Have you ever caught yourself fighting a habit, a reaction, a way of showing up that you've been trying to fix for years? There's something worth sitting with in that. What if the behaviour you want to change isn't actually broken? What if it's doing exactly what it was designed to do, but it’s now just well past the point where it's still useful?

In this episode, Dr. Amy Silver and I explore the idea that the patterns we run, like people-pleasing, over-controlling, avoiding the hard conversation, aren't character flaws but protective strategies. They made sense at some point. The work isn't to fight them. It's to see them clearly, meet them with self-compassion, and then get deliberate about what happens next. I wonder what becomes possible for you and the people you lead when that reframe lands.

Dr. Amy Silver is a clinical psychologist with over three decades of experience studying how fear and habit shape human behaviour. She began her career at Oxford University, where she worked as a tutor and researcher before making a bold leap to drama school and then into the corporate world. She is the author of the award-winning book The Loudest Guest: How to Change and Control Your Relationship with Fear, and works with organisations, leadership teams, and executives across Australia to build cultures of courageous collaboration. Amy brings rare depth to this space: the rigour of clinical psychology combined with the humanity of someone who lives what she teaches.

You'll learn:

• How to recognise a protective pattern for what it is, without making it mean something about who you are
• Why self-compassion isn't a nice-to-have idea but the prerequisite for any real behaviour change
• How fear operates in teams and why so much of what looks like dysfunction is actually people trying to stay safe
• Why the question isn't "what's wrong with this pattern?" but "how flexible can I be with it?"
• How to identify your personal choice points and build experiments for what to do differently
• Why changing your environment, even in small ways, can shift the pattern before you've said a word
• How the difference between self-awareness and deliberate action is where real leadership lives
• Why the most useful thing you can do with your fear is stop fighting it and start using it as a guide

Other References

• The Loudest Guest | Dr. Amy Silver
• Conversations Create Growth | Dr. Amy Silver
• Oxford Guide to Behavioural Experiments in Cognitive Therapy | Bennett-Levy, Westbrook
• Exposure Therapy: Flooded vs Graded Approach
• The Amygdala and Threat Detection

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Mastering Fear: A Personal Journey

(05:51) - The Role of Self-Compassion

(17:49) - Deliberate Action and Choice Points

(21:10) - Changing the Environment for Better Outcomes

(29:37) - Understanding Team Dynamics and Patterns

(42:34) - The Power of Choice in Everyday Life

You can find Dr. Amy Silver at:

Website: https://www.dramysilver.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amysilverbrave

Check out my services and offerings https://www.digbyscott.com/

Subscribe to my newsletter https://www.digbyscott.com/subscribe

Follow me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/digbyscott/

If I really allowed my fear to be in control, I certainly wouldn't have the life that I have. So I have had to master my relationship with fear. It is still, I think, as loud a voice as it ever has been. I just handle it differently.

The behaviour you've been trying to fix isn't actually broken. My guest today, Dr. Amy Silver, is a clinical psychologist who started her career at Oxford and has spent

decades understanding why people do what they do. And whose work on fear and patterns in leadership has got to be some of the sharpest thinking that I've come across in this space. And today we get into why the protective patterns we run make complete sense to us and what it takes to recognise them in real time and what it actually looks like to find a way through rather than fighting what's already there. Hi, I'm Digby Scott, and this is Dig Deeper.

where I have conversations with depth that'll change the way you lead.

Amy, welcome to Dig Deeper.

Hey Digby, this is exciting. Thanks for having me.

We’re going to have, I reckon, such a fascinating conversation. I wanted to start with what's lighting you up at the moment? Like where's your energy drawn in your work? What are you fascinated by at the moment?

Moment. What's really fascinating is this work that I'm doing on helping people identify the patterns of thinking and behaviour that they have got caught in over their lives, that it served them really well and has been a really good pattern for them to help them succeed in life, but that potentially is stopping them from moving into the next iteration of their world. So I've developed a bit of an understanding of some key patterns that.

prevent people from moving forward or sustainably moving forward. Yeah, it's really fun to kind of bring that to my clients and to see it come alive because up until about six months ago it was just sort of living in my head as an idea to help people. And now it's actually out there in the world. And I don't know about you, but when you see people using language that you've thought about and you hear it being replayed or you hear people

kind of resonating with the content. It's just, you know, the idea is free, you know, in the world and people are making use of it. So it's really exciting to watch people use it and think about it and use it in a way to help them.

Well, you're being useful, aren't you? Because I'll often start a workshop or something and I'll say, okay, get a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle of your paper. So you've got two columns and on the left hand side, write insights. And these are all the ideas you're going to get today. You're going to get all these brilliant ideas. Then I go, ideas are useless unless you apply them, unless you put them into action. And so on the right hand side, on your right hand column, put actions.

And then answer the question, how might I put this idea into action? How could it be useful? What could I do with it? And then at the end of the workshop, I'll say, okay, go through your insights and actions and pick one thing on the right hand side that you're going to experiment with. Because your story is about bringing an idea to life. And I think that's the essence of leadership. You know, it's creating rather than reacting. It's bringing into being something that

you think needs to be in the world and that's what you've done.

Well, first of all, I really appreciate the fact that you said choose one because I think the idea when you when you're listening to new things where you're, you know, to have all these actions and I wish I could do all of them and then yeah, to zone in on one is it's almost like another task in itself is to not set ourselves so many actions that we then feel disappointed with ourselves that we can't put into action all these ideas. But I love the idea of being focused, choosing one action to come from it.

But yeah, from my perspective to see the different ways in which people apply the content or the frame that I've provided, you can't predict that. You can't predict where people are going. And I often say at the beginning of my workshops, I've got no idea because everything that I do is related to psychology. So, you know, that's just humanness, right? And you're just a human or you just happen to be at work. And so I often say, you know, this idea of

I don't know really where they're gonna go in their heads when we're going through the content. They may be thinking about you know having a difficult conversation at work, heading into a new period at work or a transformation, or it may be that they're thinking about having a conversation with their mother. You know, I really don't know where they're putting the content. So when it gets played back through people's own interpretation, you know, ubiquitous these ideas are because the way we think, the way we behave, it impacts everything.

everything in our existence. So you're doing it through a leadership lens, but you know, people are still people. They're still dealing with themselves. So those patterns that we've developed will be showing up in all sorts of different ways. And I've got no idea where, you know, I just know that these patterns exist.

Well, actually I wanna rewind. This idea of patterns, where does this come from for you?

My background is that I'm a clinical psychologist. So when you see someone for therapy with the approach that I was favouring as a therapist, you do something called a formulation. So the first few sessions, if not more, you're literally building a graphic of why and how people approach different events or different experiences in their life. So the formulation is a really important part of therapy because it

helps people understand, there's a formula here to what I'm doing. Yeah. And once we kind of understand it is the pattern or the algorithm or the formulation which is creating the outcome here, regardless of the situation, it's kind of easier then to separate it from it being my fault. It's something to do with the pattern that I've set up.

Like an algorithm.

And that's just an easier place for us to sit then and do the work of finding exits to those patterns. So that's kind of what it was like in therapy land. And in work, it's kind of the same thing. I find, and in the work that I did in courage and moving with fear, it was really important to me that I helped people understand that the very first step in doing anything different, whether it's heading into fear or

changing something about a behaviour or changing about the way you feel about something, the very first step for humans to be allowed to do that by ourselves is self-compassion.

So self compassion and patterns, can you link that for us?

So if we don't have compassion for ourselves, then we can't head into doing something different because we're too trapped by shame or guilt or irritation with ourselves. We're much more likely to externalise or internalise those experiences rather than think, what can I do differently? Or what is the potential way out of this? So self-compassion becomes the first step for all of us.

To make ourselves flexible to any given scenario. And so when you can see what you're doing in a pattern form, it's easier to have self-compassion, I think, because we can locate the issue, if you like, in the pattern and not something innate in us that actually makes it so much harder for us to shift around.

So I'm kind of using myself as a guinea pig in, you know, what you're describing. I'm thinking about myself. And the words came up for me is objectify - Like I can put it out there as an object, this pattern, rather than it's me. And it's not an identity thing, but it's a, I'm doing that thing. I'm doing that pattern, but it is not the essence of me. It's a thing that I've developed.

It's not necessarily your fault, you know, it's a habit. So what do we do about it as opposed to, my God, I'm never gonna be any different. Why am I like this? Why am I not like that person? It's never gonna be different from this. Yeah, there's no worthiness to doing anything different. Yeah, or we just put it all in wishes. I wish, I wish, I wish.

And also I can't, right? Because it's like, no, because this is who I am. It's like, hey, hang on, hang on. No, this is a thing you're running, right? Which is a different question. Huh. Can I ask you what patterns have you noticed in your own research and on and doing this that you run?

Yeah and that's the

You know, there's a reason why I became fascinated with fear because I live it. You know, I'm very, very acutely aware of my own levels of fear. And if I really allowed my fear to be in control, I certainly wouldn't have the life that I have. So I have had to master my relationship with fear. It is still, I think, as loud a voice as it ever has been.

I just handle it differently. So I very much feel that fear is a guide for me and helps me understand where next. You know, I always think that when I feel fearful about something, it's often like a little flag raising for me. And now my relationship is God, I've better go and hunt that flag down. You know, I've got to head for it, lean into it. But my real core desire and the pattern that I think that.

I had for a very long time was to avoid, you know, to avoid the fear and to move away from it. And that was avoidance of tasks, but it could also be avoidance of intimacy or connection, really, because I just didn't want to get hurt. So that was a very quick and easy way to not get physically hurt or emotionally hurt, was to avoid. But as I said, I've worked really, really hard.

now to modify that behaviour. So I think that that pattern is something that I understand I have a desire for, but I really believe that I have mastered that enough that once I notice it, I can start to adjust it.

I reckon awareness brings choice, right? You know, if you've got the awareness of the pattern and you've got language for it, you can say this is what it is, then you've got some choices about what happens next. And there's a sense of agency that comes with that. I can really relate to that. You know, for me, I was saying to a friend yesterday that, you know, I'm like you, you know, avoiding the difficult. For me it's about people pleasing.

Yeah, my pattern's been to avoid those conversations where someone may not like me or get upset with me through that conversation or set of conversations. I was saying to them yesterday, this friend, I was saying, you know what, I reckon I've built my muscle that I can spot when I'm doing it, the pattern, and then I'm making a deliberate choice to lean into the discomfort because I know on the other side of that there's a better world, you know, there's a better set of opportunities that come up.

Firstly, I need the awareness. The way that I'm understanding this, and let me test this, is this kind of like understanding a bit of the why I do what I do rather than how do I deal with it first. It's kind of like get the why clear before show me what to do.

Well, I can just tell you very, very definitively why. It's because we want to keep ourselves safe. So there's not really that many questions to do. I mean, although obviously my background is quite psychotherapeutic and going into the background of where did this pattern start? How did it get supported through your childhood? You know, how do you form relationships that kind of foster that sort of a pattern? I still think all that work is really.

interesting, but ultimately the answer is that we're frightened because we have a brain that was developed to be threat-seeking. Our brain is still functioning in the same way that it always has. You know, this information comes into our senses, and then the amygdalae, which are the fear-seeking parts of our brain, see that information first, and then the clever brain works out whether we actually need to see this as a threat. Our brain is developed to be threat seeking. And then secondly, we are social animals. So we rely on each other extensively for many, many years as developing adults or developing children. And then we rely on each other. We're in social groups the whole time and being rejected or being disliked or thought of as less value by the tribe that we care about is a real threat.

So social threat, physical threat, they use the same parts of the brain, the same neural pathways, and our body experiences them in the same way. So because of that, that we set up patterns that are protective. Okay. So we people please, or we over control, or we avoid, or we put armour on. These are protective strategies. So while the why is very important.

If we're really trying to understand ourselves deeply, it's actually not as important as just recognising that we have developed protective patterns to save us from fear. End of story. It doesn't really need huge amounts of psychoanalysis to understand the simplicity of that. How you have developed those patterns will depend on how successful they've been in your life. So if they haven't been successful, you would have switched to something else.

So it's really now a case of understanding how flexible we can be with our pattern rather than what's wrong with it, why did it start. I mean, that is interesting, but not really important in developing flexibility.

Again, the insight and the action, right? The flexibility is the action piece. It's like, well, what do I do with this? So well, let me just check. What do you mean by flexibility?

So flexibility means do we have choice? Do we have the ability in the moment to say this pattern is the pattern that I want to run? Because that's the most familiar, it feels like the safest. And in this particular situation, it might not give me the result that I'm looking for. And so, how do I do something different? So it's a two-step thing. It's

Well, maybe several steps, but it's recognising the pattern in action as opposed to in retrospect and being able to have pre-prepared exits that you know that you want to try and back to your experiment word. That's a big word for me too. What are the experiments that we're going to run when that pattern comes up in the scenario that I want to do something different? Where am I going to go?

you know, what are the bits of things that I'm going to be focused on and can I pull on that in those moments? So I'm a really big believer. I've probably said this to you before over the years, but I don't think there's anything wrong with any of these patterns. They are completely perfect. I mean, they do keep us safe. They work. Yeah.

Designed for a purpose. I was just thinking that, Amy. I was like, you know, patterns are are not good or bad. They just are. And it's like, what's the usefulness? Because there's got to be good patterns. You know, actually, we were talking the other day about how we both love the sales process, right? And it gives us mojo, it gives us energy. And there's something about we know how to do that. We have a pattern. We have pathways that we activate.

That's just what's going on. The work. Yeah, yeah. And so they're not necessarily, you know, yes, some patterns can limit, but it's like if I can see them, then I go, well, how when might this be useful given my intended purpose? That makes sense.

That is the difference between self-awareness, which is important, and deliberate action, which is very, very different. So the deliberateness of choosing what to do for a given circumstance is where we get enormous internal power.

What helps us be more deliberate? So we've got the awareness at the insight, but we need to take action. What are the conditions for good deliberate action?

So two mainstreams here. And it kind of goes back to what I was saying before. There's the brain stuff and there's the social stuff, right? That's really what's pushing us into these patterns. The brain has an instinctual fear piece. If we have learnt some very, very basic strategies to bring ourselves back online when our amygdalae are firing and pushing us into instinctive fear.

So we really need our clever brain put back on because it goes offline when we're in fear. So those strategies are very, very basic and are all around, you know, regulating your breathing, reminding yourself where you are, look using your senses. They're all the very strong grounding techniques, which of course there are hundreds of. And if you don't have an understanding of how to ground yourself and bring yourself back online when your instinctive fear is activated,

You have to learn them. So you learn them so that you can activate them when you need them, when you notice that you're not thinking quite as much, or you've gone into a reactive space, or your vision has gone very narrow. You know, you're not in a sort of a broad mindset, there's no room for a pause. Those are all cues to bring in some grounding techniques. So that's the instinctive fear piece. And then the other side, which is the social side and understanding how we

have formed these patterns to keep safe in our social tribes, is having again preparation. I mean, the answer to this is prepare. You know, the value of being able to understand that we have patterns that are playing on repeat without our consciousness is not just to know, that's what I'm doing. It's to prepare for the fact that we know that it's going to run again.

So what are you going to do to prepare the different thoughts that you want to have at that time, the different physical things that are going on in your body, the different emotions that you want to have at that point. So it's actually about doing the work in advance or kind of alongside you running the patterns. I think a lot of us, all of us until we're kind of focused on it, give a lot to luck.

Or I'll do something different next time. There's so much that we can do to really take back control, even with emotions, you know, like we don't have to accept our emotions as the emotion that we want to sit in at that particular time. So we have so much choice points, but somehow we feel that we have to endure or we have no control. But I just don't believe that. I believe we've got

lots of control, but I think that it requires effort and preparation to expect that anything different is gonna happen.

It's a good word. You just I want to pick up on that phrase choice points. I really like that. You know, it's like the fork in the road, isn't it? It's like the so I could go down the well-worn path that I my pattern will take me down, or I could stop and go, hang on, which path do I want to go down? How do I identify a choice point?

So there's five areas of choice points.

Okay. You have done some thinking here. All right. Hit us.

So and I've listed some of them already, but they all require a different strategy. And I just want to say as well, the choice points again are the choice points that are potentials, right? But they still require experiments. So you may have in what any one of these five areas that I'll explain, you may have a potential choice point, but you should have like 15 in each of these areas because we don't know.

And that's the whole point. We don't know what's gonna work. These patterns are pretty strong. The pull back to them is really again has got very strong biological imperatives. So, and we don't know what's gonna work. So we kind of have to have multiple thoughts about this and an experimental kind of mindset. Yeah. So the choice point areas are we can do something about the environment. So we can change something about again, it might be easier if you think about this in advance. So

If you were to look at your calendar and think about, well, my pattern is likely to get set off in that particular meeting or in that particular moment or whatever, then we can use that as a playground to sort of plan, right? So what could I do to change the environment to make it more likely that I'm cueing myself for a different response? Does that make sense? I always look back at

Yeah, it makes complete sense.

Early sort of photos of you know how we've got this terrible history of like corporate photos that you've taken over the years for your headshot or whatever. And I look back at my early pictures and you know, I was full of makeup and high heels and like I don't know, it was pre-COVID maybe, but I was definitely trying to appear to be something that I thought other people needed me to be in order for me to be successful.

one of the things that I could deliberately do is not show up like that and show up in a particular way. So those are really tiny little cues that I can put runners on instead of high heels just to remind myself to ground myself.

Absolutely. I have a story about when I started my career as a chartered accountant in one of those big firms back in the day. You know, this was when you had to wear a tie and you weren't allowed to leave the building without your suit jacket on and so on. And God forbid if you rolled your sleeves up. And we had this fella come in from the leeds office in the UK and I was in Perth, and he would sit, he was a manager and he worked in his office and he'd roll his sleeves up and I'd walk past, what? What's that? And I'm like,

wonder if I could do that. And, you know, it was like, ooh, and then the fear kicks in. And I think it was a pattern of well, this is just what you do because you don't want to get in trouble. So and there was again the complying sort of thing. I went, I'm gonna try it. And it was just this little rebellious act, but it was actually an experiment. Of course no one bats an eyelid. The story had all been in my head. And to this day I continue to work like that, roll my sleeves up. It's

Yeah, it's interesting. I find this fascinating. So change the environment.

So change the environment, which I kind of I sort of merged those two because that was kind of changing our behaviour too. But doing something in our environment really, really simply can make a massive difference. And even if you take it to a very, very basic level of you know having more green around you or kind of changing something about the location. So really just being thoughtful about what I can do in the environment that would make it different. So you've got environment, then we've got what you're thinking.

So again, as opposed to just hoping that we can tolerate the thought that we know is going to come up, like one of my classics is I'm so boring or like I've got nothing to offer or whatever the thing is. [Digby] So You're not boring. [Amy] Thank you. Tell that to my thoughts. So if you have that thought and you know that that's a really familiar thought for you, then what's the alternative? Not I'm so incredibly interesting in every time I speak.

you know, people are drippingly kind of, you know, listening to every single word. That the extreme version of it or this extreme opposite isn't really going to be very helpful to you, or not sustainably. But we want to find a reasonable thought that we can move into it instead. So we're looking for an alternative thought where you can say, I feel boring because that's kind of the pattern that's playing for me.

And at the same time, I don't have to be the most interesting person in the room. And what I'm doing is I want to tune into the other person, not necessarily what's in my head.

Be interested rather than be interesting.

Exactly. So again, you may not a hundred percent believe it, but it's running in parallel.

I love that. Yeah, an example for me reasonably recently is when I'm facing a really difficult thing, I might say this is going to be really hard. But you know what I said to myself instead, and actually to a couple of friends, was the thing is hard, but I can do hard things. And there was a sense of agency that I brought into the thought that wasn't there before. And that's changed everything. Well, this is what I do. I do hard things and I can do them.

Another really lovely one I find is this is gonna be difficult in the short term. And in the long term, it's gonna be the right thing. Yeah, that's right. Or we're so short term focused with our feelings and our thoughts. It's so about now. So if we can hold ourselves while we travel through the now, knowing that we're heading somewhere else, it's that's a nice spot.

Take your medicine.

Can I just kind of take a slight diversion into that? Because one of the things I find frustrating for the people and organisations I work with is the short-termism that we tend to find ourselves just stuck in. We're reacting to what's now and we might be thinking quarter by quarter or whatever. Whereas we know that we need a long arc. We know we need to be able to well, I think anyway, and you can test this. I feel like

We're not thinking systemically about the longer game we're playing and what we're actually here to do. What's going on there?

Fear. It's all it all stems back. I've got a very one-track mind, but it does all come back to fear. If we are in a fearful situation that we don't have capacity or we cannot prioritise the future.

Right, because we have to deal with the now so if we're not aware of our patterns that are limiting us because they're based in fear, then we are just gonna keep running the short term game.

We have to deal with the now.

And just to play as well what you already know, but the when we're thinking in teams around you know the future and wanting to sort of increase our attention on that, we're not only thinking about that systemically, but individually we are too. So we forget quite quickly that a team is made up of individuals who are carrying their own personal fears and their own personal identities, their own personal expectations of themselves or their work.

And their commitment to the long term is also tempered by this personal level of fear, which again, they won't necessarily, or any of us don't necessarily identify as fear. But it's about wanting to do a good job, not wanting to let people down. Those are all fear-based kind of conversations, again, that we need to, I think, make explicit to enable us to get over them.

I always say, you know, fear is interfering with a lot of our decision making. So it's not that we don't want to listen to fear. It's got a lot of really great things to say. It warns us of a lot of things. And if we didn't have fear, we'd be dead. So we need fear and we need to understand where it is getting in our way of thinking about something that we need to be thinking about.

You mentioned teams. What are some of the patterns that you see teams run that can be unearthed and worked with?

Yeah. So one of the things that I do, a program that I offer is team to team work. And it can sometimes look like departments to departments. So it might be sort of the technology department to the customer service or the marketing to sales, marketing to clinical, something where there are some very different styles and approach. And although the goal is the same, you know, the values are often the same.

The expression and the habits that have been set up because of, you know, people's professions and the way that they've been trained, because of the type of person that they have designed themselves to be, have arrived in a team with potentially conflicting styles of working. That when these two departments need to function well together, there's kind of continual or ongoing frictions that just kind of

get in the way of people doing good work because the same sort of things happen. You know, the communication isn't quite what each other need. There's some old habits that haven't died of kind of previous feelings of being let down or not supported. And the tribal kind of patterns that get set up become just internal friction that is just not necessary, very disruptive.

And takes away from people's energy. So we really want to again just unearth those patterns in exactly the same way that we've already talked about. It's a pattern that we've got into. What are we going to do? As opposed to they are like this, if only they did this. Why are they like this? If you know, to keep that away from them, don't involve them, which is all very finger pointing and toxic.

We go to wow, you know, the pattern is at play. Here is where the pattern shows up. What do we do about the pattern together? Because we together know that this pattern is really destructive for us. So what's our part in the pattern? What's your part in the pattern? And then what is the pattern that we want to stretch into? So again, it's still got that very deliberate space of designing.

experiments that feel more fun and free and I think full of potential to set up this sort of more I mean I use the agile word in you know flexibility wise not methodology but agile thinking of how do we work best together, how do we get the best out of each other and what is the pattern of communication, the pattern of being with each other that's going to allow us to excel.

Just zooming out, My thinking is the word pattern is incredibly powerful because it takes us away from I think linear and it invites us to think of living systems and dynamic situations that can explain actually much more accurately about what's going on than a linear sort of transactional thing. And so, you know, I'm running an offsite for a leadership team in a couple of weeks. I'm thinking I'm gonna ask them those sorts of questions.

reflect on the pattern that's at play. Not just the problem, but the pattern that might be creating that problem. And then your purpose. Okay, we're going with some Ps here. There's, yeah, what do we actually want? And what why are we coming together in the first place? So therefore, what's the pattern we want to create? And that I'm kind of formulating as live here. It can really unlock a different set of conversations just by using that one word.

And again, just to go back to something that I said before, I think because it pulls on self-compassion and compassion really, but it pulls on this idea of stepping back and allowing us the space to say, of course it's going to run like that again, because that's how it runs. So what can we do? Like where do we push for this to be different? And what are the potential ways that that could look? And can we figure that out?

together. And ultimately it comes down to, you know, really quite practical ways of running this. You know, it comes down to really clear, okay, well, if we did this, that would break the pattern there. So the way that I run it is I work with one team or one division. And then I work with the other. So I work independently with them so that I can start to see the pattern because it's very difficult when you're in it to see it.

Right. And I think my part of my role is to understand what the pattern is so that I can sort of capture it somehow. So working with each individually, I can see what their part in the pattern is and how the pattern plays out. And then when we get together, we're really looking at mapping it out, talking about potential strategies to do something different. What is the pattern that we're going for? And then coming up with very, very practical things. And when we get to that practical thing, like

Well, we want to communicate, you know, regularly, you know, that we want to have a meeting to talk about, you know, the sale point or that this or we want this. They're the things that people are really craving and know that they're the answers, but there's a sort of a lightness and a joy about the sort of heading into it because they've sort of forgiven themselves or each other for playing the pattern. And I think that's the biggest output that you get is this.

kind of togetherness piece as opposed to just bringing in the things that we know are going to make a difference before they've done the work and seeing that the pattern is at play. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. You know, one thing I really would love just to invite us to explore a little bit is a little bit about your journey into this, because you're clearly deep expert in your space. And that you started as a clinical psychologist way back in the

Well not way back, Digby. Not way back. Yeah, exactly.

Two years ago, yeah.

Now we need to give you more credence than that, right? You've had some years going around the sun, right? We've we've had some time going around the sun. We both have. There's this sort of journey for you, because you're not doing that clinical work anymore. You're working more in the corporate land. What have you had to learn around patterns for yourself and letting go and evolve? Because it to me it's not, you're not there. It's an evolution, right? What have you learned?

around your own patterns and how to work with them through that journey.

As I said before, I think fear is a very good friend of mine, right? I have a really strong relationship with fear and I'm continuously trying to learn how to manage that. But what I think I am pretty good at is moving around my patterns in a really deliberate way. So I identified pretty early in my career as a clinical psychologist that the track or the way that I was heading was all mapped out.

And so I was working at Oxford University and I knew that I could keep going with publishing papers, supervising other doctorate students, and head towards professorship. That was a very clear path, not immediately, but that was the path that I was heading towards. And I somewhere in that sort of period of time decided that I wondered if I was on this path.

Because it was the path that I was on, as opposed to deliberately choosing a different path or a path that I wanted to be on. And so that kind of pattern of checking out, do I actually want to be doing what I'm doing? I think I started quite early. I'm really grateful that I did. And so I actually left this quite serious job and went to drama school for.

a year I applied to go to drama school and got in, which I was very, very surprised about, and then had to drastically change my life to move from Oxford to London to go to drama school for a year. And you know, one week I'm sort of helping patients that are in a very difficult place. And the next week I'm sort of leaping around a church hall pretending to be a giraffe. Like it was a very surreal. Yeah, I think I kind of did

That big a leap is it?

Again, in fear work, we talk about either a flooding experience where you just, you know, get dumped in the thing that you're fearful of, or you do a graded approach to the thing that you're fearful of. And I think I'm quite good at when it comes to it, I can make those big flooding experiences for myself and jump and have faith, pretty much what you said before, that you know, this is going to be difficult and

You know, I only have, I think, one life. I think I only have, you know, these moments. You're the master of this, which is where I'd love to spin the end of my spiel now back to you, because you're so good at being very deliberate about where you put your energy. And I think I learnt very early that I could do that, that I get a lot of energy from that. It's a very scary thing, but it's where I feel most alive, is where I'm

switching. And so that's not necessarily a pattern switch, but it required so much of an upgrade to the flexibility that I was running with on what I was thinking and what I was doing and what I was feeling and the different spaces that I was in. And I think I've just done that, you know, quite consistently throughout my world.

Yeah, I love the link you make between scary and alive.

Yeah, they're the same. You have that very strongly with physical stuff, but you also have that with social stuff as well, and being managing your emotions and your connections. And I think you're very, very deliberate in the way in which you manage your excitement slash fear stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. To me, there was a turning point. Longtime listeners will know my story of burnout. And the I think there was that turning point in my early 30s where it was like, like you say, you got one life. Make it count. And it doesn't mean make it count and be flat out all the time, which I've realised is a bad thing too, but it's about seek out enough stretch and growth. Because I think I'm running the question, what am I capable of?

And what lights me up at the same time. And those two things, you know, and lights me up doesn't have to be always in adrenaline stuff. It's just what fascinates me. You know, it's the learning life. And with learning is comes some stretch, I reckon. And in my work, I have two types of work. I have it what's crudely called exploit work, which is stuff I can do really easily and it adds a lot of value. And I'm

good at it and I guess I'm exploiting my knowledge that I have in ways that easy to help people. So that's exploit. And then the other side of it is explore work. And explore work is pushing boundaries and getting into brand new territory and where I'm not necessarily the expert in a traditional sense, but I'm learning deeply as we go on the path together. And I've found that I need a

really healthy blend of both of those. Give me too much exploit, I get bored. But if I have too much explore, I might start to spin out. But I'm pushing always between those well, you know, I'm navigating between those two things. Yeah. And it's not just with work. I think it's with, you know, try to go to a new country every year for the explore side of things.

Well, I would have you in my head as somebody that's really deliberately living deliberately living. I mean, maybe that's just the thing.

Is there another choice? Well, I mean there is another choice. Is it a good one though? You know, that's 'cause what I think. It's so we can autopilot live. And we all are to

Yeah, we all are. Absolutely we all are.

And the quest is to have more awareness, more awakeness, you know, I think. And more, therefore, more choicefulness, you know, which is what we've talked about. What haven't we talked about, Amy, that might be worth just

Digby, you and I could talk for many, many hours. I think it's a whole world of things that we could exploit and explore together.

There's maybe a part two then.

I don't have anything in my head that no.

Yeah. Well what have you learned or what have you been reminded of or what's this conversation got you thinking?

Well, just the privilege of speaking to you always makes me remember the choice points, I think. Because I do think you do live in choice. So, you know, and I think that is learning how to do that balance between, you know, I mean, I'm a mum of three and you know, that balance is always at play and I've got all these beautiful reminders of what is really important to me. I do balance.

my attention around those priorities. But I still think, you know, there's a lot of mundane stuff in life. I guess that we don't have choice about it. And reminding ourselves that we still have choice points in mundane stuff. I was with a group on Monday and we were talking about, you know, that some of their work because of the strategic direction has become a bit predictable and mundane.

And yet we still have choices around that about where we want to feel and where we want to see and what we want to think and how we want to be. So we sort of again, I think, give over a lot of our lived experience, our living experience to the scenarios that we're in when I think actually we have so much choice. There's the choices that I think you make really well, which are about deliberately living, and then there are also

these really important reminders that even if we don't have big moves to make, you know, we can still change the way in which we're experiencing them.

That is such an important thing for all of us to remember, I reckon, you know, that the world's a better place if we just have that more mindful choice. Amy, awesome. You know, here's to choice, here's to seeing our patterns, here's to living more deliberately. It's been our pleasure.

Lovely to see you. Lovely to be with you. Thank you for your time.

Absolute pleasure. Thanks, Amy. By the way, before we go, how do people find you? Because I'm bet people will want to find you now.

Dr. Amy Silver is the website or LinkedIn I'm not difficult to find.

You can find Amy everywhere. Alright, thanks Amy. See you soon.

Yeah.

There's something Amy said early on that has really struck me, I'm still sitting with it. This point that the patterns that we run, you know, the people pleasing or the over controlling or the avoiding, they're not flaws, but they're protective strategies. That's really helpful for me. This idea that were designed to keep us safe and at some point they're actually kind of useful. And the problem is that isn't that we have The problem is that we keep running them

way beyond their use by date, you know, after the situation or the context change and we don't even notice we're doing it. And I reckon that reframe matters more than it might seem because you know the moment you can see a pattern as a pattern, as something separate from who you are, you stop fighting yourself and you start working with something that you can actually move. You can kind of can just put it at a distance and look at it.

And the first move is self-compassion. It's not just a nice-to-have idea. I can it's almost like a prerequisite. You can't shift what you're still shaming yourself for. So here's something I'd love you to do, or at least invite you to do. Think about one pattern you've been running on autopilot and just name it as a pattern. It's not like it's a character flaw. And then ask yourself, next time it shows up, what's one small experiment I could try?

And that's where the choice is. And as Amy's reminded us, we've all got plenty of choice more than we think. Thanks again to Gabby White for making all this happen and for Kane Power for making it sound awesome. I'm Digby Scott, this is Dig Deeper. Until next time, go well.