Bonus Episode: Build Radical Confidence through Consciously Facing Your Fear

Gorgeous Creatures, welcome to this week's episode of Finding Your Way Home

And it's a special feature - a bonus episode, continuing our Season 8 theme of calling, and the courage to pursue it.

Sit back, rest in, and join us to uncover how to build deeper, more expansive confidence in your abilities, your purpose and encountering the fear that could so easily hold you back. Until, as we do, we apply curiosity and compassion to what our fear may be speaking, and how to move forward irrespective of the temptation to hold back. 

In this mini, we cover: 

✨How to build core confidence in your innate quality and limitless possibility
✨Embracing and working with fear, rather than rejecting or reacting against it
✨Letting go of outdated relationships, dynamics, ways of being and acting in the world - liberating the human you know yourself to be
✨Embracing the potential that lives beyond your doubt, scarcity or trauma - what Faith, Self Trust and Curiosity will create in your inner experience and outer world…

Together, we’ll go right to the heart of what keeps most people stuck at the gateway to their deeper desire - the flight / freeze response that keeps us in convenient familiarity, over courageous ambition. Learn not only how to embrace the raw capacity you feel inside of you, but how to do so from centre, resource and regulation. 

Bonus: You’ll find a beautiful little presensing meditation nestled into the heart of the episode, to support you in real time to sit with fear - until, as always, it shifts into peaceful acquiescence, familiarity and eventually, clarity on what you choose for yourself, from wholeness. 

With love my friends; let us know what lands. 

Transcript

Anthea: 0:14

welcome to Finding Your Way Home, the secrets to true alignment. I'm your host, Anthea Bell, movement teacher, mind body coach, and lifelong spiritual seeker. This is a podcast about the depth, weight, and profound healing power of connection between mind and body, spirit and soul, and from one human to another. Together with an incredible range of inspiring guests, we'll explore just what connection and alignment mean. How to get there in a world full of the temptation to conform, and how great challenge ultimately can lead to life changing transformation. Get ready for groundbreaking personal stories, conversational deep dives, and a toolkit of strategies to build not just your inner knowing, but your outer world. Let's dive in.

1:05

Hello, gorgeous creatures. So we are sitting down together today for a solo episode of the podcast. I've had a lot of requests in the past couple of months to record more solos, and my bias and my preference is always that I'd be bringing you the deepest speakers on this question of how do I really move into a more embodied, more? Mm, actualized, more alive, more energized version of myself. Fundamentally, how do I move beneath and beyond the clubber of my mind and the manifold responsibilities and expectations that I feel I walk around the world with to get to me, to get to me, to get to the essence and the essential qualities of me that are. Naturally the place from which I create naturally the place from which I leave a deeper imprint on the world. And so, because my bias is always that I bring you stunning speakers, um, I have been reluctant to interject my voice too strongly among them. And we're in this beautiful natural pause point between season eight and season nine of the podcast. Some of the interviews that I'm doing right now, team are just. O so exquisite, I cannot wait for you to hear them. But in that little pause point, I'm gonna use the opportunity to begin to release a series of episodes specifically tailored to my transitioning women. These incredible, beautiful, potent, brave, often terrified people that are stepping into the next step. And so today what I particularly wanna touch on is call. And confidence and the willingness to step into courage. The three C's, and I'm gonna start with a little bit of an explanation of where I've been. So a lot of you guys know that in the end of August this year. I took a group to Costa Rica to host a private retreat, which was an immersive body mind, energetic, experiential, rollercoaster ride, uh, deeply, deeply personalized one-to-one, and group coaching, the most incredible private eco forest where we were just languishing in. The abundance of nature in incredible comfort in, uh, trees and even the leaf palms of trees that are bigger than your entire body. And it was the most transformative experience. The group were deeply, deeply touched by it, and I'm showing what they said rather than my own reflections. Uh, most of you guys know that I'm not necessarily one to sing my own praises. Um. But it really was utter, utter extraordinary magic. And the women that entered that space were radically different women to the women that exited. And I haven't told you guys this, but the reason that I decided to host in Costa Rica, the reason I decided to launch this initiative was that two and a half years beforehand, I went on the very same expedition. As the first big, brave step into authenticity that I had ever taken up until that point, I had lived a life that was incredibly ambitious, very responsible, beautifully diligent, but in some senses lacking in truly aligned soul calling. And when I landed in Costa Rica, I was not just transported to a different place. I was transported to a new level of freedom, liberation, and opportunity. And it was at that point, and in the months that came, that I started to discover who I really was. And as I discovered who I really was, I was called to be incredibly brave in stepping away from the life. The real financial aspects of that life, the relationships, the physical home, the physical geography, even the way that I described my profession that were no longer a true reflection of the woman that I now knew myself to be. What I wanted more than anything else was to be able to continue to carry the energy of the woman that I had found on that trip. The woman that traveled from Costa Rica to San Francisco all the way down the Golden Coast to San Diego, back to la, across to Texas, back to London, uh, back to Costa Rica. That woman that was intrepid and that knew that the world was a safe place in which she could bask and discover the woman that dressed in light summer clothing. Making an exhibition of herself for the first time in her life, feeling the warmth on her skin, the person that had the knowing of her own capability, the self-assurance to know that anything that she dreamt was possible if she was willing to really get behind it, and as in other moments in my life. What happened when I really started to make that commitment on a consistent basis,'cause you don't just make it once, was that I was tested again and again and again with opportunities to cave and concede and to make myself convenient. It's one of my big watch words. When am I falling into comfortable? When am I falling into compromise? When am I falling into convenient? These are the other three C's, and I know that for me, because I've come from a place of significant codependency and people pleasing, that is always going to be a tempting tendency that on some level I make myself more pleasing, more quiet, more dulled, more deferring to the bigger power holder. More likely to want to be the sidekick in somebody else's initiative, the team member, the collaborative support, the booster, the morale enhancer than I am necessarily to have the first instincts to put myself right front and center in the stage drama or the stage joy of my own life. And yet, all throughout my life, I have had a deep, deep knowing. Of call a deep, deep knowing that I was meant for bigger and greater and stronger and deeper. There is a muscularity in my temperament that is undeniable. That comes out when I feel really confident, really comfortable that comes out when I am sometimes off duty. I am flirting. I am dancing. I mean, I went to ecstatic dance on Sunday, just gone, which has become one of my absolute favorite weekend initiatives. They are amazing. By the way, we're gonna get the, uh, the founder to come on and speak to you guys about what really, uh, brought that particular project into the world. I tell the story to say that I went there on Sunday to this incredible space where you're given full permission to be and do absolutely anything that you want in consenting space with others. There are definitely some, um, safety oriented frameworks, but when you are adhering to those, you're basically allowed to let loose. And most of the time people are doing it in independence. But then sometimes when it's really sweet and really delicious, you noodle your body or you connect and press your body into the body of another person and you start to experience the the rhythm together. This co-regulating, co challenging, strong or soft enfolding dance. And when I went on Sunday, I just went. Fucking hell, full leather. I have never danced as deep or as badass or as good, or as deliciously as I danced that day, and I had a wild, wonderful ride. And what was so beautiful was that in absolute equality to the strength that I brought, I was matched by the perfect dance partners. Uh, by one guy who I've seen at the dance, uh, several times and I've never quite had the confidence to consciously dance with. And then, oh, it just so happened that my hand was brushing his and then we were off in this little swirl that ended in him spinning me around his head pretty much, um, with an amazing woman who is as hypermobile as me. And so there was a lot of me sliding underneath her bridge pose and then her. Uh, strategically lunging on top of me. It was just the greatest fun, and I was grinning and laughing the entire time. And I say that thing about having been met by the perfect dance dancers partners, because it's really, really important to recognize that when you are brave enough to step forwards and step in, you are met. What happens for most of us, and this was absolutely the case with me for different patches of my life, and then even a little moment since I've been back from Costa Rica two and a half years ago, although it has been, let's face it, a pretty propulsive ride from strong experience to strong experience. But what happens is that we stand at the gateway. We feel the surge and we particularly feel the surge when we're in a moment with another person where they're already holding that resonance where they can already feel for us, what we can feel for ourselves tentatively where they are giving us the implicit permission that we feel that we've been waiting for, for the entirety of our lives. It's when we are not in that space, when we come out of the retreat, when we come out of the coaching container, whatever it might be, that doubt seeps in. And and why is that? Because fundamentally, we are co-creating, co-regulate creatures. That is how we are designed, our primitive, primal being adores and is intrinsically reassured in the space of another person.. And when we are not with that other person, we go into that space of, oh, I'm on my own again. Oh, I don't know if it'll work, but what if this, but what if that and doubt, doubt, doubt, doubt, doubt seeps in. And it doesn't mean that the dream that you had was wrong. And it doesn't mean that the, ah, the moments of aggrandizement and expansion are wrong. What it means is that just for a moment, you've lost the thread of assurance and the thread of, you could say God or source consciousness. That lets you know that all is well, even in this moment of fear, that lets you know that this is not not part of the plan. That there is a weave of wisdom and consciousness running through the entire time, and that in a sense, the fear is the price of admission into the dream. I'm gonna say that again. Facing the fear. And that doesn't mean confronting it with aggression. It means holding yourself, holding your dream, holding your vision in. The fear is the price of admission into the dream. And let's face it, the dream is just what you know yourself to be worthy of, equitable to. The dream is not some weird extrapolated reality that is not possible for you. If you know it on that deep guttural level. If you know it, and I know that as you're listening, you know it, whatever that is for you, this is not a fantasy. This is something that you very practically get to build into your reality. Will it come tomorrow? Well, maybe not. But if you take the aligned actions towards it, will it come? Yes. And is that aligned action coming from an aligned being? Yes. Is that required, that matching of outside and inside? Yes. But it's very realizable. What it is that you so deeply burn for is absolutely realizable. It just takes courage and that you can't see the exact how is not a problem. Because even when people have a sense of the exact, how rarely is that the actual, how rarely is that what truly materializes So much of the time, it isn't exactly according to your blueprint, but is the seed that birthplace, that life force? Is that real? Yes. Yes. And so the question for all of us becomes, when I'm afraid, what do I do? When I'm afraid, what is my response? Is my response to retreat. When I experience the physiological, the very, very real physiological sense of retracting, is my response to retract on an actual material basis to pull my dream back in or to berate myself or to wish that this was not happening? Or could there be a world in which just together. If you bring to mind any fear that you're currently facing, just together right now, we pause and we come in to the integrity of connection. So just here, just right now. So allow yourself to bring into your mind, into your heart, whatever fear you've been navigating. Whatever negative reality you have been envisaging that on some level gets you, it gets to you, creates an instability that feels really potentially polarizing. And it'll be different for each and every one of you. Like, oh, I'm afraid that my partner will leave, or I'm afraid that, um, I. That people will discover that I'm not worth what I charge. Uh, I'm afraid that the dream won't come to reality. I'm afraid that this is risky, what? Whatever it is. And we're just gonna notice where in your body right now, that fear feels as though it's living slash hiding. And with me here, you're just gonna take a really gentle breath and radically for a moment, we're gonna aim not to resist. Not to resist the fear and just together we're gonna say inside of you. Welcome, welcome, welcome, beautiful fear. I see you. I accept you. I am glad that you are here. I recognize that you are speaking for a dear part of me that really wants to be heard in this moment. And I am neither gonna believe that the narrative is true, nor am I gonna try and push you away. I'm gonna come into tender, affectionate connection with you, and I'm gonna love on you, and I'm gonna be with you and we're gonna work this out together. Right here, right now, just resting into a quality of peace with whatever it is that has been emerging and alive within you, that you feel this is not wrong, that you feel this is natural because on some level, you are being asked to get bigger. To grow your capacity to be less afraid in the life that you build and in the opportunities that you consider yourself to be an equal for you are being asked to stretch and it's scary and it's especially scary when we imagine that there is gonna be a toll. A negative reality that we can either evade nor resolve. Of course, your head goes to all of those places, and if we don't pause the fear, it's very likely that that same fear will carry into the decisions that you make. And I'm not here to tell you which is the right or the wrong decision. I don't really believe that there is one. But what I do believe is that this growth moment, this growth opportunity, is not happening by accident. What I do believe is that the moment that your fear comes up with the greatest strength, the moment that it feels the most terrifying and ridiculous to do the thing like hosting a retreat in Costa Rica, that you are solo running. With nine women in a space where you have never hosted before, and doing that without a clear crystallized certainty of success, that everyone will walk away with the the vision that you know that they will, but not having the exact how and blueprint of how that's gonna work for every person. That felt fucking ridiculous when I had the image of doing that at the beginning of this year. I was like, oh God, I'm doing this. That's literally the statement that has come out of me consistently across the course of the last two and a half years. It was the same statement that came up when I first went to Costa Rica. Oh, Jesus. I am doing this. I apologize, by the way, for my potential profanity. Oh, oh, my oh, oh my, oh. All of the exclusives that you can think of. Fuck, I'm doing this, and I had the first thought and it felt exciting, and then the closer that I got to the retreat, the more that I had done the actions, ticked off the list, done everything that was practical to make myself feel really lovely and secure. All of the people were welcomed in. All of the agendas were finalized, the itineraries were perfectly branded. Every single detail that could have been considered was finalized with the retreat center. Uh, all of the money was paid. I had paid this huge down payment to hire this space. It's more money than I've paid in one single go, except for when I paid my coach, which was my other, oh fuck, I'm doing this moment. Um, once all of that was done, actually. That was when my fear got really loud because there was nothing to distract me anymore. And it got to, uh, and she can confirm this, it got to the night before I was leaving and I'd done a really, really good job of busying myself extraordinarily to mitigate against the nervousness of this, by definition, growth edge, because I was doing a big, beautiful thing. That I haven't declared. I had not declared in that way up until that point. It wasn't until the night before that Sophie Brigg dock is sitting down with me and I'm having a full frontal, sematic resistant experience. My whole body is screaming, what are you doing? This was insane. Uh, they're gonna be disappointed. You're not gonna be able to deliver what you, on some level know that you can deliver, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All that jazz. And so she's sitting with me because of course, as a somatic practitioner, I have my own. She's sitting with me is gorgeous. Sophie Briggs dock as the trauma informed expert, EMDR specialist, um, mindfulness coach, breathwork practitioner that she is, uh, seasoned, codependent recoverer. And she's almost laughing because she knows this feeling really well too. And together we just feel the fear. And it gets to the point where I scream and I am raging, and at one point I'm throwing a pillow against the wall because the sheer frustration of the buildup of this fear has gotten to a crescendo. And then poof, it pops. And it pops because I realized that I have decided that I'm gonna fucking do it anyway. That the silly, as it feels as big of a, an investment, as it feels as big of a banking on what I already know to be possible as it feels, I decided I was gonna do it when I first had the idea in January. I decided months before this moment, I'm just having a wobble. Amen. Because the wobble is the gateway to admission to my dreams. The same for me is for you. I've had other wobbles. I've had wobbles before, a date. I've had wobbles before, a big project, but that moment was probably my most obvious. Big, big, big wobble because for whatever reason, it felt like a bigger stretch. Than the ones that I'd taken before. What has happened since is almost so simple and yet hard to word that I haven't voiced it at all since getting back. It's been about a month now and I have sat in some incredible spaces with some incredible women, and I have taken a series of decisions in my business, which are beyond imagining. Uh, I'm gonna tell you about some of those in, uh, in future episodes, but for now, suffice to say that me facing my fear, it was my jumping off point. Often when we use the phrase jumping off point, we talk about this moment where the way that you've been doing life up until that point has become so painful and you've tried everything and you have nothing left to lose, and so you jump. For me, the jumping off point was I have nothing to lose in facing this, in risking, believing in myself this much, in risking, believing in myself this much. Let that land for a second. What would it be like to be willing to risk failure? In order to realize what you so deeply fucking desire, what would that be like to be visible in the world, doing something that you profoundly believe in to say to people, this is what happens when you come into my space. This is what happens when we do this thing together. This is the outcome that I can feel is possible in my life and in your life. And to say that with assurance, how do you get there? You get there by doing the thing that you're terrified of doing. That is the only way. You can't do it by practicing a ton beforehand. You can't do it by. Assuring yourself that every single eventuality will be perfectly resolved by you behind the scenes without anyone noticing. You have to just do the thing, having planned as best as you can, and with as many tools and as many people supporting you as you can, but you do just at some point have to start claiming it. And I will be very frank with you. I did not do that until I went to Costa Rica that first time. You guys know that I spent last weekend in, uh, the Susie Ashworth world, which is a vast world, uh, in and of itself, and she was one of the first people that allowed me to believe in the possibility of claiming it. And I've been honest with you guys. Uh, she got me to believe in it because I hated it when I first heard it, because it was so confronting to the way that I had been living, which was consistently waiting for permission to believe in myself, waiting for you to believe in me before I believed in me, waiting for you to give me the authority to make decisions with my life, with my love, with my body, with my bank balance that I knew to be true or right or aligned for me. And I don't wait anymore. And the only reason that I don't wait anymore is because I have consistently forced myself towards the starting line. I've loved myself towards the starting line. I've cried and rage myself towards the starting line, but I have consistently done it, and I know that that path is not for everyone. And you guys know I am such a softly, softly, gently does it person. You know, the whole foundation of the ab embodiment school is that we grow you at a capacity that your nervous system grows in tandem with. But if I was to deny that it takes strength and courage. To realize your dreams, I would be doing you a massive fucking disservice.'cause if you're listening to this, then you're the sort of person that has really big goals. I have goosebumps all throughout my body as I say that you do. You know, you do. And you also know that there is something being asked of you to step forwards into that. And the truth is that if you are willing to step in, you will be more than adequately met. You'll be met by people, you'll be met by opportunities. You'll be met by clients. You'll be met by a new level of strength and resiliency within yourself. That is. More than adequately matched for whatever it is that you feel called to be or do in the world. And that will involve strategy, that will involve, uh, really identifying a blueprint of tools. You know, there are real actionable steps to take, but you've got to want to enough that that desire and that sense of service is bigger than the fear that would pause you. And if you do find yourself stuck in the fear, stuck in the pause, you've gotta know who the people are to go to, to hold you in that space for long enough that you can feel what your next move is. This is not about deciding anything relative to anybody else's agenda. This is about giving yourself support and care. When you're in your most squeezy moments, that starts with your way of talking to yourself. It starts with your capacity to ask for help. It starts with your willingness to surround yourself with people that are living in the same way, and it is rooted in your willingness to step away from a reality that no longer fits. One of my beautiful clients and colleagues, Wendy, talks often about this moment in her life where she decided to burn it all to the ground and. When we were on retreat together, because she came this year, you know, one of the observations is, wow, I don't need to burn it to the ground anymore. I get to build a different foundation, and that's what's on offer. And so, kind of the thing that I wanna end on, and it's gonna sound really annoying and simple, is that the fear isn't real. The capacity, the dream, the vision that is real. It might not be in manifest reality right now, but that is very real. The fear isn't, but we were talking about this in the coaching space yesterday in the container that I run, you know, kind of pick your dream as in pick the reality that you're choosing to occupy space within. We can choose to live as though the fear is real, or we can choose to see what happens. When we step into the knowing that is here, the whole time underneath, like a current, when we step more deeply into the truth of who you are, when we step more deeply into the capacity that she knows that she has. So really just wanna leave you with a little reminder that truly, truly, truly what is moving through you is meant for you. Including all of the squeezy emotions that are there, and that if you can allow yourself to meet them, to meet it, to encounter it, to embrace it, and to soften with yourself while you do, while you face this biggest thing, which is your own internal limitation. Your own internal belief, your own previous way of seeking safety. As you are willing to encounter all of that, you will be met. I would love to know all of you, the listening, what has come up for you in hearing this episode, in considering the themes and considering how they relate to your life. Maybe you're listening and you're like, do you know what anthea this is? So me of 2023 me of now is ready to go, in which case also let me know that and let me know what you want to hear more on in these solos, we're gonna have at least four more before season nine launches. So I'm really, really open to hearing what you need from me. Um, and I just send you so much love on your journey, beautiful souls. You are ready. Even in the quiet moments where you fear it, you are ready. And I just send you so much love on that ride.

Anthea: 32:56

Gorgeous listeners. I hope. You enjoy today's. today's. episode. To find. More about our. Featured guests. Have a look in the show. Notes.