This Side of Fear – Lessons From Inner & Outer Blocks

Hey there. So today I’m going to share with you a little parable from my life that might shed some light on areas that you may be having any kind of mental blocks. Come along with me and let me know what you think. If you’re listening on Spotify, you can literally let me know, because there is a message capability there now. So if you’re a Spotify listener, please let me know what you think of the episode.

So I experienced a mental block, and that mental block was literally a block. Well, let me explain. So, for the first time in my life, I’ve been treating myself to a personal trainer once a week, and I would imagine that working with me as a client has a potential to be intimidating, not because I’m strong and fit physically although I am working on that but because I’m strong and fit mentally.

Let me explain. So. I am aware that sometimes my confidence has the capacity to make people adjust themselves accordingly or make assumptions about me, particularly when it comes to knowing my body. After all, I’ve been a dancer my whole life. It’s my job to have control over and understand my physical self. But from the start, it was important for me to let my trainer know that, even though I might seem like I know what I’m doing I have little to no experience in the weightlifting realm and that I really wanted to be sure that my smart body wasn’t making stupid choices about how I was doing things.

She understood completely what I was saying and went on to share with me that for her, the assumptions went the other way and that she often had to prove to her clients that she knew what she was doing, despite her slight physique and young age. She isn’t much bigger than a flea and is barely 22 years old, but she also happens to be an award-winning weightlifter. She’s awesome. I appreciated her candor and I assured her that I could already tell that she knew her stuff and that she had nothing that she needed to prove to me, and so our work began together with a foundation of honesty, mutual understanding and respect.

Despite how easy it might have been to assume or make judgments based on each of our appearances, from that moment on I knew we were a good fit. So, anyways, she always keeps our workouts varied and interesting. From battle ropes, never have I felt less elegant to the sled, which entails me channeling my inner quarterback. Well, on this particular day, she pulled out this small black block it’s about 16 inches high and she started to demonstrate the next exercise. I watched as she easily jumped up and off the block as this unfamiliar feeling came over me.

It was fear.

So it was my turn and I stepped in front of the block preparing to do the exercise. I stood there staring at it. I couldn’t move.
“Come on, you got this, Lisa, it’s easy.” I heard my trainer saying. She seemed somewhat surprised by my hesitancy, so I took a deep breath and I bent my knees preparing to jump, but something in my brain stopped me.

Now, as a life coach, I work a lot with fear, so it was actually super interesting for me to understand what was going on. I truly believed in my mind at that moment that I couldn’t do it and was already creating vivid storylines about what might happen when I missed the box. She lowered the height and had me jump off the box, which I did, albeit reluctantly, and I could even easily leap up and land on one leg. But that wasn’t the exercise. I was completely convinced there was no way I could do it with two feet. “Just try it once.” She kept saying “I’ll catch you if you fall.”

No amount of encouragement was working, so she downgraded me to a step, and, although I did that fairly easily, a few times that too came to a standstill and I couldn’t do it.

I noticed, though, that I wasn’t angry at myself or ashamed. In fact, that day, I found it super curious, almost funny. I knew instinctively that this moment was teaching me something about myself, although I didn’t know what, and despite what you might be thinking. It wasn’t about overcoming my fear.

My focus transformed from conquering my fear to understanding it, so I thought it might be interesting to look at my story through my lens as a coach to see if there were any inner blocks that were holding me back that day.

You might find this interesting.

There are four inner blocks that can hold us back or affect our ability to move forward with the things we want to do.

In coaching, we use the acronym Gail, g-a-i-l, so the G stands for gremlin.

Your gremlin is your inner critic, and it’s the voice that tells you in one way or another, that you’re not good enough. So, in my story, if the gremlin was responsible for holding me back, it might have sent me a message that said something like don’t do it, you’ll just embarrass yourself, or you aren’t strong enough to do it or that kind of thing. But I wasn’t hearing that message.

So A stands for assumption, an expectation that because something has happened in the past, it’s going to happen again Now. That’s a little bit interesting because somewhere deep down there may actually have been a time when I hurt myself trying something similar and I believed that this might be the same thing. Although I couldn’t put my finger on it, there’s a chance that there that might have been at play here.

So the I the I stands for interpretation, an opinion or judgment that you create around an event or a situation, or a person or an experience. It’s something that you believe to be true. I might have interpreted what happened as a weakness or waste of time, but for me that wasn’t it either. That wasn’t the case. Who knows how my trainer interpreted it, but we’re looking at my inner blocks, not hers.

So the L is for limiting beliefs. So limiting beliefs are something that you accept about life or about yourself or about your world or the people in it that limits you in some way. So many things could fall under this heading in my story, including limiting beliefs about age or health or strength or maybe even courage, but again, I didn’t really feel any of those.

So what was going on that day? You know, there’s a quote. There’s a quote that goes something like, and I paraphrase but everything you’ve ever wanted is sitting on the other side of fear.

To get what you want, you just need to get past your fear.

In some instances, that may be true, and fear can actually sometimes be a motivator, especially if you ascribe to the idea that overcoming it will bring you everything that you want.

But you know what I’m realizing. Maybe I did have a limiting belief that day.

Yeah, the limiting belief I had was that I’m supposed to overcome my fear, that when I’m faced with something that scares me, I’m somehow supposed to do it anyways.

Huh, so we spent at least 15 minutes more that day trying my trainer trying her hardest to convince me to do it to no avail. The funny thing is that I thought I wanted to do it, but now, in retrospect, I realize I could care less.

I’m grateful that it happened, though, and for today’s lesson, the block wasn’t a mental block, it was just a block.

I’m Lisa Hopkins. Thanks for listening. Stay safe and healthy, everyone, and remember to live in the moment.

Listen to Audio Version here!

Published in Collaboration with:

Also by Lisa Hopkins:

Strengthening the Divine Muscle of Choice

Facing Fear

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