The Other Side of Fear
The most important life hack you'll need: A Holistic Guide to Get You Unstuck.
Self improvement topics covering mental health, trauma, limiting beliefs, mindset, spirituality, energy healing, mindfulness, and purpose.
The Other Side of Fear explores thought provoking stories about the types of fears that are triggered by our individual insecurities, conditioning and traumas. We examine the role of societal conventions and how they function as a strong determinant, in how we often choose to address our most personal struggles.
Our guests discuss how they navigate through various challenges, while taking ownership of their true desires. Giving you a gentle push, to live in a way that honors your authenticity. What does it mean to lean into fear? How can we recreate our stories and embrace the unknown? What does the other side of fear look like for you?
This is a reminder that, your fears are as big and as scary as you allow them to be. Your purpose is greater than the fear that hinders you.
Are you ready to unlearn and undo the old programs and reconnect with your truth?
The Other Side of Fear
How to Transform Fear into Peak Performance | with Dr. Eddie O'Connor
Key Takeaways:
- Our negative emotions are not pathological. They serve a purpose.
- Your anxiety at its core, is trying to help you. What is it truly trying to warn you about?
- One key that can get you to peak performance is to focus on W.I.N. ; what's important now.
Anxiety often gets a bad rap, but what if embracing it could unlock your peak performance? Dr. Eddie O'Connor joins us to flip the script on fear and anxiety, revealing their surprising role as allies in the quest for excellence. Together, we confront the pressure to chase happiness and discover how our natural responses, including anxiety, shape our survival and success. This episode isn't just about coping with anxiety—it's about leveraging it to propel you toward your goals.
Ever felt bogged down by negative thoughts or overwhelmed by the urge to flee from uncomfortable emotions? We've all been there, and in this conversation with Dr. O'Connor, we dissect the journey from discomfort to purpose. Sharing personal anecdotes and expert insights, we offer strategies to help unhook from overthinking and align your actions with your deepest values. Learn how to focus on 'What's Important Now' (WIN) and let those challenging feelings guide you to a more authentic and satisfying existence.
This episode is a treasure trove for anyone looking to enhance their performance, whether in sports, business, or personal growth. We cover the pivotal skill of focus, the power of confronting negative thoughts, and the resilience that comes from not letting fear dictate your actions. Dr. O'Connor shares his wisdom on mindfulness, the importance of support and accountability, and how to embrace discomfort when it aligns with your values. Tune in for an enlightening discussion that challenges the status quo of anxiety and turns every listener into a potential high performer.
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⚠ HEALTH DISCLAIMER ⚠
All health and mental health topics within the content of this body of work are for informational, discussion, reflective, and entertainment purposes only. The contents of this work are not intended to be a substitute for medical or professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
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Hey, there you're listening to the Other Side of Fear Podcast, where we talk about how personal fears has hindered your ability to take that next step that will get you to where you aspire to be. What will it take for you to stop playing small and start playing big? Let's get into it. This conversation centers around fair and anxiety and how it often affects our performance. In speaking with Dr Eddie O'Connor, a clinical and sports psychologist, he provided an enlightening perspective. He spoke about the importance of first respecting and appreciating our anxiety, because when we look at the core of our anxiety, there is always something that it is trying to teach us. We identified one important mental skill that is essential for any type of performance in life, and that skill is focus, the ability to remain focused, and I personally agree, because this skill allows us to work with and through the fear and anxiety we often experience.
Kertia:Dr O'Connor explains this so well when he talks about the fact that what we can do in those moments of anxiety or fear is to focus on the most important aspect of that situation and then decide what you can do about it, because we always have a choice and there are things that we might not have a choice about in that single moment, such as the level of anxiety and fear we are experiencing or the level of confidence we have or don't have. Those emotions are the result of the accumulation of so many things. But I'm sure, if you think about it, there are times when you've personally not felt the most confident. You've doubted yourself, your anxiety was through the roof, but somehow you managed to pull off one of your best performances.
Kertia:But how Was it all? Just luck or did you zero in on the target and make a series of choices that got you to the end goal? So it goes without saying that what we always have control over is what we choose to do next. And, with that being said, my question to you is what is your next move? Dr O'Connor, you have quite the resume. Thank you for being here with me today.
Dr. O'Connor:Super excited. Thank you for having me.
Kertia:Okay, so let's jump right into it. What can you tell me about anxiety and why so many of us suffer from it?
Dr. O'Connor:Oh, wow, yeah, you want to just jump right in. All right, that's awesome. Well, as I understand from what you want to talk to your listeners about, is this safe space for fear, am I correct? Yeah, and that's what drew me to being a guest here, and I'm so glad you started with this question about suffering, because you're right.
Dr. O'Connor:One of the things I've seen in my career is how unnecessarily people suffer with anxiety. Now, for the moment that I'm going to speak here, I'm not going to be saying that, hey, if you have panic disorder or obsessive compulsive disorder or these other diagnoses, that, oh, anxiety is normal, don't worry about it. There are times when our anxiety certainly gets to levels, as you said, that creates a lot of suffering. What I'd like to start off with is to kind of normalize how important anxiety actually is at its foundation. So let me ask you and the listeners a couple of questions here. I want you to tell me we have four basic human emotions. We used to think there were at least five or six or seven, but recent studies have kind of whittled it down biologically that all of our emotions come out of four very basic ones. Do you want to guess what they are?
Kertia:Definitely fair.
Dr. O'Connor:That's a big one, yeah.
Kertia:I would know yeah.
Dr. O'Connor:And what are the other three? Love, it turns out, I mean, that is an emotion for whatever reason. That didn't turn out as to sort of one of the basic ones. It's not no, well, I mean certainly it is, it's categorically but for whatever reason in this science about how we express it. So they found a sense that from facial recognition studies. So I would include love into the one big one of like sort of a happiness, and so call it happy, we could call it love, but it's just certainly that's that positive emotion. So we've got fear, which is qualitatively different than love and happiness. What about two others that are really kind of categorical? We're talking about four big generalizations.
Kertia:Four big generalizations? I have no idea.
Dr. O'Connor:Yeah, I'll put you on the spot and that's not fair. But in general you'll resonate that we are happy, sad, mad and scared. True, Happy, sad, mad and scared. And the world has to say that we have to live in happy.
Kertia:And I think right off the bat that's where there's a problem.
Dr. O'Connor:As a performance psychologist working with athletes, high performers, worried with people in general, are we really supposed to live in 25% of what it means to be human? That doesn't make sense and we're at a disadvantage if we're going to engage our anxiety as right away being if I'm nervous, I have a problem and whatever. Since we were kids, what happens? We get scared. People say oh, don't worry about it, relax, you'll be okay. If we're mad, they say calm down. If we're sad, they say cheer up.
Dr. O'Connor:And right from the beginning we are pathologized when we have these negative, unpleasant emotions. But at the same time, what I want to get across here is that they're not bad. They're not even pathological, because we've all felt them. It can't be a pathology if everybody has fear. Now, I'm not suggesting that it's not hurtful and it doesn't. That doesn't cause problems. What I'm saying is I want to create some safe space for all of us right here at the beginning, to start to create some room It'll be the theme of what we talk about, but to create some room for anxiety and say what is the purpose of it.
Dr. O'Connor:Well, it turns out it's our survival instinct. Yes, turtles go into their shell when they're threatened. A skunk will spray you. We worry, yeah, when there is a threat. And it works Like I don't walk out in front of a car, because every time I go to a corner I'm afraid. I have fear that I'll get hit by it. And it's very adaptive because what it does is it brings my attention to what could go wrong, and then I have the opportunity we'll talk a lot about this the opportunity to respond to that fear in a way that helps me get where I want to go. So we have anxiety about a whole bunch of things. For your listeners. I'm like, maybe they don't say this to you, kershia, but if you're going to ask somebody out, what might they say?
Kertia:They might say no. They might say no Rejection.
Dr. O'Connor:Rejection, big fear for all of us. If you're going to go take a test, you could fail. Fail, of course You're going to play a game you might lose. Here we go. We could play this game over and over again, but we are always aware of what could go wrong and the things that we're afraid of, and you're not crazy for thinking of any of them. If you've got financial worries that you're stressed out about, you're worried about your relationships, of course you are. This all comes out of a healthy survival instinct that says there are things out there that matter to me and so my head, if we're anxious, is going to do a damn good job of telling me everything that could go wrong so.
Dr. O'Connor:I could protect it. And if we can approach anxiety from that standpoint, even the panic disorders and the OCD and everything else, it's still grounded in this idea that your anxiety at its core is trying to help you. So that's my kickoff point.
Kertia:I love that idea because many of us we don't look at it that way, although it's like the thing that we default to most. Usually. You know that little game we just played, we could fail, we could get rejected, we could lose, and usually that's what our minds default to most of the times. But the other side of that is that most of the times, having our brains work that way, we don't tend to look at that as an opportunity to work with that emotion and to transform that into something. As how can I work with this emotion to help me? Usually we kind of get drowned in it Right.
Kertia:Instead of using that as something that propels us forward, we tend to freeze up, run away the actions that we take. After that. It hinders our overall performance and our ability to find a way to just move forward and to do what we need to do for ourselves at the end of the day. So how can we use that emotion as something that is transformative for us? How can we use that as an opportunity, instead of holding on to that and sitting in that and enabling it to keep us stuck?
Dr. O'Connor:Again. Beautiful question to get right into it. This is why I created my success stories community, where we're always working on this specifically as long as other obstacles to overcome for excellence. It really again gets back to how you've rephrased it, that instead of it's this pathology or this thing that we're suffering from, you've spoken really well to suggest that, hey, what's the relationship that I'm going to have with it? Again to your point as well makes us just want to run Sometimes. That's the right answer. Sometimes, if I'm in front of a bear let me say a small bear that maybe I could outrun, but if I get scared, the instinct or fight or flight response is going to tell me hey, I've got to defend myself. This has worked for thousands of years. When we run away from asking that person out, or we run away from that difficult thing at work, or we run away.
Dr. O'Connor:Running away works If I'm afraid of dogs and I don't go near dogs and I run away from any opportunity to interact with dogs. It works in the short term. That's why so many of us stay stuck in. Our anxiety is because the escape plan is actually a great plan. It always works. I always get immediate relief when I don't deal with it. This is the essence of procrastination. Why do I keep procrastinating? Well, because in the minute that I'm procrastinating, I'm doing something that works. The challenge, as you know, is that the more I run away from dogs, I never get to experience them as loving, fun creatures, and I have my fear actually just gets bigger. The more I procrastinate, the more stress that I have, and then the deadline comes and now I'm really screwed. We end up paying for it at some point, but we have to respect that. Our avoidance response, the running away that you talked about, is always an option, it might actually work.
Dr. O'Connor:Like I said, if there's danger and I run away from it and I'm happy to run away from it and not deal with it then I win.
Kertia:Nothing wrong with it.
Dr. O'Connor:You first want to question and I like to say is this working? Is how I'm responding working If I run away from a poisonous snake, it works. I don't need to make friends with a poisonous snake in a park. If I'm running away from my friends because I'm afraid of embarrassing myself at a party and I feel lonely after that, then I say it's not working. I respect that. It's working in the short term to treat my anxiety, but where's it hurting in where I want to go in life, my values, my goals, what's important to me? Then that gives you the question that you want to ask what is it trying to protect me from? Yeah, what's the best way to protect myself? Because in the example of running away, I don't want to get rejected, I don't want to be alone. So I run away from the party and guess what happens? I'm alone. It doesn't sound like it's working.
Dr. O'Connor:So might I be more willing to listen to the warnings that the anxiety has and I'll get to that in a moment. But can I be willing to experience the anxiety if it's safe? By safe I don't mean something bad won't happen. She could still say no, I could lose the game, I could fail the test. But if that's what I really want, I really want the outcome, I have to take a swing at it. So can I be willing to experience the anxiety of the risk and then refocus on what it takes to actually get the date pass the test and study, hit the ball and focus on it or focus on it to hit the ball? There's always going to be a performance plan of focus that has you accept the anxiety because you need to feel it, because it's healthy, because it's a natural warning, but that let it consume you, as you talked about, if we can appreciate that it's there to warn me.
Dr. O'Connor:But then I choose my reaction to the warning like a fire alarm. Fire alarms go off all the time and you don't always bolt out of the building. If you know that it's a fire drill, you might ignore it. If you know that you're burning bacon, you take the bacon off the stove. You don't run out of the house and call the fire department. You never ignore the fire alarm. I never want you to ignore your anxiety and say it doesn't mean anything. You lean into it, you say what's it trying to warn me about and then take the action that's going to help you the most.
Kertia:You mentioned something there about performance plan of focus. How can we take our anxiety in our affairs and create that performance plan of focus?
Dr. O'Connor:You're going to have to do this in a couple of steps. It's a little bit of an iteration of what I just said here. With a lot of my clients I keep getting that question well, how do I do that? How do I do that? Sometimes I get the sense that question is asked how do I do that in the sense of how is it easier and how do I just make it happen? And again, this is why I created the community, the success stories community, because this is a skill that can be trained and practiced.
Dr. O'Connor:So I'm warning everybody here, this isn't a quick tip. At the same time, if you do this little by little every day, you're going to see progress. And it goes back to that idea of the relationship. If you are feeling like I want to run away, if you're feeling like I have to escape this, if you're unwilling to feel it, that's where the practice comes in. It means I'm not going to make you feel better. It means that in your heart not just in your head as an academic point, but you practice in your heart I'm going to care more about going towards what's important to me than how I feel.
Dr. O'Connor:Yes, and we don't live in a community that empowers us to do that. It's all about instant gratification, getting relief, and if you feel bad, you got to do what makes you happy. And I think it's poisoning us as performers and as human beings, and it's actually been proven to show that it's actually creating higher levels of depression and anxiety, because now we're feeling like we're doing something wrong and we should always be happy. Well, if you're going to go into the world and think that you should always be happy and you should never feel these things, immediately we feel like we're broken and pathologized. But again, it's so damaging to us out there. But when you open up and say, hey, I don't know what your anxiety is listeners here but I bet you've got a damn good reason to be anxious. I respect that. I don't want you to respect it too. And then once you can validate that and have some compassion for yourself that I'm in a really hard time. I'm terrified right now, you'll be amazed that as you open up to that experience and you validate it and you say, yeah, maybe I do have a reason, then your vision can get out of that protective let me run away that impulse and you can say so. What do I need to do to really be safe. That's what it's about, yeah, and then the logical answer is well, if I want to pass the test, I really have to study and notice the tone that I say that with, because that's how I wanted to come in. When I accept that I'm really scared about the test and graduating or passing, there really is no other answer than to get ready and prepare for it.
Dr. O'Connor:So the anxiety has done its job. It's the alarm that brings my attention to where it needs to go, but my responsibility as a performer and as a human being is going to be to then unhook from that. Say I've already gotten the value of it, the overthinking and the obsessing that comes very naturally. We keep doing that because it feels like we're doing something, but our experience tells us that's not working.
Dr. O'Connor:The new skill to learn is the unhooking and reattaching to what's important to me and the willingness to bring the anxiety with me as I double down on whatever it is that I need to do. It might be, you know read the book in front of me, make eye contact with the person in front of me, focus on the ball, get to the gym, eat a carrot instead of a cookie. There's always going to be something. But you have to know what that step is and you have to put your heart onto that, knowing from your experience that that's the truth. That is the best way for me to go. And because I care, I'm anxious and because I care I can go take that warning and reattach on purpose. This isn't natural, it's a skill. Onto what's important now. If I want to win WYN, I focus on what's important now.
Kertia:I love that.
Kertia:That is something that I struggled with even years ago during my university career, in my 20s, and I was that person who was I'm still anxious.
Kertia:But for real, I was highly anxious and I procrastinated, and when I wasn't doing that, I got caught up in perfectionism and not doing something because I wanted to be perfect, and so it even tied into my whole procrastination, because then I needed to be so perfect that I didn't do it.
Kertia:So I know exactly what you mean, and the thing that helped me to refocus my mind was to focus on what is important, what exactly it is that's important to me, why is this important to me, what is the purpose of this and when I could focus on that entirely. That's really what took me through and got me moving. So I want to ask you, how is it that we can get to understanding what our purpose is and focusing on the why? Because what I realized is that a lot of us are so detached from ourselves, and when you are detached from yourself, it's almost impossible to find out what is our purpose, what is our why and why this is so important. So for those who struggle with that, how do you think we can find a way back to ourselves to be able to find our why. That will enable us to get through those difficult moments.
Dr. O'Connor:As we think about performance. We have to have a why. We have to have a clarity of what's important to us and really there's no, there's no trick to it, there's just a matter of saying, hey, slow down. For so many of us we've got so many busy lives and we're told what's important about how much money we should make or what achievements we should have, or what our parents are telling us we need to do when we grow up All the things that we have to do. We're on this treadmill of culture constantly giving us telling us what's important, and I can't tell you the amount of people that I have worked with where they don't know, they haven't stopped to ask. So a simple exercise might be something as just journaling, and by that I mean carving out some time and write down and say answer this question. If I could have a truly wonderful life without restrictions, without anybody else's impulse, if I was on a desert island where I've got nobody else's influence, what would really make my life worthwhile? And don't think about it, just listen to what your head and your heart might say and you might find that faces show up. You might find that, yeah, I know the family's important, but maybe your son or daughter really pops up and you feel, wow, I've been working my ass off and I want to reconnect with my kids. I'm not spending enough time there. Maybe it's the other aspect where you're like, yeah, I'm just kind of going around, but I really want to invest in some work. I want to make my work purposeful. I'm just kind of getting a paycheck here. So there's something about my occupation. Maybe it's your spirituality, maybe it's your fitness or your exercise. You're like I don't like the shape that I'm in and the doctors are always telling me to get in shape and to lose weight and I need to look this way and body image. But outside of all that noise, I want to be physically active because I want to be there for my grandkids, because I want to take that trip. You'll know that you're hitting your values. When it kind of quietly comes up, it's not really in your head racing through. But when you find out what's important to you, that becomes the reason that you can attach to. Why go through the other stuff Again?
Dr. O'Connor:For example, let's take relationships in a family. They fall apart. You don't like it. You're anxious about going in and having that conflict with a family member. So what do we do? Well, they're mad. I avoid it, I run away. I don't want that conflict and if we just stay there, we're going to stay stuck and that relationship won't heal. But, as you suggested, if that relationship really means something to me, if it doesn't, then run away from it. You don't need the conflict. You can let the relationship go but realize you have a choice. If I really do want to be reconnect with this person, you'll feel that tug, you'll feel that want and then you ask yourself you put the two together. Am I willing to feel the discomfort of this conversation in service of repairing that relationship? And that's the question that you iterate throughout your life. Am I willing to feel this anxiety in service of this outcome? That's really, really important to me, and if you're not, then you win run away.
Dr. O'Connor:This isn't about your anxiety. Saying is dangerous, you just have to ask if it's worth it. So the values clarity is really a first step, because it's what everything else gets based on.
Kertia:Definitely the thing about what you said about being willing to deal with the anxiety.
Kertia:It's like your why has to be bigger than that anxiety that you're feeling To be able to allow you to unhook and keep it moving, regardless of how you feel.
Kertia:And when you were speaking about sitting with uncomfortable situations and uncomfortable emotions, I brought up a question to me about because, of course, fair anxiety, all of these things. They come from the experiences that we've had in childhood, adulthood traumas, conditioning, things that we've gone through, starting with our families. How do we find meaning in these challenges that we have been through? How do we find meaning in the unpleasant things that we've experienced? Because I feel like when you can find meaning in that, then that can also play a role in you being able to move forward regardless of the anxiety, regardless of the fear, regardless of the self doubt or doubting your capabilities or the expectations that we've absorbed from the society and from our family members. All of those things I feel like the things that we've been through. When we are able to find meaning from that and to understand the meaning of those situations, regardless of how ugly they were, how can we find the meaning out of those situations, pinpoint that and use that to move forward.
Dr. O'Connor:I'm going to give you the answer. I'm going to give you two examples and one of them I think you're going to love in particular. It comes down to finding a way to come to terms with the idea that this pain, anxiety or otherwise is a necessary ingredient into the process. I'm going to say that again. We don't like the unpleasantness. We want to get rid of the anxiety, the agendas to feel better. The way to get around this is to respect and understand how much that anxiety needs to be a part of the process. Two examples I work a lot with athletes, my endurance.
Dr. O'Connor:Athletes come to me a lot about pain in the middle of the race runners and swimmers. How do I push through the pain? I want to improve pain tolerance. This is whole conflict that ultimately, when the pain shows up, they slow down and they're not hitting their personal best and they're not winning. And they're coming to me for pain tolerance In one session. I say I'm like, well, you're in a pain tolerance sport. If you want to swim faster than you ever swam, do you want to run faster than you ever ran? You have to feel more pain than you ever felt.
Kertia:I can't really tell you this.
Dr. O'Connor:Immediately they're like I never thought of it that way. I'm like well, what does your experience tell you when you run faster? Do you hurt more? Yeah, do you want to run faster? Yeah, are you willing to hurt more? If they say no, then that's okay. Then you can be a recreational runner. But you're not going to go to the Olympics or you're not going to win the 5K yeah, that's fine.
Dr. O'Connor:A lot of people choose not to be athletes. Now you don't have to struggle with it. Now you know it's not worth it to you. But my athletes that want to win then they say oh, okay, I need to bring this along. If a number of athletes that I'll tell you then now, the middle of the race is when they excel, so they went. I had one guy in particular that told me he would go and he starts out fast. Then, when the pain shows up now, what he says is now the race starts. Now, when I handle this pain, this is when I'm going to beat the other guys, because I know they're struggling. Yeah, this is the part of the race where I actually can excel. It went from the barrier to the place where he started to win Because he changed his relationship. He said pain's a part of the process. Let's talk about perfectionists. I never tell perfectionists stop trying to be perfect, and you probably had a lot of people tell you that too.
Dr. O'Connor:You know, right, like I'm perfect. Nobody's perfect. I give it up. Perfectionism is fantastic. I wish more people in my life were perfectionistic. I'd get better quality, everything and perfectionism. And you can tell them I'm joking with you because I'm a recovering perfectionist as well. Perfectionism got its places. Mm-hmm, that drive that nothing's ever good enough works. We have lists of accomplishments, you and I, of what our perfectionism has gotten. You want me to stop doing that.
Dr. O'Connor:I worked with this guy Tremendous business person, terrible headaches. And when I started to kind of get into this idea, he's like hold on, doc, you're about to cost me millions of dollars. I think I was going to tell him to, like you know, ease the stress and stuff. And I was like no, no, no man, I promise you I am about performance first. Remember, I don't care about how you guys feel. I want you to perform well. And again, I say that with a joke I care about how you feel, but we can't prioritize it. I was like, no, your performance is what's most important.
Dr. O'Connor:And this idea of perfectionism then comes into. Well, I've got to entourage some mistakes, because why I'm never going to tell you mistakes are okay. I can't stand when people say mistakes are okay. They're not. We know this. That's why we get red marks on our paperwork or in school, why our parents yell at us, coaches yell at us. Friends, everyone with mistakes. We disappoint our teammates. When we make mistakes, it ends up being the reason that the project doesn't go through, or we fail or we lose the game. Mistakes are not okay. Stop lying. Don't ever tell a perfectionist that mistakes are okay. You'll lose them immediately. They'll never talk to you again.
Dr. O'Connor:What mistakes are or a necessary, unpleasant part of the process of being, of striving for perfection? I've never met a human being that has avoided mistakes and, in fact, if you have avoided mistakes, I promise you you haven't learned a darn thing, because the only way to go into a place that you've never been before and to do something that you've never done before is to iterate it. It means you're going to try it. You're going to get some feedback on what didn't work ie the mistake and you can do one of two things. You could be the perfectionist that burns out and say well, that's unacceptable and I'm never going to do it again. And you have shame and you can't look at it and you're just upset and you're demonstrating all this anger and frustration to the world and people know that you're a perfectionist and it reinforces that I have to be perfect. Nobody's harder on me than I am. That's a great attitude and that reinforces how important doing well is to us.
Dr. O'Connor:But the perfect perfectionist is that, like to call it, it's still going to hate those mistakes, but he's going to realize that every mistake is an opportunity to learn. And again, everybody knows that as a cliche. But the real high performers will embrace that unpleasantness and while they're feeling like they hate the mistake, they're going to say what could I have done differently? Which means I have to humble myself and admit that I did something wrong or that I'm not perfect and that hurts. And we can go more into how do you deal with that.
Dr. O'Connor:But this piece here of changing your relationship to the mistake and to your point well, how do we go about bringing meaning to things? If I want to be perfect, my mistakes are going to drive me to perfection. They're going to annoy me, which means I don't want to keep making them. So I'm going to be motivated to not make them. But if I can learn from them after every mistake I make, that mistakes mean I'm getting 1% better, because now I fix that and I won't do it again, or I know what to do differently. So then I do this and I make a new mistake. Oh, that's frustrating. I'm not perfect, but now I'm that much closer to perfect because I fixed that too and I won't do that again. But it's only if we start responding to the mistakes in a productive way by fixing them. That's the key.
Kertia:I love that, and I think that leads into something that you've spoke about before, about the mental skill that we need to have. That is absolutely in line with everything you just said, because I'd like you to tell me what is the most important mental skill that we need to develop in order to do what you just described.
Dr. O'Connor:Yeah, I've had arguments with other sports ecology consultants about this, because I think number two what people say is confidence. People like I need to feel confident. But I argue with them wholeheartedly because I'm like well, first of all, you don't control confidence, so if that's the most important one, you're screwed, because there are plenty of things that I go into and for those who are listening with fear, confidence if that's going to be number one, we're all screwed. But I've seen people do really really well when they're not confident. What I haven't seen is people do really well when they're not focused. The number one mental skill by far is your ability to focus, to choose your attention, to put it on what's the right thing at the right time, to do it on purpose. That is, again, something that can be trained. I know you've got a history with mindfulness. This is a big fan of mindfulness training for a lot of reasons, but because it's the best way to develop that focused skill. Imagine this is part of what I suggested with the idea of unhooking. What is unhooking? It's taking your attention off of anxiety and the automatic thinking and all the biological reasons that you're on it. But to have the strength, the mental strength, to unhook, let it go and then put your attention on something else. That's ultimately. If I could go off in a little tangent, because you've heard, let it go. People say you, let the anxiety go, let the thought go over. Here I'm telling you, unhook.
Dr. O'Connor:I tried to figure that out a lot. I had tough things going on in my life my own anxieties, my own midlife crisis. There's a whole lot of stuff I wanted to let go of. I read books about letting go. I sermons about letting go, psychologists about letting go. I even watch Brave over and over again. Let it go, let it go. Nothing worked. Nothing worked why? Because, let's say this is my problem. The more I wanted to let it go, the more I focused on it. Yeah, let it go, let it go, but it's cold and it's green and it's big and right in front of me. Well, just let it go, let it go.
Dr. O'Connor:What I learned to let it go was to devalue it, be like that's the problem, and then say, let me grab something. This is what I want. If I focus and I choose this. Well, I've let go of this, I've let go of this, I've let go of this, I've let go of everything else in the world.
Dr. O'Connor:When you identify what it is that you want and you go all in on that, letting go is a byproduct. It just happens. That's why mindfulness can be so powerful, because you're constantly noticing where your head goes, automatically yeah. Then because you have chosen a target at the beginning of your mindfulness practice let's just say it's a centering breath or something like that you're practicing focus because you'll notice when your mind is wandered, which it always does yeah. Then you go through the discomfort of bringing it back on purpose to the present moment. Then you do that like a thousand times in 20 minutes.
Dr. O'Connor:It strengthens your brain and it improves your focus so that now, when you're in that big game and you're worried about striking out, or you've got that big test tomorrow and you're worried about failing, you can notice oh, my head's not where I want it. Yeah. Instead of struggling to let all the bad stuff go and get rid of the anxiety, you just say what do I want? I want to focus on going to sleep or I want to focus on the person in front of me and reconnect. You know what the target is. You practice bringing yourself back, and that's how mindfulness practice as a daily practice can have general health effects, but that's how it improves the mental skill of focus, which is essential for any type of performance in life.
Kertia:Yes, absolutely. Mindfulness is such a great practice to bring focus back to what is most important Staying present. I love that you mentioned that, staying present, because that is something that it takes so much practice and so much work, and I think the problem with a lot of us is that we're not patient. We're not patient with ourselves, we're not patient with the process and we're not patient with what it takes for us to do the things that we need to do to achieve the things that we want to achieve. We're not patient with the process. Other than mindfulness, which is a huge one, and just learning how to be present, so huge, what other strategies can we use to help us to stay centered and focused?
Dr. O'Connor:You know. Honestly, rather than go into more lists, I want to double down on two things. Well, three if you include the mindfulness, like that's the best one it is, I don't want to give you two, three, four, five, six and have you picked something lower down and avoid the opportunity to do what's actually going to help you the most. And when you combine mindfulness, the ability to kind of stay present, what it's also doing is it's teaching you how to unhook, which is another big skill. The idea of to not believe everything that you think. Research has found that half of our thoughts are automatic. We're not in charge of them, and so a lot of scary stuff shows up and if we're believing everything we think, we're going to have difficulty. So the mindfulness is a great way to practice mindfulness of your thoughts. You know, if I'm learning how to center and just be noticing what I think without actually being in the content of the thinking, is a core practice. And it also then introduces the idea of the willingness and we discussed this earlier. So I'm doubling down on this concept the idea that I'm going to give up the struggle to control how I feel Angry, scared and sad. When they happen. I'm going to embrace them, because when somebody dies, I should be sad. When I lose, I should be sad when there's injustice in this world. We got plenty to be angry about and that energy can empower us to do something. It's not a bad emotion and the anxiety, respecting it, doubling down on, noticing it, but not to get relief, but to be able to choose our reaction to it, to respect it, maybe even to appreciate it. It might be a little advanced, but maybe we get there. Of course, tying into the values we said about that too. I want to double down on that. Go back. If you haven't done the clarity exercise, then forget about any other things that we're saying yet. You have to know why it is, and then that's it. That's going to allow you to be psychologically flexible if you stay in these core concepts. But the big thing that I will add is please don't just listen to this podcast as a bunch of tips and then go read another book about anxiety. None of this stuff matters if you don't do it.
Dr. O'Connor:So you talked about the patience. Well, I want the results right now, ok. Well, notice that urgency, notice that feeling. Why am I feeling that way? Because I'm in distress and I want relief right away. Ok, can I just notice it without getting caught up in it? Because is this urgency and this lack of patience working? No, because I'm just being still more anxious and upset and not doing anything about it. Ok, if it's not working, how can I be mindful, notice it, be willing to feel the urge because it is there. I am impatient and then say what do I need to do? What's important now, again, it's the present moment, it's having the conversation, sending that email, doing those drills and just repeat this. Please, listeners, do this stuff. Like we say in the success stories community knowledge without action is worthless.
Kertia:I think this is a fun podcast.
Dr. O'Connor:We are doing, I think, a great job of sharing information. But between you and me, if you guys just listen and don't do anything with it, then it's ultimately worthless.
Kertia:Yeah.
Dr. O'Connor:But if you take action on what we're discussing, it will change your life.
Kertia:Absolutely, absolutely. You said a few things there and it reminded me of something that I've heard before Know how to use your brain or learn how to use your brain. Don't let your brain use you. Yeah, and I've had this problem myself. What you said is very true.
Kertia:Most of the thoughts that we have are automatic, just like when you learn to drive a car or learn to ride a bike. When you get to that skill, when you're so proficient at it, it becomes automatic and most of our thoughts are automatic, or brain is designed to do that. So am I going to believe everything that my brain tells me? And if I believe everything that my brain tells me because, trust me, I have I'll call out myself right now because I have believed everything my brain has told me about what I can do, what I can't do, what people will think, what they won't think, everything, all of the bad things right, mostly bad things. They only tell me good things when I am not trying to do something that my brain considers too much or too risky or too challenging. But when it comes to things that are risky or challenging, things that will push me to grow and push me out of my comfort zone, my brain tells me a lot of things that are scary, and most of those things are untrue, but I interpreted them as true and so when that happens to me, I found myself stuck. You said to respect the feeling, respect the anxiety, respect the fear, respect those emotions. In those moments I didn't know that right. I didn't know how to respect those feelings. I wanted to curl up in a ball somewhere in a corner, run away and hide, or just sometimes I'd freeze. In those moments, my brain completely used me and I think that is what most of us struggle with believing everything that your brain tells you, because some of that comes with so many things that we also need to unlearn Looking at these things that come up for us and changing that story, changing that narrative or challenging if you feel like you cannot change it in this moment, how about you try challenging that story that comes up, challenging the thought that comes up, challenging the narrative that comes up, and then see if I can challenge this narrative.
Kertia:Let's see what I can do after that, because when I practiced doing that, it enabled me to look at the situation with more curiosity Instead of, well, my brain is telling me that I can't do this thing right now because I am incapable of. Maybe I don't have enough learning to do it, or maybe I'm not fully proficient at this. I need more knowledge, I need more information, I need more of something, more skill or something in order to get this done the way that I think that it should be done. When my brain tells me all these reasons why I can't do it, one of those moments for me when I was able to switch the script on that is when I'm just like you know what, whatever, what if I just decided to do it anyway? What if I do it anyways, even if I look stupid, even if I sound stupid, even if it doesn't turn out the way that I think it should turn out? What if I just do it anyway?
Kertia:What is the worst thing that can happen? No, challenging that thought, that fear, that anxiety, whatever it is that you're thinking or feeling, and approaching it now from with a level of curiosity instead of well, let's see what I can do, let's see what will come from this Kind of like you said on hooking from the fear and the anxiety and all those things. But I think what also worked for me, not only on hooking from that, but sometimes on hooking from the result of what I think it should be, of what I'm perceiving. The realities are endless, or brain always shoots for okay, we want the best outcome, but most of the times we shoot for the worst outcomes, all the things that could happen that we don't want, right. So a part of my process also has been on hooking from my perception of what I think the outcome should look like, because if I'm going to think of all the scary outcomes then I'd never do it.
Dr. O'Connor:You beautifully illustrated everything we talked about. So if I could summarize it, maybe, and kind of label how you just illustrated everything that we just talked about. So the first thing, when you're talking about the on hooking yeah, that's what you're doing. When, all of a sudden, you stopped investing in what your head was saying, that's what on hooking means. You stopped believing it, you stopped taking it as an authority, you stopped believing it blindly, and what I love is that you simply unhooked it.
Dr. O'Connor:That didn't mean that you had that to replace it with something else, and I'll use a different word. You said you challenged your thinking, and I don't know if that's necessarily true. I think some listeners might interpret that as, like, well, I was thinking negative, I can't do it. Then I have to think positive and challenge it, and you think of all the reasons that I can. You didn't do that, and so I wouldn't say to the public to challenge it, because I don't want you getting into a fight with yourself. It's sort of like just think about the politician that you like the least and how he or she just talks in the background and you just don't pay attention.
Dr. O'Connor:That's more of what we're talking about, like I'm not even going to argue with that idiot, like what do we want to do with that part of our mind? And again, what you did well was you kind of went into it and said well, why is my mind doing this? Like you had mentioned, that we've got we call it in psychology is a negativity bias. And genetically, why we do this, biologically, why we do this, is because the negative stuff keeps us alive, like being happy all the time isn't going to make me survive, anything but worrying about all the problems Is that dangerous? Is that a tiger? Am I going to die over here?
Dr. O'Connor:Like all that negativity stuff that our head brings up is part of that survival instinct to warn us of danger. And that's why we're always thinking about the bad stuff. And we can appreciate that our brain is wired to focus on and hold on to negativity. Then it takes an extra effort to let it be there to appreciate what it's doing. So all the things that you're worried about not being good enough and embarrassing yourself again all valid. But then you got to the beautiful place where you said, okay, I appreciate, I'm just trying to protect myself and I, tied into my values, I really want this outcome, so I'm willing to take the risk and then focus on what I need to do.
Dr. O'Connor:And that's exactly what you had done. And you use the word curiosity and that to me also is another wonderful word to suggest the openness to the experience and to also realize that these predictions are future. We don't know the future, and so when I'm believing my fortune, telling like, first of all, if you can let me know who's going to win the Super Bowl and what the Lotto numbers are, because let's do that. But if you don't know, if you can't predict the future, then realize that when your mind is predicting your future, it doesn't know, it's just telling you the worst part of it. So what do we do in the present moment to move us towards that future that we want?
Kertia:Yes, yes, that is exact. I like the way that you really reframe what I said there. Definitely don't mean to, because it's really hard and impossible for us to turn all of our negative thoughts into positive thoughts. We can do that with a lot of them, but not with all of them Impossible. So I love that analogy with the politician at the back. It's just like I hear you but I don't hear you. Somebody gave right into your mind.
Dr. O'Connor:Hand to the face, speak to the hand. Is the body a listening?
Kertia:I love that. Thank you so much, dr O'Connor. I really, really enjoyed this conversation. Please tell me how can my listeners reach out to you, how can they find you, how can they get in touch with you for services.
Dr. O'Connor:Yeah, absolutely so. Everything is at my website, dredioconnorcom. Some things I'd love to highlight is I've got tons on my social media with a lot of practical free stuff. I've got a mental toughness in 60 seconds on YouTube, so nice quick, free tips. But I really want to highlight the success stories community that I mentioned a couple of times before. It's an online membership of high achievers just like you who are working to develop these psychological flexibility skills, the ability to notice what they're thinking and revealing and what's getting in the way and how to overcome it, so they can have success in whatever area. I've got athletes, both young and master's level. I've got business people, professionals, people working for health. If you want to be a high performer and you're getting in your own way, join us in success stories community and have both the support and the teaching, as well as the accountability, that you need to overcome those obstacles and be your best self when it matters most.
Kertia:Thank you.
Dr. O'Connor:Thank you.
Kertia:If you'd like to know how Dr O'Connor can help with your anxiety, so that you can unlock your peak performance, head over to his website to find out how he can work with you. I provided his link in the show notes below. Alright, catch you later on my fanlamps, where we'll continue with this conversation.
