71 Breaking Through Barriers with Fear Setting for Counselors

Let's face it, New Year's resolutions often lead us down a path of high hopes followed by an all-too-familiar sense of letdown. As Dr. Kate Walker, I've been there, but today I'm shedding light on a game-changer that's reshaping the landscape of personal and professional growth: fear setting. Inspired by Tim Ferriss and his powerful TED Talk, I'm taking you through a transformative process that goes beyond the usual goal-setting. It's about confronting the fears that stifle our progress and turning them into stepping stones for success. If you're ready for a fresh take on achieving your counseling career dreams, this episode is your ticket to breaking the cycle of unmet resolutions.

In this powerful episode, I delve into the core of Tim Ferriss's fear-setting philosophy and how it's revolutionized my approach to running a business and embracing personal change. The idea of taking a sabbatical used to send shivers down my spine, but through strategic delegation and facing down my financial and control-related fears, I've unlocked a level of empowerment and innovation I never knew possible. From a modest two-week getaway to month-long solo journeys, I demonstrate the incredible rewards of calculated risks. Join me as I lay out the transformative steps to navigate your deepest fears, setting you on a course to a more fulfilling counseling practice and life.

Get your step by step guide to private practice. Because you are too important to lose to not knowing the rules, going broke, burning out, and giving up. #counselorsdontquit.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Usually, what we most fear doing is what we most need to do that phone call, that conversation, whatever the action might be, it is fear of the unknown outcomes that prevents us from doing what we need to do. This is the Texas Counselors creating Badass Businesses Podcast with Dr Kate Walker, where I teach you, texans and non-Texans alike, the latest research-based information to hit your income goals, stay out of trouble and make a bigger impact in your community. Join me and let's fill the gaps in access to mental health care and create a counseling career you'll love. Let's get to work. Welcome to Texas Counselors creating Badass Businesses, where it's all about working smarter, not harder. And here's your host, Dr Kate Walker. Welcome to Episode 71, and we are going to kick New Year's resolutions to the curb because it's February and if it hasn't worked out by now, well, it's time for a new plan. Don't forget this is the end of our Share the Love promotion, so if you're interested in winning a free 40-hour supervisor training, you gotta get in on this. Just go to katewalkertrainingcom. Forward slash, share the love and tell me what awesome, random act of kindness you've done. Tell me about how you've shared your colleagues' content. Tell me how you've given a colleague an amazing Google review, because we want to celebrate you and I would love it. If you're the one who wins the free 40-hour supervisor training Again, just go to katewalkertrainingcom. Forward slash, share the love. All right, let's get to work. Hi, I'm Dr Kate Walker. Welcome to your Tuesday training. If you're watching me live in the Facebook group, excellent. I can't wait to talk to you. If you're listening to me or watching me on a replay, good on you for taking time out of your day to learn something new.

Speaker 1: 2:21

Now, as I mentioned a second ago, this is almost the last day of January, and so my mind is on New Year's resolutions and, like most of you, I have a love-hate relationship with New Year's resolutions. I mean, I kind of love them around December because I'm thinking about okay, what are my goals? You know me, I'm talking about Q1, this Q1, that marketing, paperwork, money goals, all of these things to get my brain churning and excited and, honestly, kind of getting through the holidays a little bit, and my future trip. That's one of my coping skills. I like to plan and think about what's coming up, I guess in that sense, I love setting New Year's resolutions.

Speaker 1: 3:06

What I hate about New Year's resolutions is. It's sort of this all-or-nothing thinking, and you and I all fall into this. We think, okay, well, if I missed one day, that means my New Year's resolution's over, and you know, hit or miss, there's no getting close right, there's none of this horseshoes and hand grenades, it's just well, I guess I didn't do that and now I'm a failure, or I guess I'm done for the year. I'll never fill in the blank. You know, I'll never stop drinking. If I didn't stay completely sober during sober January, I will never make that money because I'm still paying for that silly subscription and I couldn't figure out how to get rid of it or whatever it is. We are all trying to change about ourselves in the New Year.

Speaker 1: 3:53

So enter Tim Ferriss. Who's Tim Ferriss, you ask? Well, tim Ferriss is one of the authors that I consider to be sort of game-changing for me and my practice and my business. He wrote a book gosh, I guess it's been about 12 or 13 years ago called the Four-Hour Workweek, and you know, if you've been listening to me long enough, I tout a few books as sort of seminal and foundational, and this is one of them. So Tim Ferriss's book, the Four-Hour Workweek, changed everything about how I did business, thought about business was growing, my practice, my five-year plan, all of those things were sort of you think about that game that you pull the blocks out and it all falls down right, literally. That's what I felt, in a good way, after I read his book.

Speaker 1: 4:50

So, fast forward, a few years later he did a TED Talk about fear setting. So I imagine this was pre-COVID and I'm listening to this TED Talk. Honestly, I'm doing this because I'm about to give a talk to a young women's leadership organization and I need ideas. So I'm listening to TED Talks. I kind of have an idea of what I want to tell these women in this leadership conference and I come across fear setting and my mind is blown because not only does it take this idea of goal setting and flip it on its head, it's a challenge, it's a way to push us out of our comfort zones in a way that slaps all or nothing thinking in the face and really makes it sit down and say hey, look, just because you got close, just because you didn't hit it completely, just because it didn't go exactly how you wanted it to do, doesn't make it a failure. So I got to thinking okay, how can I make fear setting for counselors? How can I put this in a way that it's useful for you, amazing badasses who are out there in the field building your practices, because your communities are going to fall in love with you, you're going to grow, and it's scary. And then how do you move outside the therapy room and start adding those side hustles, because you know you are capable of so much more, and I thought, ding. Okay, fear setting.

Speaker 1: 6:17

So let's talk about fear setting. It starts with thinking of something you're scared to do. I mean, it's that simple, right, where goal setting and New Year's resolution starts off with this okay, what do I want to do? What do I need to do? What's the most important thing I need to get done? Fear setting says no. What scares you? Is it starting a side hustle? Is it hiring someone? Is it getting your first assistant, your first virtual assistant? Is it hiring something that you've been doing since you opened your practice and you're thinking, okay, this is terrifying. Or maybe you're like me and it's going overseas, to Spain, and walking the Camino with a group of women I've only met one, and the other ones I've never met before, and I'm going to walk almost 100 miles. Scary, right, that's scary to me anyway. So when we think about fear setting, it starts with okay, I'm going to write down what scares me and what it's going to look like if I do that thing.

Speaker 1: 7:21

So for me and my own business and Tim Ferriss talks about this in his TED Talk he had a successful business, but he was getting in his own way and he was burning out and the business was so successful and he couldn't keep up with the customer service, the orders, everything was consuming him. I think one of the stories he tells was actually his relationship at the time. She left him and basically gave him some feedback that said, hey, you work too much and you're going to burn out. And so his fear set was to leave the country for a sabbatical, taking four months off in Europe and just seeing what happened. Well, here are all the things now that he talks about that had to fall into place.

Speaker 1: 8:07

Number one who's going to take care of the business? So he's got to hire out these phone calls, these support tickets, these orders, the things that get messed up in the process. Who's going to pay taxes? What if he misses a deadline? There are several things he talks about, and so in my own life when I thought, okay, I want a sabbatical, I need to see if I can get out of my own way. I'm starting to burn out, I'm starting to get overwhelmed and I was going to plan a little two-week trip to Maine and I thought, ok, this will be my sabbatical. This fear-setting talk meant the world to me because it gave me a blueprint.

Speaker 1: 8:48

Because when he starts talking about, ok, how am I going to handle it if I hire out let's just say, answering the phone or support tickets, well, he came up with a system. If it was something that was going to cost him I believe it was $25 or less he didn't want a phone call about it. In other words, he was empowering whoever he hired to make that decision. If it wasn't going to cost him more than and I'm saying $25, it may have been $100. So if you have taken my 40-hour training to become a supervisor in Texas, then you'll know what this is.

Speaker 1: 9:21

This is branch leaf versus trunk and root decisions in a company. What's a decision that's like a leaf, and if it falls off, it's not going to bring down the whole tree. What's a decision that's more like a root, and if you chop it off, it's going to bring the whole company down. So it forced him to really sit and look at the parts of his business that he could hire out. And for us let's just say control challenged, we enjoy control. It forced him me, if I'm looking in the mirror, to say, ok, I'm going to let go of this, watch me, I'm letting go. Oh my gosh, look no hands, I'm not touching it right. And then mistakes will happen. It's not what if a mistake happens, it's when it happens.

Speaker 1: 10:07

And so now I'm starting to take these calculated risks and when I say calculated, I mean literally financially, like I'm calculating OK, how much can I afford to lose, what will happen and how much will it cost me and can my business come back from that? And so what I designed for myself was a two-week trip that turned in the following year to pulling a trailer and staying for a month at a campground by myself, which turned into the next year car camping in national parks that I'd only dreamed about and staying in on the road for a month in landing in Maine to this year, planning all kinds of trips that are going to challenge my body, my mind, because it started with this initial fear set, this idea that I could somehow face my fear of hiring out and letting go, this fear that, yeah, it's going to cost me some money, but I can afford that. The fear of, yeah, but nobody can do it as well as I can. Let it go, Kate. All of those were my real fears. It wasn't pulling the trailer, although that was terrifying. It wasn't being by myself I like having a good book and being on my own and it certainly wasn't the sabbatical which I ended up loving and revamping, the online 40-hour LPC and LMFT supervisor training into just amazing spaces. So the thing when I really got down to it was my fear of the loss of control. And then get into all the stuff for my childhood.

Speaker 1: 11:43

What does that mean as far as? Oh, come on, I'm humiliated, I'm a failure, and I don't want to minimize any of those feelings. I'm looking into a video camera right now. I know how that feels. I feel it. And then what right? It's that Kohlberg cycle, it's that idea of OK, so what? Now what? And I'm going to walk you through this, and I highly encourage you to go to Tim's website and I don't do this a lot. Tim Ferriss is not paying me anybody. I am not an affiliate for Jim Ferriss and Tim Ferriss if you're listening to this, hey, thank you so much for everything. I'm using it to help counselors and bridge the gap in access to affordable mental health care in Texas. So go to his site.

Speaker 1: 12:21

But I'm going to give you the abridged version. So here's his step-by-step process, and I do believe there's a worksheet out there or you could probably make one out of this process. So, number one define your nightmare, the absolute worst thing that could happen. Okay, so for all of us it's basically going broke, getting humiliated, the community running us out with flaming pitchforks. I don't know what your nightmare is, but I could certainly share mine. So what is the worst thing that could happen? And he says, you know, on a scale of one to 10, are these things permanent? How likely is it that they will happen? Number two is what I love? Right, because I get this, we're all going to this. Ok, it's a 10. I could die, all right. Ok, back it up, come back with me, come back from the edge.

Speaker 1: 13:07

Number two says what steps could you take to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing, even if, temporarily, chances are, it's easier than you imagine how could you get these things back in control? So, for me letting go of support tickets and that was honestly just this year that I let go of my support email and for me it was OK what's the worst thing that can happen? Well, I'll answer the email, ok, well, that's what I always did, right? If it's something where the customer is displeased with the answer from one of my assistants, it kicked up to me and that's what it's always been anyway. So, OK, check, I can do that.

Speaker 1: 13:50

Step three what are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of probable scenarios? Oh my gosh. What if it actually works? What if I actually end up taking a sabbatical, having a wonderful time, getting a butt ton of work done, having my creativity actually released because I'm not holding on so tightly to all of the things in my business, remember, anxiety goes up, cognition goes down, and that includes creativity, right. So what are the benefits? It was pretty endless. It was actually super cool, right, and I did those things. Right.

Speaker 1: 14:28

I faced the fear, I went on my sabbatical, I did let things go, things did go wrong, I did fix them and what? That was five years ago, right, and I'm still standing. My business is better than ever and it's easier, right? What is that exposure therapy? Right, as you do things, as you face the fear and the pain, and you discover that on the other side, it wasn't as bad as you thought. Right, you've experienced it and you discover your agency. You discover that you're empowered and you can do these things. Oh my gosh y'all. It's like the biggest high on the planet. It's a wonderful feeling to know that you can sit on the other side of those fears better than ever.

Speaker 1: 15:13

So, number four if you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under financial control? So, for those of you listening who own your practice, or you desire to own a practice, or you own a practice plus right, it's got several streams of income. If it all went south tomorrow, what could you do to get things back in financial control? Again, if you've listened to me, you know how we set our budgets and I talk you through how to prioritize your mortgage and keeping the lights on right. So what would you do? I mean, you're a smart person. If you're listening to this podcast, you have figured a few things out. So do you think you could fix it if it all came tumbling down, what would you do to regain financial control? This is the next one.

Speaker 1: 16:00

What are you putting off out of fear? Usually, what we most fear doing is what we most need to do that phone call, that conversation, whatever the action might be. It is fear of the unknown outcomes that prevents us from doing what we need to do. So accepting that and doing it is part of our therapy. Right, that's working on ourselves. So for me, as I mentioned before, it wasn't necessary pulling the trailer. It was the embarrassment of what if it all just tumbles down to nothing, because I knew inside of me I mean, I've gotten student loans before I knew financially that somehow my husband and I would figure it out. But it was just this sort of oh, look at it, you tried it and you failed. Look at you and I'm picturing, you know that chorus of people pointing and laughing and okay, I'm taking you into my childhood again, welcome. So those things at the really core of the matter are what's preventing us, which is also that great big green flag that says hey, kate, I think this is really, really, really, what you need to do.

Speaker 1: 17:09

Number six what is it costing you to not do it. That's one of my favorite actions. What was it costing me to not take my first sabbatical, to not revamp my course, to not automate things, to get creative with my delivery systems, the ways that I keep the course online, the ways that I market the course to people in Texas? If I had never taken that sabbatical, I can't even tell you what would have cost me. And then, finally, what are you waiting for? And Tim writes in his blog that I'm reading from right now. If you cannot answer this without resorting to the previously rejected concept of good timing, the answer is simple you're afraid, just like the rest of the world, and I highly encourage you to read this. I'm going to tell you what episode it is.

Speaker 1: 17:59

It's May 15, 2017, fear, setting the Most Valuable Exercise I Do Every Month by Tim Ferriss. Read it, download it, listen to it, but, most importantly, do it. Set some things out this year that aren't resolutions. Set things out that scare you and go through the exercise and see what the cost will be if you don't do it. And I'm just telling you from personal experience and from the messages that I get back from people when I give this message to people at trainings, when I talk people through this in personal coaching and I help them understand the work that they're doing, the good insight, the good introspection that they're doing when they do this exercise. It's profound what I hear on the other side. So, to wrap it up, let's kick resolutions to the curb, shall we? Let's do some fear setting and get our practices in a space where we are changing the world, where you are changing the world, because, badass, you are too important to lose, to fear over doing something wrong.

Speaker 1: 19:13

Okay, that's it. This is Dr Kate Walker and this is Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses. This is your Step it Up Weekly Training and I will see you next time. Take care. Thanks so much for listening, and you won't want to miss February's free webinar with the amazing Jenny Melrose, blogger, influencer, and she teaches counselors how to optimize their websites so Google can find them. It's happening this month. Go to Kate Walker Training forward slash free webinar and don't forget, for those of you needing it, it's always one free CE credit for you. That's again Kate Walker Training forward slash free webinar. I'm Dr Kate Walker. Thank you so much for listening to Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses. Thank you to Ridgely Walker for her lovely voiceovers at our introduction and do me a favor when you get a second. Please like, share and subscribe and write us a review. That's really how we get picked up by other RSS feeds and we get this information out to the mental health badasses who need it. Thanks again and keep saving the world with excellent therapy. You.