Mindful in 5 Podcast

Face Fear Forward

• Spiwe Jefferson • Season 6 • Episode 182

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Download Your Stress to Success Blueprint

Fear shows up at work wearing many masks—delay, overthinking, quiet meetings, and the idea you never pitch. We turn that static into signal by reframing fear as information and walking through a five-step, science-backed method you can use in minutes to move from stuck to started. 

You’ll hear a candid story about my dreaded client call that ended with unexpected ease, and you’ll learn why our brains often inflate imagined outcomes while ignoring real evidence that would calm the room.

We explore a 5-step technique to help you break the paralysis. Along the way, you'll get to practice language shifts that downshift reactivity, simple prompts to surface hidden assumptions, and concrete ways to test risk before you take it. 

Whether you need to have a hard 1:1, present a bold strategy, or raise a red flag no one wants to name, this framework helps you act with clarity, not bravado.

Download Your Stress to Success Blueprint

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SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Mindful in Five, where busy professionals find your peaceful oasis to thrive in complex work environments. I am Spewa Jefferson, attorney, certified mindfulness practitioner, and author of the Mindful in Five book series, here to guide you to a clearer, softer, and more supported life. Join me and your fellow mindful ninjas as we explore science-backed mindfulness strategies for successful leaders that you can implement starting with just five minutes a day. Elevate your work, empower your life, work higher, live stronger, let's go. What would you attempt at work if you knew that fear was just information, not a stop sign? What if you embraced the notion that courage is not the absence of fear, but the will to act in spite of it? Welcome to the Mindful in Five Podcast, five-minute mindfulness for high performers. Today our topic is facing fear forward, and we'll be exploring a technique to address it. Here's the situation: you are paralyzed. There's a conversation you need to have, a project you need to pitch, or a risk you need to take. But fear has you frozen. Maybe it's fear of failure, rejection, looking foolish, or heaven forbid. Maybe it's even fear of success. So you procrastinate, make excuses, or play it safe while opportunities pass you by. So if this describes any day that you have ever had, here is a way that you could think about it. Fear is not your enemy, it is your compass pointing toward your next level of growth. I'm going to share with you a technique that you can use to have difficult conversations, launch new programs, or take career risks that transform your professional life. This technique, I'm gonna give you the acronym, part of the mindful in five approach is to create short acronyms, usually four to five letters, that stand for a science-backed technique that you can use as a mindfulness or meditation tool to address something specific that is related to something that's happening in your life. Because a lot of high-performing, hard-charging professionals aren't satisfied with just becoming. They want to know what they can do. And what you can do is use the technique that is the acronym FATSI. F-A-C-E-E. The F stands for FEAL. Feel your fear and give yourself the space to acknowledge his presence. Mindfulness is being present in the moment without being overwhelmed and without judgment. One effective way to acknowledge your fear without being overwhelmed by it is not to identify your whole self as being the emotion. In other words, rather than saying, I am afraid, try saying fear is here. Or I feel fear, or I am experiencing fear. Pick one, either one, anyone. Separating who you are from how you feel allows you to make more objective decisions even when you are experiencing intense emotions. I remember once in my career, I had to call and tell a client that her son would not be coming home because his bail had been denied as a criminal defense attorney in my early years. Well, back then I had not discovered mindfulness, so in my head, I was my fear. I was so stressed because I knew she would be disappointed. She might think I didn't do everything possible to get him out. What if she got mad and refused to pay our fees? So all day I stressed. After my first task, I thought, ugh, I have to call Mrs. Jones. Through every other task, the whole day I worried. Dang, I have to call Mrs. Jones. So this takes us to the A in the acronym FASI. Acknowledge. Acknowledge the thoughts and beliefs fueling your fear. Go deep beyond the first and second surface layers. Really ask yourself what's driving the sensation of fear? The answer might surprise you. The C is for consider. Consider the worst case scenario. Is it truly likely to happen? Say I broach the sensitive subject with my employee. What's the worst that will happen? He might get mad. I'll talk him off the ledge. We'll work through it. Worst case scenario, I'll send him home to cool off. In most cases, your colleagues won't jump over the table and attack you. This takes us to the E in FASI, the first E. It stands for explore. Explore your options and steps you can take to address the fear. Sometimes facing the worst case scenario will make the source of your fear smaller and manageable. The last E is engage. Take small, manageable steps towards facing it. Maybe you just need to get the task over with. Remember my call to Mrs. Jones. Well, I finally called her at the very end of the day. I remember literally wincing and ducking as I told her the bad news. Fortunately, she was on the phone, so she didn't see my anguished conniptions. So I told her. Then there was this long silence. Finally, she said, Oh girl, I didn't expect him to come home. I was so taken aback. And she said, I've been telling that hard-headed boy he'd get into a jam like this if he kept running with those no good friends of his. Has this judge ever granted bail in a case like this? That was her question. And I had to admit, no, the judge had never granted bail in a case like this. And she said, Well, there you go then. So she was clearly expecting this outcome. And I hastily agreed because she was absolutely right. And here I was, having spent the whole day stressing over telling her something that she had been telling her son all along. So, what does success look like? You volunteer for the challenging assignment, you speak up in the meeting with your bold idea, you have that difficult conversation that's been weighing on you for months. Fear becomes the fuel that fosters preparation instead of a barrier. What is at stake? Let fear make your decisions, and you will spend your career wondering, what if? What if I had said yes? What if I had spoken up and said that thing? And this is really bad, especially if you thought it, and then somebody else said it, and then they got all the credit, and everybody was like, Bravo, brilliant, applause, applause, and then you're sitting there like, my gosh, I had that idea three months ago. Face fear as data, and you will become the person who gets things done when others are still debating whether it's possible. Courage is not the absence of fear, it's acting in the face of it. So your next step is to identify one fear-based decision that you have been avoiding this week. Use FASI to take one small step toward it today. Then visit spiojefferson.com to learn how I can help your team transfer fear into fearless action. Your breakthrough is on the other side of fear. Until next time, this is Spiwe saying be mindful and be well.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you for listening to Mindful and Five. If you enjoyed it, share it with a friend, follow, and rate it on your favorite podcast platform. Pick up your signed copy of the book and journal from speewayjefferson.com, or unsigned copies from Amazon, Barnes Noble, or wherever you get your books. Visit speedwayjefferson.com to download sample chapters of the book, watch videos, and become a mindful ninja. Join us on the LinkedIn Mindful and Five group and share your thoughts. Until next time, be mindful and be well.