51: I Took Fear With Me - And Everything Changed

In this raw, reflective, and empowering episode, Quinn opens up about the emotional terrain of fear—how it creeps in post-divorce, shows up in our relationships, careers, and even in the state of the world. They share deeply personal moments of walking into the unknown: moving during COVID, raising six kids alone, and heading back to school to become a nurse.

With wisdom from Pema Chödrön, Stoic philosophers, and Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear, Quinn unpacks the crucial difference between fear that saves your life and fear that steals it. You'll learn how to identify healthy vs. unhealthy fear, work with your body’s intuition, and use simple yet powerful tools like the Stoic Pause and the "So What?" drill to regain clarity and take action—even when you're afraid.

You’ll hear about:

• Quinn’s journey to school, single parenting, and starting over
• The two kinds of fear women are facing in 2025
• Fear as a signal vs. fear as a story
• Why the mind prefers the familiar—and how that sabotages your growth
• What healthy fear feels like in the body
• Tools to sit with fear, question it, and move forward anyway
• Why women often mistake fear for wisdom
• And the mantra that could change everything:

• “Fear is just information. It’s not instruction.”

Quotables:

• "Courage isn’t about being fearless. It’s about acting with discernment—despite the fear."
• “You don’t need to kill the fear. You just need to stop letting it drive.”
• “Is this a sacred warning—or just a dusty-ass lie?”

Resources Mentioned:

• The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker
• Pema Chödrön’s quote: “Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”
• Stoic philosophy on perception and response

PostDivorceGlowUp.com

Email: quinn@postdivorceglowup.com

Transcript

0:50

welcome back to the podcast. I am wrapping up my school year. I only have one class left to finish, and then I'm ready to apply for my nursing program, and I am so proud of myself. Can I just do a little bit of a brag? I just love being an example to my children that you get to make different choices for your life. They are seeing their mother make different choices about her career, about her relationships, about how I show up and care for the people I love and myself, oh, life is so delightfully surprising right now, but I have noticed in my clients recently, there has been a lot of fear, and that's what I wanna talk to you about today. We're kind of in a stew of fear in this country. So I'm talking to you from the United States in 2025, and I'm hoping that in 10 years people don't look back and say, oh, remember, remember she had time to get out and she didn't. There is this sense of fear in our economy, in our lives as the current administration is disappearing people, and I'm noticing that within my clients fear coming up around two things right now. For some of them, there's a lot of fear in their relationships, and that tends to be, no matter what's happening in the economy, women tend to grapple with a lot of discomfort and fear in their relationships. Learning to trust men after divorce, things like that. But this additional fear of what's going on in the economy and, circumstances that we're just shaking our heads and on a daily basis saying, there is no way this is happening. This is not the country I recognize. It's bringing up a lot of discomfort. There is a kind of fear that saves your life and there is another kind of fear that steals your life. Drip by drip, death by a thousand paper cuts. in this episode, I wanna help you recognize the difference and honor what's wise and reject the fear that is keeping you stuck. I wanna help you discern how to approach fear not as a prison guard, but as a helpful messenger in your life. I just got off coaching a client about her fear for her future because of how it's tied to the US economy and how helpless she feels and in having that space for that part of her who feels so afraid and kind of gypped off that she is having to grapple with things that she had no idea she would have to deal with, and feeling deeply uncomfortable about her future, where she came to. Is a place of deep peace and a knowing of her next right steps. So I want you to know I share that because I want you to know that even if you are feeling very afraid right now. Whether it's about your finances or something else, whatever a deep fear is that you have, there is a possibility to find your way out of it to a place of peace and clarity, even with the fear. Many of us, and I know for sure me heading into divorce, I had so much fear because there were so many unknowns. I thought I could predict the future, but I think COVID more than anything else in my life showed me that I cannot. I found myself in 2020 getting separated, moving with my children. To Tucson, which is about an hour drive from where I was living prior with my husband. Moved into an apartment with six children. It's the middle of the covid closures. I didn't know anyone in the city. My coaching business had just a couple of clients. I don't have a college degree. So many unknowns. Well-meaning people would question whether or not I really should go forward with the divorce, yet the fear of what it would cost me to continue staying in my marriage was even bigger, even scarier because I knew that staying in my marriage, I would have to compromise what I knew was right for me, and I would continue to lose more and more of myself. I was clear on what I believed was right for me and my children, and step by step I started to take action with fear towards a different life. And I want to invite you to do the same. I still get to feel fear of the unknown, fear of the discomfort of what's happening in our country. And I get to keep taking action. I think for many of us, we've learned that if we're afraid we shouldn't take action or that we don't need to take action or we should wait until we are not afraid in order to take action. I wanna give us some space to allow fear to be with us in our journeys post-divorce. And create the lives that we want. There's this beautiful quote, oh, I found so many beautiful quotes because one of my main values is courage, Courage is not about being fearless. Courage is, I mean, you don't need courage if you're fearless. You need courage when there's fear. And I, I don't know how to say this last name, so apologies in advance, but I think it's a woman Pema Chodron, and she said Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth. Many of us are so used to living within a certain bandwidth in our lives that as we start moving towards the knowledge that we need to quit the job or choose a new career or a new relationship, or stay and go deeper in the one that we have, whether it's career or relationship or health journey, whatever it is. Sometimes there is that, that fear that that buzziness of, oh my God, what is this that I'm coming upon? Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth. So I wanna define what I mean when I talk to you about healthy fear. So, healthy fear I consider is fear that signals real danger or boundaries that need to be respected, like gut level. Intuition Red flags. There's a fantastic book about fear called The Gift of Fear, and the author Gavin de Becker, he said, intuition is always right in at least two important ways. It is always in response to something. It always has your best interest at heart. One of the reasons why it's important to me to get clear on my client's values, and many times women come to work with me and they have never thought about what they value in their life, and there's usually a gap between. What they say they value. And if you look at their life, what their actions are showing they value. And I found this was true for me as well, but as I went through lists of values and started to choose what are the values I want to live from? I came up with my list and yours will be different, but now I have a way of understanding my intuition. Is it aligned with my best interest? If there's fear and it's aligned with my values, that's a path I want to take. Sometimes it's tough to know if it's intuition or if Your mind is just telling you a story. Is it really a bad idea to go on this date or to take this job or to move to this new location? Or is it just your mind telling you stories? Because we need to be careful because the mind does not like change. For most of us, our brains prefer the known to the unknown. There are some of us where our brains are, are more attuned to feeling like, no, I want change. I want things that are different. I like the variety. And so those of us who have that aspect to just know that about ourselves. And then there are those of us who our brains like to just. Have the same routine over and over again. So for the people that like routine, the brain is going to try and keep you in routine. So anything that breaks the routine is going to be uncomfortable. those of us who have high openness to new opportunities. It will feel uncomfortable if our intuition is telling us to stay, to go deeper, to not change things. So it's important to take stock of how does your brain work? Are you the kind of person who thrives in change or dislikes change? And just know that when your intuition is telling you the opposite of what you. Commonly do, and you feel discomfort or you feel fear. It may not be just a story, it's just a natural reaction. Based on how you generally like to be in the world. Does that make sense? I hope that makes sense. So let's talk for a minute about unhealthy fear. So, unhealthy fear, I would define as fear that's rooted in past trauma stories that we inherited. fear of rejection or. Judgment, unhealthy fear keeps us from trying. It keeps us helpless. It masquerades as being realistic, like it's not realistic to expect that I can find an awesome partner in today's day and age with all the bro podcasts telling men how to be misogynistic, or it's not realistic to start a new career or go back to school. This kind of fear shows up most when we are on the verge of growth. When I started dating, I had so much fear. My bestie literally had to hold my hand when I logged on to dating apps for the first time and started my exploration socially, heading back to school a year ago, so much fear. Was I gonna be able to do it? Was I going to be able to balance? A full load of classes along with being a mother, and my husband had moved outta state, so I was going to have my kids 24 7 365, like no support. So I really had to face a lot of my fears, but both of those, whether it was to start dating or to head back to school and explore a new career, both of those were aligned with my values and my goals. And so the fact that there was fear, because I hadn't done these things before. I knew that I could do them with the fear, and I want you to ask yourself, what are the things in your life that you're not doing but doing them? Is aligned with who you want to be, the person you want to show up as the example. You want to be in life of how to live. And if you are stopping because of fear, because of old stories or old trauma, I want you to consider getting someone to hold your hand and taking some action with the fear. Now women are socially trained to distrust ourselves, distrust our bodies, telling us that our bodies are very, very dangerous and unsafe places to live. But we're also. Made to feel responsible for other people's comfort. So we have these really interesting fears about being too much or too loud, or too needy, or too ambitious, too something. Something that is not right. But this fear is not wisdom. This is conditioning. You are this wild, amazing creature that gets to live in this body. And with this gift of being in this body, you have the opportunity to receive all of these horrible messages about too much, too little, too loud, too quiet, all of the two kinds of things. And I want you to notice when those come up. I have clients that regularly ask me, especially if they're dating, is it too much to ask? Am I, am I being too picky to think that a man should follow through on what he says he will do? Or is there. Career trajectory? Is it too much? Is it too big? Their dreams? I have a client right now who is on the cusp of a really big breakthrough and she's been building to this for years and years, and here she is, and the economy at the United States is doing what it is doing, And it's brought her to a point of questioning, is this all for Naugh? And there's so much fear that she has wasted these past five years of building this business. And what she has been able to come to is undoing all of those thoughts that come up when as they come up. The thought that, who are you to think that you can have this business thrive? And looking at it from the other side, like, why not me? Why not me? When we look at the people who have tremendous resources and are using it to destroy the world, why not her? Why, why shouldn't she be able to have all of the things that, that she needs and desires to thrive in this world? So much of our fear about. Becoming big, big in our love or big in the way we show up in our communities or in our careers. So much of our fear of becoming a target is not real. It is. Story and it is evolution, but it is not our lived reality. And if you look for proof about why you should be scared right now, you will definitely find plenty of evidence as to why you should be scared. This particular client, she started looking for. Why she should feel safe and past proofs of how the money has always come. The clients have always come, like everything has always worked out. She has no reason to believe that it won't continue to work out. Life continues to support her, but when her vision is on how scary the world is and she's buying into the stories of fear. She's blind to what is actually in front of her. And as humans, we get to choose to believe whatever we want. And you can choose to believe that Handmaid's Tale is right around the corner. And if that motivates you to show up as a more full, vibrant, badass version of yourself, absolutely do it. But I think for a lot of women. Being in a place of fear is more of a way to shut ourselves down and to not step up in our lives. And I want you to have your full expression of who you are and what you can accomplish. And so part of that work is learning to live with fear. And seeing it for what it is. So when you have a thought that creates fear. I want you to notice what fear feels like in your body. And I wanna get specific about fear because fear is a very specific emotion that is different from anxiety. I. Or helplessness or rage. But sometimes we are very messy with our words, so we might call fear by another name or say We're angry when what we are is afraid. And so I want you to ask yourself, what is it you're afraid of right now? And for some of you it might be economic hardships. It could be. I'm going to be alone. I'm never gonna have someone that loves me, and that's really scary to me. It could be about your children, it could be about your community. It could be about what's happening in the United States at this time in history. And I want you to notice where that lands in your body, because I want you to get really familiar with the feeling of fear. So for me, when I feel fear, I feel it a lot on my shoulders, and it's kind of prickly as well as this deep gut punch. And there tends to be like this inner quivering inside of me. Outside, I can look as stoic as anyone else, but on the inside there's this, just, this quivering is all I know as how to describe it to you. Notice that. And so when fear comes in, I want you to expand your ability to sit with that vibration. Emotion is just energy and motion, and as we learn to sit with our fear and make friends with it, that's when we can start dissecting it. Is it healthy? Fear is this. Intuition, is it a boundary? Was crossed and I'm not going to stand for this, and it makes us stronger and more deeply trusting of ourselves and our life? Or is this the kind of fear that's connected with story with a future that hasn't happened? The client I was telling you about, she has this whole future vision of breadlines and. A lot of violence and guns and bloodshed and horror, and when she lives from that place, she literally wants to die. But none of that is real right now. What is real right now is that she is safe and she has a thriving business, and she can do this. So I wanna give you some tools on how to work with fear. So the first was, you know, getting embodied. I think that is foundational for so many women. We try to figure out the world in our heads, and a lot of our deep wisdom is. Just gut intuition and learning to trust that. Again, another tool is called The Stoic Pause. I'm a big fan of stoic philosophers, and one of the foundational ideas of Stoicism is about the fact that. It's not the things themselves, it's not the circumstances that disturb us or create fear, but it's the stories we put on top of it. this really came to the fore for me last week. I made a trip to my chiropractor, and this was right after the stock market took the plunge after Trump did the whole tariff insanity, and. My chiropractor was thrilled. He's like, I knew this day was coming, so I sold everything a couple weeks ago. Now everything is half off. So I repurchased all of these different stocks that I had before and they're just gonna go back up. Like he was thrilled that so many of these stocks he felt were undervalued. So just because stock market plunges. Doesn't mean everybody was sad, and so it's this stoic pause. It's not the things that happen, it's the stories we tell ourselves about them. The next tool I wanna share with you is The So what drill? So for fears, we just wanna keep asking ourselves. So what, so for instance, if I get on the dating apps and nobody asks me out, so what, well, what if I go on a date and they don't like me and they don't text me back? So what I know for women, it's not that easy because you could say, well, what if I go on a date and they murder me? I get it. That's a real fear. And so be smart about your dating. Let people know where you are, meet in public places, all of that. But that usually doesn't happen, babe. That's, that's a fear that, I'm not saying it never happens, but it's highly unlikely it's gonna happen to you. So as we dig down into our fears, so what, so what, so what? What are you making that mean? We often get to the bottom of the pile and we realize it's not a big deal. I. It's not a big deal. Like what if I had gone back to school this year and I found I couldn't balance it all, and so I'm not going to get a degree. I'm not going to be a nurse. So what. There are a million other things I could do. The most painful part about dropping out of school would be the story that I would tell myself and what I would make that mean about myself, and that's oftentimes the most painful part of a divorce. What do you make it mean that you got divorced? What do you make it mean that your children have a certain story about your divorce or your ex has a certain story, or friends have a certain story? What does that matter? What is your story about them having a story and why is that a problem? So asking yourself, so what? So what? So what? What if I post this on social media? Nobody likes it. So what? It doesn't usually matter. The next tool I wanna offer you is to learn to honor your intuition and ignore. The chatter, and this takes you trusting your body's responses. Healthy fear feels like clarity. It feels like. Energy, unhealthy Fear feels like shame and shut down with a client I've been telling you about for her. She wants to sleep, she gets depressed. She's impatient, she's frantic, she's short, she's not happy, she's not present. She's not able to save her life, and that is. How we can tell, oh, that's unhealthy fear. It's not giving her clarity. It's not motivating her to do anything. It's actually shutting her down. So if you find yourself in a spiral of unhealthy fear. The most important thing to do is to start questioning it with the so what's, but also getting into your body, allowing it to be there, to vibrate and to allow it to pass. We don't have to hold onto it just because fear comes in. Doesn't mean it has to stay. And especially with unhealthy fear, once we see through it, it's like it evaporates. It's like this boiling pot of water and we can just let it evaporate away. Now, I told you that my top value is courage, and I want to reiterate again that courage is not the absence of fear. It is acting with discernment despite our fears. Fear can be used as this beautiful compass. If something scares you and it aligns with your values, it's often the way forward. It's pointing you in that direction. I wanna invite you to stop waiting for the fear to go away and take the next step anyway. Fear is just information. It's not instruction. You don't have to listen to it. You get to question it. I want you to ask yourself one of the fears that you're dealing with right now, and I want you to question it. Is this a sacred warning? Or just a dusty ass lie. I used to think that the life I wanted was on the other side of fear, and so I had to wait till the fear was gone or get through the fear to get to that life. And now I know that it gets to be here with me and it's going to serve me. And when I stopped trying to be fearless, I started to become brave, knowing fear is gonna come along with me. And that is when everything changed. That's when I got my house. I got clarity about my business. I attracted the clients. I got the strength and the body that I want, the health that I want. I stopped being small because I took fear with me, but when fear came up, I questioned. I left the unhealthy fear. Now, not always. I, I get caught up like everybody else in unhealthy fear, and it seems very, very real, and that's why I have a coach, but I'm getting better and better. This is a skill to learn how to live with fear and to take action anyway, so remind yourself I can be afraid and take action. I can be afraid and create the life I desire. You truly, truly can. It's like it's, it's a skill like anything else, and you can do this. I will see you next week.