# 35 - It's Hard to Follow Through without Breathing

Episode 35

[00:00:00] : Hello, my friends. It's Rick Lewis here with Episode 35 of the follow through Formula Podcast and today I want to talk to you about breathing. I wish I knew more about this subject. I wish I could tell you about all of the physiological implications of being able to breathe properly. But all I can tell you is that from my own experience, when I'm trying to make a life leap, there's often a lot of fear there. And even these days, with what I'm doing in online business putting out podcasts and articles, I can speak in front of thousands of people for a live event with less fear. Then I can post ah, podcast where I'm speaking about something that's revealing of myself. The whole online world triggers fear in me, and I think it's chiefly because I can't see the recipient of what I'm putting out and because I'm not getting any feedback, I'm putting it out in a in a blind channel. I feel fear because I don't know how I'm being received, and when you're in front of a live audience, you know immediately how things air landing. So I'm experiencing a lot of fear. And it's not that I didn't experience fear when I first tried public speaking. In fact, the very first keynote that I delivered for a corporation was for a restaurant chain called Taco Bueno, and I remember for weeks prior to the event I was developing my keynote material and reviewing it and memorizing it, and I got so excited about the material I was presenting. I kept changing it and revising it up to the last moment, which may not have been the best idea. But the material was very alive for me, and so as I was revising right up to the end, it was very difficult for me to actually remember what I was going to say. The function was a lunch function, so I traveled to the hotel the day before I was in Texas and I got to the hotel late in the afternoon and had planned to spend a couple hours just rehearsing and going through the keynote that I would give. And I was so nervous that I was going to forget what I wanted to say, that I kept practicing and running it over and over again until I could remember each transition from point to point and story to story, in fact, at about 10 o'clock, because I had still been rehearsing it and I wasn't satisfied with my recall. I went to the ballroom where I would be delivering the keynote the next day, and I stood on this stage in this big, empty ballroom at 10 o'clock at night, and I repeated my keynote until about 4 a.m. In the morning. It was so important to me that this work and this come off well. I wanted to become a speaker so badly that I was willing to make this kind of effort. At four AM I went back to my room to try and get a little bit of rest, but I couldn't sleep. I had some breakfast. I practiced some more and I went back for set up at 8 a.m. And I delivered my keynote after lunch, and fortunately it went very, very well, having run it through in my mind that much, it flowed and I got a really good response. I met John Chris Miller, who is the CEO of Taco Bueno at that time, who's since become the CEO of Denny's restaurant, and I've had some wonderful conversations and exchanges with him, an amazing leader. So a lot of good things came out of that. But the benefit of that particular presentation is I was able to make an effort and see the immediate result in relationship to human beings. And this online digital way off offering value does not provide the same kind of feedback, the same kind of queues. So I'm having to rely interestingly mawr on an inner sense of how this feels to me. Does this feel good? Does it feel right? Does it feel helpful? And often the only reflection point I have is to say, Is this helpful to me? Do I find this true? Do I find it connects me to something that's powerful internally? And if the answer is yes, then I move forward with it, and if the answer is no, then I might start a podcast and not use it because I'm moving in a direction that isn't authentically connected toe what I would find useful myself. So it's a very interesting dynamic to be presenting this way. I never really thought about this before, but this makes it very different than public speaking. There is this phrase that we're our own harshest critic, and I think that's true. So that's the downside off being self conscious when we're self conscious, that's when we're harshest and most critical of ourselves. But when we're conscious of self is opposed to self conscious, we can use that self observation to gauge if we're lining up with what's really true and authentic to ourselves. So the thing I want to share that I hope will be useful today is about breath and what I notice when I get afraid when I'm up against this big question mark inside about whether I should speak about something or share something. What I notice is that my breath constricts and you may notice yourself when you're preparing to do something that's new or different, or has some degree of risk associated with it, you may find yourself holding your breath. So right now that fear is coming up as it will when I'm not sure about what it is I'm going to say, but especially if I have a sense that what I'm going to say might be revealing of something that I usually want to hide, and many of us have a fear of failure that we just don't want anybody else to see. We may not even want to see it ourselves, and we can become very manic in our activity in pursuing things as a way to try and leap over that fear or pave over that feeling of insecurity. The problem with this is that that fear and that insecurity contains the seeds of energy that we actually need to succeed. The energy that's in the fear is the same energy that's connected to our passion for the vision we want to pursue. So if we physiologically lock down around that fear and just get busy over the top of it, we don't connect from our belly with that authentic energetic, which is full of sincerity when someone is speaking from the same place. That fear is sitting in a way that it just comes out as honesty, vulnerability, humility, whatever message it is we want to carry forward for others. Thio here has an entirely different effect when we allow that fear to be present in our body while we're producing our expression and communicating from that place is very powerful because human beings air actually listening for vulnerability. We want to hear it the moment someone speaks from a real place. Everyone is quiet in that room. We become immediately receptive to that kind of speaking, because that's what we most want. It's coming from a true place. It's coming from heart, and we want that kind of heart in our lives. We want that for ourselves. We want it for others. So how do we connect with that fear energy in our body and transform it when we might even not when we may not even realize that's what's going on inside. So a simple way to do that that I often use is just to breathe mawr deeply into your belly. So just to let your breath Phil the lower part of your diaphragm, breathing into your diaphragm, inhaling and letting the breath fill your belly and then letting it out again, just allowing deep breaths. If you do that when you're feeling afraid and actually put energy into the fear, it's counterintuitive. But what actually happens is the fear is grounded and that energy gets absorbed into the whole body, whereas when we don't breathe deeply in the presence of fear, the fear just grows. So what I want to do is read a passage to you from a book called The Big Leap. This is a book that I love that was written by Gay Hendricks. He's a New York Times best selling author. He is, Ah, coach and workshop leader. He has done a lot of work with his wife, who whose name I believe is Katherine Hendrix, the quite well known on the personal growth circuit. And so he's written a bunch of books, and this one, The Big Leap focuses on a dynamic, which he calls the upper limit problem. And in the book, he describes how most of the people he works with in private coaching, many of whom are highly successful people, CEOs of major corporations, high level athletes, performers. He describes the upper limit problem as being a kind of internal set point for success that gets crystallized early in our lives, and then as we progress and mature as an adult, we come up against this invisible internal ceiling, which is a kind of internal belief system that actually holds us in place with respect to our current limits, and much of the book is about how to work through this internal upper limit and actually moved to the next level of your growth. And the pages I want to read to you. Here are about breath and how toe work with your breath in relationship to this issue. So, he says, quote, there's only one way to get through the fog of fear, and that's to transform it into the clarity of exhilaration. One of the greatest pieces of wisdom I've ever heard comes from Fritz Pearls M. D, the psychiatrist and founder of Gestalt Therapy. He said. Fear is excitement without the breath. Here's what this intriguing statement means. The very same mechanisms that produce excitement also produce fear, and any fear can be transformed into excitement by breathing fully with it. On the other hand, excitement turns into fear quickly. If you hold your breath when scared, most of us have a tendency to try to get rid of the feeling. We think we can get rid of it by denying it or ignoring it, and we use holding our breath as a physical tool of denial. It never works, though, because as Dr PERLs has pointed out. The less breath you feed your fear, the bigger your fear gets. The best advice I can give you is to take big, easy breaths. When you feel fear, feel the fear instead of pretending it's not there, celebrate it with a big breath just the way you'd celebrate your birthday by taking a big breath and blowing out all the candles on your cake. Do that, and your fear turns into excitement. Do it mawr and your excitement turns into exhilaration. I find it very empowering to know that I'm in charge of the exhilaration I feel as I go through life. I bet you will, too. So that's from Dr Gay Hendricks. And it's interesting just standing here, even just speaking about breath and allowing the breath to fill my belly. And my rib cage touches on emotions that I can feel. I've been holding inside, and I spoke about this a little bit in the episode called Seven Rules. You were born to break where I was admitting the fear I'm feeling these days with respect to my own life leap. There's fear that it won't work. There's fear that I won't be able to support my family. But at the same time, there's fear that it will succeed, because if it succeeds, it means I'm in relationship with more people at, ah, level where there's mawr, contact mawr responsibility mawr of a contribution being offered, and that's a bigger game to play. I'm going to link to a Ted talk that is given by Max Strom. And he is a breath coach and breath trainer who teaches people how to breathe in a way that releases older emotions and allows the kind of energy that gay Hendrix is speaking of into the body. And the Ted talk is fantastic. I highly recommend you watch it through to the end and actually go through the exercise that he leads the audience through. The process, as he describes, is designed to release and touch on places where we're holding unexpressed grief. Now what could grief and grieving have to do with follow through? As Max Strum describes in this Ted talk? When we don't allow ourselves to feel grief, we become physiologically stuck and incomplete to the extent that we can't move forward with full feeling in the rest of our lives. So if you try this exercise. If you watch the Ted talk and try this exercise, don't be alarmed or worried if feelings come up that are unexpected for you and the ability to start getting in touch with these feelings. That air beneath the surface that we might be skating over in our lives is actually integral to our following through on what matters most because to follow through on what matters most, you have to be able to feel what matters most. And when we start feeling what matters most, we also feel the grief and the disappointment around those things that matter that didn't work out for us or that aren't working out now or that are difficult now. So watch the Ted talk. And in general, if you can pause throughout your day, especially if you notice your feeling fearful or constricted and just take a deep breath, inhale, inhale into your belly, expand your rib cage and let it out. Just remembering to breathe a very important and very simple activity that I just wanted to share with you today and let you experiment with a little bit yourself. And if you feel like there's value there for you something you could lean into a bit more. Then watch Max strums Ted talk or do a little bit more research on breath work. You might have toe learn how to breathe again. So many of us hold our breath. We do not breathe deeply into our bodies. We do not breathe deeply into the reality of who we are because who we really are might scare us a little bit, especially if we're playing small and to give Mawr breath to who we really are means we get big and when we get big were suddenly at risk of being seen or of being rejected. But if we truly want to follow through, this is the direction that we need to go, and breath is a vehicle that can help us get there. All right. I think that's good for today. Thanks again for listening to the follow through formula Podcast. I'm Rick Lewis. This has been Episode 35 and I'll be back tomorrow