Confronting Fear and Pursuing Freedom - Part 1

Picture this: You're standing at the edge of a metaphorical cliff, paralyzed by fear, unable to make that leap of faith. Sound familiar? In today's conversation, we'll delve into the powerful topic of overcoming these fears, those that hold us back from achieving our dreams. Drawing insights from Carla Chud's book 'The Pathway to Powerful', we're going to deconstruct how subconscious thoughts and emotions often lead us to make fear-based decisions and how we can harness this fear to become a powerful force of change in our lives.

We'll unpack the concept of the three floors of the mind - the conscious, subconscious and unconscious - and how to invite truth into these spaces, transforming our decision-making processes. More importantly, we'll gain an understanding of how to recognize fear as an emotion that can guide us, rather than hinder us. Don't let another opportunity pass by due to fear. Join us in this empowering conversation and start making faith-based decisions to unlock your fullest potential. This isn't just a discussion; it's the first step towards a braver, bolder you.

Chapters

• 0:00 Overcoming Fear-Based Decisions
• 8:55 Fear-Based Decisions and Overcoming Fear

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

the Coupelitas podcast Music. Welcome to the Coupelitas podcast. I am Nick Coupelitas, your host. This is episode number 20 in the hot and humid days of summer of 2020. I am so glad that you've tuned in, you've dialed in whatever the phrase should be. I am so glad that you are listening today.

Speaker 1: 0:34

I really believe today's episode, the topic of today's episode, is going to impact every single person who's listening. Unless you're a psychopath or sociopath or megalomaniac any of those things. This topic might not actually apply to you, but I would say to the average person who is doing their best to live their life in the fullness of who they are and want to accomplish great things and leave a legacy for their children and their children's children, I think the topic is going to somehow impact you, and the topic is fear-based decisions. So let me ask you a couple questions for gentlemen. Let's say there's something on your front that is just burning for you to do. There's a vision that you have, and that vision could be starting a new business. It could be a relationship that you want to start, maybe a guy's, a girl that you want to ask out, or maybe it's something you just want to accomplish, and every time you kind of get to the threshold of that decision. You make a safe decision, a good decision, but it's not really the decision that you want to make. It's not a decision that you would say that you would look back on in five or ten years and say that was a courageous decision, that was an awesome decision. I think there's a lot of decisions we make in our life that are not necessarily the courageous decision. It's the safe decision. It's not necessarily the decision that we look back and it's not that we're ashamed of that decision but we're not proud of it either, and I would say that that might be because there is fear in your decision making.

Speaker 1: 2:22

Now let me give a little disclaimer here. Here's the disclaimer I'm not telling you to make stupid decisions. I'm not trying to tell you to go out and say you know what? I've always wanted to jump off a bridge at 100 feet high and see what would happen. I'm not telling you to do that. You're going to have to take what I'm saying and apply it to your life. But I'm talking about the things, man, that maybe the things that are on your bucket list or things that have been burning inside of you, and that you get to the threshold of that decision and you just punk out. There has definitely been things in my life that I've punked out instead of stepping forward, and we're going to jump into that fear based decision.

Speaker 1: 3:01

So I want you to know, first of all, you are not alone. Second of all, I think if you can be honest with yourself and have some self reflection about fear and how it's impacting your life, that you'll be able to address it and, one step at a time, be able to overcome it. That's my goal. My goal is to get us to a point where we recognize in our life that we are making decisions not on faith, not in trusting the Lord, not on stepping out, but on fear. And if we can identify those fear based decisions, guess what we might be able and we will get free from them and there's going to be some free living. There's going to be some awesome, awesome testimony, some awesome moments where you look back and you said you know what? I was freaked the heck out, but you know what? I stepped out, not in fear, but in faith. Alright, after the break we'll jump right into it. What are the opportunities you've missed in your life that, if you were truly honest with yourself you were making a fear based decision and you said I missed an opportunity. What are the opportunities that you are missing right now, at this moment, because there's fear in your life.

Speaker 1: 4:30

Alright, so let's discuss this Fear in itself. I'm gonna give you just a little bit here and then we're gonna get into our quote. But let me tell you this fear in itself is not bad or good, that's right. Fear in itself is not a horrible emotion. Now, I know I love the Bible and when we look in the Bible, we do see that there is a fear of God. That's healthy. We also see that there is a spirit of fear that's demonic or fleshly, that keeps us from operating in courage. But fear in itself is an emotion. That's what it is.

Speaker 1: 5:08

There's actually, if you didn't know this, there are seven universal emotions, and each of them have distinct facial expressions, and so you can go anywhere on the planet and you can run into these emotions. What are they? Happiness, surprise, sadness, fright, disgust, contend and anger. All of those are universal. Now, the way that a culture might display fright or disgust, that that might shift and change, but that's a universal emotion. Fear in itself is a universal emotion. What does that mean? It means that the way that we've been designed on a biochemical level is to have a certain amount of fear. Now let's just define fear before we go forward. All right, fear is an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain or a threat. So it's an unpleasant emotion that's in our life Now. Emotions in general, whether joy, whether happiness, joy and happiness kind of the same thing, whether disgust or contempt or whatever emotion is inside of us. They make wonderful servants, but emotions make horrible masters. So it's the same thing with fear.

Speaker 1: 6:29

Fear, if fear is your master, it becomes something that holds you back. Fear, when it's a servant, is healthy. Fear helps guide you, it's a tool in your life. But when fear becomes your master, it becomes something toxic in your life, holding you back from stepping out courageously, from achieving the dreams that are inside of you, having intimate and deep relationships. Fear will hold you back. Why? Because fear will ultimately try to isolate you. Fear will be the survival mechanism in your life that says if you step out of yourself, if you take a risk, no matter what it is, you're going to be hurt. There's a threat of pain, there's a threat of danger, so don't take the risk. And so what happens is you can't achieve, and you don't achieve, those dreams that are inside of your heart. You don't experience intimate and fulfilling relationship because you're constantly in this place of fear.

Speaker 1: 7:32

Fear by itself, again, is a healthy emotion, but fear that runs amok in our life keeps us back. It becomes something that is toxic. This is like iRobot with Will Smith. When the robots begin to protect humanity against itself, what do they do? They isolate humanity from each other. That's what fear tries to do. It tries to isolate us from each other. It tries to isolate us from ourselves Now hear me here. It tries to isolate us from our creator. Fear is a dangerous emotion when allowed to run free.

Speaker 1: 8:10

So what is a fear-based decision? Important question, that's what this episode's about. But let me tell you this about a decision. What is a decision? It's a willful choice that you're making. Nobody makes this choice for you. You make it for yourself, no matter how much pressure is on you from the outside. At the end of the day, your choice is your choice, nobody else's. So blaming other people for fear-based decisions, blaming other people for decisions that you chose, is a coward's way out. Take ownership of your decisions, take ownership of what you've chosen up to this point. You've chosen, you've chosen, you've chosen up to this point.

Speaker 1: 8:55

So what is a fear-based decision? It's a decision, it's a choice that you've made based on being afraid of a future or potential outcome. So you've made a choice about something in the future, something that hasn't even happened yet, something that you're afraid of Now. I'm not talking about wise choices like, hey, there's this great company, there's this great company. Should I invest my money into them? No, it's not a good company. I don't want to lose my money. That's a choice not based on fear. It's a choice based on informed wisdom. But a fear based decision is a decision where you miss opportunity, not even because something is going on in that present moment, but something might go on in the future. So, instead of making a choice, of stepping out in courage and faith and trust and trying something new, you make a decision based on something that might not even happen. Why Fear is dictating your decision making? And I just want to say to all of y'all, all of y'all, that a lot of times, some of the decisions we've made, that we've put the most scripture verses on or the most Christian knees around are actually the core of those decisions. The core of those reactions are based in fear. But you have to be honest with yourself and take the time to self reflect in order to say am I making decisions in fear Now?

Speaker 1: 10:40

This year I went through a book with our church staff called the Pathway to Powerful, by Carla Chud. Carla Chud is the senior associate leader at Northgate Alaska Church, where she is responsible for developing culture, implementing strategy and directing operations, and she wrote this book. This is a team building, staff building book, a great companion book to something like five dysfunctions of a team, or a John Maxwell book. Carla comes at the team building, or the staff building, from an inner healing perspective, meaning if we can address the broken areas in our lives, then we can go from being powerless, meaning that our life is dictated by others and dictated by fear and dictated by brokenness. We can go from powerless to powerful individuals, walking in who God's called us to walk or walking as God has called us to walk.

Speaker 1: 11:35

Now I want to read you a quote from this book found in chapter three, page 38, paragraph three, sentence two, and I want you to hear this phrase. And now she's talking about a specific situation, but you can almost apply this situation to any kind of toxic or bad situation that you're going through or I'm going through. We can apply it actually really loosely if we need to, because the sentence I'm about to read harpooned my heart. It stuck me like a fish, it picked me up and shook me like a dog. I mean, it did all those things when I read it and I want to read it to you right now, and then we'll talk about it. I hear Carla Chud. She writes this until I forgave him, my heart would remain connected to the situation, allowing the pain to continue influencing my subconscious thoughts and emotions and drive a fear-based reaction. I'm going to read it one more time Until I forgave him, my heart would remain connected to the situation, allowing the pain to continue influencing my subconscious thoughts and emotions and drive a fear-based reaction. Wow, boom, boom. That's what that moment was when I was reading this with our staff.

Speaker 1: 13:00

Here's the thing she's talking about the subconscious. What is the subconscious? All right, psychology actually says that the person is like three floors. They have a conscious, which is their top floor. They have a subconscious, which is our middle floor, and then the base floor, or I'll say the basement, is the unconscious. The conscious is the thoughts that we are very much aware of, the decisions that we are making, that we know that we're making. That's the top floor, the second floor of the house. When we come underneath, that is the subconscious. This is things that we're not necessarily directly aware of, but it would be like riding a bike the information is inside of you, it comes out, you really don't have to think about it, but it's there. Then there's the unconscious, and when I was reading about this, this is to me like the musty basement with all the different boxes, and in those boxes are memories and experiences, some good, some bad, but they're all in these boxes. There's these kind of like three different floors of every person the conscious, the subconscious and the unconscious.

Speaker 1: 14:08

Biblicly speaking, this is I mean, forget Freud, we just talk biblically. We see this in Psalm 19, verses 12 and 13. David talks about first of all and you have to read those in the amplified version but David talks about that there's a hidden places that are within him and that would be the unconscious or the subconscious. These are the places that there are things that you're doing by omission and not commission. These are the things you're doing that you don't even know that you're doing. In another Psalm, david would say God put truth in those hidden places. So the Bible affirms that there is a place of subconscious and unconscious. And the Bible says let's invite truth into those places. Actually, in the next verse in Psalm 19, not 12, but verse 13, he talks about the willful places, the places of commission, the places of conscious. Like God, help me there as well. So there's these things that we're dealing with.

Speaker 1: 15:09

Why is this important? Because Carla in this sentence is saying there are things that are influencing, meaning exerting pressure upon me in my thoughts and emotions, that are in my subconscious. This is, I think, a great kind of thought. Here is this is like when you go out into a beach and you're swimming in the beach and there's a warning and the warning is hey, there's an undertow. Today you can't see this undertow, you can't see this thing, but if you're not careful, the undertow will grab you and pull you out into the ocean. So there's these undertows that are in our life that if we don't understand where they are or what they are or why they're there, they will actually do more damage than they'll do good.

Speaker 1: 16:00

Another. I just would say another example of this or illustration would be when you're driving, what's in your blind spot? If you don't turn your head or you don't have blind spot detection, then if you go to change lanes you could very much run into a truck or another vehicle or whatever it might be in your blind spot. Here's the thing there are places in our life that if we don't take the time to look, if we don't take the time to understand that they will exert a pressure upon us that will lead to devastation and not health. It will lead to isolation and not connection. And if we don't deal with it, if we don't take the time to really ask ourselves about fear and how fear is dictating our life, then we will never achieve what God has called us to achieve. And so Carla here saying there was something influencing, exerting pressure upon my thoughts and my emotions. It was driving her and she saw in her quote fear-based reactions. Fear-based reactions oh man, I'd shoot on this for a while Fear-based reactions and this not a good fear the toxic fear-based reactions.

Speaker 1: 17:17

Reactions versus decisions. This is important. There are times in our life where we're going to have reactions. What is a reaction? It's something that's instantaneous, it's something we sort of don't have control over in the moment. But as I thought about this, I thought about what's the difference between a reaction and a decision. All right, so if a reaction is instantaneous, what's the decision? It's something that's been thought about, it's a willful choice that's in our life. And here's a little epiphany that I had that If I'm making faith-filled, healthy decisions not fear-based but healthy decisions it's like a row of dominoes and it's the domino effect that when I get into a situation that might be trying to influence me in a negative way because I've made a series of healthy, faith-filled, trust-filled, courageous decisions guess what? My reaction then will be mitigated because I have these healthy decisions. And here's even the net under the trapeze Even if I initially have a fear-based decision, instead of a decision of connection, it's a decision of personal survival that because I've been training my mind and my heart to think faith-wise, I'll be able to recognize the fear-based reaction. So this is what I want to say to you that a decision, if you continually make a decision, a willful choice for health and for life, and you take the time, then you are going to mitigate fear-based reactions in your life. This takes work. This takes initiative.

Speaker 1: 19:08

But let me tell you how do you know that you have fear in your life? I'll give you four ways that you know really quickly. Number one you have negative thoughts. Number two you have troubled feelings. Number three there's disruptive behavior. And number four you have frayed relationships, negative thoughts, negative thoughts and what are negative thoughts? Negative thoughts are things that are plaguing your mind that, I would say, can lead to thoughts that are irrational, right?

Speaker 1: 19:36

So you have an initial fear reaction, which is common, and they call it the 5Fs fight, flight, freeze, flop or fawn. And so your initial reaction in a fear moment is to either fight put up your dukes, I'm pushing through. Flight, which is, hey, I'm a runner. Fear comes in. I run freeze, which is basically becoming paralyzed, almost like in a hypnotic state in the moment, and then you have a faint flop, which is like freeze 2.0. This is the fainting goat syndrome. If you've ever seen fainting goats on YouTube, if you haven't, go look it up. This is where you're completely immobilized and then fawn. And this is where somebody, in their fear reaction, actually start like people pleasing and throwing themselves in a negative way, but throwing themselves at the problem. We all have an initial fear response.

Speaker 1: 20:31

But when those initial reactions become then reaction after reaction, and you have negative thoughts in your mind constantly and the negative thoughts tend to be on the extreme. And so, where one person might say, I'm going to the store to grab milk, the response, the fear response to that, the fear decision to that is to say, be careful. If you go to the store to get milk today, it might be the end of the world, there might be a zombie apocalypse in all life as we know, it will cease. Right, you've gone from kind of this initial reaction to, all of a sudden, this illogical response, this irrational response, because there's these negative thoughts that are driving you.

Speaker 1: 21:09

Negative thoughts, troubled feelings you don't have ease with inside of you. When you come into a situation, you're in it for yourself because you feel like you're going to be left out. You have these troubled feelings and you know it's like this. What is disease? Disease. What is disease? It's dis-ease, it's separation from peace, it's separation from ease.

Speaker 1: 21:33

So you have negative thoughts, troubled feelings, people who have fear, who are connected to situations that, like Carla says, that are influencing their subconscious thoughts and emotions, driving fear-based reactions, they have disruptive behavior. What is disruptive behavior, behaviors that you are. You're short tempered, you're self-protected, you're abrupt People who get angry over nothing or really quickly, or storm out, and again it's kind of illogical and irrational and you're working through it. And the last one here is frayed relationships. How do you know? Well, there's relationships that should be connected and intimate, whether it's in the marriage, whether it's with your family, whether it's with your church family or maybe even work relationships, and they're frayed. They're frayed F-R-A-Y-E-D. They're frayed relationships because you're just suspicious of everyone around you, because fear is dictating your perspective.

Speaker 1: 22:30

Fear is in your thoughts, fear is in your feelings, fear is in your behavior and so, really, at the end of the day, you find yourself like Carla Chud, realizing, if you don't do something and in her case she needed to forgive the person, to disconnect from the unhealthy behavior If you don't do something, you find that you are drowning in fear. So let me ask you this Is there a place in your life that is filled with so much fear that, if you're really honest with yourself, fear is your master in your decision making and not faith? There's going to be a few parts, this whole thing on fear-based decisions, but I hope that this is stirring you up going. You know what, if I think about it, I think I'm letting fear be a master and not a servant. I think I'm actually held back in some of my relationships, maybe in some of my endeavors, because of fear. And if that's you, I want you to stay tuned to next time, the next episode, because we're going to dive deeper into this.

Speaker 1: 23:42

But begin, I would just challenge you, begin to identify those places in your life that there could be fear. The first step is just saying hey, you know what? I recognize there's fear in my life. I recognize I have troubled thoughts. I recognize I have troubled feelings and disruptive behaviors. I'm recognizing this. Don't make an excuse right away because you'll say well, it's there for good reason, it's there. Is it fear or is it faith and trust? All right, till next time, love you. Let's get this fear out of our life. Thank you so much for listening to the Coupelithis podcast. Please consider supporting this by a donation at thecoupelithispodcastcom. It is a tax deductible donation. If you would like to write into the show, you can write me at coupelithis at gmailcom. Yes, you got to figure out how to spell that. But share, subscribe, see you next time, just show up.