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Many of you will be familiar with Katie Hendricks, and her husband Gay, who run The Hendricks Institute together. Katie’s work is vast. But essentially, she helps people use their body’s innate intelligence; and she helps people get friendly with the unknown, as she says today.
Katie and I talk about how to befriend and work with fear because, well, we can’t really conquer fear or get rid of it. Katie takes us through her fear-melters for when we get caught in fight, flee, freeze, or faint mode. In the show notes on my Substack, I’ll also link to these physical movements so you can start experimenting with them. I’ve found them to be so, so helpful.
As Katie explains, these fear-melters help wake up your body’s intelligence so that you're able to get messages from yourself.
Katie shares a few more tools, like playing with your pace so that you’re able to get present, instead of just feeling at the effect of everything coming at you.
She explains the loop of awareness, which is a tool for shifting your attention and getting the nourishment of somebody else’s aliveness.
And she explains why she sorts life into two files every day: the things she cannot change or control—which are typically very compelling, unfortunately. And then there’s the much smaller file of things she can actually change or influence, which is where she tries to focus her attention.
We also talk about the zone of genius, which is ideally where most of us would spend the majority of our time. And we talk about how to incrementally work up to this 51%, and then perhaps beyond.
We finish the conversation by talking about persona work—and why I’ve found it difficult, but also fun and powerful.
MORE FROM GAY & KATIE HENDRICKS:
The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks
Fear Melters Video
Katie’s Pulling the Thread Episode #1: The Upper Limit Problem
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
This morning I was typing up some notes from a James Hollis book and he was talking about how the Joseph Campbell idea of following your bliss, he feels like it's infantile and he was following your passion as a more appropriate way to think about your life so long as you understand the cognate of passion, which is to suffer,
KATIE:
But he's
ELISE:
Not wrong.
KATIE:
That's also the part of compassion is technically means to suffer with.
ELISE:
Right? Exactly.
KATIE:
Yeah. So the whole, you must suffer for your art. That's very common
ELISE:
And it depends on how you hold it, but this idea that only through some sort of suffering, resistance, et cetera, like meeting the world, not as you would like it, but as the world is a source of growth, unfortunately.
KATIE:
Well, it's very hard. In fact, one of my friends, I don't know if you've heard this, is a saying that one of my friends who works a lot in the corporate world and helping to create conscious leaders,
ELISE:
Diana Chapman,
KATIE:
Diana, yes. So Diana was sharing with me VUCA, do you know about VUCA? No, because I was saying to her, all of the structures have fallen away, all of the norms that we could find our place within, they've all fallen away. There's just a sense of how are people finding their way? And so VUCA is volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous. And so what we've been focusing on and what Diane is also focusing on is our signals, our inner guidance that allows us to make choices in the unknown. And our work for years and years gay and my work has been about getting friendly with the unknown and now it's really this is the job for us all now to be able to turn toward the unknown and find our pathway through that without really any external structures that really make much sense.
ELISE:
I mean, yes, and thinking of CLG's work and Diana's work and this whole concept of the way that so much of it is structured around managing fear and staying above the line, but living mostly below the line and contending with uncertainty. And I know you do so much work with fear, which is even just the basic, here are the flavors of fear and here's how to recognize what's happening in your body and move it. Is that the goal of your fear work?
KATIE:
I'm so glad you mentioned that because one of the things I've been seeing particularly in this last week in the social sphere, but how people are communicating with each other even on big headlines in major newspapers is that fear is how this administration is operating. So I think there's another thing that goes with that is fear plus contempt. And I don't see anybody really talking about contempt, which is really the you are less than I am. You are not equal to me. And so when you put fear and contempt together, you get hate when people are willing to treat others as if they are subhuman and there's a whole bunch of that going on. But what I've discovered been working directly with fear for at least 10 years and in developing these ways for people, you cannot conquer fear. You can't get rid of fear, and for sure you can't talk anybody including yourself out of it.
So people will say things like, just push past it. Just don't pay any attention to it. And that's like asking yourself not to have any experiences if you could just detach your head and move it around. I think that's what a lot of people are talking about. But I have found that if you befriend fear, if you really let yourself give your attention to what you're experiencing, you can shift and liberate the energy that is in each of these fear signatures. Would you like to hear a little more about that? Because that's kind of the exciting edge for me right now. So
ELISE:
Yes, please.
KATIE:
I developed what I call fear melters, which are very simple, but really scientifically based movements that allow you to unfreeze and allow you to unpaint yourself and to flee yourself, but particularly to move from fight. When you move from fight into what we call oozing, you begin to liberate your oomph. So what people think of as fight, like let's fight back, is actually fear and that's going to keep you from actually being effective and fear runs up the front of your body, but anger runs up the back of your body and that's where you can get your oomph to really combat injustice. And so when you liberate the I'm going to fight back and the oh gorilla moves that we make, what you actually liberate is backing yourself up, being able to move with a kind of cutting through that if you've seen anybody really using their anger effectively.
There's some of our women senators who are really skilled at that. Amy Klobuchar is getting much better liberating her anger and speaking from that. And I'm thinking also Cecile Richards who is no longer with us, but for me, she was such a model of being able to be soft and feminine, but also really clear and direct and speaking her anger, but in no kind of hysterical way just to really, this is in just I'm using my energy to move this away. So that's fight and flee. People flee up into their thoughts, they flee forward into, well, what if this happens? And so they're not really embodied if you liberate. So the fear melter for flee is rooting, and a very simple way of rooting is to find and feel your feet. And then I have a whole series where I encourage people how to let energy come up through them and also their energy to come down for them to actually let their roots come down into the earth to let the earth hold them.
So when you do that, I think of what it liberates is readiness. Thinking of a tennis player who's ready for the ball to come from any different direction. And that kind of readiness allows you to move very quickly and to respond, but to respond with your whole being rather than with just part of you. You have flea and you're not really here. And the one that's common for many people is the freeze. And the freeze is designed to help make us invisible. But when you freeze, you really treat yourself as prey. You let your body know and you kind of shrink and you become more invisible to your own power. And the antidote, the fear melter for freeze is wiggle. And you'll see little kids doing this when they fall down, you'll see animals doing this. So the wiggling really allows you to move from freeze to what I call pause.
I've noticed in our world right now that almost nobody can actually just pause. They freeze, but freeze. I'm contracting in fear, but when I pause, I'm just taking a moment. So when critters are freezing, they're actually also looking around so that they're like, what's my next action? And I've noticed so much that when I can pause for a moment, the next action becomes really easy and that's all I really need is the next action that's going to start getting me back into the flow of engaging in life. But I think the big one that is kind of enveloped the whole world right now is faint, that people just feel overwhelmed and their energy is just puddling and pooling. And I just want to go back to bed or hide, but there's a sense when you faint that you've taken yourself out of being able to interact.
And the antidote for that, the fear melter, which I call love scoops, really comes from our first human interaction when we're developing that allows us to have agency in the world. And that's reaching out. So babies at first don't reach out because they all just have random movement. But when you get that oh, grape mouth and go, oh, I did this and oh, this happened, is that beginning of incorporating the world into you, but also I'm here in the world and I can have wants, I can move forward. I can say, I don't like this. I can sign petitions, I can show up. And so what I've seen is that a lot of people are now using their connection with others and supporting others as support for showing up. But you can do that with your own body by pulling love in and letting it land anywhere that feels tense or tight.
But it's that reaching out, especially if you use your torso that says to your body, you have agency here, you can actually interact in the world. And so that's part of what I have been teaching people and sharing with people is the fear. Melters are really a portal. They're not a panacea. It's not like everything is solved now, but they give you your energy back. I like to do fear melters plus taking a few deep relaxed breaths or fear melters plus playing with my pace. Usually most everybody is speeded up in this adrenaline trance, faster, faster, more and more, faster, faster. And that keeps us from actually experiencing our bodies at all. So if I do fear melters and then I just play a little bit with moving or walking at a pace that allows me to be aware of myself and to be aware, like taking a walk and I play with different paces or fear melters plus an appreciation, that's very powerful.
If I'm in an interaction, I'm having a difficult conversation with somebody and I do fear melters and then I can see something to appreciate, I'm just really touched by your willingness to listen to me about something that's so challenging. And when you add something to your fear melters, then it rewires you talking about above the line, it actually rewires you to be able to make decisions in presence rather than from fear. Even just one shift you actually get here in your life and you're able to then interact rather than feeling just at the effect of everything coming at you.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, and I think that being at the effect of the world, which is how it feels particularly right now, is clearly disempowering and disheartening. And I think the other thing that happens is particularly when everything is VUCA.
So pronounced in such a pronounced way externally is that many of us then feel like, well, I can't be okay until the world is okay, and so I need to maintain this fear state and hypervigilance and extreme compassion, which is a wonderful thing except for when empathic distress and overload, which is not sustainable at all. And I think part of it is like the more you can do this and work in your own little garden and in your own life and on your own relationships and in your own ideally zone of genius, which I really want to talk to you about, then you're much better to your point, when you can soften the front and actually channel your anger effectively, you're much more able to be present in the world and to not add to the fear. That's what I see. All these emotions are so contagious that when we don't manage ourselves even with the greatest of intent, you go in there and you're dumping it on other people and it's just explodes.
KATIE:
Yes, because it's mostly coming from our cognitive brain. And what fear melters also do is they wake up your body intelligence so that you're able to get messages from yourself because really authentic messages don't yell at you. Most of the time. People have critical thoughts, their thoughts are mostly critical. And what I've noticed is that my actual guidance when it comes from inside, it bubbles up and it's quiet and it's usually very simple and it doesn't repeat. And so if I'm all full of static and I'm not going to hear it, I'm not going to be able to take advantage of it. And so opening up to what does my body have to say? But there's a whole other element that I wanted to add to this, which is the nourishment of connection
That most of us have been getting our nourishment, we think it's nourishment from adrenaline, from being hyped up and oh my God, when we get that burst of what we think is energy, but it's actually it's a non-renewable energy, adrenaline is it just wrecks your nervous system, but presence is also contagious. And the way that you can fill your reservoir is with something that I call loop of awareness. And the basis of it is simply being able to shift attention. So as I'm talking to you, I'm also noticing my body sensations and then I'm noticing you, and I'm noticing you just held your breath a little bit and then I'm coming back to me. But just shifting your attention allows you to connect with the outside world, but also with your own inner intelligence. And what it does is open up this flow that you can feel and it helps to fill your reservoir.
And so that's one of the things that I focus on with community is that if you're feeling overwhelmed, let your attention go the other direction. And that shifting of your attention allows you to notice color, to notice where the light is to come back to you like, oh, I just felt a little twinge in my spine. And you're just noticing that. And what that does is loop presence, that you're opening up your own presence to you, but also to the outside world. And I've found in practicing that when I do work live workshops, I have more energy at the end of the day than when I start. And the really big factor is that I'm shifting my attention and I'm getting the nourishment of somebody else's aliveness, and then I can open up to that in myself and then I notice they're having a feeling and then I go, oh yeah, I've had that too, but I don't get stuck in it because I'm shifting my attention. It sounds really simple, and in fact it is very simple, but it's incredibly powerful to help you create presence and to help you shift from the ongoing onslaught that's happening right now.
ELISE:
I feel like you probably share this view that one of the things that's, so there are many things that are upsetting in our collective when we go to this idea of fear. And I think about masked people, kidnapping people off the street as
KATIE:
One in my backyard.
ELISE:
In one extreme example of, I was listening to Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher last night, and he put it very plainly where he was like, these are people that we pay. These are civic officials that we as Americans are paying. They need to show their faces.
KATIE:
Yes, they need to show their faces and identify themselves
ELISE:
And identify themselves as the most basic, obviously I'm sure you and I have feel like that's the bare minimum of what needs to be happening right now. And his point was, I think Obama at this point was deporting two to three times as many people a month, but they were doing it sort of at the border and not in a way that was intended to inspire and invoke fear across an entire country. But when I think about that and I think about the overwhelm of what's happening, I just read about how the EPA plans to essentially deny climate change, they're changing their foundational documents. I read that yesterday and when it shuts us down, and then I don't think it's just women, but I have this feeling of like, I need to fix all of these problems and go and solve all of these problems. And then I need to be reminded actually, and this maybe gets us into the zone of genius. That's not my zone of genius, but I need to be embodied, present, capable to actually do my zone of genius and whatever it is. That's my tiny piece of this puzzle. And we all need to be equally equipped, right?
KATIE:
You need to have your own tool belt on and you need to have your equipment, you need to have your water. So it doesn't help if you become a martyr. It doesn't help if you sacrifice yourself. And what I found is that you don't have to sacrifice yourself, that you can be what I call filling your reservoir on an ongoing basis. But there's one thing that I do every day and almost always in the morning I do what I call sorting the two files, and it comes from perennial wisdom, it comes from actus over 2000 years ago who said that one of the keys to a successful life is being able to understand what you have control over and what you don't. And so we call it we have two files, the things I cannot change or control, which are very compelling, and then the much smaller file, which is things that I actually can change or influence.
And so every day and sometimes multiple times a day, I sort the two files because what is it that I actually can influence or control and different ideas come up to me, but I think beneath that is a question that you can put it in another way, which is what's mine to do? What's really mine to do? And that then leads us into the zone of genius. So what's mine to do is really all about body intelligence and about relationship. Those are the things that I've been passionate about for decades and I have some facility and am able to be with people and have them change directions and learn things that they then can carry into their lives. So the zone of genius is a combination of what you love to do that makes a contribution. So how you find what you love to do is what is even as a child that you just love to do, that time would disappear. And for me, it was also what I love to do. I could do all day long, but it gives me energy. So that's when in my baby book, which I didn't discover that my mother kept for me, I didn't discover I was until I was in my twenties. The very first entry was Katie loves to pull herself up in her crib and dance.
So there it was right there at the very beginning. Moving has always been my passion. And so finding ways to bring body intelligence into the mainstream. I've been a registered dance therapist for over 50 years, but even before you got into school, what did you really love to do? Because once you get into school, the external world starts acting on you, sit still, get in line, be quiet, don't speak up, you're just a girl. So all of those things start acting on you. So I'd like to have people go back before that, but would you like to hear about the other zones? Because they can be also really important to allow you to get into your zone of genius. So one is the zone of incompetence, and that's the zone where you're just not any good at it. You're just, for example, gay has never balanced a checkbook in his life.
So that's his zone of incompetence. So what you do in zone of incompetence is either fix it or fold it, and usually it's folded. And I found that in delegating is a great way to handle your zone of incompetence because we have this feeling that I should be able to do everything well. Is that keeping you from your zone of genius? I remember way back in the eighties where I've been teaching and seeing clients and having workshops and it was also cleaning the house. And one day gay said, why are you doing this? You really already know how to do this really well. Why don't you have somebody else do that? And then paying somebody else and people, we have clean our house, we pay them very well and we love them and they take pride in what they're doing. I'm making this beautiful and everything is in harmony. So it allows other people then to choose how they're wanting to share themselves in the world. So that's a hard one for people to let go of, especially if you're committed to suffering.
ELISE:
And that sort of can be close to zone of competence. I actually kind of enjoy cleaning and I'm competent at it. I recognize it's not the highest and best use of my time, but I do like deep cleaning my kids' room. I find it very satisfying. So for I think a lot of people it can sort of bridge, right? Competence, maybe greatness. It's a zone of greatness for me. I don't know.
KATIE:
Well, I mean it certainly could be, but what I'm hearing is that you like it. So even when you say you like it, I can feel your body kind of softening and yeah, there's a little bit more play that goes on, and so you can have things that you choose to do because they're satisfying and you're going to do it this week, but you're not going to do it next week. But you have the freedom to do that. If you're caught in your zone, you don't really have any freedom.
ELISE:
Got it.
KATIE:
So confidence is very interesting because it's something that you can do it, but almost everybody else can do it okay too.
It's like an addiction to mediocrity.
Yeah, I can do this. I'm just going to stay here because I'm not going to stick my head up and have anybody say, who do you think you are? So I'll just stay here. So competence is not as challenging though as the zone of excellence. And that was the one that was most challenging for me because it's something that you are really good at and you're better at it than almost everybody. And you get rewarded for it. You get rewarded with, oh wow, you're so good at this. Let me give you more of this to do. So I'm a very excellent organizer, but the prep of excellence is that it's not really satisfying. And so there's this little kind of little irritability that is underneath that and you wanting people to give you more appreciation because the task itself isn't really rewarding. I've handled finances for us. I'm just really, really good at it, but it's not in my zone of genius. So when you were able to do online banking, just change my world, I go and then I'm actually delegating and other people are handling it and it frees me up. So your zone of genius really takes you both into the unknown, but it also takes you back to something where you felt most at home in the world. So it almost always has to do with some way of expressing yourself creatively,
Whether that's when gay first started, what he really liked to do was to sit in his living room and talk to people about the meaning of life. And that's where he started six people in his living room way back 56 years ago where they would be just talking about the meaning of life. And then that grew and grew and grew and then into, he'd been writing for years and years and years. So your zone of genius, I'd like to have people reflect on when you were playing as a kid, what kind of play did you like to get involved with? And they'll always be someone who can get everybody else to, they'll be the producers. They can go, okay, you need to be over there. We need this to be a little higher. And they like to arrange the setting, and there are other people who just have to express what's inside them.
I'm just thinking about Andrea Gibson, who we just lost recently of their spoken poetry. Now, I mean, it's very powerful written down, but to hear them, that's so clearly in their genius, and they've been doing that since they were very little. And so almost all of us have something. We may not value it because the world doesn't value it. You may be a genius baker. We have genius bakers in our community. There's a woman, Kate's Bread who makes the most fabulous bread, and people come from all over to get it on Sunday mornings from her. And she started a restaurant and she was trying to manage other people, and she gave that up. She went back to what she just loves to create her own. It's like her own little bread cathedral. And so that's satisfying for her. So that I think is an ongoing inquiry because mostly the world wants to tell you that you're not doing it right and likes to keep you anxious because then you buy stuff,
ELISE:
Right? Well, that's true.
KATIE:
What's changed for me a lot in the last few years is if something isn't easy, I don't keep pushing, I pause, I presence myself, I reconfigure. I go, what is going on here? And I give myself a chance to go, oh, I just got on a kind of a gerbil wheel there. And that whole sense of would you be willing to have your genius be easy? Would you be willing to have your life be easy, even easier than it is now? That's also a gateway to genius. But having the support of other people, because most of us didn't get that. Having somebody say, wow, you're really good at that. Wow, I didn't know you're seven and you do that. Wow. How can we give you supplies support for continuing to develop your genius?
What I would like to see education be about is people noticing rather than test taking from some standardized, trying to fit you into a pigeonhole, I could be in the world in a way that contributes but also creates ease and fun and play for me.
ELISE:
I was talking to a friend along these lines, and she's a high powered woman in the world, and she was talking to another sort of up and coming, a woman who organizes meetings and collaborations and whatnot and does it in a very impactful way. And she was looking at her proposal and she was like, but your gift isn't in here, and all the things that kind of tedious and boring are in here. And she was like, well, that part's so easy for me.
She was like, that's the part that's the most, that's what you actually charge for. That's your gift. It's similar to what you're describing. That should be the most expensive thing. And I was talking recently to a friend, one of my closest friends who's in the midst of a big career transition. She was a bankruptcy lawyer. She's spent her life in her zone of excellence and her zone of competence, feeling safe.
Then she started a business, which was a big bold move. It's been very difficult. Now she's trying to figure out what to do next. And she was working with a coach and she was like, what am I good at? And I was like, go and read Gay and Katie Hendrix work. I don't think you're thinking about this, right? It's not about your technical skills. When do you feel most alive? I can tell you what I see. And she was telling me what other people had reflected. I was like, those are all your tactical skills. That's not your genius regimen, and she's still working through this process. But to your point about the iterative nature of it and doing it and doing it again, and maybe this is a projection of my own experience, and I feel like the work that I do is very meaningful, and some of it, a good amount of it is zone of excellence work. I have a long list of people I work for, and that's the foundation of my existence, but it enables me to spend as much time as I can in my zone of genius for which I get some remuneration and hopefully that grows. But I am not going to make my living writing a book every three years. It's just not going to, well, who knows, at this point, it's not going to happen.
KATIE:
That was a little flee forward there,
ELISE:
But that's okay. But as I was saying to her, it's about shifting into these different spaces and some things you're going to love and some things you're not, but you create some stability and then you can go and find the meaning, I think.
KATIE:
Absolutely. Absolutely. So what you're pointing to is another very important aspect of moving into your zone of genius, which is doing it incrementally. So what we suggest is that you first commit to spending most of your time, so most of your time is only 51%, so spending most of your time in your zone of genius, and then there's getting around's, cooking and cleaning and house and groceries and all of that, but it's committing and recommitting. It took us years to really move to spending all of our time in genius. And I'm currently, I'd say about 80% of my time is ingenious, which I feel very happy about because my consider myself an artist of life. And so part of what really gives me a lot of joy, if you saw our house, it is a work of art and our yard is work of art. And I also consider other people evolving works of art. And so if I can support people in really treating themselves as a really valuable work of art, then recommitting to a little bit more time in my zone of genius really allows you to take care of the business of life without it just dominating everything. But for most of us, it takes some time to make that shift from hunkered down in safety to flying into the unknown.
ELISE:
Yeah, no big time. I wanted to ask you about personas. I have this workbook coming out from my last book. You'll get your copy shortly and you're in it along with Diana and Conscious Leadership Group and other facilitators around this core process around essentially identifying the stories that are scaffolding your personality and making those stories as big as possible and really understanding the underlying fear and the payoffs of those stories. Yeah, no, it's actually, I have to say really good. I did it with Courtney Smith, who is very close with Diana, and she has taken many of your workshops as well, and, and then making these stories big, teaching the class, which is a CLG tool, and then personas and the persona work, which is identifying those parts of ourselves. It's obviously, it's very aligned with Richard Schwartz and IFS and recognizing in those moments of fear of stress, or maybe not, I'm sure there are many positive personas as well that these parts of us show up to play or to take over, and it's a really uncomfortable, for me, it's been hard just because it requires
KATIE:
What part has been hard. What's been hard.
ELISE:
I struggle to play Katie. Oh, I can totally resonate, but I think it's so powerful. When I brought up, I have a persona bag, lady Bethy, my mom, Beth had and maybe continues to have a very pronounced fear of becoming a bag lady. She went on Donahue to talk about her fear of becoming a bag lady with Gloria Steinem, which was a major event in my childhood growing up in Missoula, Montana. It was so incredibly random, but that was a very real persona, and I picked up that persona from her. And I've worked with that persona. I wouldn't have known to call it that, but that when I feel kidnapped by a part of myself that is like, you are spending too much money. You are in trouble. What are you doing? You are going to get in trouble.
KATIE:
Yes,
ELISE:
I'm keeping you safe ultimately,
KATIE:
But
ELISE:
Can you talk to us about personas? It's so meaty.
KATIE:
Oh, yes. The persona allows you to welcome what's happening, to meet what's happening, to get toe to toe with what's happening, rather than I'm going to put you in the closet. I'm going to sit on you so that you don't take over involving control. So play is ultimately letting yourself be affected by what's coming at you. And I find that the tool that makes the most difference with personas is exaggerating. So taking and particularly letting yourself take on the posture, the gestures and the expressions of that aspect of you and making them bigger. And we have something that we introduce that people consider, like their premier tool, which is the persona interview.
ELISE:
Yes, that's in there.
KATIE:
And the persona interview we've seen be our most user-friendly process. We've used it with all different ages, with all different populations, and people really love it. People go out, have persona parties and go out to dinner and personas. But what your persona is, yeah, it's been hilarious and all dress up and I mean, it's very, very fun. So what it allows you to do is to include this aspect of yourself, because one of the big questions is what's the gift in this persona?
And if you let yourself exaggerate what your body is doing, and then you just let yourself respond to what are you most proud of and who did you learn your style from? And also what are you most scared of and what do you most want? Those really give you a clue how come the persona is still around. What's the gift that you have not been just using directly? So for example, I have a very well developed critic, and my critic used to come out as a kind of a know-it-all, or a kind of a teacher. Here, let me do that because you can't. And when I started really looking at is there any good thing about a critic? And I started to really explore it, and I found that a critic, what a critic really does is discern discerns the differences between this word and that word or discern the, oh, I hear a feeling there.
And I realized that the critic is what allows me to do what I do because I can see and sense just the emerging thing. I can discern that before the other person gets it. I can discern, oh, there's sadness arising, or, oh, this is how they stop themselves. And then that allows me to be of great service to people. And if I hadn't included my critic, I would not have the kind of precision and ability to guide people to make the choices that they can't see yet, but I can assist them to open up to their own skill in listening to their own body wisdom. So particularly the personas that you're most ashamed of, those are the ones that have the most power.
ELISE:
Of course, they're the shadowy ones, right?
KATIE:
Yeah. My super competent, remember this was many years ago, my super competent melted down about 15 years ago, but before that, there was a year where I realized until I walk into a room, everybody's been doing fine, but then when I walk in, everything sort of falls apart. And I realized that for me to be super competent, everybody else had to be incompetent. And so when I began to let go of that, by golly, people started showing up and doing things that were really helpful, doing things that I really didn't know how to do. So your shadow, I think, is just an unintegrated aspect of yourself, because we think of the shadow as uhoh, it's bad, but the shadow is just something that the light hasn't reached yet.
ELISE:
Yeah, Carl Young would say it holds all the gold and it's full of energy, and starting to work with personas and doing the persona interview, which is so moving and watching women do it, popping off these revelations of, whoa, whoa, whoa. Oh my God, I totally get it. And instead of trying to eradicate or get these things out of us, there is this welcoming, hi back lady. Beth, I see you. I honor you. I don't need you right now,
KATIE:
But I see you and here you are. And that what I hear in your voice and what I experience is that people then genuinely love that part of themselves. And the most powerful aspect is if people really let their whole body play with it. And by play, I mean participate.
ELISE:
Yeah. No, to really feel what it is to be that part of you. And a big part of this process, which I'm sure is rooted in your work, is recognizing that everything that we do, and I don't think that we're taught this. I think we're taught that we're full of problems that need to be resolved and healed. And that the reality is that the stories that we tell about who we are and how we show up in the world, there's a reason. There's a good reason that we've selected these stories and they're how we've survived and sometimes thrived, and many of them are old stories, and we could put them down and choose something else or expand them or loosen our grip on them, but there's a utility without letting them be so defining, right?
KATIE:
Yes, they can be part of your committee and then you can call on them, and then they're not going to bother you if they're acknowledged.
What I found, if you go, okay, critic, I'm going to be going over a training manual in just a couple days, and so I'm really going to need you. And so right now just relax. But that acknowledgement really gives you a tremendous amount of resource to be able to live your life. But I'm right in the middle of teaching a year long course called Cultivating New Stories for Humanity. And at the very core of it is something that we started with, which was how do you shape yourself in your old story? How do you shape yourself in your old story and how can you move into a new story? And you literally will shape yourself differently? And what we started with was letting yourself be affected by the presence of others. Because I've noticed in society that's mostly bounce off Now when I'm talking to you, I experience being affected by the tone of your voice and by the contact and by your presence. And then my being affected then affects you, and we begin generating a new kind of we energy and an ability to fill our own reservoirs and to support each other in expressing ourselves fully in life rather than having, it's mostly a power struggle
When people are not aware that they have this ability to be themselves and to welcome other people in being their authentic selves. And it's much more fun. I've always found, I'm sure you have that when people are expressing themselves authentically, whoa, it's very exciting. It's even sexy. Authenticity is sexy.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, it is. And I agree. When you can dig a bit beneath the armor or the surface, then it gets very juicy, very fat, very fast, and very loving
KATIE:
And very loving, and that's challenging for people. So we think that only the bad stuff brings up fear, but I've really found that expanding what we call our upper limit, that's the most challenging, is really how much love and positive energy can I give and receive every day. That's sort of my basic commitment, is I'm willing to expand my ability to give and receive love.
ELISE:
Yeah. I'm going to link to our first podcast conversation. We talked about upper limit, which is so powerful and that sabotaging that we all do when things are so good with your partner, and then you're like, I just got to pick a fight. It's not conscious, but it's just too much friendliness.
KATIE:
It's just too much goodness. I'm not used to it. And also I just want to let people know that's not a personal issue. I think it's an evolutionary issue because we got here from thousands of years of people being vigilant. The flower children were not our ancestors, the survivors, the people who could spot the threat more quickly. So I think we're at an evolutionary turning point that we could choose to expand our capacity to give and receive more love, more presence, more appreciation with each other, and let that be the ground of our being rather than competition and power struggles and fear.
ELISE:
Yeah. Have you heard of this, the idea of concept creep? I'll send you a copy of, he's a professor, moral psychologist named Kurt Gray. I had him on the podcast. He wrote this book called Outraged, and what he talks about in the context of fear is really interesting. Prehistorically, one out of 10 people in a tribe would die a year. So we come from extreme stress and threat, even though we like to imagine ourselves as these apex predators, that was not the case. There were giant eagles picking children up and taking them away to eat them. So many predators beyond what we have today. And anyway, but this idea of concept creep is that in the absence of these extreme existential threats, we just continue to widen the aperture and seem more and create more things. Create more threats. Yes. Now, trauma has a million variations, right? A bad encounter at a gas station can be traumatic, whereas trauma, I'm traumatized because we are. So in order to get the requisite amount of fear, maybe it's like everything counts now.
KATIE:
Well, I think that's adrenaline
And adrenaline if you're very, very close relatives, but adrenaline is that spike that we get one from being right. I have a controlled winner, a power struggle, and I win. I get that adrenaline surge. We get it from going really fast. We get it from going, going, going, going, going, going. And so I think that we have a tremendous adrenaline addiction. Interesting. So if people are quiet and connecting, we don't think anything's happening. People kind of go, oh, this is not worth it. Where's the juice? It's really like everybody is addicted to her Hershey's chocolate got to have more, got to have more. And so actual nourishment would just taste like, Ugh.
ELISE:
Katie and Gay Hendricks’ work is vast. As mentioned that the upper limit problem is another huge breakthrough concept that Katie and I spoke about in our first podcast interview. I will link that and their books and their workbooks and the videos of the Fear Melters Persona Interview and Fear, not the Fear Melters, but the Fear. Some of their Fear work is part, is integrated into our core process in choosing Wholeness over goodness, which is out now. That's the Workbook Companion to honor our best behavior. Although you don't have to have read, honor our best behavior to get a lot out of the workbook. It's this core process, this set of tools that you can do to really excavate the stories that you tell yourself that are structuring your personality. My editor would not like me to say that You don't need to read on our best behavior, but you don't.
But maybe you'll be inspired to after. But yeah, it's really, really rich with ideas and tools if you are looking to shift things in your life. And I will have Katie on again and again because she is so brilliant and wise and delightful. Alright, friends, go melt that fear. If you got something out of today's episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That's how we grow this thing. It's so helpful. Thank you. If you want more in this world, please consider picking up copies of my book On Our Best Behavior and the new workbook, Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness. Thanks again, friends.