Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the Poweredge podcast, where power is refined, impact sharpens, and leaders move from success that performs to powerful legacy.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Hello and welcome. I'm your host, Alara Sage.
Anxiety is an emotion, a state of being that a large part of our population is very accustomed to.
Dare I say, experiences anxiety on a regular basis.
But anxiety is not power, and even more precisely, anxiety is not presence.
Anxiety is when we are literally thinking about possibilities, potentials, in a state of anxiety. We are up in our minds, we are in thought, and we are moving through potential outcomes or experiences that are causing our nervous system to react.
This can be situations about your business, this can be situations about your relationship, this can even be situations about yourself.
The most important thing to understand is what I just said. It is you are not in the present moment.
Power is a state of presence.
And there's so much that is granted to us when we understand what it means to be fully present in the moment.
You know, that is a term that is often spoken of a lot, and it's something that I find that few accomplish.
Well, because it requires a great depth of self awareness, it is very easy for us to abandon the moment and find ourselves in thought.
So not only is anxiety not a place of power because you are not in a state of presence.
And to take this a little bit deeper, what does presence actually grant us? That's a whole another conversation.
But ultimately, when you are fully present, you are emotionally grounded.
You are in a state of coherence, which in the institute of heart math is where your brain and your heart are working in unison together because they're not separate. And it's even proven now that there are more of a brain, its own neurological center of the heart, than the brain itself. So you are in a state of coherence between your mind and your heart.
What matters to you, your purpose, your values and your thoughts.
And you are available to the state of internal wisdom, that state of internal knowing, intuition, whatever you want to call it, as well as you are tapped into everything that is happening in that moment, meaning other people's feelings and states of being, as well as the interactions between the people that are in that moment and all of the different facets of the experience.
So presence is pure power, 100%.
So anxiety is pulling you out of that presence.
But the also the other thing about anxiety is it's not just something that's uncomfortable and dare I say, it's not just something that is normal because it is so rampant in our society.
I think a lot of times we just believe that it's a part of success, we believe that it's a part of pressure, we believe that it's a part of being a leader.
And I won't debunk that completely because there are always going to be times where you have to face your, your internal fear in order to create whatever it is you're creating.
However, to say that anxiety is a normal state of being or simply a symptom of success is wrong, incorrect, and definitely not doing humanity any justice whatsoever.
So as I mentioned, anxiety is where you are not in the present moment, you are up in thought and you are projecting into the future.
But let's take a deeper look at anxiety because emotions, any emotion, every single emotion, is pointing to a belief structure.
So beliefs are thoughts that we create into beliefs about ourselves, about the world, about relationship, about business, about every single category under the sun. And you have beliefs about all of it, whether you're aware of those beliefs or not. You know, in the first seven years of our life, a lot of those beliefs become programmed from our parents and the people that we spend the most time with.
Those beliefs elicit emotion in the body.
So anxiety isn't simply not being in the present moment. Anxiety isn't simply a projection into the future that may or may not be true. Anxiety is pointing to a belief.
And this is where we take anxiety to a whole other realm.
This is where the power comes from.
Because although anxiety itself is not a state of power, we could absolutely learn how to find power in anxiety as we can learn to find power in any emotion, any state of being, and any experience.
The trick is to be able to one, have that self awareness.
If you are not even aware that you're having anxiety, if you're unaware of what it feels like in your body to be triggered, if you are unaware of when you are not in the present moment, you have some work to
[00:07:38] Speaker A: do
[00:07:40] Speaker B: because already you're at a massive disadvantage.
Self awareness is crucial for leaders.
Self awareness is crucial for creators.
So having the self awareness that I feel anxiety, I feel anxious, I feel unnerved, and really what that's saying is I feel unsafe.
I'm going to be honest with you here.
The whole conversation around safety took me quite a while to first off, really accept.
And why do I mean this? What, what am I saying?
It's very obvious. The majority of the time, in the realm of the physical reality, our bodies, we are perfectly safe, right? Like as I sit here right now, I am safe.
If you walk into a board meeting, you are technically physically safe. No matter what really happens as far as the conversation in that meeting, even if you quote, unquote, lose your job or have something quite radical happen in the meeting, you physically are safe.
And so a large part of me, through my own personal process, kind of debunked safety for a long time.
I wanted to understand it as that's just a part of our brain that hasn't evolved.
But that's not true.
There is some truth to it, but it's not 100% truth.
And really, if you sit with that kind of concept, our brain just hasn't evolved.
It doesn't even feel right. Because why would our brain hold on to something that isn't serving us? That's not really how nature works, that's not how evolution works.
So then the question becomes if humans don't feel safe in our society at large, where we are largely safe now, yes, bad things happen there. There are things that do happen where people are not physically safe. Correct.
But if you look at your day to day, most of the time you are safe.
And if you look at the times that you feel anxiety, they are not experiences that are are validating that sense of unsafety. Right? You are not in a car crash.
You are not being chased by somebody with a knife or a gun.
You generally are speaking to people. You are, you know, doing something outside of your comfort zone or you are working with something in your life that frankly is triggering you.
So my point to this is, is that when we speak about feeling unsafe, the belief, actually I want to bring it back to the belief because this is truth, the belief that you don't actually feel safe. I want to clarify and make it really clear that I'm not speaking to a concept that you're being chased by a man with a gun, or you just experienced a car crash, or you're walking along.
If you have a fair heights, like a high building or something where you feel like you might fall right there isn't a direct threat to your physical presence.
So what is then the belief that you're not safe?
Because this is the question to be asking yourself.
If you are a person that experiences anxiety on any level of somewhat consistency, this is a question to not just ask yourself, but explore very deeply.
What do you believe about yourself that grants you this feeling subconsciously, not consciously, that you are not safe?
And as I alluded to at the earlier part of the conversation, it absolutely goes back to our childhood and experiences we've had in life.
There's a lot more to it than just that.
So if you had a really loving childhood. Sometimes we just want to dismiss that. No, my childhood was fine. I didn't really have anything.
But there's a lot to understand where, for one, children experience things very differently than adults do.
Sometimes something to an adult feels very benign, wasn't so benign to a child.
So oftentimes when we look back at our life as adults, we don't see what we actually experienced from the perspective of being a child.
And there are many layers to safety. It isn't just physical safety. One of the biggest attributes of safety is emotional safety. And let's be really blatant and honest here, our society has no idea what that is because the majority of humans walking around do not hold emotional intelligence. Therefore they don't feel safe in their own emotions, let alone supporting other people to feel safe in theirs.
Emotions feel very chaotic. Emotions feel like something that we can't quote, unquote, control.
So the fear, the uncertainty, the unsafety of that chaos is very real.
Also the, you know, the fear of failure, the fear of embarrassment, the fear of abandonment, these are fundamental to the human experience.
They are not. Those are not things that only some humans experience. All of us experience that.
And these are factors that can bring us into a sense of unsafety. If I do this, I'm going to fail. If I do this, I'll be rejected, ostracized, not received, not understood even.
There's a plethora of different examples that I could go into around the topic of the belief I'm not safe.
It can go all the way back to those first few moments when you were a newborn.
Do you know what happened? Do you know if you were placed directly into your mother's arms or were you placed on a cold table for a moment?
Do you know what happened when you would cry as a baby?
Did you feel that you had support and safety in your life in those early years?
This is often what I find when I explore this conversation with my clients.
Now, unresolved experiences, meaning an experience that you weren't able to process emotionally in your body because emotions are of the body are stored there.
This equates to all different kinds of issues that Western medicine is just starting to catch up on, that Eastern medicine has known for a very long time, And that unresolved energy, unresolved emotion can be triggered.
So while something is happening that seems to have no physical risk or potential risk to your physical body, right to your actual physical safety, it can trigger a memory that you may or may not be aware of and most likely are not.
From a very long time ago that your body remembers, but you have, and this is known in psychology, you have disassociated from it in your mind because it in of itself didn't feel safe.
Quite a lot of layers to that.
So just take a breath.
You don't have to understand everything I said.
You will feel it.
And most importantly, out of this entire conversation, what I want you to really understand is a. Anxiety is not a normal state.
It is meant to show us that we are believing something.
It is not simply a symptom of success or high visibility or leadership or a place of power.
Yes, it can be, in certain circumstances, something that we're having to deal with because we are making big decisions that do hold risk. Like if you're the President of the United States, no doubt you're going to feel anxious at times because you are making decisions that have large impact.
But if you are the President of the United States and you live in a state of anxiety, that is pointing to deeper truth.
So understanding that there's a difference between decisions and circumstances causing anxiety. Right. And being more in a consistent state of anxiety. And that's what I'm really speaking to here.
Regardless, all of it points to beliefs, no matter what.
Because going back to the example of the President of the United States, the belief is, what if I choose the wrong decision? I could kill people, or I could cost people, or I could. That's a belief. I could fail. I could make a wrong choice here. Right. So it always comes down to belief.
And you know, that can be a beautiful thing because we want somebody to pause when they're making big decisions for a nation.
We want somebody to pause when they're making decisions that are going to impact others. We want them, quite frankly, to feel that and to have to consider the decision.
So anxiety is not necessarily wrong or bad or hey, don't ever feel it, because then that means that you're doing something wrong. That's not what I'm here to speak about.
All emotions serve purpose, including anxiety and fear. And all of them point to belief structures.
So when you're in a perpetual state of anxiety, or when you experience it often, regardless of the decisions you're making, this is where it's pointing to a true sense of instability. A belief. Sorry, excuse me. It is pointing to a true belief of instability and unsafety. And this is the gold.
This is the gold. Why is it gold? Because if you are experiencing this, there is a solution for you. And the solution is definitely not just calm down, relax the Solution is not taking vacation or getting massages. The solution most definitely is not drinking alcohol, despite what our society really loves to portray, especially in the movies. You're tense, you're pressure, you're going through a lot. Just drink some alcohol. That does the opposite effect. It gives you temporary feeling of relaxation, but overall does absolutely nothing to resolve the underlying belief that is creating this in your life.
So drink away. It's not going to cure it.
And I think most people would know that, because when has it worked again? Temporarily, yes, but in the big scheme of things, no.
And really, nothing else will either in the context of pharmaceuticals or supplements. And hear me when I say, sometimes it can be so bad that people need to take support like pharmaceuticals to get them out of a very vicious cycle. So I'm not against any of it.
Most of these things that humanity has created for ourselves has a place.
But if you're having to stay on pharmaceuticals all the time because of the anxiety, again, you are not getting to the core.
The core?
The core of what is creating this state of being in yourself. So it will always have a grasp on you.
And who wants that?
I don't think anybody would raise their hand and be like, I truly desire anxiety to rule my life.
No, no, we don't want that.
So why is our society so anxiety ridden?
Because so much of us don't believe inherently that we are safe, that we are secure in our bodies, in our emotions, in our lives, in our relationships, in our businesses.
And we aren't in a lot of ways. The world is chaotic.
Things change. We always say change is the only constant.
But there is a difference between needing the stability to come from your relationships, your business, your financial, you know, structure, situation, society, the government, world peace, and there being a sense of safety within yourself that is there regardless of what is occurring in your external reality.
When you have a sense of safety within yourself, which I always say is one of the three things that we seek as humans, we seek a sense of safety, a sense of safety, stability, and a sense of love.
When you have that and those big decisions arise, that might trigger a sense of nervousness because you are faced with a big decision, that sense of safety overrides that nervousness. Instead of that nervousness overriding your sense of self, overriding your ability for clarity, discernment, and execution.
So if you have a consistent state of anxiety, this is the place for you to become curious and start asking yourself, what do you believe?
I mean, I just gave it to you. You're going to believe that you're not safe or stable or secure or loved or received or supported.
But play with it because this is the golden nugget for you. This is the opportunity for you to radically change your life.
Not a drug that you have to keep taking, not a bottle that you have to keep purchasing. A radical transformation within your subconscious mind.
That affects your conscious mind and how you go about making decisions and taking action in.
Ask the question and when you find the belief.
And you might even find some memories there, some memories of when you didn't feel safe, secure, loved, appreciated, any of the things.
Now you have the opportunity to shift that belief.
Awareness is the first step. You have to first be aware that you have the belief.
The second step is the acceptance. The acceptance for yourself that you ever chose to choose a belief like this. Because sometimes these pills are hard to swallow. Sometimes we find beliefs in ourselves that are very counterintuitive to how we've been creating our lives. But when you're honest with yourself, you can actually see how it's been there in the background, like a low hum the whole time.
You're not wrong for having these beliefs. Most of them happened before you knew, had the awareness to choose.
So love yourself, accept yourself, and then you can start to take action on transforming that belief and creating a new belief.
And that's where the magic truly happens.
So remember, anxiety first and foremost is not a state of presence and therefore it is not a state of power.
It is pulling you up and out into your mind and into future potentials.
Potentials there may or may not ever happen.
And two, and here's the real truth. Anxiety is pointing to a deeper belief that you hold in your subconscious mind that you may be completely unaware of about yourself or about your environment that is creating this experience.
I hope this has brought you a lot of awareness and revelation.
If there are parts of the conversation that you felt like you couldn't quite understand or weren't landing completely, I recommend you go back and listen. I brought in a lot in this conversation. There was layers of wisdom here. So go back and listen again and perhaps listen more than once, because each time you listen, your mind is going to hear it's slightly different and hear something new.
Your path to a place of presence is in the here and now.
Thank you so much. And until next time, much love.
[00:29:12] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the Power Edge podcast with host Alora Sage.
Connect with us on Instagram at the Power Edge or on YouTube @Alarasage.
