67 Aaron Hill: Do It Scared

Fear has a unique way of announcing its presence in our bodies. For me, it's the cold sweat under my arms that appears despite the warm spring air of Barcelona. As I made my way to a radio station where I'd been invited to speak in Catalan—my third language—about my personal journey and professional work, that familiar cold sweat reminded me I was stepping far beyond my comfort zone.

What makes this experience worth sharing isn't the interview itself, but the practices that helped me move through the fear and show up.  I'd spent time sitting with my discomfort, acknowledging the protective voices in my head without letting them dictate my actions.

Perhaps the most powerful practice was consciously choosing what this opportunity meant to me. Instead of framing it as a potential public embarrassment, I decided it represented a chance to prove to my younger self that remarkable achievements are still possible, even on unfamiliar stages. 

The next time you feel that familiar clamp of fear in your gut, remember it might be pointing you toward your greatest growth opportunity. 

Need support applying these tools to your own challenges? Let's have a conversation.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Forging Resilience

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to Forging Resilience, exploring for a different perspective on strength and leadership. Join me as we discuss experiences and stories with guests to help gain fresh insights around challenge, success and leadership. It was a warm spring afternoon here in Barcelona. The sun was shining, the breeze was cool and I definitely got a sense that spring was just around the corner, the sense of newness, a fresh possibility that I love about the seasonal changes, especially spring. As I made my way from the house down to the train station, I got the familiar feeling of fear within my body, nerves, and the key indicator for me is the cold sweat that I get in my armpit, despite the fact that it's really quite warm outside.

Speaker 1: 1:03

On my way into town and arrived early, as I'd planned to, to sit and just practice being with this fear before the event started. You see, I've been invited to speak on radio. I was going to be speaking in my third language about my own story and about my work, and to say that I was close to the edge of my comfort would have been an understatement of the year for me personally, so many things came up for me in accepting this. In my heart, in my gut, I knew that it was the right thing to do. The invitation had come, the opportunity had come, and despite that clamp in my gut of resistance or fear I often use that as the compass of yep. I can follow that there's something to learn, and as I sat in the studio my mouth already started to dry up. It became very, very real. Yet there's a few things about this story that make it really quite interesting. That's the reason I'm going to share it about this story that make it really quite interesting and it's the reason I'm going to share it. There's things that I've been practicing personally and that I help my clients see for themselves when they're taking on new challenges, when they're learning about themselves, when they're stepping into their unknown or onto the edge of their comfort.

Speaker 1: 2:46

And the first one is this preparation. I was given a pre-interview, which went fine an easy conversation with a woman who took lots of notes and then sent me a rough guide of how the interview would go a few weeks before. It wasn't a script. She said just something to base the conversation on. However, every time I picked up the script, I couldn't help but feel even more resistance. I wanted to have a free-flowing conversation and to see these facts and figures and dates and almost like the feeling of being boxed in contained, which really didn't resonate with me. So my preparation in terms of the actual interview was minimal. In that moment I prefer to trust my instinct and heart, although there was an interesting lesson at the end that maybe I could have read the script a few more times to have slightly clear certain opinions before speaking about them. That's what I'd consider the external preparation.

Speaker 1: 4:06

Then there's an internal element, and that was, as I alluded to before going into the interview, sitting with that level of discomfort and that nerves and even those voices in my head and letting them just be there. I'd sat with them many times before going into this interview. I'd written about them, I've reframed them. I allowed them to be there because I understood that they're just trying to serve me, they're trying to protect me from something that my brain considers dangerous, and really it's just a conversation with somebody who's interested in my background or elements of it, my story or elements of it and the work that I do.

Speaker 1: 4:53

The second part is visualisation, and I'm not going to give you a big whole host of things to do to visualise. However, I had seen myself there in that room doing the interview the room looked different. It was smaller, there's more windows than I thought, and the guy looked completely different. But on the day of the interview it didn't feel alien. My body and my brain had sensed that it had been there before. I'd allowed myself once again to imagine what it would be like, sat there in that interview speaking my third language and again just allowing all those emotions to come up and let go of them.

Speaker 1: 5:39

The third thing I did was I processed them. I really let them be there, really let them be there. In terms of the preparation, my heart was telling me don't follow this script this time. Just see what comes up for you. Part of me thinks I don't speak fluent Catalan. I speak enough to get by, and trying to explain complex ideas in certain tenses of grammar isn't something that comes very natural to me. So I'd much rather speak from my heart or off the cuff on the day, and what comes out comes out.

Speaker 1: 6:24

Allowing myself to process the emotions before the day meant that the emotions weren't as heightened on the day, and when I was sat outside letting them be there, I also practiced a few breath work techniques, just sat with the feeling, putting my attention on the feeling of air coming in through my nose and out through my nose, putting my attention on the feeling of air coming in through my nose and out through my nose.

Speaker 1: 6:50

And the fourth thing I did was I was the one who decided what I meant this opportunity mean. Does it mean I'm going to mess up on national or local depending on your political view radio, or is this just an opportunity to step into something that's new, learn about myself and prove to a younger version of me that you can still do quite incredible things, even if it's not on the same stage or platform as a once upon a time and I got to decide that it was the latter. That, for part of me, it was an incredible achievement, irregardless of the mistakes I made or what people thought of the interview. I did it for me, and if you find yourself sat on the edge of a challenge, be it internal or external, maybe consider looking at a few of those tools that I've talked about the preparation, the visualization, the processing and allowing and the meaning that you give this, and if you need some help and support with that, then get in touch. Let's have a conversation.