Fear Is Quietly Running Your Life (Until You Do This) - Episode 18

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There are people who stay stuck in unhappy jobs, unhappy relationships, unfinished dreams, and unfulfilled lives for years. Not because they aren't capable, not because they don't want more, but because fear quietly becomes the decision maker of their life. And what's crazy is most people never actually stop and examine the fear. They just feel it, assume it's truth, and organize their life around avoiding discomfort. Today we want to walk through something that honestly changed the way we think about fear. Because we realized most fear feels massive when it's vague, but when you actually force yourself to break it down, it starts losing a lot of its power.

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Today we want to walk you through something we've been calling the fear trap framework. Not because it magically removes fear, but because it helps you to stop letting fear control your life without being questioned.

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And honestly, this framework became really powerful because it forced us to stop asking, How do I stop feeling fear? And to start asking, how do I stop letting fear make every decision? So why do fears keep people stuck? The brain wants familiarity. Your brain often treats uncertainty like danger.

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And fear grows when it stays on defined. Most people never examine their fear, they just obey it.

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That's right. We stay stuck in this loop of not examining the fear, and we just mold our life around these fears to incorporate them into our life, into our being, and we just leave them there lingering. A great example that we have is the purchase of a restaurant. We were on this uh hunt for a business to buy.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Yeah.

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And we did all the research on this particular restaurant. We did all of our due diligence. We spent a couple of months preparing and researching and deciding whether or not we wanted to buy purchase this restaurant. And it ended up, I remember it was a really dark, cold night in November, and we're on our way to the lawyer's office. And I couldn't get a hold of my lawyer. And we're meeting the other, the seller of the restaurant. We're meeting him and his lawyer at his office.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Yep.

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And I'm trying to get a hold of our lawyer, and he's not responding. He finally responds as we're on our way to the closing. And he's saying to me on the phone, yeah, uh, I just, I don't think this is a good idea. I I don't think you should do the purchase. I don't think you should buy the restaurant. And this was like a he was our lawyer, but it was like a friend of a close friend.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Yeah.

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So it was somebody we kind of knew, but not really. Yeah. We weren't looking for personal advice, let's put it that way.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Right.

SPEAKER_02 2:46

But he's giving me his personal opinion, and he's just like putting all this doubt and fear into my mind as we're on our way to the freaking closing. You know, checks have been cut. Uh, we went to the bank, got the check from the teller for uh made uh what do they call that, a cashier's check.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Yeah.

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Everything was in place. And at the last minute, he's putting all these fears into me.

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Right before the closing.

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Right before we had to go sign it.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

Yeah.

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So I say, oh, I tell him, okay, well, we're on our way there. Like, please be there on our behalf. And then I hang up the phone and we're you're driving. I remember I'm in the passenger seat and I'm like, oh shit. Like, oh no. And I start panicking and spiraling, like, maybe we shouldn't do this. This is a lot of money. You know, we have a young family, we have bills to pay, all my limited funds. Limited funds, yeah, mortgages to pay. And so I call my mom and I was just like unleashing on her, and I was just like, the lawyer just called me and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and spiraling on her. And she was like, Kim, stop. She was like, You did your due diligence, you've done your research, you have a plan that you are going to be implementing on how to turn this business around. Just follow through. Yeah. Just do it. Like, what do you what's the worst that could happen? And I was like, oh gosh. And I'm going through the list in my mind of all the worst things that could happen. And of course, none of them are exciting. I don't want those things to happen, but they're very real, very real possibilities, right?

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Yeah.

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And so I'm like, okay. So I have this pit in my stomach and I hang up the phone and we show up and we do the thing and sign the paper and hand over the money and all that. And it was like, that was it. You know, I felt the fear and I did it anyways.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

Yep. Yeah, we did. So back then, uh, even though I was in the car, I do not recall that call from the lawyer, the lawyer saying that, though I was certain that I want to do it. Uh, of course, I have fears back then because you don't know, right? So your first time buying a restaurant, owning a restaurant. So we were younger. That was in 2014.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Yeah.

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Over 10 years ago. And uh so we were kind of, you know, all in with faith and with the due diligence that we did, and we felt confident that we were able to do it.

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We had the fear, but we made the choice to move forward anyway. And we didn't know it back then, but we were actually using this framework that we've built today.

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Yeah.

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I decided that I needed to push through the fear and do it anyways.

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So the first thing we realized is most people never actually define the fear. So we decided to create a framework called the Fear Trap Framework. It's a five-step framework that is going to help you out to overcome the fears that might be holding you back. So step one, name the fear.

SPEAKER_02 5:42

In our example of the restaurants, I had to define the fear. Like I had this overwhelming anxiety leading up to this closing. And then that call from the lawyer really pushed me over the edge because I already had this ball of anxiety in the pit of my stomach, right? But I wasn't really labeling it. I wasn't really calling out what I was feeling. And what I was specifically feeling was I was afraid. I was afraid of failure.

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Yep.

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I was afraid of judgment. I was afraid of being embarrassed. I was afraid of financial instability. And most importantly, I was afraid of wasting time.

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And all that happened in an instant. What am I buying here? Judgment, rejection, embarrassment, dead.

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Oh God, the failure is real. All the money is going to be blown on rent every month. And when I made the phone call to my mom, she kind of put it into terms that I could examine. Like, what's the worst that could happen? You know? And when you start defining a fear, it becomes something that you can actually examine. And the fear will lose its power the moment you force it into clarity. Because what you resist persists.

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But step two, examine the story. So is this reality or a catastrophic thinking?

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When the lawyer was telling me this on the phone, I started going into this downward emotional spiral and just like exaggerating everything, like, oh my God, he's right. We're never going to be able to pay the rent. We're ne we're going to be broke. We're going to be putting in money every month.

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At that moment, Kim, your thoughts are not automatically truth. It's just an assumption of the future events.

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But the important thing is at that moment we recognized that we had a choice. Yep. And the choice was go through with it and take the risk or stay stuck.

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So step three, prepare for the worst. And when we say prepare for the worst really hard because you know there's so many variables. But if the worst happened, how will you recover?

SPEAKER_02 7:40

Right. And I'd like to give a little caveat on this section because I don't like to tell people to focus on the worst and always have a worst case scenario. And because people will focus on that. And they'll just that will make them stay stuck. Like because you're you're limiting yourself in that case.

SPEAKER_01 7:59

Yeah, and some people actually start building, preparing for the worst case scenario, which is crazy. Like you're building this new business or this new relationship or whatever you're building. And instead of just focusing and putting all your all your energy into the idea or the project.

SPEAKER_02 8:18

Right. You want to expect the best. Expect the best, but but prepare for the worst. So you want to be prepared and understand your scenarios that could possibly happen, but you want to expect the best and focus on the best. That is a key caveat to this section.

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I remember that we talked in the car, like we started thinking and asking a question that changed everything. If the worst case scenario did happen, what would we actually do?

SPEAKER_02 8:50

Right. How could we recover? But one thing stuck out to me at that time was I in having that phone call with my mom, it reminded me that she was, I think she was like 65-ish at that time. And she had personally just gone through a bankruptcy with a former business. And she was in the process of rebuilding a new business at that time too. And I was thinking to myself, if she can rebuild a business at 65.

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And she did.

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And she did, and a very successful one at that.

SPEAKER_00 9:25

Yeah.

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Then why couldn't we rebuild at, you know, in our early 30s?

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So you have to assess what's going on, right? So we're asset we're assets in here, prepare for the worst. So could you get another job? Could you pivot if the event or the situation allows it, right? Could you recover financially? Right? Could you learn from it? You learn from it, okay, you know what? I now I have all this knowledge and I can just again pivot or start something new based on that. Would life actually continue? Because we get so stuck like it's just the end of the world.

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Right.

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The keys, now I have no money, everything sucks, I'm broke. But if you pause for a second, the worst, it is bad, but it's fixable.

SPEAKER_02 10:13

Exactly. And the truth is at that time I still had my full-time job, which was uh I was still making a a decent income. I was carrying our health insurance and all those things, and Ken was going to be running the business, the restaurants during the day while I was working.

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Yeah, with all my experience.

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With all your experience. So there was, of course, there was a crap ton of risk involved. I'm not saying there wasn't risk involved, but like our worst case scenario was okay, I keep my job.

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Yeah.

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And you have to go and get another job.

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Yeah.

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And then we'll have debt to pay. Maybe that might have, you know, maybe we had to file bankruptcy or, you know, whatever the case may be. But like we weren't gonna die.

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Yeah.

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We weren't gonna be homeless. Our kids were still gonna be healthy and happy and, you know, unaffected.

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And we were confident because that was a franchise. We, you know, the what we bought was part of a franchise. And then they had the training and all that. And we went.

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So we felt supported.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

So we felt supported, like, all right, so yeah. So they're a franchise, they know what they're doing. We we hoped. We thought we hoped and we thought wasn't the case. So, but yeah, so that happened. And that takes us to step four. Count the cost.

SPEAKER_02 11:30

That's right. What is staying the same costing you? And that was something else I had to go through in in that moment. Was what is staying the same costing me? What is keeping with my job and not taking that next step, even though I was going to continue with my job, but that meant no way out of my job. And taking the next step was a possibility that I could get out of my job, which I disliked very much. So at that moment, it was like I had a possibility of leaving my job if I followed through with this, right? And that to me was exciting. That to me was the exhilarating part of all of this was the possibility that I could get out of my job, you could remain out of a job, and we could be working towards this bigger goal of having, you know, more franchise locations and such.

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And that made us wonder what if staying stuck is actually costing you more than trying?

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Exactly. We had to weigh the cost of staying stuck. So not going through with the deal would have meant there was no possibility of me leaving my job. It would have meant emotional exhaustion because then we had to go, we would have had to go back to the drawing board and spend more months and months and months trying to find the next business that we could do. It would have been regret because I would have never known if it would have worked out or not. So I would have always been questioning, like, well, gee, if we did go through with those restaurants, maybe I could have been out of my job by now.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

Yeah. So regret is a big one, Kim, for a lot of people, uh, more than anything, I think. Because when you get older, you're gonna look back in your life and think, man, if I would have just followed through. You know, you don't wanna uh live your last years thinking about that opportunity that you had and that you're carrying this three cred to your grave. That's the cost. That's one of the biggest, I think one of the highest costs. For me personally, that will be one of the highest costs.

SPEAKER_02 13:28

Yeah. A fear has the cost, but staying stuck has a cost too. And sometimes the biggest risk is spending years becoming someone you were never meant to be. You're staying complacent.

SPEAKER_01 13:40

Exactly. That's what I was said a minute ago about regret being in your deathbed, thinking about that you became someone that you were never meant to be because you didn't you didn't take the leap of faith because you let the fear control you back when you were younger and stronger.

SPEAKER_02 13:56

Well, I know that I myself used to struggle with staying stuck because I allowed my lack of confidence back then to keep me stuck. My fear of not being good enough allowed me to be stuck. My fear of being seen, being visible back then allowed me to stay stuck in so many ways. Different things that I tried, wanted to try, different things I wanted to accomplish. Starting way back, I'm talking when I was like a kid, even in like high school where I wanted to be a cheerleader, but like I didn't because I wasn't confident.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

Yeah.

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And I was afraid I wasn't good enough. So I allowed myself to stay stuck, and I never had the experience to be a cheerleader.

SPEAKER_00 14:41

Wow.

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Yeah. That's just one example.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

Yeah, fear is just consumes part of our life, and we just don't even see it. So we know that it's there, but we're just gonna know we just allow it to to linger and control uh lead your life. Like right now, there's a lot of people listening to the show and they're carrying this fear for so long, for so many years, and they're not moving forward.

SPEAKER_02 15:08

No, like I said, you you allow that fear to mold your life. So, like in my example of the church leading, I allowed that to mold my life. Well, I'm not gonna do that because I I I'm scared. And I didn't know it at the time. I didn't know why I didn't, you know, just sign up.

SPEAKER_00 15:25

Yeah.

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But I didn't realize that like I was afraid of judgment and I was afraid of being seen and I was afraid of embarrassing myself. And I didn't really understand all those things back then, but I let it mold who I became as an adult. I was like, no, I don't want to do that because, you know, I just I don't want to be embarrassed or I could never do that. I never named the fear.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Right. So it's like a lot of people aren't just afraid of failing, they're slowly becoming comfortable being unfulfilled. And I think that's what happened to you. Right.

SPEAKER_02 15:58

And I I wouldn't say I was comfortable being unfulfilled because I feel like I've spent most of my life fighting against that and being really unhappy because of that.

SPEAKER_01 16:09

What I meant also when I said comfortable, becoming comfortable being unfulfilled. There's a lot of people out there that they're just they have a dream, they have a talent, and they are just now thinking, I'm too old for that. Mm-hmm. They're just putting a limitation, right? They're just becoming comfortable being unfulfilled. Well, yeah, I know I can do it, but I'm too old.

SPEAKER_02 16:31

Yeah. And I think a lot of that causes a depression and an anxiety, which I obviously suffered from significantly, but I I knew my potential, but I still wouldn't allow myself to fulfill my potential because of those fears. I let them mold my life, I let them hold me back.

SPEAKER_01 16:54

Yeah.

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But no more.

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No more. No more. That's right. Alright, so step five, move anyway. Because action creates clarity.

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Sure does. At some point you realize nobody ever feels ready. And this is the big key takeaway.

SPEAKER_01 17:10

No one feels fully ready. You never feel fully ready. Even when you are just think about it, these marathons, you know, these Olympic, I don't know, athletes. Olympic athletes, they train and train and train and train, right? For years. And then when they are about to perform, they are so afraid that some of them they don't even feel fully ready. How crazy is that? Yeah. After all the training, and no one is more capable than them that they've been training for so long. And they had this fear triggering right before the competition starts. But that fear also works like a fuel.

SPEAKER_02 17:50

Right. It translates into courage almost.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

Exactly. So it's needed. Even though fear is there, letting us know, hey, watch it. You know, you could fail, watch it. There's a snake right there. Um, you don't want to get get beaten. But there's also always a reward after you pass that fear. A movement creates momentum because certainty is an illusion and confidence is built through action.

SPEAKER_02 18:17

The Olympic athletes that you were discussing, like the courage comes before the confidence. You have to have the courage to push through, and then the confidence comes once you start the doing and the movement. I wasn't confident going into that closing, but I was courageous that I had done my due diligence and I'd done my work and I'd done my homework. So I had the courage to go in and sign those documents, right? I didn't have the confidence yet because I had none never run my own business before. So I didn't have that confidence built up.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 18:50

But there has to be a first time, and that was it. So confidence comes after the action, not before it. You don't need to eliminate fear completely. You just need to stop letting it make every decision for you. And the moral of our restaurant story is that the restaurants ended up failing. We were not able to bring them back to life. We purchased them as struggling businesses and we couldn't fulfill that. But regardless, we took the risk and we moved through the fear and we learned a ton. We learned how to buy a business, how to create an entity, how to set up taxes, payroll, manage employees, run a business. And a lot of people that will let fear hold them back will never understand how to do those things. They'll never know. They'll never have that experience because they're letting fear hold them back. But we decided in that moment that we weren't gonna let fear hold us back. And we decided to move forward with it and give it a try, anyways. Did we die? No. Did our kids become homeless? No. The fears that I was allowing to run through my mind never came true. They were stories that I was telling myself.

SPEAKER_01 19:58

Stories, exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:00

But it was a lesson that we learned. It was an experience. Since then, we've opened and tried several other businesses, and now we know how because of that experience. So it was a very expensive college education, as I like to call it.

SPEAKER_01 20:16

Yep. Now everything that we build, not everything that we do, we're coming from a place of experience.

SPEAKER_02 20:21

Right. We're not starting from zero now.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Exactly.

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And just to recap, the fear trap exercise. If you're listening right now and something immediately came to mind while hearing this episode, try the exercise. Step one, write the fear. What am I actually afraid of? Failing, looking stupid, losing money, being judged, wasting time, rejection, starting over. Step two, write the story. What story is my mind creating? Things like, if this fails, my life is over, people will think I'm ridiculous, they'll think I'm a loser, they'll think I'm a failure, I'll never recover, I'm too late, I'm not capable. Step three, write the possibility. What if it actually worked? This is the missing side most people never explore. What if this changes my life? What if it opens new doors? What if this builds confidence? What if I learn something? What if this leads me somewhere unexpected? What if I become stronger through this? Step four, write the cost. What is staying the same costing me? Emotionally, mentally, financially, physically, spiritually. You lose years or resentment, low confidence, regret, missed opportunities. Step five, write the next small move. What is one action I can take? Not change your entire life, one action. Send the email, post the video, apply for the job, make the call, start the plan, research the idea, sign those papers, show up. These steps work well because it takes you from fear into action. Most people rehearse disaster every day, but never speak.

SPEAKER_01 22:02

That's right. What I said, Kim.

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This framework will help you move through the fear and gain some clarity. So maybe the question isn't how do I stop feeling fear? Maybe the better question is, how long am I willing to let fear decide my life? If this episode resonated with you or helped you in any way, we'd love for you to share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you're ready to go deeper, we created something for you. Head over to Ken and Kimp Podcast.com where you can get access to our full library of rebuild guides. These are step-by-step tools designed to help you actually apply what we talk about here. And if you want to connect with us, join our private Facebook community, the Rebuild Room, where we're having real conversations about rebuilding your life. We'll see you in the next episode.