Transcript00:00:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m Joanna Lindenbaum, a coach ritualist and all around transformation nerd who is obsessed with helping clients go deep to create more change and results with their clients. I created the coaching revolution.00:00:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
Podcast to share with you coaching skills, tips and advice, as well as a deeper understanding of human behavior and.00:00:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
For yourself so that you can do even better client work and group work. Grow your business organically and know that you’re making a real difference in the world. This is about creating a revolution in the transformational industry so that more practitioners feel amazing.00:00:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
About what they do and so that more of our clients experience life changing shifts, let’s get started.00:01:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
Welcome back to the podcast everyone. This is Joanna. It’s the beginning of August and I am about to go away on vacation for a week with my family. We always take a week in August to go to the beach and I try to completely unplug. No.00:01:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
E-mail no social media. Very limited access to the phone. It’s a way of rejuvenating and resting and clearing my mind and really spending that special time with my family in full press.00:01:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
Sense and truth be told, I usually take most of the month of August off. It’s a great month just because it’s summer, but also it’s my birthday month and I always believe you shouldn’t work around your birthday time so often like to take the whole month off.00:02:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
This month especially is a bigger one for me. I’m turning 50 more on that soon, but anyway, I’m mentioning all of this because I wanted the podcast to keep on going even though I’m not in the office enough quite this month to make.00:02:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
Enough podcast episodes and so I thought it would be really valuable for us to rewind all the way back to our very, very first podcast episode, our kickoff episode.00:02:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
I would I had created that one very intentionally with the topic of fear and how coaches and practitioners can work more effectively with fear when your clients are scared, when you have fear come up because as we all know, fear can stop us in our tracks.00:02:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then we don’t create the results that we want. So I hope that you’ll enjoy this very first podcast episode replay. You’re going to learn a lot about foundational principles that will help you so much when it comes to working with your clients and working with yourself.00:03:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
And the topic is very timely because as you probably know, if you’ve been following me, we are right now welcoming people into the autumn 2025 cohort of the sacred depths, transformational practitioner training and the topic of fear.00:03:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
And the signature technique of befriending fear in sacred depths.00:03:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
Is one of the most important pieces we in sacred depths we go deep step by step into learning the technique and it is a game changer not just for your work with clients, but for your work with yourself. Anyway, I’m hoping that this week’s.00:04:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
Replay episode will wet your palette and that you’re going to love what you hear. Be ready to take lots of notes. This episode is a juicy one.00:04:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
Welcome. Welcome to our first podcast to the inaugural podcast. I am so excited and I am really excited about today’s topic, which is helping your clients work with their fear.00:04:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
We’re going to be talking about some really valuable and juicy things today.00:04:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I as we get started, I just want to quickly share that this topic of helping your clients work with their fear is the same exact topic that I started my newsletter with when I started my newsletter 17 years ago.00:05:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
And what we’re going to be looking at today.00:05:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
A lot of the content is very similar to everything that I wrote 17 years ago, but also a lot of the content is different and has changed. I’ve learned so much more about fear and helping clients with fear over these years.00:05:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’ve as I’ve worked with thousands of humans.00:05:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
Beer is one of my most favorite topics to teach about and share about. So as you’re probably already aware, when you don’t know how to support your clients to work with their fear, they can end up self sabotaging or procrastinating.00:05:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or getting overwhelmed or confused. Your clients may even start to question if you’re the right support.00:06:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
And for that and when your client is stuck in fear, you might even start questioning yourself. When I was first trained as a coach nearly two decades ago now, even though my training was excellent, they never mentioned.00:06:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
The word about fear. They never mentioned that fear might get in the way of a clients success.00:06:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
This they never mentioned.00:06:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
How to identify fear or what to do?00:06:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
When fear is rearing its.00:06:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
Head.00:06:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
And many practitioner trainings out there today still don’t address this very important topic of fear or they don’t address it fully.00:06:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I didn’t hear a word of it in my original training, and then I started working with clients and of course.00:06:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
All of the.00:06:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
Human messiness showed up, and the fears showed up, and I had to learn on the job hitting the pavement, how to work with fear. And I’ll tell you it took time and a lot of effort and a lot of experimenting.00:07:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
To be able to really get it right and that’s one of the reasons why I’m excited to share a little bit about it with you today.00:07:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
Say so that it doesn’t have to take you as long as it took me to figure out how to work with fear.00:07:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
So what does?00:07:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
Fear look like when we’re working with our clients or even when it comes up for ourselves, fear can rear its head in so many different ways.00:07:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
With so many different what I call core fears inspiring at all. For example, your client might have a fear of rejection, a core fear of rejection, and because of that they don’t put up their dating profile even though they really want to find a romantic partner.00:08:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
For your client.00:08:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
Might have a core fear of visibility and because of that they don’t really move forward with their marketing and their outreach. Or maybe they are taking action steps with their marketing and outreach. But because of that fear of visibility, they’re pretty miserable.00:08:32Alright.00:08:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
They obsessively question themselves or brace themselves for failure. Here’s another example. Maybe you’ve got a a client who has a core fear of abandoned.00:08:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
Men and because of that, because they are so scared of others leaving them, they don’t set important boundaries in their lives, like telling their teenage child that they can’t use the car or telling a friend that they aren’t willing to lend them money.00:09:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or maybe you’ve got a client that has a core fear of not being good enough, and that fear holds them back from applying to Graduate School. So there are hundreds if not.00:09:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
Thousands of different ways that fear could show up and manifest, and one of the things that I think is just so perfect about this being my inaugural podcast and us talking about fear is that I put off starting this podcast for about a year or two.00:09:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
And a lot of the putting it off was about waiting for it to be the right time and the right timing. I really do believe in right timing. However, if I’m being totally honest, some of the putting off of the podcast was also out of a fear that.00:10:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
I wouldn’t do the podcast the right way. A fear of getting it wrong. And it wasn’t until a month.00:10:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or two ago.00:10:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
When I finally really confronted the fear and worked with the fear and made friends with this fear.00:10:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
That the pathway for finally getting the podcast out into the world opened up. Fear is one of those topics that I believe is just so crucial. It is really at the heart of excellent coaching and at the heart of transformation.00:10:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
Itself and at the heart of being able to help your clients make progress on their desires and to feel good about it as they do learning.00:10:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
How to really master working with fear? It takes time, it takes training and learning specific techniques and practicing those techniques in the sacred depths. Transformational practitioner training. We have a full and extended module.00:11:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
On exactly how to help clients befriend their fear, and you learn the cognitive and the somatic techniques for how to do that step by step by step. Then you get to practice the.00:11:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
For our podcast today, I want to get us started by sharing with you a couple of vital foundational principles about fear so that we can really start to understand the psychology and human behavior.00:11:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
Behind fear? If you’ve participated in any one of my trainings, you know that before we learn the techniques and the skills.00:12:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
We always start with the human behavior of any topic that we’re looking at because as practitioners understanding the human behavior is the 1st and most important piece. It helps us really make so much better.00:12:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
Use of all of the coaching and transformational techniques and it helps.00:12:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
Us become more masterful with all of those techniques, so let’s jump in. And the first piece of human behavior or foundational principle that I want you to think about when it comes to fear is this. Fear is.00:12:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
Common and normal, in other words.00:12:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
It is 100% common, normal and.00:12:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
Even.00:12:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
Expected that a fear of some sort is gonna rear its head when you or your client is about to step into something bigger or different for yourself, in other words.00:13:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
When you step into something bigger for yourself into a bigger goal into a dream that you have.00:13:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
Most likely there are fears that are going to come up. Fear is often part of the process of up leveling and expansion and growth. Fear is part of that process of grow.00:13:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
And.00:13:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
And there’s nothing wrong with fear. A lot of people think that if you experience fear when you pursue something that you want, it means that you can’t have the thing that you want. But that’s not true at all. If you experience fear when you pursue the thing that you want, it just means that you have some fear and it’s common.00:14:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
That it’s normal. It also doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with you or that you’re not whole and complete just because of fear comes up. And I share this because a lot in our culture and society, and even unfortunately.00:14:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
Me in the coaching and transformational industries, fear has been stigmatized and even pathologized in a way we’re taught to think that there’s something wrong with us if we feel fear that really we are most whole and able when we.00:14:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
Don’t ever feel fear, but that is baloney again because fear is totally 100% normal and I’m going to take that a step further and share this fear is healthy. We want to sometimes have fear.00:15:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
That’s because fear is there to protect us because at some.00:15:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
Point in our life there was.00:15:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
A real threat.00:15:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
Right. And so the fear is a survival mechanism, if you will, that’s there to protect us. I like to think of fear as actually something we want to respect.00:15:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
And the metaphor that I often like to use is that it’s like a smoke detector. So we need the smoke detector in the kitchen because there might be a dangerous fire and that smoke detector is going to let us know to get out of the house or to do something about it. Right. The thing is.00:15:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
A lot of times smoke detectors confuse and overcooked dinner with an actual dangerous fire and same thing happens with.00:16:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
Right. We want the fear because sometimes we shouldn’t walk into that dark alley. Sometimes we shouldn’t give a presentation that, you know, maybe we’re not able to prepare for adequately, etcetera. We want to know and we wanna help our clients.00:16:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
And all the difference between the fire.00:16:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
And the smoke from the grilled cheese sandwich. So we don’t want to fix fear. It’s not something to be fixed. Instead, we want to help our clients assess. Is this fear helpful in this moment in this situation? Should I listen to it or is it?00:16:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
Unhelpful in this moment in this situation. Should I not listen to or in what ways is the fear helpful and in what ways is the fear unhelpful?00:16:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
Right. And then support our clients to make proper adjustments around it. The other thing as we talk about fear being normal and part of the growth process is that as practitioners, one of the greatest gifts that we can give our clients.00:17:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
Is to normalize.00:17:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
Fear. A couple months ago, I heard Brené Brown say that normalizing is the opposite of pathologizing and I just loved that quote and that piece of wisdom so much. The more that we can support our clients to see that fear is normal.00:17:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
And natural and healthy and part of that growth process, the less shame they’re gonna feel about having that fear. And the more they’re gonna have all of their resources available to be able to take the next action steps that are right for that. OK. So that’s foundational.00:18:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
Principle number one. Fear is normal. Here is foundational principle #2 I mentioned this a little bit earlier and I want to get a little more deep into it. I said earlier that fear is there to protect us.00:18:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
So let’s break that down a.00:18:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
Little bit more.00:18:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
A fear like the fear of visibility or the fear of rejection or the fear of others getting angry at us, et cetera, et cetera. Any fear that comes up in the present moment in the here and now is often not always but.00:18:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
Most of the.00:18:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
Line it’s rooted in a fear that we have experienced in the past, either as a child or as an adult in the past and what happens is that we have a situation in the present, in the here and now, and we forget.00:19:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
That we have a ton more resources.00:19:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
And a ton more safety in the here and now than we did in the past. And the then and there when the fear first got triggered.00:19:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’ll give you an example of this. When we’re a child, that the possibility of being abandoned by others.00:19:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
Is truly a threat to our survival, right? We can’t fend for ourselves. As children. We need for the adults in our lives to not abandon us. However, as an adult, if someone abandons us, it might.00:19:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
Hurt. It might be uncomfortable. It might be really hard, but chances are we have enough resources.00:20:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
Yes, inside of ourselves as adults, that if someone abandons us, it’s not going to literally be a threat to our survival, right? So in those moments when that earlier self’s fear is projecting itself onto the current present here.00:20:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
And now situation what’s happening is that our earlier selves, maybe even our child selves, if the fear came up when we were a child, is what’s running the show in the moment.00:20:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
Not our adult self or not, our current self with all of our resources.00:20:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
To me this is this is so simple, but it’s very very powerful to really think about this and and embody this and one of our jobs as coaches and as practitioners is to support our clients to make this connection.00:20:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
And and to really see the difference between the present and the past and the resources that we have now versus the resources that we had then let’s keep on going. Here’s another foundational principle.00:21:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
About fear, something that is just part of our human psychology and and behavior that’s really important for us as practitioners to know and understand.00:21:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
When we create as our clients do next goals for ourselves, big goals for ourselves. When we step into our our preparing to step into a new place or a bigger place for ourselves after our next goals, there’s always some relationship.00:21:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or some held belief, or some value, or some physical object, or some idea about ourself that is at risk.00:22:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
And we can’t actually go after the goal or achieve the goal unless we’re willing to take the risk part of our job as practitioners is to support our clients to build.00:22:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
You know what I call the risk muscle?00:22:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
To help them become more comfortable with.00:22:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
Risk and again.00:22:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
And back to what we were saying earlier, you know, to assess the risk because there’s some things that aren’t worth risking, right. So we’re going to assess it, but then we’re going to become more comfortable with those risks that are worth risking. I’ll just drop this little tidbit. There’s a lot to say.00:22:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
And and teach on this, but just to kind of take this one step further, part of supporting our client.00:23:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
To build that risk, muscle is about supporting our clients to be more regulated in the face of fear. When fear comes up, usually dysregulation.00:23:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
And the more that we can support our clients.00:23:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
Who not get rid of the fear, right? But to hold the fear while also becoming more and more regulated in their systems. That’s when they are in the best position to be able to move forward with their goals.00:23:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
Even if a fear comes up, and that’s why we don’t only want to work with fear cognitively, we also want to work with fear somatically, because when we work with fear somatically, that’s when we can also support with that.00:24:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
Let’s take a look at one more foundational principle around fear for today.00:24:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
This is another Biggie’s the only way to work with fear effectively is to make friends with it. So I develop.00:24:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
Booked the term and the concept of befriending your fear after many, many, many encounters with my own fear, as well as that of working with my clients and their fear and this idea, this concept of making.00:24:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
Friends with fear is very different than a lot of the talk that you see in the coaching and transformational industries about fear. Oftentimes you’ll see things.00:25:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
Like conquer your fear, slaying your fear, destroying your fear. We’re not, we don’t.00:25:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
Want to do?00:25:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
Any of those things, I’ll take this a step further. This went off in shocks people at first. When I say this, but go with me here for a moment. We don’t even.00:25:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
Want to release our fear?00:25:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
We want to become friends and becoming friends. When you become friends with something, you’re not releasing it right. Not to mention back to the the smoke detector metaphor. We don’t want to release the fear we we want it there for when it’s appropriate, when.00:25:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
We try to conquer fear or slay fear or destroy fear or deny fear, pretend like it’s not there, or even when we tell the fear we’re gonna let it go.00:26:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
And you might know this for yourself. It just becomes stronger. It just becomes stronger when we try to get rid of it. The only way to work with it is to become friends with it. And I often like to share when I talk about becoming friends with fear.00:26:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
Versus slaying fear, I often like to share this parable that I first learned when I was probably 3 years old watching Sesame Street because I was a very big and avid Sesame Street watch.00:26:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
There is always stuck with me. It’s a parable about the sun and the wind and the sun and wind. See a man walking down the street and the man is wearing a coat and wearing a hat. And the wind says to the sun. Hey, son, I bet you that I’m stronger than you.00:26:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
And that I can get that coat.00:27:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
That hat off that man. Way quicker than you can. And the son says, OK, I’m game. Let’s see who can get that quote in that hat off. And so the wind goes 1st and the wind blows and blows and blows working really, really hard to try aggressively to blow.00:27:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
The hat and the coat off the man. But instead of the hat and the coat coming off the man, the man because of the wind.00:27:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
Holds on tighter and tighter. He clings on to that coat and that hat.00:27:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
So that they don’t.00:27:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
Blow away. Finally, the wind gives up, sees it’s not getting anywhere, and it’s the Suns turn. The sun doesn’t try to bully or to force the hat and the coat.00:27:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
Off the man instead, in a very friendly and loving way, the sun just shines. She shines and she shines until the man gets so warm that on his own avail.00:28:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
He takes off the coat in the hat and I just love this story, this parable and relationship to fear, because fear works the same exact way as the man when we try to Vanquish the fear or slay the fear, or force the fear away, or even ignore it.00:28:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
It just clings on tighter and tighter, right, like to the hot and the cold. But when we can create.00:28:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
A true and authentic loving mutual respect relationship with the fear that’s when it is more likely to begin to loosen its grip and soften and work with us.00:28:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
To be more helpful than unhealthy.00:29:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
And This is why, in the sacred depths, transformational practitioner training we devote so much time to learning somatic techniques for befriending fear versus vanquishing.00:29:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or even releasing fear because this is really what works overtime, OK.00:29:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
I I hope you enjoyed this first podcast. I hope you got a lot of great content and information and a much better understanding of fear. You can apply this understanding right away to.00:29:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
Your client sessions and cases and even to your own fears. I dropped some practitioner trips tips. Sorry, not trips, tips along the way as we were.00:30:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
Going I hope you apply those tips. If you enjoyed this podcast and if you got a lot out of it, I would so so appreciate you giving us a good review on whatever platform you’re listening. It will really help us.00:30:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
Get off the ground and I hope to see you next time. I can’t wait to share more with you.
