Transcript
00:00:05 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.
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I created the Coaching Revolution Podcast to share with you coaching skills, tips, and advice, as well as a deeper understanding of human behavior and of yourself.
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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.
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This is about creating a revolution in the transformational industry so that more practitioners feel amazing about what they do, and so that more of our clients experience life-changing shifts.
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Let’s get started.
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Hi, friends.
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Welcome back.
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I’m so happy and grateful that you’re here with me on the podcast.
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And today I want to talk about something that is very, very important to me.
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It’s a vital part of my mastery when it comes to my client work.
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It’s a vital part of my business and my marketing.
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And it’s also a vital part of my personal life and my overall sense of well-being.
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We’re going to be talking about the inner fear work that we do for and on ourselves.
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Not the inner fear work we do with clients, not the fear tools that we learn so that we can help others.
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Of course, that’s important, but today I want to talk about
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the practice of turning the work on ourselves.
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I want to talk about the importance of being a practitioner and a client at the same time, and how we do this for our whole careers.
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And the reason why I want to devote this episode to the inner work is
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Because as coaches and practitioners of depth, and if you’re part of this community, I know that you know how important your own inner work is.
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You’re my people.
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We’re transformation nerds.
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We believe in the inner work deeply, and we love to do our inner work even when it feels hard.
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But all that being said,
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I’m going to say something that I know a lot of you can also resonate with and maybe admit to.
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Just because we know it’s important to do our own inner work, and even if we love doing our own inner work, that doesn’t always mean that we’re actually making the time consistently to do our own inner work.
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because life gets in the way.
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Other things take precedence.
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The making time for marketing, for creating content.
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And of course, adulting takes precedence because somebody needs to do the dishes, right?
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So the inner work can often fall to the bottom of the list.
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And
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What I’ve actually noticed is that especially if you’ve already done a lot of your own inner work, and especially if you already know yourself really well, and especially if you’ve already befriended a number of fears, there can be a tendency to then under-prioritize your inner work even more.
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the hope is kind of like you’ll get by on the work that you’ve already done, like been there, done that.
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And I know that this happens because I’ve been there.
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I’m human.
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And I still have seasons where I’m more consistent than others in the time that I set aside for my inner work and not just set that time aside, but actually get to the inner work.
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So
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I’m not here to make a case for doing your own inner work perfectly.
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But I do want to say this.
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I believe that the inner fear work, especially the fear work, isn’t optional.
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Not if you want to do the deep client work at the level that you’re capable of.
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and not if you want to grow your business.
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So in terms of the client work, you really need to be doing your own deep inner fear work on yourself so that you have the lived experience of working with fear ongoing.
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And that experience, that understanding,
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It becomes part of the wisdom and the skill that you bring to your client sessions.
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It helps make you more attuned, more precise, more truly helpful and transformational.
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Not because you followed a script, but because you know from the inside what the terrain actually is.
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And in terms of your business, it’s so important to be doing the deep inner fear work on yourself so that you stretch yourself when it comes to your business and your visibility and your leadership so that you have the courage to make yourself visible, to show up and do the outreach and to make the bold moves.
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And I’m going to say something that feels a little edgy to share out loud,
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but I also know it to be truth and I see evidence of it all throughout my business.
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Only about 10% of my business success has come from the actual marketing that I do, which by the way is bonkers because I definitely spend more than 10% of my time working on my marketing.
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But the other 90%
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the 90% that actually drives the bulk of my sales and of my business success.
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It’s the combination of the inner work that I do on myself with the skill that I have to help clients with results and transformation.
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And that’s because so much of my business runs off of referrals, renewals, and reputation.
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from incredibly happy clients who I help work through fears.
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And then it also comes from the inner ability to work with my own fears so that I can continually show up and put myself out there.
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Now, I say all of this not to minimize marketing.
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Of course, marketing matters, but to really take a stand
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for how much the inner work matters.
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It matters for the marketing.
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It matters for your client work and for your business as a whole.
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And of course, it matters for your personal life and your well-being.
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So today, I want to share with you some of the ways that I use the Befriend Your Fear work in my own life.
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Because Befriend Your Fear isn’t just something that I train practitioners on.
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It’s really how I live my life.
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And I am first and foremost my biggest client when it comes to this.
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So I’m going to be sharing three personal stories, three really big fears that I’ve worked through using the Befriend Your Fear process, what the fears were, where they came from, and what became possible because I worked with the fears instead of around them.
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But first, I want to say something about fear itself.
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And when I say it, it’s going to sound really obvious, like, duh, Joanna, of course, that kind of thing.
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But stick with me on this, because even though it’s obvious, it’s something that I think many people ignore.
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Fear doesn’t just go away on its own.
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Most of the time, if you don’t actively work with fear, it stays.
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It may not be so loud and explicitly calling your attention in obvious ways.
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Maybe over time, it goes underground.
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But from underground, the fear starts running things.
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and it runs things in your life in ways so that you probably don’t end up getting what you want.
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That much I can pinky promise you.
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So in other words, most of the fear that’s shaping your behavior in your business, in your personal life, you’re not even consciously aware of it unless you do the inner work on it.
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It’s in the background,
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It’s kind of running quietly like an app on your phone that you forgot you opened and the app is just slowly draining the battery.
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So think about the coach who knows she needs to follow up with the potential client she spoke to last week.
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She knows she has every intention of following up.
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And yet, she just doesn’t do it.
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Something always comes up.
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She tells herself she’ll do it tomorrow.
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She worries it’s going to feel pushy to follow up.
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She opens the e-mail draft and closes it again.
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That’s fear.
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That’s not laziness.
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That’s not bad time management.
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It’s fear, maybe of rejection, of not being chosen.
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Maybe it’s fear of being seen as desperate if she follows up or salesy.
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It’s the fear that is preventing her from doing the very thing that would grow her business.
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I could name so many scenarios like this, right?
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And you know them for yourself.
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fear often runs the show.
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And these fears, they’re not character flaws, and they’re not signs that the practitioner isn’t meant to be doing the work.
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The fears, they are very human.
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They’re almost universal.
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And many of them aren’t even originally ours.
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So I want to say that part again.
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This is really important.
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Some of the fears that we carry are personal.
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They’re born from our own experiences, our own particular wounds, etc.
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But many of the fears that we carry
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are actually much older than our own experiences, much bigger than our own experiences.
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These fears, they get handed down through families, through generations, through culture.
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There’s personal fear, and then there is what I’d call tribal fear.
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Fear that
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was woven into our lineage long before we even arrived.
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And I know this from my own life.
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I have many examples of this from my own life.
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One is that my ancestors experienced the Holocaust.
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And one of the fears I’ve worked with most consistently using the befriend your fear techniques
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It’s the fear of being hated for who I am, the fear of being visible as myself and having that visibility bring danger.
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That fear, it didn’t originate in my lifetime.
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It was handed to me through my family, through collective trauma that’s still alive in my nervous system, even
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generations later.
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And you can’t logic your way out of that.
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You can’t talk your way out of that.
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You can’t reframe it.
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You have to actually work with that fear in the body, in the places where it lives.
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And that’s what the Befriend Your Fear work does.
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And it’s why this practice has been so central
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to everything in my life and also in my work.
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Okay, so with all of that, let me tell you some stories.
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And the first one is about my older daughter, Pnina.
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And Pnina, this August, is leaving for college.
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She’s graduating as of when I’m recording this episode right now.
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She is graduating high school in exactly 10 days and she’s leaving in a couple of months.
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And on the surface, it’s normal, right?
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Her leaving and going off to college, it’s a normal, beautiful, bittersweet passage, the kind that many parents go through.
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But I will tell you, I’ve written a little bit about this, but I’ll tell you a little bit more.
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Underneath it for me, there is a lot of charge.
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And I know that there can be a lot of charge on this for a lot of parents out there.
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So I had a very, very close relationship with my own mother, a very close one.
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And
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around the time that I went away to college, something shifted between us.
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And I won’t get into all of the details and the reasons here because we’d be here for hours.
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But suffice it to say that when I left home, the distance started to creep in.
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And, you know, my mom and I,
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We always, always loved each other so much.
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Our love, that was never in question.
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And we always, till the day she died, and this brings up some tears as I share this, we always, till the day she died, we always told each other how much we loved each other.
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We did it frequently and freely.
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But that being said,
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I kept parts of myself from my mother.
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And that grew bigger over the years as I stepped into adulthood and as I became a mother myself.
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And while she and I, over the decades, we remained very close in so many beautiful ways,
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In other ways, we never quite found our way back to the closeness that we once had.
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And I know that what my mother wanted more than anything else till the day that she died was for us to be even closer than we were.
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And of course, wouldn’t you know it,
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As a mother, myself, I’ve now taken on so much of my own mother’s fears around closeness with my own daughters.
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And so…
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As I’ve watched Penina becoming more and more of her own person over the years, and by the way, that’s exactly what I want, right?
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That’s the whole point.
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I want her to become her own person.
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But as I’ve watched this and witnessed this and hopefully facilitated it, I have also started inside of me feeling a fear that feels almost existential.
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the fear that once she leaves and gets out of the house, we’re not going to be so close anymore.
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And that as she becomes more and more of an adult, we’re going to be less and less close.
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And I said it was existential because underneath even that fear of not being close,
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There’s this feeling of, oh my gosh, this relationship with my child, this is what I exist for.
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It’s everything.
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And we need to be very close or else how can I even exist?
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Now, of course, I don’t know the future, none of us do, but I can say rationally
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that based on my relationship with Penina right now, there is a very low likelihood that we’re not going to be at least somewhat close when she’s an adult.
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I can see that rationally.
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Sure, that makes sense.
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But when there’s a fear, those rational knowings, they don’t really matter so much.
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And I will tell you again, like this has felt so big.
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Like I said, existential.
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There have been moments where it’s genuinely felt like I wouldn’t be able to bear it physically if she and I weren’t close anymore.
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I just wouldn’t be able to survive it.
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And by the way, part of the fear relates to what I was sharing earlier.
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because this fear isn’t just mine.
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It’s tribal.
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It was my mother’s own fear that I’m carrying, right?
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And also, it’s even bigger than that, because while I don’t know this for a fact, I am pretty certain that this is related to my ancestors’ fears.
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all of the mothers in my bloodline who literally lost children to pogroms, to concentration camps, and also the ones who, thank goodness, didn’t lose their children to that, but at some point really faced that possibility.
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Now, I could have just pushed all of this fear away.
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I know how to do that.
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We all do.
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I could have just told myself that it’s irrational or that I’m catastrophizing, right?
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Just kind of gather my will, trust the relationship is going to be okay, and move on.
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But I also know, I know this in my bones after all of these years of working with fear, that when you push a fear away,
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It doesn’t go anywhere, and it usually gets stronger, and maybe it just goes underground, but from underground, like we said earlier, it starts to run you.
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And so I knew that if I left this fear alone, it would wreak havoc inside of me and in my relationship with my daughter.
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It would have had me clinging to Penina in ways that would have pushed her away.
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That’s something my mom used to do.
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If I would have left that fear alone, I probably would have ended up saying things that subtly communicated my anxiety.
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I maybe would check in too much.
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Being the slightly overbearing Jewish mother that I am– and I say that with love and self-awareness– if I would have left the fear alone,
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it would have created the exact distance that I’m dreading.
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Unworked fear often creates the very thing that we’re most afraid of.
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I’ve seen this happen, and I was not going to let this happen in my relationship with my daughter.
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And so over these last months,
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As we’ve been getting closer to Penina’s high school graduation and to her leaving the house, I’ve been using the befriend your fear process on myself consistently over time.
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Not once, not as a quick fix, but as a practice.
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And what the practice has given me is this.
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an expanded capacity to stay regulated even in the face of uncertainty around our relationship.
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And I hate the uncertainty, but I’m working with it.
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By using the Befriend Your Fear practice, it has helped me to feel in my body, not just know in my head, but to feel in my body
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that I’m okay, that even though I don’t know what’s going to happen with the relationship, that it’s okay if it shifts.
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I can still be standing.
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Working with the fear has let me know that I’m going to be okay no matter what happens next.
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And on top of that, the evidence that
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doing the befriend your fear work is working.
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Well, I wish I could say that I’m fully able to enjoy the time that Penina and I have before she goes to college instead of, you know, being in grief on it in advance.
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But that would be a big lie because I am definitely grieving sometimes.
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Hello, I’m human.
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My baby is going to college.
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I also wish I could say that I never, through doing this work, have inadvertently said something to her that’s a little bit too clingy, but nope, it has come out here and there.
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But all that being said, what I can share is that through doing the fear work, I am so much more present.
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I am less anxious.
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The fear of losing her isn’t gripping me.
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And because of that, I think, I really hope, that the way I’m showing up with Penina is helping us strengthen and fortify our relationship
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even more.
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That’s what befriending a fear makes possible.
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Okay, so that’s a story about how I’m using befriend your fear in my personal life right now.
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Let’s switch gears a little and here’s a professional story.
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This one goes way back.
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So
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I don’t know, about 10 or 12 years ago, I started noticing something that was deeply troubling me about the coaching industry.
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The conversation across the industry had become almost entirely about marketing.
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Tactics, funnels, messaging, how to position yourself, how to scale, but
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the quality of a practitioner’s actual skill, the depth of your client work, a practitioner’s ethics, all of this was almost entirely absent from the conversation in the industry.
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And a lot of the marketing that I was seeing out there was actively unethical.
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there was false urgency.
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There was wildly inflated pricing.
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I was seeing promises that were just impossible for any practitioner to deliver, marketing promises that just were impossible.
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And practitioners that were just being taught to prioritize their business growth
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over their clients’ well-being, just starting to see clients as numbers, seeing it all as transactional.
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And I had something to say about all of this.
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I believed, I still believe that A, it wasn’t okay, and B, that the answer to a thriving coaching practice isn’t just better marketing, it’s better work.
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It’s becoming the kind of practitioner whose clients renew and refer and give testimonials that sound like they were written from the heart because they were.
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I believe that the answer is about ethics and about depth.
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It’s about being so good at what you do that your business just becomes the natural outpouring of the transformation that you create.
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with clients and the transformation that you are.
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And because I really believe in the coaching industry, and I love it, and I knew that the industry could do so much better on all of these things, I knew that I needed to talk about it publicly.
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I felt it deeply.
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But it also terrified me to think about doing this.
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Because for me, especially with my history with ancestors who were persecuted for being who they were, the fear of being hated for speaking a truth that other people didn’t want to hear was not a small thing inside of me.
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It ran deep.
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And because of that, even though I wanted to say these things publicly, even though I wanted to really educate the industry on it, even though I wanted to create a pattern break on these things, I was holding myself back from the fear.
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And so I saw this and I started to use the befriend your fear work a lot at the time.
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Not just once, not just one sitting with it a lot consistently.
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And the more that I did the befriend your fear work, the closer I got to being ready to share publicly.
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And eventually I was able to share publicly and I started writing about it.
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And I’ll tell you, the fear was still there.
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Every time I sat down to write something bold, the fear was still there.
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Every time I hit publish or send on something that named what I was seeing, I felt the fear.
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But doing the befriend your fear work still allowed me to send it and then not have the fear take over my life or the anxiety take over my life.
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And
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I’ll tell you, because things aren’t always rainbows and unicorns, they rarely are.
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The thing that I feared the most happened.
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I got hate mail.
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I got real anger.
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from people in the industry who I knew because they felt called out.
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And by the way, of course, I never once used a single name.
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That’s not my style.
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That’s not something I would ever do.
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I don’t, you know, throw people under the bus.
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But people felt called out.
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They felt threatened and they were not kind about it.
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And it hurt.
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It was hard.
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But here’s the thing, even the hate mail, it didn’t stop me from speaking my truth.
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And it didn’t own me.
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I felt the fear and the hurt and the pain when some hate mail came.
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And then I worked with it and I still moved forward towards what I believed.
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I still wrote the next piece.
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This is what befriending your fear makes possible.
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It’s not that you get rid of the fear.
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I still have fear of hate now.
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But it’s that it helps create freedom, even in the presence of the fear.
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And in case you’re wondering about what happened on the other side of all of this,
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I’ll tell you that while yes, there were some people that did not like what I had to say, overall, the speaking out clearly and consistently and ethically about what practitioners actually need, right, the depth, the skill, the ethics, the inner work,
00:32:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
This is what had so many people in my newsletter community and in my social media community become more interested in me and my work.
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The practitioners who were tired of being told that marketing was the only answer, and that marketing only in this particular way that felt unethical to them was the only answer.
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They found me.
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They found their way to me.
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They hired me.
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They came into my programs, and they stayed, and they referred others.
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They became the community that I had always wanted to be building.
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The very thing that I was most afraid of, the being visible, the being hated,
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It kind of became the foundation of everything.
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And I wouldn’t have been able to do any of it if I hadn’t been willing to do the inner fear work first.
00:33:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
Okay, so one more story today about fear.
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This one, I have a feeling, will be really important for some of you listening.
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And if you’re meant to hear it, I really, I really hope you hear it and take it in.
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So this story goes back six, maybe seven years ago.
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It was definitely before the pandemic.
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And about 6, seven years ago, I made a decision that terrified me.
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I decided
00:34:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
that I was going to take a sabbatical from my private client work.
00:34:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
So at the time, I was running many groups and trainings, and I also had a full…
00:34:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
client roster.
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I was fully booked, like to the brim.
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And I had a private practice that I loved.
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I loved my clients, so satisfied from the work.
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It was so meaningful.
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But at the same time, I was also really tired, like really, really tired.
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I desperately needed some more space.
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I needed breathing room.
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I needed restoration.
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And even though I knew I needed all of that, I probably needed it for like a year before I made this decision to take a sabbatical.
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Even though I knew it, I didn’t at first take the space.
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I didn’t take the sabbatical.
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And that’s because of all of the fears, right?
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If I take time off, the clients aren’t going to come back.
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I’m going to lose all the clients I’ve worked so hard to build relationships with.
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They’re going to be upset with me.
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They’re going to feel abandoned.
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I’ll end up not being able to recoup the income.
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I’ll step away, and then when I try to return, all the doors are going to be closed.
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I had all of the fears.
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And those fears had kept me– and I didn’t work with them for a long time because I didn’t want to work with them because they felt too scary.
00:36:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
And because of that, they had me continuing to push.
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and continuing to be exhausted and feel depleted.
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Because the fear of losing what I had built was so much louder than the deep wisdom that I needed to rest.
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Thank goodness I finally decided to do the befriend your work fear around this.
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And it
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helped me get to really embody and integrate and embody in a deep way that I would be safe no matter what happened after my sabbatical.
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It helped me get to not just the cognitive knowing,
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but the knowing inside of my body and my nervous system that even if doors would be closed after my sabbatical, that I could find other ways.
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And all of that fear work ultimately allowed me to take the sabbatical.
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I wasn’t courageous enough to just take time away from my business completely.
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I still kept up with my groups.
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I was running multiple groups, but I did take the sabbatical from the private client work.
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And I thought that it was only going to be six months.
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But it turned out that I ended up taking a full year.
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I really needed the year, I needed that space.
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And because I continued to do the befriend your fear work on this topic, I had the inner capacity and the strength at the six month mark to extend the sabbatical.
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And when I came back after the sabbatical, I had a waiting list.
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There were clients waiting for me.
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Now,
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just like all of life, which is messy, it wasn’t all a happily ever after story.
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I want to be honest about that.
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There were big, big wins around me taking the space and resting.
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Oh, I needed it.
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I’m so glad I did it.
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There were big wins around coming back and just having clients there ready and waiting for me.
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But
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There was also some fallout.
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There was one client who did feel abandoned.
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And I had worked so hard, when I took the sabbatical, just so it wasn’t like a last minute thing.
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I prepared my clients months in advance.
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I didn’t, you know, I waited for contracts to end, et cetera.
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I let them know how much I cared about them and that I would be back, you know, all the things.
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But there was one client who felt abandoned and deeply hurt.
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And she didn’t come back.
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And I don’t know, even to this day, many years later, if she’s fully forgiven me for that.
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And I don’t want to say that that’s not painful.
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It is.
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And also,
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I am more okay with that than not because I know I did what I needed to do and I did it with love and, um, and I needed the space.
00:40:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
So, you know, I share this story because I know that so many coaches right now are living some version of this fear.
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And look, owning a business, there’s often hustling or some hustling involved in it.
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would be a lie if I were to tell you I don’t hustle sometimes.
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A good amount of the time.
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It’s often part of the deal.
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But it can’t be an ongoing hustle at high volume without any end to it.
00:41:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
And
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that fear of taking a step back, that fear of saying no to some things, that fear that rest or spaciousness is going to cost you, it’s so important to work with those fears and to find the aligned balance inside of all of that, right?
00:41:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
And, you know, aligned balance
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is different in one period of time than another period of time.
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For that sabbatical time of my business, the right balance was to not work with private clients.
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For this season in my business, it is to work with private clients, right?
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But to find the right place, we’ve got to work with the fears.
00:42:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
Okay, so I’ve shared vulnerably 3 completely different fears.
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A very personal one about my daughter, a public and professional one about speaking out, and a quieter one about allowing myself to rest.
00:42:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
And yet, the same thing
00:42:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
was true in all three of these stories.
00:42:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
The fear.
00:42:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
The fear was real.
00:42:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
There was a younger part of me in each of these situations that needed something not to be pushed away or reasoned with or managed.
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Something to be genuinely met.
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And that’s the heart of the Befriend Your Fear work.
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It’s not a technique.
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It’s not a breathing exercise.
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It’s not a dialogue that you script out in advance.
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It’s a real practiced relationship with your fear, with the parts of you that are sometimes younger than you.
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with the parts of you that are carrying things that are way older than you, from your history, from culture.
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They’re all doing their best to protect you from something that once felt genuinely dangerous.
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And what I want for you
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more than anything else, or one of the things I want for you, more than anything else, is for you to really make the time to do this work for you.
00:44:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
Like I said earlier, without any myth of perfection,
00:44:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
I have, like I said, times when I’m more on it, times where I’m not as consistent.
00:44:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
But I keep on coming back to it because the practice gives me more of myself, more creativity, more groundedness, more clarity about what I want and the capacity to actually create it.
00:44:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
And because as I’ve shared,
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The Befriend Your Fear practice contributes to my mastery and my client work, and it also contributes to my business success.
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And I want that for you as well.
00:45:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
So before we close, I want to leave you with some homework if you feel like taking it on.
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This week, I invite you to make a list.
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just a simple, honest list of the places in your business or in your life where you sense that fear is holding you back.
00:45:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
And list out the obvious ones, the ones you know, you can name the fears off the bat, but also take the time to consider
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the places where you’re holding yourself back, where you’re not following through, where you keep meaning to do the thing and you don’t, where you pull back right before you’re just about to be seen.
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Name the places where decisions feel harder than they probably need to be, because those are the not so obvious places where fear shows up.
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And once you’ve made the list, take a moment and journal on what the impact of these things are.
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What are they costing you in your business, in your relationships, in your well-being, in your sense of who you are?
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Because
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Becoming more aware of that will hopefully motivate you to then do the befriend your fear work with it.
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I don’t want those fears to continue to be an invisible ceiling for you.
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I want you to do the inner work.
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Like I said earlier, I think it’s not optional, not for those of us who go deep with our clients, not for those of us who are looking
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to grow or sustain our businesses.
00:47:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
Okay, so if today’s episode has been landing for you, first of all, it makes my heart so happy.
00:47:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
And also, I want you to know about the Befriend Your Fear certification.
00:47:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s where I teach all of this, the Befriend Your Fear process, the somatic skills,
00:47:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
how to use it with clients and how to use it with yourself.
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The practices that you can take into your own inner work as an ongoing part of how you move through your life and your business.
00:47:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
So if you want to take a look at the certification, I’ll drop the links for it into the show notes.
00:48:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
I would love for you to take a look.
00:48:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
And in the meantime, please remember, come back to the inner work.
00:48:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
Do it for yourself.
00:48:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
Do it for your clients.
00:48:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
Do it for your business.
00:48:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
If you enjoyed today’s episode, also, it would mean the world to me if you gave us a five-star rating, if you left a good review, and if you let people in your life know about it.
00:48:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
Thank you so much, and I’ll see you soon.
