60 | Why Uncertainty Triggers Anxiety — and How Telling the Truth Brings Peace

Here you are again — doing something hard, something uncertain, something you don’t know the outcome of.

In this first episode of The Honest Work, we talk about what really happens when you’re standing in the unknown — when confidence feels fake, motivation is gone, and your nervous system is on edge. This isn’t about pushing through, fixing yourself, or pretending you’re fine. It’s about telling the truth.

We explore why uncertainty feels so unsafe, how chasing certainty and approval actually creates separation from yourself, and why anxiety, burnout, and panic don’t come out of nowhere. They build quietly — like an iceberg under the surface — when we ignore what’s true.

This episode is for you if:

• You feel like you’re “back here again”
• You’re tired of performing confidence
• You want peace more than control
• You’re ready to stop living from fear and start living from truth

You don’t need all the answers.
 You don’t need a perfect plan.
 You just need honesty — one moment at a time.

Truth doesn’t punish.
 Truth regulates.
 And maybe the truth really will set you free.

 👉 If you’re up for trying this — just trying honesty — I created something for you.

It’s called The Honest Work. It’s free, and it’s a simple guide to help you start noticing the lies that keep your nervous system stuck in fear, anxiety, and self-doubt — without fixing yourself or spiraling.

You don’t have to change your whole life.
 You don’t have to get it right.
 You have to be willing to look at what’s true.

You can find it in the show notes or go to LisaCovert.com/honestwork.

I’m walking this way — in truth.
 You can come if you want.

I’ll see you in the next episode.

 ✨ Click Here Now. ✨

 🎶 Instrumental Acoustic Guitar Music by Viacheslav Starostin (original_soundtrack),

W E B S I T E - LisaCovert.com

I N S T A G R A M - @lisamcovert

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, hello. I am so glad you're here. I'm really excited about this episode. Because honestly, I think so many of us come to this place so often. This episode was based on multiple things, but really it's doing something you don't know the outcome of. Which is every single day, all day long. But we can tend to get really good at things and know the outcomes we think we do. We're certain it's going to take a certain amount of time to get from one location to the next, or to do the morning routine, or to make dinner, all of these things, to do the laundry. There's just so many tasks that we do in a day that we can almost guarantee certainty this is what it will be like. But then there's those times when even those moments aren't that certain. A morning doesn't go as planned because something shifted, someone's mood, something didn't work. But what I'm talking about is those big things. The big things that we say, when I do this, I'll be happy. Why can't I do that? It could be a job change. It can be maybe you have a dream and you're starting to go after it, but you've gone after it before. And you're at a time when it says, that's it, I'm gonna do this. But not knowing if this will work or flop or even matter can put your nervous system into haywire. And let's be real, at that moment, no confidence is gonna pull you through that. It's it's a performance at that point moving forward. There is no certainty. All there really is is just truth. And I'm only just naming that moment of a time when we do something that is difficult. Something that we don't know is going how it's gonna work out. One of the examples I can think of quick is I remember when I had my first son. I did not do Lama's class. I have set myself up so many times to either have no expectations or extreme expectations. So it was an all or nothing and it was almost perfection. Nothing was ever good enough. And this was one of those things where I didn't want to overanalyze. I didn't. I didn't want to come up with a birth plan. For what? When how was that gonna be my decision? I was the beginning of saying, you know what? I don't know what's gonna happen. I was scared to death of having a C-section. That was the scariest thing I've ever had surgery, and I had wisdom teeth taken out, but that was it. Nothing like this. That was scary, and I mean, thinking about it, still I can feel anxiety. I almost just decided not to think about it, and it was not out of in my control. And I also wasn't gonna be mad at my baby on how he decided to show up in the world. So I didn't take Lama's classes, I did not have a birth plan. I took one step at a time, thought about some things, but I didn't even analyze it, nothing. And it was my first time where I started to get comfortable with the unknown. I mean, it was just, I didn't know what was going to happen. And I was realizing I'm okay with that. Because I also didn't want to know and stress about it for nine months. And I might have even loved that, that I didn't have to plan it or do it, and it was almost out of my control. Because I know myself I can tend to over control when I feel uncertain. And that's that's a very typical nervous system. And I'm gonna give you a little clue. If you're thinking about your nervous system off, that is that fight, flight, freeze, fawn, all of those kind of responses. And a key is for me, I can tell, like all of a sudden I'll hear a noise and I can my body will jerk in kind of a fear, or some, or I'm touched, unaware that that was going to happen and I'll jump a little bit. But the most serious one that I know of is if my mind and my thoughts go straight to, oh my gosh, I'm behind. This is never gonna happen. Your nervous system is out of whack. It's off kilter. And my biggest is, I mean, stop. I used to take my shoes off and walk in the grass for two minutes. I would just sit there and breathe, but your thoughts are still coming. Jump on a trampoline, I don't know, run in place for two minutes, 30 seconds, stop and go, stop and go. Maybe you need a 30-minute walk. But nothing from that state is ever going to be truly freeing for you or feel good. That's all reaction. All I'm saying is, what if we would get comfortable with the unknown? Because we don't know. And let's think about this. Maybe you're in a situation that you've been in multiple times. Maybe you're doing something, they oh, here you are again. Or maybe, you know, again, maybe you've done this before and it didn't always work out. Things came in front of it, or took the place of it in priorities. Or maybe it feels like nothing ever turns out differently. It could be even with your kids. Here you are again, arguing with your kid. And no matter how old they are, it still seems to go back to there. It's all your fault, or you gotta fix it, or no matter, it's just it's a crisis situation. That is the truth of the reality of what has happened in the past. But right here, right now, I am here to tell you there are no promises things are gonna work out. There's no promises things are going to be perfect. But there's also no promises that everything's gonna fall apart. There's no promises that your effort isn't worthwhile. There are promises that you act in a nervous system that is not calm in the moment and you are reacting, then it probably won't end up likely how you're wanting it to. How many times have we said stuff and then had to apologize, even though you weren't completely wrong, but you reacted. And here's the lie expectations do not equal safety. We can have expectations, we can have goals, plans, approval, all of it. We can use everyone to try to feel safe. It's deep down, it's like we think if we know how it'll go, we'll be okay. But nobody actually knows. Not me, not you, none of us. And I'm not anti-goals. Those are strategies. You need to be able to say, I'm headed here. I don't, you don't expect to get in the car and have no idea on an address when you're heading to a location and just hope you get there. No. That is the target. There is a beginning and end point that you're trying to get to and do. But you're not knowing exactly ahead of time that you're going to be safe getting there if you need to know the whole trip. You can look at the route, but in the end, you're trusting yourself that your driving capacity and your awaken is going to get you there. You're going to focus on the road on the best that you can. You're going to do your driving abilities and experience and get there. You're not banking on the safety of the street, the safety of the people around. It's the safety based on trusting yourself, on the truth that you have been driving this long, that you are comfortable with this area. You're comfortable with the car that you're driving. So again, I'm not anti-goals or targets or any of that. I'm anti-false certainty. Because this is where we begin to separate ourselves when we need certainty to feel safe. And here's the truth about it. Or the honest truth. We're not very nice to ourselves. We will trust other people's voice more than our own. Hey, do you think I should do this? What do you think about this? What's your perception of what I'm about to tell you of an argument I had? We wait for permission from someone else. And needing other people to believe in us more than we believe in ourselves creates actual separation. Think about that. If you're needing someone else to give you permission that you can't seem to give yourself, that is literally separating from yourself. And this is no shame. I'm telling you from experience. I'm just asking you to recognize it. Because I can tell you the truth is I recognize that. So when I come down to something I'm doing, I'm looking the truth in that. I have had repeated patterns where someone else's permission meant more than mine. But it never actually felt good because the first moment of a struggle, it was based on someone else's permission. I didn't actually believe in myself, I believed in that person, not myself. And that's the pattern that just keeps repeating at small moments of change, big moments of change all around. It's the same feelings, that same stuckness, the same exhaustion, and the same fears. And it's not random. We think it's random. Like, where did that come from? That came out of nowhere. It did not. I want you to think about the iceberg. Everybody knows the analogy. You see the ice up top, but there's the big, huge ice underneath. And the only thing I think of whenever I think of the iceberg is that is my first panic attack. And it might been in second. I had two panic attacks. One where I literally thought I was having a heart attack, and the other one I fainted and fell on a sidewalk cement. And not since in almost three years. I did not take medication that does not to promote not to. That is the point of how in the heck did I get rid of that fear so bad that it was panic attacks? Or the depression that was so hard that couldn't get me out of the bed. How did that how was that possible? Yes, I love my teas and things like that and herbs, and I'm not saying that might not have been a part of it, but there's thoughts in my head were still there. What got rid of that? That iceberg, because it always I was the first person to say it came out of nowhere. It did because I wasn't listening to anything my body was communicating to me. There was an iceberg. There was acid reflux while I was sleeping, hot flashes, and waking up in the middle of the night in complete sweats that I couldn't stop, and then I was cold at 42, 43 years old. No. I felt the heaviness of everything. There were so many lies within my head and my thoughts and my beliefs. I just didn't pay attention to them. It was, oh, well, that's what they said to do. Okay, but how long ago is that? Are they the same as you? Do they live in the same city as you? Do they have the same family as you? Is this now or is that person from 50 years ago when they had a house? You know, it's all of these things, but it was there. I can see that now. But that iceberg underneath is us separating from ourself and getting permission from other people. I didn't need permission from someone else to say those hot sweats were not, that's not supposed to be going on. What is that? That was my body talking to me on things that were going on that I needed to listen to. The stress and the lies that were within that were time to exit. And instead of looking at them, I was looking for other people to give me permission. And day after day after day, I would do and I would complete those lists because nothing would ever be good enough. Because I was looking for someone else's permission, someone else's feedback, not my own. And that's where this whole podcast, the honest work, is not about fixing everything. It's about actually looking at what's true. No blaming, no spiraling. I don't blame myself. I don't put myself down. Because the truth is, if you have something in the house and you have gnats rolling around your house and you finally find the potato that fell underneath in the pantry, are you yelling at that potato? Yelling at yourself? No, it's just a potato. Pick it up and get it out. The gnats will go away, everything's done. But the more time you waste on being attached or blaming or putting those massive negative feelings, not only are you creating another routine or judgment to yourself, but you know what? You're wasting your time. You're not gonna get that time back. And I always think of this part where it's the truth. You know, it's the house analogy. If you don't have the foundation of the house structure well, then as pretty as the house may be, the house may fall down. Well, how much time are you gonna spend on something that's going on in the house? Yes, it's gonna cost money. Yes, it's scary and all of that. But if you keep it down to the truth one step at a time, you are not mad at the house. You're looking at the foundation and you're trying to find out what's going on. You want this house to be functional. You want to enjoy your life in that home. And that's where your time is valuable. When you get honest, we start to look at things as they are. As in right now. This is the part behind it. We have so many horror films going on in our mind. Horror films. I've seen this video once where somebody had a knife and they were in the kitchen and they kept changing the background music, and your whole perception of the video completely changed. If you they had horror music on, you're like, oh my gosh, is this woman gonna murder somebody? Um, if they changed it to something else romance, you're like, oh my gosh, you got the feelings like, oh, maybe this is like a Hallmark love story, those kind of things, like just by changing the music in the background. You don't think that that's what's going on in our minds? It's looking at honestly, and if there is a story attached, look at that story. That story is most likely not true anymore. And this is where I want to give you permission to stop chasing approval from other people. The approval from yourself is way better. Permission to stop living in fear, and the permission to look at the truth without punishment. Fear always has a lie attached to it, and the truth feels different in the body. It just does. And this is not to have an argument, this is an observation. If someone came over here and the effort of trying the honest work is to prove me wrong, please come to me. I would like to know the loophole. I have worked with so many people on seeing the truth, and I have seen nothing but awaken. I can see their bodies relaxing. It's just an observation. Fear always has a lie attached to it. I want you to think about this. Seasons change. Trees rest. Our bodies heal, they have a cut. How does that happen? Things regenerate, our hair keeps growing, and we have to actually cut it. Toenails? Kind of gross. I don't like toenails, but they just keep growing. This is all evidence around us that renewal is real. That's what I see. And I'm telling you, even faith. Faith is trust without guarantees. You've got faith in something. Why do you have to have faith in fear? Why can't that faith be in truth? Why can't that faith be in, you know what? I don't know what's gonna happen. But I'm comfortable with that. I really am comfortable with that. And I actually kind of love that because then I don't have to worry or think about it. And like I said, that baby, actual baby, or maybe a dream, will be born on that terms, as it's meant to be. Maybe it's gonna be even bigger than I ever dreamed. And no, I didn't have a C-section. That baby came fast and wonderful, and no birth is easy, but on my considerations, it was super easy. And I did not overanalyze, I accepted the uncertainty and I felt safe in it. I want to close here on this podcast today. I want you to just try honestly. I want you to just see, think about it. Just try honesty. See if it feels any better than fear. Give yourself a chance. Maybe you weren't meant to live a life of fear. Maybe the truth really will set you free. And if you're up for the challenge of doing the honest work, I created it free for you. I want to help as many people I can to let go of the lies that are holding them into fear and anxiety and depression and all the negative. I don't want you to waste another moment suffering. So I've created a document. All you have to do in the podcast notes, you can go to LisaCovert.com slash honestwork, and that's it. I'll send it to you. And I really, really hope that you test it out. See if it works. Just try honesty. I'm walking this way in truth, and you can come if you want. Okay, I'll see you on the next episode. Thanks for spending the time with me.