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How to Confront Fear, Scarcity, and Pressure
Do we have to depend on fear for motivation?
Can we learn how to put scarcity and pressure into perspective?
And how can we learn to forge our own path instead of following the herd?
Today, my wife Alyson and I discuss how fear can serve us — or work against us.
On many levels we’re being challenged. For many this challenge is simply a matter of being uncomfortable or bored. Others are experiencing great uncertainty with regards to their professions and financial well-being. And then there are those who are being confronted by mortality itself.
We can get caught up in the collective freak out or we can use this period as a wake up call. It’s a time to zoom out and reflect.
The men I’m coaching all around the world are seeing this challenging time as an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for us to assess our lives and how we’re choosing to live them. Are our professions and relationships and lifestyle choices aligned with our deepest values? Or does today’s challenge help us see that it’s time to course correct?
Instead of sleepwalking through life or settling for whatever gets slopped on to our plate, we can use this opportunity to tap into our deep desire. Instead of waiting for the perfect plan or the perfect time or the perfect opportunity, we can shift gears, take smart action, and create alignment with what truly matters today.
No more waiting. No more excuses.
Most men won’t do this. They’ll dismiss this opportunity. They’ll let fear get the best of them. They’ll refuse responsibility. But that doesn’t mean we have to live like most men.
Today’s conversation was recorded before the Covid-19 virus became the major focus here in the US. Regardless, the core ideas of this discussion still apply when it comes to how we confront fear, scarcity, and pressure in our day-to-day lives.
In this interview:
- Creating from fear, scarcity, and pressure
- Rat-racing and magical finish lines
- Why fear glorifies hustling
- How fear serves us and how it makes us weak
- We don’t have to freak ourselves out in order to be successful
- Nothing to prove
Plus:
- Depriving ourselves now in order to get what we want later
- Get out of dumb goals and create smart goals
- Why a pain in the ass is valuable information
- Why perfectionism is a defense
- Why fixating on ourselves kills peace of mind and meaning
About Alyson Lanier
Alyson Lanier is a guide, coach, mentor, asskicker, counselor, and teacher. She received her BA, MA, and LPC in psychology, and has extensive training and certification in attachment work and Gestalt therapy, Transpersonal psychology, and Shambhala Buddhism. She has over 50,000 hours of therapeutic experience with individuals, couples, families, children, and adolescents in clinical and private settings. Halfway through her second decade of working in clinical and trauma informed therapeutic settings, Alyson realized psychotherapy alone was incomplete. In order to better serve her clients, Alyson broadened her professional toolbox with trainings and certifications in somatic sex education, energy work and consciousness development, and Ancestral Medicine work, a lineage repair approach to healing personal, family, and cultural burdens.
Adding alternative and spiritual practices to her therapeutic offerings made sense for Alyson because her experience with animist traditions and supernatural encounters began at a very young age, and set the foundation for her life’s study and practice. Her encounters with other-than-human beings, Old World traditions, Shambhala Buddhist practice, and subtle energy work over the years have given her a unique and layered perspective that plants her feet firmly in seemingly antithetical worlds: clinical and transpersonal psychology; Eastern and Western philosophy; clinical diagnosis and energetic and spiritual traditions of healing. Alyson has learned to fully embrace this duality, and to use it to understand the lenses her clients are seeing through, how they’re metabolizing what’s coming through for them, and to lovingly stir shit up to help them level-up.
Alyson delights in supporting her clients as they navigate their growth processes on psychological, physical, energetic, and spiritual levels. Her knowledge of psychology, development, and integral, energetic, and somatic studies give her a centered gravity, and her formative experiences and practices give her a rare wisdom. Her passion and humor spring from a desire to make the sacred profane and the profane sacred. Alyson approaches her transformative work with creative and dynamic interventions, serving her clients and groups as if the world depends on the fulfillment they are seeking, because it most assuredly does.
For over a decade, Alyson has been married to Tripp Lanier (who is also a coach and the host of The New Man Podcast which has been downloaded millions of times by men and women all around the world). Together they have a daughter and live on the coast of North Carolina.
