This podcast episode elucidates the transformative process of unwiring fear, emphasizing the pivotal shift from being a victim of one’s circumstances to recognizing oneself as a powerful creator of one’s life. Through a condensed coaching session with a client named Sarah, we explore various techniques, notably the counterintuitive volume knob technique, which encourages individuals to confront and amplify their fears rather than suppress them. This approach allows for a radical release of the grip that anxiety holds over one’s nervous system, ultimately leading to a profound transformation in perspective. We delve into the intricacies of the mind’s wiring, illustrating how our thoughts are interconnected and can be consciously restructured. The episode culminates in a powerful visualization exercise, wherein Sarah receives an award for her capacity to create fear, thereby reframing her narrative and empowering her to reclaim her inherent strength. The podcast delves into the transformative journey of individuals grappling with pervasive fear and anxiety, exemplified through the poignant case of a client named Sarah. As the narrative unfolds, listeners are drawn into Sarah's tumultuous emotional landscape, characterized by an overwhelming sense of dread stemming from various life pressures, including financial instability and existential concerns for her family. The hosts, Mark and Lynetta, deftly guide the audience through a unique coaching session that emphasizes practical strategies to dismantle entrenched patterns of fear. They introduce the innovative volume knob technique, which encourages individuals to confront their fears head-on, rather than retreating from them. This counterintuitive approach serves as a catalyst for profound personal change, allowing Sarah to transition from feeling like a passive victim of her circumstances to recognizing her innate power as a creator of her reality. The session culminates in a powerful visualization exercise wherein Sarah is celebrated for her capacity to confront and transform her fears, ultimately emerging with a renewed sense of agency and self-compassion.

Takeaways:

1. In this episode, we explore the transformative journey from trauma to empowerment through practical tools and strategies.
2. The facilitators emphasize a paradigm shift, guiding clients to view themselves as powerful creators rather than mere victims of circumstance.
3. A significant concept discussed is the 'volume knob technique' which encourages embracing and magnifying fear to diminish its hold.
4. The podcast introduces the 'five stage process' which outlines the path from unconscious patterns to conscious creation of one's desired life.
5. The narrative illustrates the profound impact of recognizing one's creative power in shaping experiences and overcoming anxiety.
6. Ultimately, the episode invites listeners to reframe their relationship with fear, transforming it into a source of strength and insight.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. whythiskeepshappening.com

Welcome to why this Keeps Happening.

From Trauma to Transformation.

The podcast that helps you break free from repeating patterns and create the life you want through our five stage process.

We're Mark and Lynetta.

Before we begin, we want you to know that this episode is based on a real coaching session.

We've condensed it down to the key insights and breakthroughs to protect our clients complete privacy.

The voices you're hearing are AI generated to keep our clients flow fully anonymous.

This allows us to share real transformational moments from our coaching work.

In today's episode, Unwiring Fear, and the award for best creator, you'll discover how

to use the counterintuitive volume knob technique to unwire panic, how to cut the zip ties on your brain's fear circuits, and how to radically shift from being a victim of your circumstances to recognizing yourself as a powerful creator.

So diving right into this deep dive today, we really need to set the stage for you, the listener, because we have a very specific mission today.

Yeah, we're looking at a raw, highly condensed coaching session with a client.

Her name is Sarah.

Right, Sarah.

And right out of the gate, I just.

I want to manage your expectations about the kind of tools we're going to be exploring because we are not.

Oh, we are absolutely throwing the textbook right out the window today.

Literally out the window.

You are not going to hear any dense psychological jargon.

Yeah.

No.

Complex academic theories that, you know, require a dictionary to decipher.

No.

Instead, we're going to talk about thoughts, we're going to talk about habits, and just incredibly practical, simple ways to look at the patterns that actually run our lives.

Yeah.

We're exploring the mechanics of the mind using metaphors that anyone, and I mean anyone, can grasp instantly.

And I think, I really think that approach is so necessary, especially given where Sarah's at when this session actually begins.

Oh, absolutely.

Because let me tell you, when we first meet Sara in this source material, she is not just having a mildly frustrating Tuesday, she is drowning.

Completely drowning.

I mean, the level of absolute sheer panic she is experiencing, it's something that almost vibrates right off the page of the transcript.

You can feel it.

You really can.

She describes this feeling surging through her body, like she wants to literally jump out of her own skin.

It's physical, it's visceral.

She is just entirely consumed by fear.

And the thing is, it's not just one fear.

It is a cascading avalanche of them.

A total avalanche.

Let's.

Let's look at what she's actually carrying in that specific Moment, Right?

So she's terrified about these huge macro things.

The overarching state of the world, which to her feels entirely chaotic and unpredictable, which is relatable, very relatable.

But then it immediately zooms into the micro, the deeply, deeply personal stuff.

Yeah, she's terrified of her creditors coming after her.

Right.

A very real, very pressing financial dread.

And she's afraid for her daughters.

Her daughters are living out in a big city, and she's just agonizing over their safety in a landscape that she obviously can't control.

And then on top of all of that heavy existential and financial stuff, she has this highly anticipated trip to the mountains plan.

Yes, the mountain trip.

And she is utterly paralyzed by the anxiety that this trip is going to

fall through, which is just.

It's fascinating to me how the brain does that, how it groups all these entirely different things together.

Global crises, financial ruin, the safety of her children in a big city, and a vacation to the mountains.

They all carried the exact same weight,

exactly the exact same weight of terror in her nervous system.

She feels like she is losing her family.

She feels like she's losing her hope.

And she explicitly says out loud that she has hit absolute rock bottom.

And that phrase right there, rock bottom.

That is precisely where this session takes a completely unexpected turn.

Yeah, it really does.

Because usually, think about it, when someone says they've hit rock bottom, the societal response is immediate pity.

Right?

It's this instinctive scramble to pull them up.

Oh, for sure.

Friends or therapists might say, you know, no, no, it's not that bad.

Let's look on the bright side.

You have so much to live for.

Right?

But what is so wild here is the reaction of the facilitators in the session.

Yes, instead of pity, there is genuine audible excitement.

They actually celebrate the fact that she's at the bottom.

They do.

And, okay, I have to play devil's advocate for a second here, because when I was reviewing this, my immediate reaction was, isn't that a bit cruel?

Or at least bordering on toxic positivity?

I completely get why you'd think that.

Right?

Because to look at someone who is visibly shaking, terrified about her kids and her bank account and say, hey, congratulations on hitting rock bottom, that just sounds so counterintuitive.

If I'm in that state of panic, the last thing I want is someone cheering for my despair.

Yeah, how is that a helpful starting point?

Exactly.

It is exactly the right question to ask, because on the surface it sounds incredibly jarring, but it is not toxic positivity.

It is actually a profound shift in physics.

Emotionally speaking, of course.

Okay, unpack that for me.

Physics.

Think about the feeling of falling.

When you're falling through the air, you're flailing, you're waiting for the impact.

That is when the panic is at its end.

Absolute peak.

You have zero control.

True, the anticipation is terrifying, but when

you hit the solid ground, the absolute bottom, what happens?

The falling stops.

There is no more down left to go.

The facilitators are celebrating because the agonizing anticipation of the fall is finally over.

She has hit bedrock.

Okay, I see that now.

So it's the difference between the terror of falling and the reality of finally landing.

The landing might hurt, but at least the ground is solid.

Exactly.

You cannot fall any further.

The bottom is solid.

And because it's solid, it becomes the perfect, unshakable foundation for true transformation.

You finally have solid ground under your feet to actually push off from.

Yeah.

Makes a lot of sense.

And this whole perspective, it's rooted in two incredibly important concepts that frame the entirety of our deep dive today.

If we don't understand these two concepts, the rest of the tools we're going to talk about just won't make sense.

Right, let's get into those.

The first one is what they refer to as SoulView.

Yes, SoulView, which kept coming up in the source material.

Can you break that down for us?

Because it sounds a bit, I don't know, ethereal, but it actually seems to be a very grounded, practical shift in how we view ourselves.

It is deeply practical.

Soulview is essentially a massive perspective shift regarding your own identity.

Think about most traditional models, whether society, or sometimes even clinical.

They look at us as if we are broken people who need to be fixed.

Like we're malfunctioning machines.

Exactly.

If you have anxiety, you have a broken part that needs repairing.

But soulview flips that entirely.

It asks you to look at your life, recognizing that you are a spiritual being having a human experience.

You aren't a broken machine.

You are an incredibly powerful creator.

You are entirely capable of reclaiming your power in any situation.

Reclaiming your power.

I love that.

Under this view, Sarah isn't broken just because she's panicking.

She has just gotten her immense creative power caught in a negative loop.

That distinction changes everything.

Reclaiming your power instead of just trying to fix a defect, it completely takes away the shame.

It really does.

If I'm a creator who just built a really scary haunted house for myself, well, I can also tear it down.

Beautifully said.

Which brings us perfectly to the second Core concept, the five stage process.

The source material mentions this as the overarching roadmap for getting out of that haunted house.

Right.

We obviously don't have time to do a massive seminar on all five stages today, but we need to give you, the listener, the basic architecture of what this journey actually looks like.

Let's walk through it.

The five stage process is, simply put, the journey of moving out of those unconscious, repeating loops of pain and stepping into the active, conscious creation of a completely new life.

Okay, let's look at the architecture so you understand exactly where Sarah is in this moment.

Stage one is essentially being asleep at the wheel.

It's the unconscious loop.

This is where your patterns run your life.

You react automatically and you firmly believe your circumstances are dictating your feelings.

You're entirely at the mercy of the outside world.

Yes.

Which, honestly, is where most of us spend a lot of our time.

Oh, traffic is bad, so I am angry.

The world is scary, so I am anxious.

Pure cause and effect.

Precisely.

Then comes stage two, which is exactly where we find Sarah hitting the wall or hitting rock bottom.

The pain of the unconscious loop becomes so great, the panic so overwhelming, that the system simply cannot sustain it anymore.

The old way of operating just breaks down.

It breaks down.

It's painful, but as we discussed with the physics of falling, it's absolutely necessary because it forces you to wake up.

Right.

And that leads to stage three, which is pattern recognition.

This is the moment you start to see that you aren't your circumstances.

You aren't.

You are the one reacting to them.

You start observing the thoughts instead of just believing them blindly.

Okay.

So you gain some distance.

You become the watcher of the fear rather than being the fear itself.

Exactly.

And once you have that distance, you can move into stage four, which is unwiring and releasing.

This is where the heavy lifting happens.

It is.

You take those old patterns, those old fears, and you actively dismantle them.

You release the grip they have on your nervous system.

You release the past entirely.

Release the past?

Yes.

And finally, once the slate is clean, you enter stage five, conscious creation.

This is where you step fully into your power and actively choose what you want to wire into your brain moving forward.

So it is a complete journey from being a passive victim of your thoughts to being the one firmly holding the steering wheel.

That makes total sense.

It's a huge shift.

But let's bring this back to the reality of the room with Sarah, because understanding the five stage process intellectually is great, but she's currently sitting in stage two right she is standing on that bedrock of rock bottom, but she is still absolutely terrified.

Her nervous system is on fire.

What did they actually do with her in that moment?

This is where we see the first major tool deployed.

And I have to warn you, it goes against every single instinct we have about panic.

It's called the volume knob technique.

The volume knob.

Think about what you normally do when you feel a wave of fear or anxiety coming on.

What is your immediate gut instinct?

To run from it.

To suppress it.

To distract myself or, you know, if I'm trying to be healthy about it.

I try to calm myself down.

I take deep breaths.

I try to rationalize with myself.

I try to make the fear go away.

Think happy thoughts.

Right?

Exactly.

The human instinct is flight.

We want to escape the uncomfortable sensation.

But in this session, instead of trying to make the fear disappear or trying to talk her down from the ledge, the facilitators do the exact opposite.

They guide her to make the fear bigger.

They do.

Okay, again, I have to stop and ask.

Turn the fear up?

That sounds completely counterintuitive and frankly, maybe even a little dangerous.

If someone is already vibrating out of their skin with panic, wouldn't pushing that panic even higher just trigger a massive, uncontrollable panic attack?

How does making it worse make it better?

It's a very fair concern, and it's why this isn't something you just rush into without understanding the mechanics.

To understand why this works, we need to look at what fear actually is.

Okay.

Fear in the context of anxiety and panic is essentially resistance.

Resistance?

Yes.

It is the massive amount of energy you spend trying not to feel the thing you were feeling.

It's like trying to hold a giant beach ball underwater.

Oh, I like that visual.

The fear isn't just the ball.

It's the massive, exhausting physical effort of pushing against it, holding it down.

When you tell someone to stop resisting and actually make the fear bigger, you are telling them to let go of the beach ball.

So the exhaustion isn't from the fear itself.

It's from the resistance to the fear.

Precisely.

By turning it up, you are paradoxically removing the resistance.

They ask her to stop fighting it entirely.

They guide her to actively, intentionally feel the fear in every single inch of her body, from the top of her head all the way down to her toes.

They want her to flood her system with it voluntarily.

Yes.

And then they hand her an imaginary volume knob.

Here we go.

They ask her to assess where the fear is currently at.

Let's say she says it's at 80% capacity.

They tell her, okay, grab the knob.

Turn it up to 100%.

Just visualizing that makes my own heart rate spike a little.

And the wild thing is it doesn't stop there.

When she hits 100%, they say, Keep going.

Turn it up to 200%.

And she does it.

In the audio of the session, she is verbally tracking the numbers as she turns this imaginary dial in her mind.

She says, okay, 250%, then 300%.

She breathes into it.

350%.

She literally pushes it past 400%.

And what is so brilliant about this facilitation is that they don't let her stop and rest.

They actively encourage her to find more fears to throw into the fire.

It's as if they are feeding a massive furnace and demanding more coal.

Exactly.

They ask her to search around in the dark corners of her mind for any untapped fear she hasn't mentioned yet.

And, boy, does she find them.

She really does.

The transition here is wild to me.

It starts with very primal, almost biological fears.

She brings up the fear of extreme physical pain, which is universally terrifying.

But then, as the dial turns up, the fears get incredibly personal.

So specific.

Incredibly specific and just so deeply, vulnerably human.

She mentions this vivid fear about her eventual death, but it's not the existential part of death.

She's terrified about her kids having to clean up her condo one day.

Yes.

She is horrified at the thought of them going through her things and coming across her deeply personal journals or finding embarrassing items, specifically her vibrators and sex

toys, which is such a grounded, real thing to be afraid of.

It really is.

Right in the middle of all this existential dread about the state of the world and financial ruin, she's worried about her kids finding her sex toys.

It's so real, it brings it right back to humanity.

And what I loved about the facilitator's reaction is that they don't shame her for it.

Yeah, they don't quickly pivot back to the serious fears.

They actually lean into it.

They use a little bit of gentle humor to help her fully acknowledge it and just throw it right into the fire with everything else.

That lack of shame is vital, isn't it?

It's crucial because hiding those seemingly embarrassing or silly fears takes an enormous amount of energy.

Shame is just another form of resistance.

Right.

Holding the beach ball underwater.

Exactly.

By putting the vibrators and the private journals on the table, right next to the global crises, she is removing the last bits of resistance.

She is saying, I am afraid of all of it, and I am not going to hide any of it.

Wow.

And once the mundane fears are in the furnace, they guide her to the deepest, most foundational fears of all.

The core fears.

Yes.

The fear of never getting the life she truly wanted.

And then the ultimate crushing fear that all the immense love she has inside her, all her good intentions, will be entirely wasted.

She voices a terror that she will go to her grave completely misunderstood by everyone in the world.

They have her turn the volume dial up so high that she actually visualizes a scenario where literally no one, not a single person on the face of the earth, understands her heart.

That is incredibly heavy.

It is.

So you, the listener, might be sitting there wondering, why on earth would anyone intentionally torture themselves like this?

Why would you magnify your absolute worst, most agonizing nightmares until they encompass the whole world?

But here is the massive payoff.

This is where the magic happens.

Yes, there is a physical shift that occurs by breathing deeply, continuously through the fear and turning it up to its absolute maximum limit.

Something breaks, but it's not Sarah who breaks.

It's the panic itself.

If we step back and connect this to the bigger picture of how our nervous systems operate, it actually makes perfect biological sense.

We talked earlier about keeping things simple and avoiding jargon, but let's look at a very basic concept of how we're wired.

The stress response system.

Right.

The human body has this stress response system, the fight or flight mode.

It's designed for short bursts of intense energy.

To escape a tiger.

Exactly.

Fear requires continuous, massive amounts of mental and physical energy to sustain stain.

It's like sitting in your driveway and revving a car in, just in neutral with the pedal pushed all the way to the floor.

Eventually, you're going to run out of gas.

You deplete the fuel supplier.

When Sarah was asked to feel all of these fears simultaneously, the creditors, the daughters, the mountains, the physical pain, the embarrassing condo cleanup, and the total global misunderstanding.

Not one after the other, but all

at once, all at once, she pushed her nervous system to its absolute maximum capacity.

The result wasn't a mental breakdown, because a breakdown usually comes from the exhaustion of resisting the fear over years.

Right.

The result of fully feeling it was simple, profound, quiet exhaustion.

Yes.

You can literally hear the shift in her voice in the description of the session.

The thoughts that were creating the fear suddenly lost their grip on her body.

The tension snapped like a rubber band that was pulled way too tight.

When the facilitators ask her what she feels after doing this maximum volume Exercise.

She just takes a breath.

And so she feels worn out.

The panic is entirely gone.

She is just tired.

And I think we can all agree that being peacefully exhausted is vastly superior to being in a state of jumping out of your skin.

Terror.

Absolutely.

It's completely different physiological state.

She moved from panic to peace simply by running the engine out of gas.

And this raises a really important question for us to explore.

Why?

What exactly was happening in her head that allowed that terror to build up and interlock in the first place?

Why did a trip to the mountains trigger the exact same alarm bells as financial ruin?

Right.

And how can we understand that sudden complete release?

This brings us seamlessly to the mechanics of the brain.

But again, no clinical textbooks today.

We are keeping it incredibly simple.

We need to talk about how the brain wires thoughts and habits together over time.

Because this isn't just a fun metaphor.

There is a physical reality to how our thoughts connect.

There is a very common phrase used to describe this process.

Neurons that fire together wire together.

Let's break that down.

In the simplest terms possible, every time you have a thought, a tiny electrical signal fires in your brain.

If you have two thoughts at the same time, or in quick succession, repeatedly, like feeling stressed about money and then immediately feeling stressed about your kids, those

two pathways start to build a bridge.

Exactly.

Over years of repeating the same patterns, your brain literally wires these individual separate thoughts together into one massive circuit.

It does this to be efficient.

It says, oh, we always worry about these five things at once.

Let's just group them.

Which is incredibly efficient for the brain, but also incredibly unhelpful when one small trigger sets off a five alarm fire.

Very unhelpful.

I absolutely love the metaphor they used in the coaching session to explain this to Sarah.

And it is so vivid and easy to picture.

The car hood metaphor.

Yes.

Imagine you are looking under the hood of a car.

You pop it open and you see all the greasy engine parts, the belts, the metal.

And running along in the side of the engine block, you see a wiring bundle.

It's dozens of individual brightly colored wires.

A red one, a blue one, a yellow one.

And they were all gathered up and bound tightly together by a thick, heavy duty plastic zip tie.

That plastic zip tie is a perfect visual representation of a habit.

It holds everything together.

Over years of repeating the same emotional patterns.

Sarah's brain took an individual thought about money.

Let's call that the red wire.

Okay?

Red wire is money.

And a thought about her kids safety.

The blue wire, a thought about physical pain.

The yellow wire.

And a Thought about being misunderstood.

The green wire, and it grouped them all together.

Her brain wrapped a metaphorical plastic zip tie around them to create a single, massive, fierce circuit.

So whenever one wire was triggered, say, she looked at a bank statement and the red wire fired.

The zip tie ensured that the blue, yellow, and green wires all lit up simultaneously.

The whole bundle fired at once.

Yeah.

Creating this overwhelming, paralyzing feeling of doom.

But the absolute beauty of seeing it, this way of using this car hood metaphor is realizing that intense fear isn't a life sentence.

Right.

It's not a personality trait.

It's not fundamentally who you are.

It is literally just a wiring bundle.

It's just a specific set of thoughts, Zip tied together by years of habit.

And if it's just a plastic zip tie, well, you can cut it.

Which is exactly the guided visualization they take her through next.

Having exhausted the panic with the volume knob, her mind is finally quiet enough to do this precision work.

They ask her to close her eyes and picture that specific wiring bundle, that thick zip tie, right in her mind's eye.

They have her visual eyes reaching in, taking a small, sharp pair of wire cutters, carefully slipping the metal jaws under the tight plastic of the zip tie, and snipping it.

Snap.

Exactly.

And when she cuts it, she watches in her mind as all those individual fear wires loosen.

The tension is gone.

They just softly float apart.

The red wire drifts away from the blue wire.

They separate.

I want to pause here because I know some listeners might be thinking, okay, that's a nice little mental movie, but.

But how does picturing wire cutters actually change my anxiety?

We have to connect this back to what we just talked about with the brain.

It's about conscious interruption.

Exactly.

By consciously separating the fears in her mind, by acknowledging that the bank account has absolutely nothing to do with the mountain trip and the condo cleanup has nothing to do with the global state of the world, she is actively interrupting that automatic fire together, wire, together, circuit.

She is forcing the brain to look at them as separate, individual things.

And once they are separated, they lose their collective compounded power to overwhelm her.

A single wire is just a thought.

A bundle is a panic attack.

That is a perfect way to put it.

The visualization is just the tool to create the mental shift.

But here is the most empowering part of this entire concept.

What's that?

Those are just wires.

They are just conduits for energy.

Now that they are floating freely and the habit is broken, she has a choice.

She can choose to gather those exact same wires that exact same mental energy and focus and retie them.

This is huge.

She can bundle them together to create a totally different circuit.

This is where we get back to that soulview concept of being a creator.

She doesn't have to throw the wires away.

She can repurpose them.

Exactly.

She can literally build a new circuit for peace.

Or crucially, she can build a circuit designed to release the past.

Release the past.

Just let that sink in for a second for you listening right now.

You can take the exact same intense, powerful energy that was fueling your late night panic, cut the habit that binds it to fear, and rewire it to actively release the past.

The power source hasn't changed.

You've just plugged it into a different outlet.

It is a profound reclaiming of personal authority.

You are the mechanic of your own mind.

And this realization leads us perfectly into the climactic moment of this entire deep dive.

It's the final exercise they do with Sarah, what we call the award ceremony.

And it marks a total radical philosophical shift.

This is where everything comes together.

Up until this exact point in her life, Sarah had viewed herself as a completely helpless victim of her own mind.

The fear was something terrifying that was happening to her.

She was at the mercy of the wiring bundle.

But the facilitators guide her to a massive paradigm shifting realization.

If she was able to manifest an all consuming, multi layered terror so vividly, so physically and so powerfully, it doesn't mean she's broken.

It means she is incredibly powerful.

Oh, this part completely blew my mind when I read it.

It flips the entire script.

The realization is that she was created to be a powerful creator.

And she has used that immense innate power to brilliantly, flawlessly create the ultimate fear.

She isn't a victim of fear.

She is practically a prodigy at creating it.

She built a masterpiece of terror.

It's a brilliant reframing technique.

In psychology, we talk about the danger of meta emotions.

Feeling ashamed that you feel afraid, you get anxious.

And then you beat yourself up for being anxious, which just adds fuel to the fire.

But by framing her as a powerful creator of her fear, they are completely neutralizing the shame.

Instead of fighting her ability to feel deeply, they honor it.

They say, wow, look at what you built.

Look at how strong your mind is.

And to really lock this in, they take her into this vividly imaginative meditation.

An awards ceremony.

It's amazing.

I want to paint this picture for you because it is so rich.

In this visualization, Sarah is standing on a grand, brightly lit stage.

It's an opulent setting.

God is there.

God is standing right in front of her, clapping for her.

God steps forward and actually pins a medal to her chest.

And Mel reads, Best Fear Creator Ever.

It is such a powerful, almost absurdly wonderful image.

The divine isn't judging her for lacking faith or for being afraid.

The divine is celebrating her raw, creative output.

Exactly.

She is handed a literal spiritual Oscar for her unsurpassed performance in the category of panic.

I love that.

A spiritual Oscar.

And she looks out from the stage and there are tens of thousands of beings in the audience giving her a massive, thunderous standing ovation.

They are cheering for her because no one has ever investigated, constructed, or explored fear as thoroughly, as creatively and as completely as she just did.

And as she stands there on that stage receiving this standing ovation, she visualizes taking that award, that shiny, tangible acknowledgment of her power, and absorbing it directly into her chest.

It dissolves into her.

And in doing so, in accepting that she is the creator of the experience, she experiences this immense washing wave of compassion for herself.

Compassion, not pity, not judgment.

Exactly.

She isn't judging herself for being afraid anymore.

She is holding deep compassion for the brilliant, hardworking creator inside her that spent so much energy trying to build that fear to protect her.

She realizes the fear was just misdirected love and protection.

That compassion is the ultimate key.

It softens everything.

But the exercise doesn't end with just a warm, fuzzy feeling.

No, the award doesn't just sit in her chest.

It actually transforms into an ultimate shield of power that she can take out into the real world.

In the next part of the visualization, she is given a physical certificate of this Best Fear Ever award, and she pictures herself taping it to the inside window of her car as she drives around her city.

Now, what happens next in the visualization is crucial, and we need to frame this carefully for you, the listener.

Right.

The sources use some very specific, specific, politically charged imagery to represent intimidating external forces.

To be absolutely clear, we are imparting the content of the source material impartially here.

We are not taking any sides, left wing or right wing.

We are not endorsing any viewpoints or specific political figures presented in the original session.

We are simply exploring the psychological metaphor being used in Sarah's mind to represent feeling intimidated by the outside world.

We all have things out in the world that represent power, intimidation, or chaos to us.

So in this mental exercise, Sarah visualizes driving her car with her Best Fear Ever certificate proudly displayed in the side window.

She imagines Driving slowly past lines of angry, highly energized political marchers on the street, people shouting, holding signs, projecting anger and demand.

Then she visualizes driving her car past the grand, imposing residence of a famous, highly powerful politician.

These figures and groups are used in her mind as the ultimate symbols of intimidation, societal chaos, and external power forces that used to make her feel small and afraid.

But here is the absolute magic of the shield she now carries.

Because she holds the ultimate award for creating fear, none of these external forces can intimidate her anymore.

As she drives past, she imagines these marchers and politicians looking at her car window and seeing her certificate.

And instead of being intimidating, they are deeply disappointed.

They realize they are looking at someone who has already willingly turned her own internal fear dial up to 400%.

They realize she has already experienced a level of terror far worse than anything they could ever impose on her from the outside.

I love this imagery so much.

You cannot scare someone who holds the gold medal in scaring themselves.

The intimidating forces realize they are completely powerless against her.

She holds all the power.

They wanted to make her afraid, to control her, but she has already mastered fear.

She went into the furnace, felt it all, cut the zip tie, and walked out with an award.

What could a generic protester or a politician possibly do to top that?

Nothing.

And that is the point.

So, bringing this all back to you, the listener, what does this mean for your daily life?

How do you apply Sarah's bizarre, wonderful awards ceremony to your own stress?

It means that when you stop viewing yourself as a fragile victim of your circumstances, a victim of your bank account, your boss, the news, or your own

emotional states, and instead recognize yourself as the powerful creator of your experience, you change your entire relationship with reality.

Yes, because if you believe the world is doing it to you, you are helpless until the world changes.

And spoiler alert, the world isn't going to change just to make you comfortable.

But when you own the fact that you created the panic by zip tying all those thoughts together, you instantly own the power to uncreate it.

You restore the ultimate workability in your life.

Workability.

You aren't permanently broken.

You just have some wiring that needs a plastic zip tie cut.

You have the power to look at your darkest, most embarrassing, most vulnerable moments and feel incredible compassion for yourself rather than shame.

It is the ultimate shift from being at the mercy of the world to being the conscious architect of your own experience.

It's moving from stage two, the bottom, all the way to stage five, conscious creation.

We have covered some truly incredible transformative ground today, from finding the unexpected solid ground of absolute rock bottom to having the courage to turn up the volume knob on your own panic to burn

out the resistance we talk about visualizing the mechanics of our minds, cutting the zip ties on our mental wiring bundles to separate our compounding anxieties.

And final we explored the radical acceptance of accepting the award for being a powerful creator, using our own capacity for fear as a shield against a chaotic world.

But as we wrap up this deep dive, I want to leave you with one final provocative thought to mull over on your own.

It builds on everything we've discussed today.

We've established that you have an incredibly

powerful mind if you have the immense creative power to successfully wire together your deepest anxieties to build a masterpiece of fear so strong it paralyzes you.

What happens the moment you decide to take those exact same wires, cut the zip tie, and intentionally bundle together your greatest joy?

Today we explored unwiring fear and discovered how to shift from being a victim of your circumstances to a powerful creator of your life.

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