In this episode, I’m going to talk about the ways using fear as fuel can sabotage you. A metaphor for you: If you want to run a marathon, and you hire a bear to chase after you so you finish the race, you probably won’t run linearly and you’ll spend more time looking behind you than ahead of you, and you definitely won’t enjoy the marathon. If you take the time to prepare, condition yourself, and practice, you will feel much better about the journey and you might even enjoy it and want to do it again.

Using fear and shame as motivation is going to result in wasted energy to stress, anxiety, and shame. Being stuck in that cycle of stress can force your body into a fight, flight, or freeze response, and you can’t always choose which one. 

When you remove fear as motivation and you’re out of your stress response, what processes, systems, and strategies can you apply now that you’re not spinning in panic?

How efficient, effective, and pleasurable can meeting deadlines be? How can we learn to work with our natural cycles and rhythms rather than manufacturing scary conditions as motivation?

Ready to start making art, making, money, and making an impact? Visit makingartistspodcast.com or connect with me on IG @thenancysun.

Music credit: Positive Experience by Sunny Tones

A Podcast Launch Bestie production

Hey artists, how's life?

, when this episode drops, we will be in October and here in New York City it

will be peak, spooky season . And as an adult, I have not really celebrated

Halloween in a while, but I am already so excited to be celebrating it this.

It will be my son's first Halloween and we just got him his first Halloween costume.

I should say costumes because my husband, my son, and I are

making it a themed family affair and are dressing up together.

I am keeping it a surprise for now, but if you want the reveal, you

can catch us on Instagram at my Instagram handle at the Nancy Sun.

The link will be in the show notes.

I will definitely share our Halloween on IG stories and depending on the

photography skills of my husband, hopefully there will be a post.

And it being spooky season sets the best stage for today's episode

where we will be discussing fear.

However, unlike last week's emotional perfectionism episode, we will

be talking about fear as fuel.

So what do I mean by.

. Well, specifically I'm gonna talk about the ways using fear as fuel can

sabotage you like sugar in your tank.

If we're just going to continue that metaphor, , which I

just learned is a bad thing.

, and I'm talking about fear as quote unquote fuel today because there are so

many artists who only know how to motivate themselves with fear, and they come to me

for coaching because them using fear as motivation on themselves isn't working.

and sometimes their brain solution is to hire me in hopes that I can

now scare them sufficiently into doing what they already want to do.

This is something, for instance, that I have first noticed in my consults.

So for those who don't know, I have consults with artists who are

interested in working together.

They're either interested in joining the Making Artists Mastermind or in

hiring me for one-on-one coaching.

and a consult is a one-on-one conversation to give us both data on whether or not

we are a good fit to work together.

And in this conversation I usually ask them why coaching?

Why coaching with me and what has worked for them in the past with

a coach or with someone else?

And the artists who use fear as Fuel will tell me that they want

coaching for accountability.

, what works for them is getting coached hard and they want someone who will

yell at them and grill them about why they didn't do the thing they

said that they were going to do.

Now I love a self-aware human who knows that having external accountability,

like a human, a deadline or a standing coaching appointment works for them.

But here is the red flag on the call.

They will defend their limiting beliefs and they will want me

as their coach to agree with.

And then they tell me the reason why they want to achieve.

Their goal is to prove this limiting belief wrong instead of thinking,

This belief is already wrong right now.

. They're afraid that if they don't think that they're the biggest piece

of poop at the center of the universe right now, that they will lose all

desire to go after their dream.

So, for instance, a common fear motivating belief artists think and want me to

keep for them is the belief I'm behind.

It could be, I don't have a book deal.

I'm behind.

I don't have representation with a gallery, an agent or a manager.

I'm behind.

I don't have a TV or film.

Credit to my name.

I'm behind.

And they want me to be their coach to get them to successfully hurry

up, hurry up so much and so fast that they will get that book deal, that

representation, that TV and film credit.

And only when they get these things, they will allow themselves to consider maybe

letting go of the I'm behind thought.

Knowing them, one, I don't know if they will ever hit that goal post or

they will simply move the goal post and keep the thought that I'm behind.

And artists, the reason why I even have these conversations

with these people is because they don't have what they want yet.

Another way, fear as fuel shows up in my consults is when the artist I'm speaking

with is burnt out and ready to give up.

This exhausted state is actually a totally normal consequence of keeping

limiting beliefs like I'm behind because then you rush, you work

hard, you keep busy to escape or.

Prove that thought instead of simply working effectively towards your goal.

I tell my clients, this is like getting a bear to chase you as

motivation to run a marathon.

So in this metaphor, your goal is like running 26.2 miles,

which is the length of a.

And you think that if I believe this is a matter of life and death,

I will run the entire length of this marathon super duper fast.

So you hire a bear to make the marathon a matter of life or death.

But when you hire a bear to chase you, you both probably don't run linearly and

you will also be more focused looking behind you at the bear rather than

in front of you, towards your goal.

And your sympathetic nervous system, so this nervous system that is responsible

for your stress response gets activated.

So you are likely to be in a fight, flight, or freeze mode.

, and while you hope that your response is flight in the opposite direction as

fast as you can towards your goal of running 26.2 miles, that's not always

the response that your body chooses.

. Your body might be like, Hey, why are we running 26.2 miles anyway?

and you know, if we give up on this marathon, this

bear won't chase us anymore.

So you might actually fly or flee by quitting this goal entirely, which

my hunch is not what you actually wanted to get from keeping this

fear inducing, limiting belief.

Now, I want to normalize for you that in the year 2022, it's normal that

artists like you think you need fear as motivation, or to just equate.

All motivation as fear based.

In fact, a lot of my clients on these consults will often have , like have

their brain melted when I have them.

Consider there are other forms of motivation other than fear.

And the reason why it might be completely normal is because if you're listening

to this podcast, you are probably a human in a westernized nation with

an economy that is influenced by capitalism, if not Wally, Capitalist

like me, based in the United States.

. So capitalism uses a lot of fear based motivation because for this type of

economy to function, society needs the majority of humans to show up to work

consistently, reliably, and a lot.

and that means business owners pay their workers just enough to survive, but

not enough for them to have abundance to leave their boss, or even worse,

start competing with their boss.

So capitalism thrives.

Ironically, it succeeds by using fear as motivation on workers.

When businesses keep its workers afraid of losing their job, their income,

their retirement benefits, their health benefits, workers will then show up

to work reliably, consistently, and perhaps even more than they need.

Capitalism creates workers that don't take their vacation days, even when they're

unlimited, that don't take their sick, leave their parental leave, and instead

creates workers that work over time and even play the game of moving up the ladder

to prevent being poor by getting rich.

. So in this economy, it is unsurprising now that you're sold

on being afraid as the best, only, and greatest form of motivation.

even as an artist, it's unsurprising If you forget that you can run a

marathon without the motivation of being chased by a bear.

So what's possible when you try to run 26.2 miles without being chased

by a bear as your only motivat?

Well, we know that you might actually train to run a marathon

and run that marathon differently that you don't have access to when

you are being chased by a bear.

So I don't know a ton about.

Running marathons.

I've trained for it once, so I will just go by my plan of training and how

I ran a marathon differently because I didn't just roll out of bed, hit

the starting line, and, uh, think of something scary behind me, which was

I trained for several weeks leading up to the New York City marathon date.

I would have.

Short runs on the weekdays.

Short is relative, right, so it's short compared to 26.2 miles.

I would have long runs on the weekends.

I would allow myself rest breaks.

There would be days that I didn't run.

I would, participate in races and learn to have good shoes.

And I would learn to give myself, like at the time, this may no longer be the rage,

but there was like this sugary goof fuel that you would use in addition to water,

to hydrate and nourish yourself on a run.

And you would do things like get good shoes, get good clothes,

carbo load the day before.

, you would take exquisite care of yourself as a marathoner.

That is not possible when you're just in a fight, flight or freeze stress response.

In this version of running a marathon, there's also the possibility of

you actually enjoying the marathon.

You might actually enjoy training.

Enjoy resting, Enjoy going on long training runs.

Enjoy the marathon itself.

And because you actually enjoy the marathon itself, that might intrinsically

motivate you to run more marathons.

. Whereas if you needed fears, motivation, should you even succeed

at the 26.2 mile race, you might be like, That was exhausting.

My adrenal glands were firing the whole time.

I have cramps in my leg now.

I don't wanna do this anymore.

So I just wanna offer that you can have access to other forms of motivation of

inspiration, and they might actually serve you better, longer, and possibly be even

more effective than using fear as motivat.

Now, you might be thinking that that's a great metaphor, but how

does this apply to real life?

Are there people out there who actually let go of fears, motivation,

and do they actually experience the kind of success that I want?

And the answer is yes.

So for example, I have a client who.

, used to use fear as motivation.

He works as a freelance copywriter and is a journalist in the food,

drink and hospitality space.

And before we even started working together, he was making the average

freelance writing salary of, I wanna say, in the mid five figures.

Now I wanna acknowledge that making a living as a freelance

writer itself is no small.

but he came to me because he was overworking underearning

and 100% burnt out.

The gigs that he was getting were low paying, and because of that,

he needed a bunch of them to make his mid five figure salary.

And then on top of that, he was spending a lot of time really anxious in fear,

stressed out, frustrated, and those emotions were creating an incredibly

slow and miserable writing process.

So what now takes him, let's say, two and a half hours to do

it might take him all day to.

So he was finding himself under pressure and behind the eight ball

in terms of meeting deadlines.

I don't even know if I'm using that expression correctly, but what

I mean is he was not meeting his writing deadlines, and this was

from the thought that I am behind.

I am late.

It's too late.

I'm too far gone, which were all thoughts.

That probably served him at some point in time to keep and to use to motivate him.

He was hoping that what these thoughts would create is, , an opportunity for him

to defend himself to prove those thoughts wrong by hurrying up, by hustling, by

getting things under in, under the wire.

But when you work this way, you are not considering that your

body may react to this stress response with a different choice.

You cannot always choose if you are going to fight, flee, or freeze.

And what he was discovering was what used to work for him defending himself

against these negative thoughts that he was behind by trying to get things under

the wire, was no longer serving him.

He actually found that he was freezing.

He was spending a lot of time that he should have been writing.

Doing other things to mitigate the emotional experience when he could

have just removed the thought and then thereby removing the emotional roller

coaster and then creating a different experience of him writing, whether

it be for his clients or for himself.

And that's what we ended up working together.

Was, Hey, what happens when you let go of fear as motivation?

What else could be motivating?

And when you remove fear as motivation, and you are out of your stress

response, what systems and processes and strategies can you now apply

because you are not spinning in panic?

So one, we learned that what motivates can sometimes just be,

let's see, how efficient, effective, pleasurable meeting deadlines can be.

So we took the focus away from the problem and onto the, so, And then

we had a lot of fun just tweaking and iterating on the solution.

So what are ways that we can, gamify, right?

How many words we're writing and how can we make these systems

and processes more efficient?

And what I mean by that, that's like a lot of like corporate

speak, but really like how.

We learn to work with our natural cycles and rhythms when we are motivated to write

as opposed to manufacture stress and.

Scary conditions as the only writing motivation, and this can have an

impact on your financial ability to thrive on your money bottom line.

So when you need fear is motivation, you will probably end up taking a

lot of low, more low paying gigs and you probably won't ask for a raise.

Or you probably won't raise your rates because you are afraid of

losing any or all of the income.

When a client says no, as opposed to playing a bigger game for, Hey, how can we

create more money so that we can work less so we can have the life that we always.

. So I worked with this person on raising their rates with their highest volume

and I believe actually best paying client so that they could create 30% more

income by doing the same amount of work.

So fast forward, uh, we let go of the, I'm behind.

I'm too far gone.

It's too late for me.

Dialogue and now this person has like a life that even I am jealous of.

They are now making over six figures and they're making

six figures faster and faster.

Whereas last year they probably hit that milestone in December.

Right now we are at the end of September and they've already

exceeded that six figure.

and they're not doing it from a place of hustle, from overworking.

They've actually taken vacation this year, vacation without their

laptop, or it's vacation with their laptop, but they're actually working

on their fun writing projects.

The things that they always wish they could be writing their bucket

list so that they're actually noodling on the book proposal.

They've always wanted to get out.

journalism articles that they've always wanted to write regularly publishing

their newsletter whenever they, the impulse strikes, because now there's

room for that impulse and they're taking exquisite care of themselves

because they now have the financial means and actually have the time.

They have, I would call like an entourage or a squad where.

Like you have someone who's supporting you emotionally, so a therapist,

someone who's supporting you, your physical wellbeing, so a trainer,

someone who's helping you take care of your house, so a house cleaner.

And these are all resources that they would not give

themselves permission to invest.

had they stayed in a fear as motivation state that W might have them hoard

money and also still be depleting their personal, individual time, money, energy.

So I just am giving this to you so you know what's possible for yourself.

You know that you too can have access to this life with

your creative skills just by.

swiping left on needing to believe that something bad about

yourself in order to motivate yourself and prove yourself wrong.

And if you think, Well, that's great for this person, but that won't work for me.

What if I am the terminally unique person for whom only fear works?

I wanna invite you to consider that that's not true.

So these days I look at my son and I look at how he's learning and how he's

developing new skills and how he is going from learning how to lift his

head to learning how to lift his body.

And now he's in a stage where he's actually crawl.

He's army crawling and jury's out on whether or not he's going to crawl

in all fours or just skip that stage entirely as he's practicing standing

and learning what how to walk very soon.

And I share this because that is a process of learning how to do things

differently than you've always done them.

So prior to this, he was always been carried everywhere.

He didn't think, Oh, I need to look at adult humans or look at older humans,

see that they're walking, and then be scared that I'm gonna be left behind as

motivation to bust my butt and start going through all the levels that would have me.

he was intrinsically motivated.

He just let himself play and through play he actually learned an important

skill and he kept on just building that important skill through play until he

got his lifting head badge, until he got his lifting his body badge, until

he got his I'm Army crawling badge.

, so, So I wanna invite you to access the wisdom of your inner

baby who learned through play.

Through joy, through curiosity, and chose to pursue goals and dreams from

that place as opposed to a place of making your current circumstances

wrong and making yourself wrong and needing to run away from your present

conditions and towards something else.

Fear as motivation is optional.

There's probably going to be plenty of things to be afraid of on the

journey to getting what you want.

You don't need to invent another circumstance or another story

before you've even begun.

Start pursuing your dreams from a belief of, I can do this and

see what happens next instead of from a place of I can't do this.

and then having to fight, engage, defend, manage your disbelief, suspend it instead.

All right, So that's everything I have to say today about fear.

Letting go of fear as fuel.

And if you like what you heard, I encourage you to share this

with another fellow artist.

You can do so by rating and reviewing this podcast wherever you are listening

to your podcast so that other artists can find this episode as well, or

just share it in your personal life.

If a rising tide lifts all boats, why don't you contribute to that rising tide?

All right.

Until next time, hope you have a very spooky season, but not creating

any additional spooks for yourself.