 trillion connections.

So I guess what you're saying really is that whilst we might be born with these billions and billions of how we develop and use those depends on those formative years in terms of how.

Yeah.

As we have experiences and as we start to sense stuff and as we have relationships and as we learn things from other people, we start to code those experiences in the brain through the connections of these brain cells into what we call neural pathways.

Yeah.

They're how we code our version of what we think reality is.

But how do I fit into the world?

What kind of person am I?

What am I good at?

What am I not good at?

Am I enough?

Am I not enough?

All of those sorts of concepts that we accept as reality begin to form and then they just sit at the back of the subconscious sort of whirring away as if they were absolutely true.

So self awareness is about starting to tap into.

Tapping into that.

So how do you do that?

My metaphor for this, if you imagine you're on a boat, and when you're in a boat on the sea, you can pretty much only see the surface of the sea if it's really a really clear day.

You might be able to see a little way under the surface, but there's stuff happening in the depths that you're completely unaware of.

So it's a whole ecology, a whole environment and all you can really observe is what's happening on the surface.

So I would say that's a good metaphor for what we think of as consciousness, what we're actually sort of aware of at any one time.

Sounds like it's a small part of the overall.

Yeah, it's very limited.

Consciousness is an amazing mystery.

But there is a kind of train of thought that says we can only be actually consciously aware of relatively few.

I think it's something like 8 to 10 pieces of information at any one time.

Okay.

So tuning into those is really important because they lead us, if we are self aware, to the deeper stuff.

So in other words, if you can become aware of how you put your thoughts together and how your body reacts to certain situations, so you're tuned into the physical side of things, which is in my view, how the subconscious communicates, communicates through the soma, the body.

If you can be aware of those two things and realise that the combination of those two things direct behavior, then that's the beginnings of self awareness.

I think.

Of course, the other thing is to be, particularly if you're a leader in a business is also to realise how you as a human being and your interactions and your communication affect others.

So let's explore how fears play into this then because obviously we want to talk about how our fears hold us back and prevent us from reaching optimal performance.

So we've talked a little bit about what self awareness is and the fact.

That actually there's only relatively little amount.

Of stuff that we're actually aware of at any one time.

But how do fears play into this?

And in your experience, what are the common fears that most people experience?

I've come up with a model for this.

Okay.

Call it the four Stories.

The Four Stories.

Yeah.

And it's a simplification of stuff that I've observed over the years and also some theory from trauma resolution work.

Okay.

Yeah.

So the idea is that there's four sort of patterns of thinking.

So these deeper patterns that we were talking about earlier.

Yeah, the coded stuff.

Right.

In psychology we call those beliefs and what a belief is is a subconscious learned pattern of it's beyond thinking feeling.

So state.

Right.

I've basically worked out you can categorize these in four ways.

So one is what I call the good enough stuff.

So subconsciously if I sit down and I think about it and I think about how I interact with others, and if I think about how I interact with the world and my performance.

Right.

So if you think about me and my photography, taking.

Taking my work into an office to show people.

Yeah.

And quite often, you know, there'd be somebody on the phone who kind of flicks through your stuff and doesn't even really look at it and goes, yeah, thanks very much.

Off you go.

Two ways for me to process that.

Yeah.

One is that person's a bit of a twonk.

Yeah.

The other is clearly I'm not good enough.

Yeah.

To sort of get their interest.

And do you think that's what you were experiencing at that time?

Yes, I think this.

This particular category was probably what.

Yeah.

I struggled with.

Even though you may have been good enough.

Yeah.

There was a story in your head saying yes, because I'm getting rejections all the time.

Maybe I'm not.

Yeah.

And the derivation of that, the root of that was in stuff that happened in the past.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

It's where the concept of imposter syndrome comes from.

Yeah.

Perfectly adequately qualified, capable people in situations where they feel that they don't really belong there.

And the key thing about it is it's not usually true.

No.

I quite often come across people who feel like they shouldn't be doing the jobs that they're doing.

And one of the questions I often ask is, so the people that employed you to do this job, they just must be a bunch of idiots.

And if they're employing somebody like you clearly doesn't know what they're doing.

The other thing is tied in with that one is relationship with failure and success.

Okay.

Ability to try things and be prepared to fail.

Failure is an opportunity to learn and all of that sort of stuff.

A lot of people have a very black and white view of failure and success.

Yeah.

And only success is allowed because only success backs up this idea that I'm enough.

Yeah.

Right.

In your professional work in sports psychology, you must have seen that a lot.

The thing about sports psychology is a lot of it's about the winning mindset and.

And how to win.

You know, think like a winner and all of this sort of stuff.

But the problem in sport is that you lose a lot.

Okay.

So if you're a tennis player, you have to know how to lose.

Right.

I think any sport.

Don't you really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Absolutely.

You do.

Yeah.

But in those.

In those kind of individual sports, the pressures may be greater because you're out there on the court on your own and you have to be able to process losing.

I'm thinking about Emma Radican, what's her name?

Radicano.

Emma Raducano.

Yeah.

Yeah.

At the weekend, had a bit of a shocker in the Australian Open, I think.

Well, she lost love and won, didn't she?

She did, yeah.

So how she processed that?

Does she.

Is she down on herself?

Is she telling herself that she's not good enough?

Or is she saying, you know, maybe it was a fitness issue, technical issue.

What can I learn from it?

How do I move forward from this?

Don't know.

Because don't know her.

Even the best players, the best performers in any walk of life are going to have a fair bit of failure or a fair bit of.

They don't actually achieve the goal that they set out to.

That's going to be normal.

Yeah, I mean, there's one way to make sure that you never lose and that's just never play anybody who's any good.

You're not going to get anywhere, you're not going to advance, but you can certainly maintain your 100% winning record.

Maybe if you played me every week, you know, didn't play anyone else, you'd be fine.

So the second category would be what I call agency.

It's that it's what, you know, what's my relationship with control?

Control is an interesting one because the reality of life is that we don't really have the ability to control much at all.

Most things are outside of our locus of control.

So if someone was listening to this and they're a self confessed control freak.

Yes.

Or they get called a control freak by significant people around them.

What would you say to the control freaks listening?

Stop it for two reasons.

One is that it can really limit your performance.

If you're constantly just trying to do things that you feel are within your locus of absolute control, then that's going to be quite limiting, isn't it?

Because so much isn't.

So what's the fear around control then?

What's really going on there?

Fear around control, I think links into some of the other categories that we'll talk about.

But there is a sense, isn't there, that if I'm not in control of things, then I'm not safe, that something, something awful is going to happen and I need to mitigate that by just sort of keeping a close eye on everything and making sure that I can maintain the elements of the task, whatever they are.

But I guess in life that's okay.

To a point, yes.

But not if you take it too far.

Is that what you're saying?

Take it too far?

Particularly if you're managing other people.

Yeah.

Because that's when you end up with really ineffective, over zealous sort of.

Of micromanagement that can slow things right down.

Yeah.

Projects don't get done on time.

It can demotivate your team.

You're very demotivational, actually, in terms of motivating people.

You have to give them autonomy.

Okay.

You'll put boundaries around that autonomy.

But I guess if someone wants to control their environment too much, they're going to restrict the boundaries to very tight boundaries, aren't they?

Yes.

And the way to sort of mitigate that a little bit is to ask yourself a different question.

So what I would seriously say to people who would consider that they have an issue with control is try and replace that word with something else, like influence.

Yeah.

What can I influence?

What can I influence?

I can influence this by X, Y and Z, but I can't actually control it.

I did an exercise once, I can't remember, it must have been on a training or something, where we were talking about this locus of control thing.

And.

And we're asked to take ourselves through a week.

Okay.

Maybe a working week.

I can't really remember.

It was a long time ago.

And think, you know, from Monday morning when you get up, can you control that?

Maybe, you know, if your alarm goes off.

But can you control your alarm going off?

Not necessarily.

You know, your alarm clock might run out of batteries or something.

Yeah.

You might sleep through.

Yeah.

So that's, you know, from that point onwards, everything that I imagine doing, there was always something about it that I couldn't control.

Yeah, I like your question.

I think it's a much better question, rather than say, what can I control?

Because the answer is actually, when you think about it, not that much.

Apart from your internal reactions to things.

Yeah.

Conclusion that I came up with.

And there's one more fear.

You said that.

Well, there's two more.

Two more.

Okay.

That feeds in, I think, to the security thing.

Right.

You know, just the sense of.

Is life relatively safe?

Don't we all want that, though?

We all want that.

Of course, you can't say absolutely yes, because that would be untrue.

The opposite to that, if you like.

The other end of that sort of spectrum is that nothing ever is.

So there's potential threat everywhere.

Every time I kind of leave the house, something awful is going to happen.

And we call that catastrophizing.

You know, it's a well known terminology for this sort of thinking.

And in the workplace it's important for two reasons.

One is if you feel relatively secure, secure in your role, then you're going to perform better.

You know, if you're what if ing, what if this happens?

What if that happens?

What if the company goes under, what if we don't get enough orders next year, that sort of thing, then you're going to feel stressed and anxious.

And those are fear responses because your mind can't necessarily tell the difference between fantasy and reality in those terms.

So, you know, you think of something terrible happening, your soma, your body is going to react to that.

Fear is not your enemy.

No, anxiety is not actually your enemy.

Fear is your friend, really.

Fear is a mechanism, you know, because it's an alert system.

It's a response to previous learning.

So we learn what to fear through experiences.

Yeah.

That means that when I go into a situation, when I'm challenged about whether I'm good enough or not, and I did put myself into situations where that was quite sort of black and white in the sense you're either accepted or you're not with the photography thing.

Right.

Then my alert systems are going to go off and they're going to say, this is not a great position for you to be in, so let's avoid this.

And if a leader hasn't got a healthy level of self awareness, hasn't got the ability to recognize, identifying and manage these fears.

Yes.

They're potentially going to be putting out some quite damaging ripples into that environment, into that ecosystem.

Absolutely.

I mean, I think I was telling you earlier that I've been running some mental health awareness training in companies.

It gives the managers or the leaders a bit of space to sort of understand this stuff.

Yeah.

Think about their team members and maybe understand some of their responses.

So sometimes you might find the team members having a particular response to a particular challenge.

And because you're set up differently, remember we all have different versions of reality, you might think, well, there's nothing really to worry about here.

I don't understand why this person is getting stressed about this.

Well, with some of this information you can get a better understanding of where people are at and then find ways to mitigate and to manage through that.

But I'm guessing what you're also saying is every human being is going to have their own frame of reference.

We've all grown up in a slightly different environment to everybody else.

You and I might be similar on some levels, but we didn't grow up in the same way with the same experiences.

So actually, managing people is very much.

There's no one size fits all here, is there?

There's no.

Actually, if you try this, it's probably going to work because everybody's different.

Yes.

So observe, understand, flex, and adapt.

So, Andy, we've talked about three of the fears so far.

Let's.

You said there was a fourth fear as well.

Do you want to expand on what the fourth one is?

Am I a cuckoo?

Am I a goose?

It's about relatability and my view of myself as a social creature.

It's about my ability to relate and how I see myself.

So it's almost like my sense of myself as a person in relation to other people.

So do I fit in?

Am I a cuckoo?

Do I belong here?

Yeah.

So it's kind of related to some of the others.

Like, they're all sort of interrelated, these concepts anyway.

Or am I a goose?

You know, am I a good team member?

Do I know how to fly in formation?

Do I feel comfortable just slotting into that?

It's also to do with communication.

Am I an effective communicator?

Am I able to get my point across?

Right.

Well, there are a number of key techniques that one can use.

The first is what.

What I would call metacognition, the ability to step back from your thinking and take a look at it.

So almost like, see your thinking as, like that cup on.

In front of us on the table.

Yes.

Yeah.

So we have something, I believe, like 30,000 thoughts a day.

It might be even more than that.

How many of them do we notice?

But there's a lot going on cognitively all the time.

You're having thoughts all the time you can't notice.

No, no.

But mostly we don't sort of understand that we can observe our thinking, and we need to.

We need to develop the ability to stand back and think.

Okay, so if we're.

If we're in this endless pattern of doing stuff every day, not really taking a break.

And again, we've spoken about this before in previous podcasts, this endless loop of just doing stuff, we're not going to actually get that level of, as you call it, metacognition, we're not going to see ourselves from the outside looking in, are we?

When I do training on this, I always ask the delegates, what is a thought?

And what do they say?

Oh, all sorts of stuff about, you know, electrical impulses and neurology and really clever stuff, which is probably absolutely right.

But what I'm kind of drilling down and into is the fact that most thoughts are just pictures or words.

Okay.

So when you start to look at your thinking, listen to your thinking, you're actually, you actually begin to realize that, you know, what we, what we do when we think is we create images and we talk to ourselves.

Yeah.

And that's what I'm talking about.

Understanding and getting to know is your chatter, your internal chatter.

What you begin to observe is that thoughts come in several patterns.

You know, some thoughts will just be on a loop.

Yeah.

Some thoughts, when you start to notice them and just what, what, what is that?

And you can let them go.

And then of course, thoughts sort of chain together as well.

They link, you know, have you ever done that kind of experiment where you sit and just observe your thinking for a while?

You start thinking about an apple and you end up in a hotel in Barbados or something.

They just link and chain together.

So, okay, Andy, do you want to just summarize those four fears?

So again, then we'll talk about how those fears impact our performance.

So, yeah, the four categories.

So there's the good enough stuff.

Am I up to it?

There's the idea of agency.

Do I have a sufficient amount of control here?

What's my relationship with control?

Is it realistic?

Is it helpful?

The idea of feeling secure, feeling safe in my role and where I am in my work life, is that a secure thing?

Am I making mountains out of molehills and what if ing and catastrophizing and this idea of relatability, am I a cuckoo?

Am I a goose?

Do I fit in here?

Do I fit in anywhere?

Okay, so thanks for that summary, Andy.

Really, really interesting.

So let's talk about how these fears now impact people's performance in your experience.

So maybe we think of a simple sort of example of a challenge in the workplace.

Yeah.

Maybe your manager comes in and says, tomorrow I want you to give a talk about something you know a lot about.

Yeah.

To 50 other members of the business or something.

So the reality of the situation is that you know your stuff, they don't yet have the information.

So they're coming because they want to get the information.

And you're the person that your manager's decided is the best person to deliver it to them.

So that's the reality.

Yeah.

So if we have a little think about how the stories might pan out, there's something here that I just wanted to mention, which is it's a quite well known sort of philosophical idea that basically the idea is that it isn't events that cause us stress or fear, it's our relationship with those events.

So our interpretation of those events and the kind of internal constructs that we build around those events that causes us to fear.

Because if some people are okay with public speaking and some people aren't, then public speaking is a neutral.

So what's happening there is if somebody is feeling uneasy about speaking in public, then they're bringing one of those elements, one or more of those elements to this challenge, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

So if it fits the not good enough stuff, person may feel reluctant to do it in the first place because they don't want to get found out.

So there's that kind of internal dialogue going on.

Avoidance sort of interferes with progression, doesn't it, with a career progression?

So if that's a pattern that you have fairly constantly, then it might be that you're not progressing in your career as well as you might.

Yeah.

Sometimes, of course, people employ you to do a certain thing, and then if you don't have the competency to do it, they start to question whether they've made the right decision or not.

If you're worried about control, if that's one of the sort of stories that's going on around an event like that, you're going to think about how many of those elements you're out of control of.

Safety.

The idea of catastrophizing.

Right.

So if I'm going to be thinking about everything that could go wrong tomorrow when I do this talk, you know, what if I forget what I'm saying?

What if I trip up when I go get up onto the.

What if they ask me a question that I don't know the answer to?

What if they ask me a question that I don't know the answer to?

Exactly.

And this sort of relatability thing, I think, also feeds into that.

You know, what people going to think of me.

I'm really.

I'm really overly concerned with what people are going to make of me.

And of course, in that situation, if you're giving a talk, there's 50 potential people out there who could be thinking badly about you.

So that brings us actually quite neatly onto some of the strategies that you can utilize just practically from now.

Yeah, right.

That can be helpful with this sort of thing.

Okay.

I mean, ultimately, the way I genuinely see this is if you're struggling from acute fear response in certain situations, it's probably a good idea to get some help because sometimes if you go and see the right professional, you know, they can help people.

You ameliorate the subconscious stuff.

Yeah.

It's quite hard to do that on your own.

Okay.

If you think about the.

The sea metaphor, it's quite hard to change what's happening at the deeper level by fiddling around on the surface.

There are some practical principles here that might help.

Okay.

Yeah.

Repetition of a task.

The theory goes that the more often you do that thing, the more that the fear around it reduces.

It's a bit like what you just described.

I think there was a very famous self help book called Feel the Fear.

And Do It Anyway.

Yeah.

And that principle is one another thing is to become aware of how you put thoughts together so you can challenge your thinking and challenge the accuracy of your thinking.

I call that acuity.

So how do you practically do that?

So the first thing is to learn to notice your thoughts.

Okay.

If you spend time sitting quietly, you can learn to notice your thinking more comprehensively.

So practically that could be meditative practice.

It could be journaling, it could be those types of things.

So mindfulness is simply really just sitting with yourself non judgmentally and kind of noticing, being curious about what's happening internally.

Just stop judging yourself, Just be curious.

When you start to be curious about your thinking, you notice that you know you're having thoughts, that you decide really whether you want to accept them or not.

Because remember, the fear response is a protective response, like a guard dog.

It'll bark at what it thinks is a threat.

So these pictures and words, if we start to spot them, are just information for us to use and make a decision about, aren't they?

We don't have to respond negatively to them.

We have a choice if we recognize what they're there.

Yes.

And it's good to learn that difference.

Yeah.

Discipline leads to an ability, I think.

Yeah.

To then recognize you're thinking more in the moment and challenge it and be quite legalistic about challenging it.

You know, what's the evidence?

So you made a good.

You made a really good point there.

Just want to pick up on that.

So the more we consciously step away from our day to day merry go.

Round that we're all on these days.

Actually start to spot some of this stuff and just see what's there.

Spot it.

Then when we're actually having to sort of manage ourselves in the moment, that.

Becomes easier because we've learned to do.

It by stepping away.

Yeah.

And having balance is really important as well.

And what I mean by balance is uptime, downtime.

If you're a person who's going through sort of a stressful Time.

Basically, there's certain parts of your neurology that are switched on and certain parts of your neurology that probably the response there is a bit weedier than it should be.

So just having downtime and relaxing and breathing strengthens that, the parasympathetic response and then mitigates the stress response.

So it's getting balance.

So anything else practically before we wrap up that you'd say, yeah, well, you.

And I are both fans of self reflection and being quite disciplined about the reflective process.

Yeah, I've got much better over the years.

I think Rich will give him credit for that.

Something he brought to me in terms of did a lot of that, and I think I do more of it now because of that.

So the ability to learn from experiences in a structured, positive way.

So what you do is you look back.

Yeah, well, I had this experience and I had this response to whatever the challenge was, what was happening, what was I thinking, what was going on, what were the external influences on that?

What was my reaction to it, what needs to happen, and what can I do better next time?

Just thinking about those questions in a reflective way.

So journaling is a very good way of doing that.

Okay, thank you.

So to summarize our conversation, fear isn't a bad thing.

No, fear is actually useful information that we need to do something with.

We need to develop our levels of self or we need to spot what's going on.

So you talked about.

About the pictures and words.

We need to spot this stuff and then curiously decide what to do with it.

Yeah.

And then develop some of these habits, these techniques that you're talking about, to manage it.

Yeah.

So if you had three top tips, what would your three top tips be?

If you've listened to this and you're thinking, oh, I do that a bit, then reflect on it.

If that doesn't sort it, get some help.

Okay.

And always remember that you're not stuck in this because your brain has the ability to grow and learn.

You know, we talked about 100 trillion bytes of information.

Well, the truth is, you haven't used hardly any of them yet.

So make the most of them.

You know, learn new ways of doing things, new ways of thinking about yourself.

Great.

Possible to change.

However old you are, you can still change.

Exactly.

So thanks for those top tips, Andy.

That's great.

If people want to find out more about the four ways model, maybe just briefly explain that now for us.

What is the four ways model and where can people find more information about it?

So I was thinking about the idea of physical fitness and the fact that you need to be physically fit, you need to develop strength, you need to develop stamina.

And flexibility and balance are also included in whether somebody is considered to be physically fit.

And in various sports, different elements are more important than others, but they're all important.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

So if you're a prop forward, you need more strength than you would necessarily if you're a tennis player.

But there's a psychological equivalent to that, that we need.

Psychological balance.

Yeah.

We need to be flexible psychologically, and it's good to be able to have that kind of internal psychological strength.

And, of course, resilience is a big word these days, and that's a similar thing, I think, to stamina.

Over the last couple of years, I've been really thinking about this and writing courses around this stuff, and I've come up with a lot of tools and techniques and strategies for developing that psychological fitness for performers.

And by performers, I don't mean necessarily to support people.

A lot of my work is done in the arts, and I'm really interested in.

In this stuff in the workplace, because we're all performers, right?

We are.

So when you go to work, you're performing in one way or another, and you can benefit from the same input that athletes and opera stars get.

Well, maybe, Andy, in a future podcast, you'd come back in and we can talk about that a bit more, and that would be great.

Yeah.

But in the meantime, where can people get more information from?

So website is www.the4ways.com the four the number four.

Yeah.

So t h e 4 w a y s.

And a lot of the information's on there.

My contact details are on there, and I'm always happy to talk to anybody who wants to explore this further.

We'll put the links for that in our podcast notes as well so that people can find that.

So I'd just like to say thank you very much for your time today, your insights.

I hope people have got some good nuggets of information.

Yeah, I hope so, too.

It's been a pleasure and we'll see you next time.

Yeah, see you next time.

Bye.