High-Functioning Fear: From Procrastination to Peak Performance, with Grace Marshall

Welcome to Building your Leader Brand. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Grace Marshall. Freeze is often the interesting one at work, because if you're an animal in the wild, you freeze to play dead so that the danger passes you by. Whereas at work, if you stay really still, that's going to get you noticed. So freeze can look like busyness. It's I'm so busy with all the stuff that, if I'm honest, feel safe. I haven't got time to deal with the thing that feels like a struggle. And so freeze can often look like busyness in order to stick with the status quo. Hi there, and welcome back to Building your Leader Brand. My name is Bob Gentle, and every week I speak to incredible people who share their secrets to building, marketing, and monetizing their expertise and the mindset you need for your business to grow and thrive. If you're new to the show, then Take a second to subscribe or follow whichever it is on your device. This week, I've been thinking a lot about change. Change used to be something that we planned for and something that we thought about in advance. It seems like in the last four or five years in particular, there's no such thing as a period when we're not experiencing change. There's nothing that scares people more than change. I don't like change. Grace doesn't like change, but Grace is my change and fear expert. So today, Grace, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. So, Grace, for the listener who's meeting you for the first time, obviously, you're a returning guest, part of a special club. I always tell guests at the end of an interview, It'll be so nice to have you back. I'll have you back again and again. Often I don't, and that's not because I'm a mean person. I just forget to. But there are some people actively think of, Again and again, and I wanted to have back. And you're top of that list. So for the listener who's meeting you for the first time, who is Grace Marshall? I am someone who helps people to think about how they work. For probably the last 15 years or so, I've been a productivity Ninja, and I still am. I help people in that space to think about how they structured their day, their working environment, the way that they work with their teams, basically, how do we get our best work done. But as part of looking at productivity, there was an emerging theme that came out, and that was Okay, this is all great in the ideal world, like when we can, like you say, plan for what we're going to do. But what happens when the shit hits the fan, basically? What happens when things go wrong, when I hit a roadblock, when there is a lot of extreme change or even constant change going on? What does it look like to do my best work in changing and challenging times? For the last five years or so, that has been my focus. I wrote a book called Struggle: The Surprising Truth, Beauty, and opportunity hidden in life's shittier moments. I have been doing a lot of keynotes and workshops, working with leaders and teams to help them think about how they approach work in times of change and challenge. You have a podcast that came out September? Yes. It's something about your stuff. You always like a spicy name. What's the podcast? The podcast is called What the Fear, and it is about high functioning fear. So the fear that doesn't always look or feel like fear, the fear that might hide behind or masquerade as productivity or strategic high performance. And the reason why I started this podcast was really to explore this thing that I noticed in the background and the thing that I started talking about when I started talking about a struggle that people started resonating with, where they go, Oh, I never thought of that as fear. But actually, now that I I see it as fear, I can see it in a different light and I can do something about it. It felt like there's a whole thing here that we've all been feeling, but maybe not quite noticing, quite paying attention to, that was worth surfacing and worth exploring. The podcast is my exploration ground, basically, talking to different people, different experts, about how fear shows up in their work, in their lives, and what we can do about it. I think where I'd like to begin the conversation is, are They're very personal every day. Then maybe we can then shift that onto perhaps what that feels like for a very senior leader, somebody who has a lot of responsibilities. There's probably a direct correlation. I'm guessing we'll see a lot of the same things, but I want to think about maybe how this reflects my client to begin with. When I say my client, if you're a client listening to this, it's not you. Or maybe it is, you'll know. One of the things I see all the time is in terms of personal productivity, for example, people will know these things are important, these things, these projects, these things that I've decided in advance I wanted to do because they are paving the way to the future. Then there are other things that explode during the day that are on fire. What I find happens more often than I can count is the seemingly urgent take making precedence over the actually important. Sometimes you would think that that's because the seemingly urgent is more important. But actually, a lot of the time, that's not the case. When you look at what's being put off, it's not because it's more difficult, it's not because it's less important. It's usually because it triggers people at a slightly subconscious level in one of a thousand ways that could be wrapped up with a bow called fear. What's your perspective on that? If people are listening, nodding their head, thinking, Oh, my goodness, yes. How could they perhaps begin to work through that? That's such a good question. It reminds me of something that my fellow author, fellow productivity Ninja, Graham Allcut once said about writing a book. He said that writing a book is like 1% writing and 99% lizard brain management. To speak to that fear that you talk about, that the things that we put off, usually our lizard brain is involved. We call it our lizard brain. Basically, it's that primitive part of your brain that's responsible for keeping you alive. It does that by activating the fight or flight stress response. So it tells you either there's a problem, do something, or there is danger, get away from it. And so that's where we get that classic procrastination from. It's like, this This feels scary, or this feels uncertain, or this involves a bit of exposure. That can feel scary as well. I was thinking about that when you said about your clients, it's not you. And there is that fear. It is. That fear might be the fear of exposure, of having that spotlight put on you. The thing about those fears is when you shine the light on it, it actually makes it less scary. Because I think fear has a shadow. When we leave It fits in the periphery, in the background. That shadow that it cast is bigger than it actually is. We just feel this dread or this however it manifestsates. But basically, it often feels a lot worse than it actually is. When we finally see it, it can be, Okay, that's what it's dealing with, or, Okay, now I feel a bit silly. Sometimes that's part of the fear itself. It's like the fear of feeling silly or fear of looking stupid. I think there is something about surfacing that and allowing ourselves to face that fear. But I think the other interesting thing about fear is the fear that's also driving the urgent action. Because often what happens is we conflate urgency and importance. So really classic example, somebody really important emails you. So if you work in a company and your senior director emails you or your your most important client emails you, they're important. And so your instinct is, I must reply to them straight away, and we're responding with urgency. That's the one example of where we're conflating urgency and importance. The other one is, sometimes what happens is we have, I guess a lot of our environment is set up to grab that lizard brain, to go quick, do something, must respond. So classic example, the the notifications, the little red dots on your device that says you've got a message, you have to deal with it. All of that actually is designed as a way of grabbing that primitive part of our brain. The little red dot, for example, is supposed to look like a red berry and almost mimicking if we were back in the wild foraging for food, we would zoom in on that red berry because that would be food. Equally, the alert, something's happening, quick, I need to close that loop, I need to do something about it. So you've got fear that very subtly creates that sense of there is a threat, I must do something around the quick and the immediate. Then you've got the fear of the uncertain or the new or the unfamiliar or the uncomfortable stuff that's got us putting off doing the thing that's really important. The two together, no wonder, were constantly going, I know I should do that, but I've dealt with this instead. As you were speaking, one of the things that became really clear to me is how logical it is to have somebody whose focus has predominantly been productivity, talking about fear. I've never seen it this way before, but for a bit of context, I spent 15 years or something like that working in search and rescue, and I learned a lot about fear. I was very comfortable with fear and learned how to manage it. I learned how to understand it, to see it, how to move through it. There was a process. One of the things about productivity is it's very... If you're going to be productive, you need to have frameworks, you need to have structure, you need to have processes. It strikes me that fear and productivity, they go hand in hand. One of the things about fear is It never goes away. It's a constant for everybody. There are some things, I think when you begin to settle and you're in a stable place, it might fall into background noise for a little while. But if you're somebody that's listening to this podcast, you're somebody who's probably going to be spending the rest of your life trying to improve, you're trying to grow as a business, as an entrepreneur, as a leader. You're not somebody who's likely to just sit back and think, Okay, I'm done now. Having fear as a constant companion is a given. On that basis, we need tools for dealing with it. Obviously, in your podcast, you've spoken to a lot of people about this. What's come up on that side of things. Yeah. I think a lot of it... I mean, there's a framework that I share when I speak to leaders and to teams. I call it my three shifts framework, and it comes straight out of the book, Struggle. The first shift is O-shift. It's recognising what's going on and allowing ourselves to actually just name it. Name the fear, name the pain, name the thing that's gone horribly wrong, name the mess. It It sounds really simple, but it's amazing how often we don't do it. Or we do it in a way that is either really damaging or in a way that is just in little small pockets. It might be, I will tell my colleague or my coworker, but I'm not going to tell my boss. Or equally, you might have leaders within the leadership team being very open with each other about their fears, but not a word spoken to everybody else. The thing is fear, like any emotion, it's contagious. Even if we don't speak about it, we can feel it. But when we can feel this really uncomfortable thing and we can't name it, again, that shadow gets bigger. It comes out in different ways. We might just keep ourselves busy in order to avoid feeling that discomfort. We might start having really short fuses and narrowing down, hunkering down to like, I don't know about you, so I I don't trust you. I'm just going to be me. He's just my thing here. So you get control freakery, you get defensiveness, you get all sorts of ways in which fear plays out when we don't acknowledge it. So one of the things I do is I get people to name some of their fears, some of the things that have gone wrong, and to do it in a way where it is really open and it actually becomes a real connector, because often when we're in the middle of struggle or fear or challenge, it feels isolating. It feels like I'm the only one. Whereas actually, when you name it and you suddenly find you're not the only one and that we all have fears, it becomes... It has less of a hold on us. So it becomes a thing that connects us rather than the thing that divides us. And it then becomes something we can actually look at. And we can question, we can apply some process to it, we can apply some curiosity, we can surface it and decide, is it something we need to do something about, or is it just acknowledging it? And yes, we move through it. This is what it's all about. So that's often, I think, the first thing is about naming it and creating a space where it's safe to talk about fears. So some of my guests have talked about things like psychological safety and how we go about creating that. Margaret Heffernan, for example, she talked about the fact that, like you said, you can't remove fear from work. And particularly, anywhere where there is hierarchy, that means someone has power over me, then I have a reason to be afraid, whether that's founded or not. It is a genuine reason. The more that, and I know you want to go on to talk about leaders later, but I think the more that we're able to surface that fear and talk about it openly, I think the more that we can mitigate against some of that unspoken fear that comes with the hierarchy. I think listening to you, there are some people who are naturally very self-reflective, and then there are some who are just not. It's this whole problem of you can't see your own ears unless you look in the mirror. Some people just never look in the mirror. This idea of surfacing your fears is a simple idea, but only if you just create a moment of stillness for it to happen. Personally, I I use the bullet journal method for just everything. It's been completely life-changing. If anybody regularly gets overwhelmed, I thoroughly recommend it. But it does give you this method of capturing emotional states, ideas, and things like this. I'm not one of nature's natural journal keepers. I think there are people who do that beautifully. But I do feel creating moments to reflect on how do I feel is so important. Because if you don't, all that's left is the reacting to the thing that you can't see. Yeah, exactly. I think journaling is a great way of doing that. I'm a big fan of Allison Jones's Explorative Writing. She talks about doing six-minute writing sprints, as it were. It's almost a writing at the speed of thought. We get a scruffy piece of paper, so not a beautiful notebook because you're not going to keep it. You set the Timer for six minutes and use a prompt. So your prompt could be, How am I feeling? What's going on? And you just write at the speed of thought. So you brain dump, write everything down, whatever comes out. It's a funny thing that often, and often He's asked, Why 6 Minutes? There's something magical that happens in that last minute. The first few minutes, you're just like, I have no idea what. Either I know all this already or what the heck am I writing about? Then you start getting to a point where you're like, I think I've got everything out, but I'm still I'm not sure. And then between five and six minutes often is where you find yourself writing something that you're like, Oh, that's interesting. I hadn't thought of it like that before. And then that's a great tool, I guess, for surfacing those reflections. The other way I find sometimes that's useful for surfacing fear, especially for people who aren't used to thinking about naming their emotions and that thing, is to start the other way around. So start with the behaviours. In my talks, I often talk about, I unpack high functioning fear. I say, this is how fear might show up in the workplace. And we talk about it's not just fight or flight, it's actually four modes. There's fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Flight might not look like I'm ready to have a punch up. It might look like hard work or hustle or perfectionism or defensiveness. Flight often looks like avoidance. Where am I keeping my head Where am I shrinking? Where am I staying safe or keeping small? Freeze is often the interesting one at work because if you're an animal in the wild, you freeze to play dead so that the danger passes you by. Whereas at work, if you stay really still, that's going to get you noticed. So freeze can look like busyness. It's like, I'm so busy with all the stuff, but if I'm honest, feel safe. I haven't got time to deal with the thing that feels like a struggle. And so freeze can often look like busyness in order to stick with the status quo. And then fawn, the lesser known response, is like, if you imagine an animal in the wild turning around to its predator and saying, Please don't eat me. I'll be your friend. That's the fawn response. So that is our people-pleasing tendencies are being accommodating, saying yes to things that we probably should have said no to, or telling people what we think they want to hear instead instead of what we actually think or what they need to hear. And so when I describe that, and then I get people to reflect, Which of these behaviours do you see in yourself? Which of these behaviours do you see in each other or in your teams? All of a sudden, there's this huge conversation that erupts in the room because everybody recognises themselves and each other in different ways. And it's often not just one thing. It's like, I'm a bit like this here, I'm a bit like this there, or I start off here and then I go to there. But in recognising that, it gives them a way of going, Oh, that's the behaviour. What's the fear that's behind that? I think as you were speaking, I was reflecting on, in my life, I've met two people that I had a visceral dislike for, only two. I can find something to like it, almost anybody. It really puzzled me for a long time. What is it about these people that I just cannot stand? They just trigger me as soon as I'm in proximity to them. It was fascinating to really look at this because they were holding up a mirror to me. To this day, I can't really look at what it was that they were triggering me, but I know it wasn't them. I think I could claim a level of insight and self-know. But even I won't look at what that was. Maybe I should. But I think a lot of people react to the world rather than moving through it, knowing that they are in full control of their functions. I think that's where this level of reflection can become really important because it will allow us to grow into greater capability. That's what we all want. I think This is where we're going next. I think to your point there, even if you don't know, even if it's like, I'm still working that one out, recognising that fear, okay, I don't have a name to give to it, but I know there is some fear there. Recognising that as fear can allow you to at least move with it. It means that you're not going to be reacting to them. You're going to be holding maybe certain judgments lightly, maybe certain decisions. You're like, Okay, is that really the course of action I want to take, or is it just because I'm feeling like this? So you put choice back into your toolbox. It's also separating yourself and your identity from your emotions a little bit, where you can see them from the outside. Yeah, absolutely. I was having a conversation recently, actually, with someone who was saying that because he has childhood experience of growing up with an alcoholic father, he wasn't able to empathise with someone who was struggling with alcoholism. Actually just recognising that, it doesn't mean that he needs to... It's something he has to fix. But even just having that level of knowledge, that awareness, he was able to then go, You know what? What's What's going to be for them and for me is for me to keep this distance, or for me to interact with them in this particular way, or for me not to be the person that they come to, to find that particular level of support. Knowing that, that awareness, that self-awareness, helps you then to take the next best action. A lot of what we've been speaking about so far is really at the personal level. If you're a solopreneur, a small business owner, everything so far is going to make perfect sense. It would be easy for me to say in a corporate environment, it's different, but I think there are different dynamics at play. One of the things that throughout the '90s and 2000s, and even now you would hear all the time, is about the industry named change management. What's really fascinating over the last four years is, like I mentioned in the beginning, change is the constant, it's the new normal. There is no such thing as stability. Then we couple this with the growing drive towards automation, virtualization. Then alongside that, we have people not really spending time in the office, so the connexions aren't quite the same. For leaders and leadership, this does put very different pressures on them. The way of leading that they've experienced from most of their careers just doesn't work anymore. It is triggering a lot of fear. I think that's maybe a place we could play next. Is that resonating with you at all? Yeah, absolutely. So many different places. That move from command and control to a more collaborative way of leading. Now, what does that look like? What you said about remote working as well. What does it look like when I can't see my people? There's a really interesting thing I'm still exploring at the moment about how fear can fill space spaces and gaps. So when there's silence or when you can't see, and how our fear will fill that with all sorts of fun and games and how when we react to that. So what we're seeing a lot at the moment of a lot of leaders just going, You know what? We just want to have everyone back in the office. We're not going to make it optional anymore. It's just got to be this way. I have been in boardrooms and in rooms with senior leaders who are making those decisions, and I can understand why they're making some of those decisions. I've also been in companies where my brief before I talk to somebody in a workshop is like, Hey, by the way, we have this office first policy now. It's not been popular, but it's what we have to work with. Just so you are aware, there are some tensions around that. I think there's a lot. I think if we start looking at the fear, it can shine some light into it. One of the things I've worked with business owners my whole life, and I watch how people who are fairly new to business, especially in the consultant advisory space, and you see the same phenomenon again and again. Business owners and leaders are accustomed to being in control. And wherever there is a lack of control, they experience a vacuum. If that vacuum is allowed to persist, they will insert themselves into that and exert control. This, I guess, tension comes from two sides. Number one, I need control. Control is my currency. Then there's the other side in terms of perhaps I need to learn to demonstrate control. There's fear at both sides. I think communication is probably the answer. But I know, for example, when I've had remote staff in the past, I They had a lot of anxiety around, What were they doing? And are they being productive? Are they providing me a return on my investment? Are they operating strategically? I didn't like being a manager, and I didn't like being a leader because I didn't know what I know now. But I'm interested in your perspective on people who have grown up through traditional management culture, finding themselves faced with these vacuums. Yeah. So the obvious one is, are they working? And I think that was a big question that was top of mind when we first did the mass move to remote working. So when the pandemic hit and lots of us went to remote working, there was that big question of, are they working? Like, are they being productive? What happens if I can't see that people are working? And it ranged from people worrying that people would just slack off to, are they working on the right things? Are they getting sucked into the wrong things? I mean, to answer the slacking off question, I think all the statistics show that people worked harder and longer working from home compared to when they were in the office. I think the slacking off thing is a really interesting story that we use to fill the vacuum. I would argue that if you're worried about your workforce slacking off, then that is not a laziness or dedication or control question. That is a purpose and alignment and clarity question. Do they know what good work looks like? I love them. There's a quote from the guy who wrote essentialism, Greg McKew. And he talks about the difference between really clear and pretty clear. And he said, basically, if people are really clear about what the work is, what their role is, what their purpose is, they will get on and do the work. We are wired that way. We are wired to be purpose-driven. So if we know what good looks like, we know what the work is, we can get on and do the work and feel good about it. If, on the other hand, we're just pretty clear, then what happens is naturally we will start to grapple with, how does it look like I'm doing the right thing rather than how do I do the right thing? Because I'm not 100% sure what that right thing is. So it might be, okay, is it more important to show up to that meeting and be seen there? Or is it more important to carve out the space and do the piece of work over here? What's going to give me more brownie points? What's actually more valued by senior leadership or by my colleagues or whatever it is? We grapple with presenteeism, with perception management rather than productivity. If that's the case, then actually what needs to be worked on isn't, I know I will just get everyone to work in front of me, because we can also find ways of looking good even in the office. And that happened way before we were working, probably. The question there is, How do we create clarity in our purpose, in each other's roles, in what good looks like, and how do we measure productivity by outcomes rather than by inputs? So I think that's one element of it. And then I think the other element of it is probably slightly more intangible. It's that feeling of like we're missing something because we're not together. It might be it felt like the team was really tight previously, and it doesn't feel like that anymore. Or it might be it doesn't feel like we've got each other's backs, or there's more misunderstanding and more niggles in the team, or the silos coming out, or the culture feels like it's been diluted. And a lot of that is down to the fact that as human beings, I think we do absorb a lot of things when we're in each other's presence. So we pick up things that aren't easy to be explicit about. And it might be the energy we bring into a room or the way that... If you worked in a call centre, for example, you pick up how to answer and how to deal with things by how other people deal with things. There's a lot of culture that is absorbed in that way, and it's hard to be explicit about those things. And so I think with that, again, forcing everyone just to be in the same space, you hope that's going to create it. But if that's also creating a lot of resistance, where people go, I don't understand why we're being in the same space here, when actually all I'm doing is trying to compete for desk space and put my headphones on and trying to block out everybody else because I'm on back-to-back meetings, that's not necessarily going to create the environment that allows people to create those things. But actually, and this comes back to your command and control piece, is what if the answer isn't in what you do as a leader? What if the answer is in how you communicate and how you set the problem and therefore the solution, the challenge up as a collective thing. If it's like, how do we learn from each other? How do we create the culture? What culture do we want to be creating? That becomes a wee problem to solve rather than a, I've got to figure it out and tell you, then you're going to come up with much better answers. I really enjoyed listening to you there, and a lot came up as you were speaking. On the one hand, from an employee perspective, I was thinking initially, if people want to thrive in the work from home culture, you could argue that The natural selection would take care of it over time. We did see, I think during the pandemic, some people did just slack off at home, but everybody knew who they were. What I did hear as you were speaking is we need a distinctly different culture for that scenario to work. From leaders, it needs them to be very differently present. They need to find ways to actually express their They need to be shown to be actually embodying it and living it so that when people get an email with the values and the mission at the bottom of an email, they're not reading it rolling their eyes, but they're thinking, Yeah, that guy or that woman, they live this, and I can see it every day, that they feel connected to this person. They feel invested in this leadership team and the mission that seems to come out of them rather than something they just came up with on an away day. That they do feel authentically led and not simply managed. But similarly, if I want to be able to work at home and I want people to be confident in me, I'm going to need to find ways to perhaps connect with people that I didn't have to before. I'm going to have to make an effort. This is where the natural selection thing comes in, in that it does cultivate new abilities in a species. They adapt and they I think this is what we as people need because the world is changing. I think the alternative is what I think we see a lot, where people feel like they're commoditized, they move to a new company for a few pounds more, and leaders feel like they have no buy-in from their teams. That's the natural way things can go if command and control is allowed to do its thing. If we want this new way of building businesses, which you see all around you, blossoming, it requires a very different method of mode of presence for leaders. I think this is where fear comes in, because it's very easy to lean into the very masculine command and control. Leaders and leadership have grown up through half a century of very masculine advice and training for management that just doesn't work anymore in this new world. As somebody who speaks to very senior leaders on a regular basis, does any of that resonate? Yeah. Yes. There's a lot of like, Okay, this is how we used to do things. Often for leaders, you're navigating uncertainty. There is an instinct to lean on what you know. How was I managed? Then how do I replicate that? I want to speak to your point about presence. This may take us in a different direction, so do bring me back to this point, if it does. It's okay. We roll all over this hillside. It's fine. There's something that I see often with senior leaders, and I guess it plays into fear. I think there's something about how I'm supposed to come across. If we are leading by, Well, this is how things should be done. This is how I'm expected to be. This is the culture. The culture is such an interesting thing. Employees, lower down, will think that leaders are in charge of the culture, and leaders are like, We are so not in charge of the culture. So everyone feels controlled by the culture, if you like. I think, to your point about authenticity earlier, the more that you're in a space where you feel like, I just have to show up like this because this is how it's supposed to be, the less connected we are in that and the more of a mask we have to put on. And fear will creep in there. But also there's that lack of authenticity will mean that everything is harder to do because you're not building trust. You don't trust who you are. So why should anybody else trust how you're showing up? And that lack of trust will slow everything down. So I think there is something about... I know Brenny Brown does a brilliant job of talking about vulnerability, especially in leaders. And some of that, that can come out in lots in lots of different ways. It can come out in leaders being open about their fears and their feelings. And that will feel dangerous sometimes, or at least uncomfortable to begin with, because that's not how things were done. And a lot of A lot of us have this story in our head of like, no, if I'm the leader, I should be the one that's holding it all together. And I know I'm talking about really empathetic, self-aware, compassionate leaders who still go, I'm not quite sure how much of my mental health journey I want to be sharing with my team because I don't want to erode their confidence in me. There is a fine line, and it isn't about bleeding all over everybody else. There is something about what does that look like to connect with openness, with honesty and vulnerability. I think also we find it hard because we've not seen it modelled to us much, and we've not done it much before, so we've not had much practise. At Actually, if you've never seen it done before, and if you've never done it before yourself, you're probably not going to get it right the first time around. I think there also needs to be an environment where there is grace and we're allowed to try something and get it wrong. That can be really hard in leadership, because especially with everything being so public, it's like when leaders get things wrong, it can feel like there is no space for forgiveness and grace and learning from that. That all sets up this natural instinct to go, Oh, better not go there, or at least, Better not be seen to go there. I think in many respects, as I'm listening, I'm thinking, Senior leaders are well-accustmed to having key performance indicators and things that they are measured on, but they are typically very analogue. They're very easy to track and measure. But Personal growth is not something that's measured. It's also not something that's necessarily measurable. But as I'm listening, I think if people want to grow in seniority, opportunity, profitability, whatever matters to you, then personal growth and leadership go hand in hand. If anybody is sitting at their desk or on their chair thinking, I I am a complete human being in all his fullness, there's nothing more to develop here, you're deluding yourself. I think that's coming through very clearly, especially if you're a senior leader in a large traditional organisation that's trying to do things the way they were done in the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, and even the 2000s. The organisations that people wanted to be part of now require very different leadership. This is about competitive advantage. This is about retaining the best people, attracting the best people, the best leaders, because nobody wants to be part of a fractured, crystallised, overly structured, outrageously managed organisation. It's just not what people expect anymore. And yet a lot of organisations and a lot of leadership is still built that way. Moving through that is going to be Moving through fear with a small F at a personal level and fear with a very big F at the organisational and cultural level. Yeah, absolutely. I've been in rooms where we've had senior leaders talk really openly about mistakes and failures and times when they felt fear. It's not to allay that fear that I talked about earlier of like, what if I show this side of myself to people? Will they lose confidence? No, the effect was the opposite. The confidence that people had, it conferred confidence. It conferred confidence in the leader. It also conferred confidence in themselves of like, oh, okay, I am allowed to fail. I am allowed to make mistakes. I am allowed to struggle. Actually, this is what it looks like. So it's like stripping out all these unspoken rules that we've written in through fear, and we're taking them off, and we're actually removing those limitations. That's a much better place to be. We need to look at your three things. You've been here before. You had your three really sensible things last time. You're allowed a licence for frivolity now. I don't think it's necessarily in your personal style, so don't feel under any pressure. But do you have three things that we can play with? Okay, I'm going to give you one thing that I've been playing with. This was a challenge that was set to me, an exercise that was given to me by a health coach that I work with. Jake Mahal, he's a primal health coach. We've been doing lots of work together. That's been really fun. It's completely changed how I eat, but also got me moving lots. It's a lot of fun. But one little thing that's been sticking with me recently that I'm still working on, and it sounds really simple. So his challenge was take 10 deep breaths, so parasympathetic breaths, where you're breathing in for, say, three and breathing out for six. So the idea is that it puts you into that rest and digest mode. Do 10 of those before eating a meal. All right, so that's really simple. It does, but not when you're hungry. No. And not when you've been busy cooking, you're like, Come on, everyone, it's time to eat. The number of times I find myself halfway through a meal going, Oh, I forgot to breathe. It's hilarious. But I think it's a really good thing to, I guess, programme in to yourself and to do that like taking your time before having a meal. When you think about it, it makes complete sense. If I want to be digesting my food, I want to be in rest and digest mode. At the same time, I think it's also a really good practise to have that pause, and we don't have enough pauses built into our day. When I talked earlier about being reactive and all of that thing, it was like, look for... I guess the bigger thing is look for ways to practise the pause. Where can you put pauses in your day? But a really simple practical thing, what hard to do would be It goes like 10 breaths. To give you an example of how hard it's been for me, I've now made it minimum three. It's not always 10, it's a minimum three. That's more achievable. If you find yourself halfway through a meal, you can still and do some breathing and then carry on with it. But yeah, that would be one that I've been playing with. Feel free to go for it and let me know how you get on. I like that. I can think of lots of other ways to implement that because the pause, it creates this space for surfacing. I could imagine before every meeting, before you answer the phone, how am I feeling? Because, like we said, fear is a catch-all for any negative emotion, really. It's quite complex, and the number of triggers are vast. The more fluent you are in the language of fear, the more quickly you're going to understand how you're feeling and why you're feeling that and how to move through it. Obviously, it's good for digestion, but I think it speaks to a more wide-ranging, practical application. So thing number two. I think it's associated with that. It's like noticing how does fear feel in you? So it comes out in different ways. It might be that you start noticing it through behaviour, those the fight, flight, freeze, and fall that I talked about. It might be, Let me start noticing how I show up, what's my behaviour, and then I can reverse engineer that and start to notice it. For me, I notice it a lot in speed, so I'll talk faster. I will be in that mode of like, I'm thinking really fast, I'm talking really fast, and I will interrupt my husband incessantly, which he absolutely hates. He is dyslexic and he finds words hard. So if I speak over him, I interrupt him like, That's the worst thing I can do. But if I'm in that space of fear, basically, anxiety, worry, caring about something, if I'm animated, I will speak 100 parts an hour. I remember, actually, once I did a talk for a client that was filmed and they wanted to use a clip. There was a part of it where the audio had cut out of the recording. They said, Can we just get you on a call where you can just do a voiceover and we will splice the audio over. And I realised I was talking so fast that I felt like I was rapping when I had to do the voiceover. So speed is something I notice in myself. So when I'm on stage and if I'm feeling nervous and I start speaking really, really fast, that's a signal to me of going, oh, okay, slow myself down. Take a beat, take a breath. First of all, they will hear me better if I go a little bit slower. But also it's that presence piece. It helps me to go, Oh, what's going on here? It helps me to tune in and be a little bit more present rather than just running off fear and running off those fumes. I suppose that's something specifically that I use in either animated conversations or difficult conflict moments or when I'm on stage. But equally, you could do that when you notice that you're about to jump on that email that's just landed in your inbox or in a meeting, or whenever you feel like, I just feel like I have to react to it, maybe notice that. What if that's a sign of fear? I think also giving grace to other people that a lot of the time the behaviour you experience from them, it may be through the lens of fear. This may not be the pure signal of them. If you are in a position of authority over somebody, that's going to be most of the time, actually. Yes, exactly. I was talking to someone the other day who was talking about their experience of giving feedback to their line manager. They'd given this feedback and the line manager basically said, Why didn't you tell me sooner? I can imagine from my Line Manager's perspective, they're thinking, I'm really approachable. I wish you'd have brought it up sooner. I really value this feedback. But in that moment of, Why didn't you tell me sooner? For the other person, actually what it felt like was, Oh, I feel like I'm being told off, or there was a defensiveness to that. Even that in itself makes them think, Oh, maybe I shouldn't have said that. I think in many respects, the fear of others in that situation is your responsibility to anticipate and get ahead of, really. Because if your team are scared of you, that's a terribly crude way of putting it, but I think the listener can extrapolate. Yeah. But also, even if you feel like your team is not scared of you at all. This episode hasn't come out yet, but I had a really good conversation on the podcast with Jeff Wetzler, who talked about and asked ask. That's his book, The Ask Approach. He says, As leaders, if we want people to speak their mind to us, we need to ask them. We need to invite that conversation because just saying your door is open or I'm open to feedback isn't enough because of those hierarchy and the power dynamics. I think also there's the fear of consequences when you do speak your mind. I think that's where culture is really important. Yeah. Thing number three, So my books. So we've got... There's three books. First one is 21 Ways to Manage the Stuff that Sucks Up Your Time. I wrote that when my kids were little and I was growing a business that was like my middle child. So if you are a solo entrepreneur, trying to raise a family alongside growing a business, that is a super easy to read, very thin book that will give you some good tips. Book number 2, How to be Really Productive: Achieving Clarity and Results in a World Where Work Never Ends. It It was named Best Commuters Read by the CMI Management Book of the Year Awards, One year, and it is a book, a really good companion. If you're thinking, actually, I do want to work on that productivity piece, how do I get stuff done? How do I have a better relationship with time and with my work, then that is the book for you. Then book three is Struggle: The Surprising Truth, Beauty, and Opportunity, hidden in Life's Shittier Moments. One of the things I love about productivity advice perspectives and frameworks is they are almost timeless. I think as we grow through the productivity genre, they just become more and more practical and applicable. That's one of the things I love about your books is they are a very graceful way of approaching a perennial problem that never goes away. In a world that's full of very, very structured time management processes, it's a breath of fresh air. So everyone should go and read those books. If they were only going to pick one, which one is your current favourite child? Oh, well, I think it would have to be Struggle. And your podcast, again, in case anybody wasn't paying attention, what's that called? It's called What the Fear. Grace, this has been an awesome conversation. I've really enjoyed it. Hopefully, people at home, haven't been left thinking, Oh my God, I am broken. I'm suddenly having the world piling on me with all these things I've now recognised are driven by fear. What I'm hoping is that everyone feels empowered and that all opportunity lies on the other side of growth. If you are still listening, number one, well done. You're obviously very courageous. If you did enjoy this, you will love the personal brand business roadmap. It's everything you need to start, scale, or fix your expert business. Just visit amplifimee. Agency/roadmap. If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe. It really does help. Thanks at home for listening and you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me, Bob.