The Conscious Investor
Chasing after Financial Freedom often bankrupts other parts of life.
That’s why the Conscious Investor Podcast goes beyond Financial Freedom and helps investors cultivate Personal Freedom by featuring experts in the core areas of health, mindset, and investing.
If you’re looking to grow financially, if you long to unleash your full potential, and build a life of meaning without bankrupting the most important parts of life then this show is for you!
The Conscious Investor
Ep508 How to Overcome Fear Forever
Can fear actually be your greatest ally? Join me, Julie Holly, on this week's Conscious Investor, where I share my personal journey of facing fear head-on and redefining what it means to live a fulfilling life. We unpack the misconception that financial freedom equates to true happiness and explore how stepping out of our comfort zones can lead to genuine personal growth. Using an insightful analogy inspired by Michael Neal, we delve into the transformative power of embracing fear instead of letting it paralyze us.
In this episode, we'll navigate the intricate freeway of our thoughts, drawing inspiration from both Michael Neal and Michael Singer. Imagine thoughts like cars in traffic—do you hop from one to another or stay focused on your destination? With practical tools and powerful insights, we’ll discuss how to manage these mental vehicles without letting fear, doubt, or insecurity derail our path. Tune in to learn how to maintain conviction and connection, leveraging your thoughts to overcome fear and support others in their journey.
Hello, conscious Investor, and welcome back. I'm your host, julie Hawley. For over four years, I've paired my background in real estate, investing, education and coaching to create powerful content for you each week. This podcast is where we take a holistic approach to investing by focusing on three ingredients to a life of personal freedom health, mindset and wealth. We'll talk about everything from passive investing through syndication and how to use your retirement accounts to boost your investing, to mineral balancing and gut brain health, and into topics that cultivate your inner strength and resilience so you can thrive regardless of any of life's current events. And yes, those are all episodes currently available and linked in the show notes below. Join me each Monday for a mindset episode and later in the week for an interview with expert investors and health professionals, so that you can experience your greatest health, strongest mindset and build the wisest wealth.
Speaker 1:Welcome back, or welcome to the Conscious Investor. It's Monday and, as always, I'm so happy for Mondays. I'm excited every Monday about the time you and I get to share together. Conscious Investor, this is special. This is a special time where you and I get to have a dialogue and remember it's a dialogue because I love that you take time, you leave ratings and reviews to let me know what you're getting from the show and you share the show and you send me texts and emails and messages and I absolutely just love it. Conscious investor, you absolutely are the best, and these conversations that we have on Mondays, they're really definitely not singular conversations. I hope that these conversations are conversations that spark, that they're just tender for other conversations you have with people around you, that these are conversations that allow you to think deeply and maybe more abstractly about concepts. Today I did want to share with you that the purpose of this show and the purpose of the purpose of the conscious investor and I thought I need to do a better job communicating that with you, because I realize and I've been putting things together as I'm working on the full manuscript of the conscious investor book and I realized that this needs to be communicated very clearly to you.
Speaker 1:You're a great life and this might be so freeing and liberating for so many of you listening. A great life is not dependent on your net worth. Gosh, that gives permission to so many of you. For those of you trying to be, you know, the first millionaires in your family. For those of you trying to, you know, make sure that you maintain the multi-millions that your family has created over generations In any capacity. That concept of net worth can really feel overwhelming and burdensome, and we need to remember that our greatest life is not hinged and coupled to our net worth.
Speaker 1:I love financial freedom, but it really does become a distraction to so many people, and the goal of the conscious investor is truly to emancipate people from the shackles of chasing after that financial freedom so that they can live into the fullness their DNA pre-qualifies them for. I absolutely love that. I wonder what would the world look like if everybody lives like that? Oh, absolutely amazing. And what would the world look like if we didn't live in fear? Gosh, I am an expert conscious investor when it comes to fear, and we're going to talk about fear because, good golly, it's my Achilles heel. You've heard me talk about it on the podcast before, but over the last year especially, I feel like I've gained so much even even more momentum and traction with really being able to quiet fear in life, and I think that a lot of people need this, and it might not be you, conscious investor, but I guarantee if it's not you, in some facet of your life it's going to be somebody very close to you, someone in proximity maybe, maybe a neighbor, a relative, a colleague, a friend. There's going to be someone around you that you're going to go like, oh dang, that person needs to kick fear to the curb. And apparently that is a theme of this, this cluster of podcast episodes, because, you know, we've spoken about we we can't let our circumstances be our excuses. We we spoke about, you know, breaking the hamster wheel and ending burnout, and now we're like get rid of fear. Apparently, you know, we're just on a trajectory to really take control over every aspect of our lives and I just, I love sharing this with you. Conscious Investor. It's a lot of fun and it's also really important.
Speaker 1:Now, as we were talking about fear, going back to, if you listened to the last few episodes mindset episodes, you know, sharing about Super Ed, steve. He has a project that he really wants to put out in the world and he's wrestling with a lot of different things, elements of that. That's very normal. I feel like that's common to man and that's one of the ways that you know you're moving forward with something of substance, right? If you don't feel fear, doubt, insecurity, if you don't feel any of that, you're probably not doing something that's going to do anything great in the world. Sorry, that's like probably a massive spoiler for some of you, but it's just, it's reality. Okay, it means we're playing safe, we're not getting into that zone where it's really going to impact and create change zone. Where it's really going to impact and create change as Super Ed, steve and I were sitting out on our deck probably enjoying a cocktail over the sunset I would have no doubt if that's when it was, but I just remember it was a beautiful skyline and we're sitting out on our deck talking about fear. And this is the analogy I gave him and I'm not going to take full credit.
Speaker 1:It's a borrowed adaptation of Michael Neal. Again, you've been listening for a long time, so you know I referenced Michael Neal's work. I'm looking over at a couple of his books. He wrote Super Coach. He wrote the Inside Out Revolution. He's written other other works. He has a fantastic podcast, a couple of them. One of them is called caffeine for the soul. I highly recommend it. Um, they're short, they're sweet and they've really allow you to get control of some headspace, uh, so. So I am totally going to say this is a borrowed adaptation of um, a podcast episode that he released a couple of months ago, and the idea is this we tend and I will say so, michael Neal will say that fear is a product of our thinking and that our fears are just, it's just our imagination, it's just part of that process in our brain, isn't that interesting?
Speaker 1:The more I've worked with fear over the last several years and thought about it, the more I realized, like how much life I subordinated and lost out on to fear. If you think about, you know, sand in an hourglass slipping through that hourglass, I just it makes me tint up and cringe and just like, oh, I lost a lot of life. Like just because I was a slave to fear and it sucks, and I don't want that for anyone else. My fears go all the way back to when I was like a very, very young child, and I think that, just like we all have our unique DNA that pre-qualifies us to live into a unique purpose and contribution, I think that we also have some facets of us that are always going to be that challenge in our life, and for me, I think fear is one of them. It's great to be able to identify them, to name them and to work with it. I don't anticipate fear ever leaving my life and I don't need it to. I don't need it to because I'm not subordinate to it. I'm going to get into the three things right that fear is an indicator of and how to overcome it in just a moment.
Speaker 1:But here's an analogy that is an adaptation from Michael Neal that I was sharing with Super Ad Steve. On the deck that morning he said you get to decide. Okay, I'm sorry, I am going to tell you this was actually not tied to his purpose. He recently went on a little solo fishing trip, which is so cool. I love that he did that. So important that we get's. So important that we get away privately, that we get quiet time, and not just quiet time in our own bedroom, or you know even my studio. That's on my property. It's I'm here by myself, but I know the energy of my family is in proximity. Right To remove ourselves completely from those settings is absolutely imperative in life.
Speaker 1:If you haven't done that recently and if you are not encouraging your spouse to do that, please help everybody out. Find time for both of you to take solo trips to go and sit and be and do. It's magical. But what happened is that he was going to stay an extra day but he woke up and his imagination went wild. What if this happens with my business? Maybe that client needs this, maybe Julie needs this with the teens, maybe this? And he did the what if game and he named it such. He named it the what if game. He's like I went into all the what ifs, what ifs that's, you know, like the best friend of fear. It's like just another facet of fear.
Speaker 1:And we started talking about our thoughts. I said you know, you can't control your thoughts. Your thoughts exist, but your thoughts are no different than cars traveling by. Now. We lived in California, we lived in Denver, colorado, so I started throwing out some freeways. This is going to register and resonate with some of you, right? So I said you know, it's kind of like if you were on 99 or if you were on the 405 and you're in the 405 and congested, you know, five o'clock traffic, it's not going to be fun. Maybe you're on 25 over in Colorado. It's not going to be fun if you're going by the stadium at five o'clock, okay, especially if it's game day. Never go by that, never take 25. You're going to be congested.
Speaker 1:All of those cars represent thoughts. Every one of those vehicles are thoughts. You're driving your car, do you ever? I mean, it stops traffic. Let's just assume it's absolutely stopped traffic. Do you ever get out of your car to go get into a different car? Have you ever done that? Oh, you know what? That Bentley over there looks pretty rad. I'm just going to go hop in that Bentley. Oh man, you know what that Kia looks so comfortable. I'm going to go do that. Oh, that jalopy over there, I'm going to go get into that. Do we ever do that? Good God, we would have a lot of trouble in our life if we literally physically got out of our car and stepped into somebody else's car.
Speaker 1:And the interesting thing is that when we're in our car, we know our destination. We know where we're headed right. So maybe we're headed out to dinner and we're going to meet up with friends. We're in our car, we're driving to dinner that night, we're caught in traffic, but we're going to stay in our car because we know where that car is going to go and we want to be there. That's where we want to be.
Speaker 1:All of these cars are no different than thoughts. You have all these different thoughts traveling down the freeway go, go, go. It could even be slow. We pointed out, you know, down our road we have very little traffic. It's a dead end, so very little traffic, and maybe it's just maybe your thoughts aren't go, go, go all the time.
Speaker 1:Regardless, we're not getting out of cars to get into other cars, but we do this with thoughts. We let ourselves hop around from thought to thought. We're like, oh well, you know what? I guess I need to get into that car or that thought that's passing by, because that thought came through my mind. Therefore, I have to go into the car with that thought and I'm just going to have to go that direction. Isn't that absolutely Super? Ed? Steve is like that is such a great analogy and I hope it's translating well for you as well Conscious Investor. But he's like wow, that makes so much sense.
Speaker 1:Breaking it down a little further, it's like this we know where we want to go, we have a thought and a belief and we're taking action on it and we're gaining momentum and traction and all of a sudden, some other thoughts seem to come through Fear, doubt, shame, insecurity, all of these, you know, rejection, all of these things start flooding our mind like the 405. And instead of letting them just pass by, we decide to change cars and get into that car and go to the destination it wants to take us to. Why would we do that? But we do do that. We have full control over our thoughts. You see, we don't have to, we can just let the thought pass by.
Speaker 1:As he and I were out on the deck there, a car did pass by. I said like we're not going to just like go, hop in the car with our neighbor there, right, it's like. No, I'm like we just let it pass by and we can let our thoughts just pass by. Our thoughts aren't an indication of who we are and our character and what quality of person we are, or caliber of person, or if we're competent or capable. They're just thoughts and we can just let them pass by and we don't have to get in the car with them. We can stay in the thought that we have in the in the lane in the vehicle that we are currently in. Now I hey, guess what, if there's a thought that comes by, that's better thought, I might upgrade my thought. You know like. Well, you know what. There is a a thought that comes by. That's better thought. I might upgrade my thought, you know like. Well, you know what? There is a Land Rover Defender. I think I'm going to upgrade my thought and go that direction right. So I think you get the idea. We want to make sure that we are staying focused and that we can just release, let the thought go, let things pass on through. Pass on by.
Speaker 1:Michael Singer does a great job talking about this concept and topic in his book Untethered Soul and also in Living Untethered. Those are two very helpful books, I believe. With this, what's interesting I know, conscious investor, some of you share my faith, right. What's interesting to me is that while these gentlemen, their works, aren't written in the zone of my faith in Jesus, these books have actually helped me internalize and understand my faith in a very substantial way. So I think that's really interesting.
Speaker 1:Sometimes we can say and for years I didn't read anything that wasn't written by a Christian author because I was not going to let somebody else come into my head and have control of my thoughts and lead me astray. All that to say, I've found quite the opposite. I've found it's actually everything I've read has led me into a deeper understanding and knowledge about my faith because I'm contextualizing and I'm thinking in a whole different way. I'm processing it through a lot of different lenses. It's really helpful. So I want to encourage you. Know that all of the books that I read don't always completely align with my faith and trust in Jesus, but they helped me understand my faith and trust in Jesus in a new way and I absolutely love that. All right, here are the zingers. You know I'm going to bring them because I've been a little bit spicy the last few episodes and so I'm going to give you three tough questions.
Speaker 1:When it comes to fear, yep, you thought you were getting away with just going up with the car analogy, but I'm going to give you a little more. I wrote these down because they're kind of tough. Fear is actually an indicator, julie's opinion, not Michael Michael Singer or Michael Neal. In my humble opinion, I think fear is also an indicator of laziness. Hmm, I know that hurts saying it. You know it's. It's easier to allow few uh fear into our life. It's easier to allow the fear to just come in and cloud is. It's almost like um, what is that? Is that the second law of thermodynamics where you know like all things move from order to disorder my house while I'm in here with you, I guarantee that my kitchen is going to be a disaster. When I walk in there, right, and fear is like that, fear will just come in and it's going to just like leave stuff all around and messes all around in our life.
Speaker 1:And in order to overcome the fear, we have to take action. I don't know about you, but I just I don't mind cleaning, I actually enjoy cleaning, but there are times where it's like I'm tired. I'd rather just sit and snuggle on the couch and watch a show than go to fold the laundry. I'd rather sit and snuggle on the couch and watch a show than clean the kitchen up. And my teens would say wait a second. You do clean the kitchen, but usually we're on KP. So just shout out to the kids, the teens. So all I have to say is that we have to be proactive.
Speaker 1:We can't be complacent and lazy when it comes to fear, depending on what freeway and what cadence and such you might have, fear that wants to, you know, rear end, you Like. We have to be alert and aware. So, like well, stay away from that one, stay away from that thought. Let me let that one go by real fast, and that means there is a level of engagement involved. We can't be complacent, we can't be lazy, and so when we start to notice that we are being fearful, we need to ask ourselves am I being lazy with my thoughts? Am I just letting every thought come and hang out in my head, or am I being intentional about when they start to hang out and they're not good of no, shoot, run along, get away. Right, that requires intentionality.
Speaker 1:The second indicator of fear is that it's a lack of conviction. Seriously, because guess what the reality is is that sometimes we want to say like oh, that's just, that's so scary, I don't want to do that Really sometimes. Usually we're saying that's uncomfortable or I just don't want to, I'm not interested. But when we have a deep conviction in us, we can do anything. I want you to think about how many people have heroic acts in the world. The world or two particularly comes to mind. I don't know why, but I think about Schindler's list, and I think about the stories of so many people at concentration camps that weren't there as being held hostage, but the people that were on the outside that were smuggling the kids out right. Their conviction was so strong that this is wrong and I must do something about it. And if I get caught, I could be tortured or killed, but I must do something about it. Their conviction outweighed their fear of death. Now that's, you know, that's like an extreme example, right? But you see people of when conviction comes into play, people become absolutely unstoppable in fear. It's like, does fear even exist? So I want you to say like, wow, if I'm afraid, where am I lacking conviction in my life? These are questions I ask myself. Don't worry, conscious ambassador, this is not pointed at you. This is definitely coming back my own direction in every way.
Speaker 1:Fear the last one I want to share is fear is an indicator of a lack of connection spiritually. Like you know, my faith is paramount in my life. I cannot imagine walking through life without my deep connection with the sovereign Lord. For me, that is the anchor on which. That's where all fear just completely like, just gets squished down. It's like all right, well, if God can create those mountains and if those mountains have been here for thousands of years and God has done amazing things in my life and the world around me, and he promises and he says doesn't say my life is easy, doesn't say my life won't have struggle, but he says I'll always be with me, like, okay, so you might not share my same belief system. I get that the world is a smorgasbord right when it comes to this, but I do want you just to definitely acknowledge if I'm afraid, then I must be, I must be trying to walk through this world alone. I must be trying to tackle this in my own strength and in my own power. Well, guess what? We're finite, we're limited, we, we don't have it all. In my own opinion. So aligning ourselves with the sovereign God creates a whole new trajectory for our life.
Speaker 1:If you aren't connected spiritually in any capacity I absolutely love the church I go to spiritually in any capacity, I absolutely love the church I go to you could check out Cedar Hills Sandpoint, idaho. You could check them out online and you could listen to past episodes and current episodes. They teach on mindset, they teach on all sorts of things, and it's so helpful and just such a simple way of going about faith and I just love how they represent the Jesus that I love so well. So if you're looking for some support in that spiritual area of your life, like, go check out Cedar Hill Sandpoint. So the reality is, let's just do a quick recap on these three indicators of fear.
Speaker 1:Right, Fear indicates we're being lazy, that we're lacking conviction and that we're not connected spiritually. So I wanna encourage you and remind you that fear is never gonna go away. Fear will always be there, but when our conviction rises, our fear is quiet, and the goal is not to eradicate our life of fear. Fear is actually a very healthy indicator that we're on a great path. If we don't have any fears, maybe we're really not doing that thing that we're called for because it should kind of make you a little bit nervous to some extent. But we don't want to subordinate our life to fear, and that's the difference, right there, all right, If you are ready to just be free like Julie, I'm done with fear this is really helpful. And you want to take this a little bit further? Just remember that you can text freedom that word freedom to 208-944-1836. And then I will send you a beautiful magazine style PDF.
Speaker 1:That is the. It's the very nugget version of the upcoming book for the conscious investor and it talks about beyond financial freedom and how we develop personal freedom, and that's what this is about. You really want to support people in developing that personal freedom. Conscious investor you are. You're so rad. I appreciate you. I appreciate the time you take to listen to these episodes. It's always a delight to know that I'm not alone. Other people are thinking in these ways, and not just in these specific ways, but looking for deeper, richer meaning and substance in life and being willing to do the work to do it, because it is effort. We can't be lazy with our life, Not if we want to do something beautiful and create something beautiful in our life. That means that we have to be a driver in our own life. Until next time, cheers to your health, your mindset and your life. Thank you. ©. Transcript Emily Beynon.
