Episode 305: Getting over a BIG fear
What are you holding back from doing? In today's episode, Fiona shares how exposure therapy helped her with her fear of spiders and how this can help small business owners to overcome the fear and gain confidence. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Arachnophobia (fear of spiders)
Fiona’s early childhood memories of encountering spiders
How Fiona overcame her fear of spiders for her children
Exposure therapy
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Welcome to episode 305 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today it is a quick tip episode and that's where I share a tip, tool, or tactic that you can implement immediately. This one's a little bit personal. It's not personal because we're talking about business, but it derives from a personal issue that I have had pretty much my whole life and I seem to not be able to get through it. Before we get stuck into that, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the beautiful land on which I record this podcast. Also, the land that is exacerbating this problem for me, but is beautiful nonetheless, and the traditional owners are the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
I also just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has contacted us about last week's episode, all about why and how we rebranded and just in general have contacted us about the rebrand, whether they heard it through the Sunday email. If you don't know, we send an email every single Sunday full of business tips and ideas. It is not just a recap of the podcast, it is usually quite different, and you can subscribe to that at mydailybusiness.com/subscribe. But whether they saw it on the Sunday email or Instagram or through last week's podcast, we've had so much great feedback. Thank you. Let's get into today's quick tip episode.
Today, I'm going to talk about something that is quite a personal challenge of mine. I am 42 and I probably have struggled with this particular challenge, at least since we came to Australia and I was just under four when we came. My whole life that I can remember, I have struggled with this particular problem. It's hard to tell when you have very early memories if something happened or if you imagined it in a way. But I believe that this happened because I feel like this is where the problem starts. This might sound like a bit like a therapy session, but when I was very young, I was before school and I started school when I was four and a half.
I think I was about four maybe, even though it was the first year of school. I'm not sure. My parents lived in a quiet leafy suburb when we moved to Australia and I was going up to the top of the driveway to get the post with my dad from the letter box. I remember looking down at my knee and seeing a giant, what I felt like was a giant spider on my knee. Shortly after that, I was probably seven or eight at this time. My dad got bitten by a redback spider. He was gardening and it bit him in the calf muscle of one of his legs. My mother was a registered nurse, she was a midwife and psychiatric nurse and all sorts of wonderful things. As a nurse, she was able to treat him.
I think he must have gone to the hospital, but I remember it felt like months afterwards, maybe it was just weeks, but it felt like months that my mother was dressing and redressing this wound on the back of his leg. And for anyone who doesn't know redback spiders, a pretty horrible creatures. I just checked and about 10,000 people are bitten by a redback spider in Australia every single year. However, there has been one death in the last 70 years which is from the first place that I Googled. I'm sitting here going, their fatal, they're not, but it's not a nice thing to have. I had this spider on my knee that I was very scared about, maybe I wasn't scared about it, but I remember that specifically looking down at my knee and seeing this spider. Then my dad had a redback spider bite and we lived in an area where if you moved like the TV or you moved something that had been there for a while, quite often there would be a big spider behind it.
I remember my mom, we had like a split-level house. When you went down the stairs, there was a tiny little landing and then more stairs to go downstairs. My mom moved a piece of artwork and there was a giant black huntsman. She had grown up her whole life in Ireland where there are just no spiders and it's cold and everything else. I remember her having this big broom trying to hit this spider. And I just remember thinking, “My God, like this spider's going to attack us.” She wasn't scared of it, but she was more just like, this is a nuisance and I can't reach it. I have had numerous occasions with spiders. When I was living out of home for the first time I lived in North Carlton, I lived in all sorts of places, in North Melbourne.
I remember one particular time I was moving between houses and I had my old Camara trusty crappy car. I was driving on the freeway on the eastern freeway from Collingwood to Ringwood. That's a bit of a drive for anyone who doesn't know. Just before I got onto the freeway, there was a petrol station. I was getting petrol and when I got back to my car, I saw a giant Huntsman. I was about 18 at the time and all of my clothes, or maybe I must have been about 20. All my clothes and all the crap that I was moving between houses were in the back of my car. I was young, I was messy. It was just in bags and everything on the backseat. And in the boot, I saw this giant huntsman.
Suddenly, it disappeared into the car. I went into the petrol station, and I got a massive can of Martin, I know that is bad and I sprayed the whole car and I was petrified, but I sprayed so much that I was almost choking. I asked the guy in the petrol station to help me and he did not. I got onto the freeway frightened for my life that this huntsman, this very hairy big spider would crawl over my dashboard or something else, managed to get to my parent's house and it crawled out of the boot. It had somehow got from the front seat into the backseat into the boot. It was scary. I remember my dad helping me and I was just crying and he was like, “Calm down, it's a spider.” I've had so many instances of that when I used to live in North Melbourne, I would sometimes go back to my parent's house in North Ringwood, which is a bit of a drive if there was a spider in the house.
I have quite irrational probably fear of spiders now. I live in an area in North Warrandyte. It is a very bushy leafy area, huntsman, and spiders, are part of the course. I have had to get better at this, particularly as we've had children. My husband is like, “You are not putting your fear onto them.” My husband is very much into like save every animal on the planet, which is lovely. He does not want to kill anything in our house. We have a spider jar, he will collect any insect, anything into that. I'm fine with pretty much every other insect, just spiders. He'll collect it. He's taught my 10-year-old son how to collect a spider, how to know if spiders are poisonous or not, and to put it back out into its place.
I understand that I'm on the spider's territory, I have a house in the bush and they were here first and they'll probably be here long after hu are extinct. But I have had to start trying what is known as exposure therapy. I'm not working with a psychologist or anything like that. What I'm about to say I'm not a mental health professional by any means. If you have a sincere phobia that is stopping you from living your life go and talk to your GP and seek proper mental health help. For me, this fear is something that panics me. I can start crying. I can feel like, I've gotta get outta the house. It's pretty bad, but it's getting better. I have to say that I've been in the last 12 months allowing myself to have exposure therapy, a very loose exposure therapy.
What is exposure therapy? Also, why am I talking about it on a podcast? I think that a lot of the time in business we freak out about stuff that we've never done. We put a whole lot of worry into our mind about things like being on a panel, speaking on a podcast, being photographed for the media, and even talking about your business's success in some capacity because we worry about this stuff that often doesn't happen in the same way that I worry that even though it has been proven again and again, that daddy long legs, huntsman, very common spiders where I live in Victoria, in Melbourne, that they're not that poisonous unless a child eats it or something, but they're not poisonous if they bite you, it's not going to cause much more than an irritation and maybe a little bit of soreness.
I will still be worried about it. What if they do have some venom that nobody knows about and I'm going to be the unsuspecting victim? We worry about things that have very little and scientifically proven in my case, pretty much zero chance of happening instead of thinking about how could I expose myself to this fear and see if the fear diminishes. I have to say that I used to be petrified of every single spider. If there was a spider in the room, I would move rooms. Sometimes I would go to my parents' house or go to somebody else's house to not be in the house. If a spider was in the house, I'm talking smaller spiders, daddy long legs and things like that. I've gotten so much better at this.
I would say that I can pick up or I don't pick them up. Let's be real. I put them into a jar. A daddy's long legs, a black like a house spider. They're pretty awful. Any spider that's not a huntsman. Huntsman is my most feared spider. If anyone wants to ever scare me, you know what to do. But I have to say that as I have exposed myself more to these animals and thought I'm an adult, I'm in charge of two children, I cannot just leave the house if there's a spider here. I also have to teach them not to be afraid of them. I've had to learn to get the spider jar out and sometimes I don't do that. Sometimes I still get the can of horrible spray, but most of the time I will try to get the spider in the jar.
That has taken a long time. Now I'm not talking about Huntsman, I just want to make that clear. I don't go anywhere near Huntsman. I'm still petrified of them. The other day I opened the door to my car and there was a big huntsman on the side of the door and I had to call one of my neighbours because no one else is home. Thank God this guy Ben came up save the day. I'm not there yet, but I feel like in the next couple of years I may get to a point where enough of the exposure therapy, my loose exposure therapy, I'm not talking about professional help, has helped me get to that point. I also have read a lot of books on spiders. I've done a lot of research. I've even looked into getting a spider in a glass and putting it on my desk.
I'm just constantly okay with it being around, even at the museum, I will go and look at all the spiders. I'm fascinated by them, but I'm also scared of them. But in terms of business, I want you to take away from today's episode, what do I need to give myself a little more exposure to? What am I holding myself back from doing? I'm not talking again about serious phobias and having a serious anxiety attack. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about where maybe you'd love to be on a panel or a speaking gig, or you'd love to put yourself forward for a podcast. You know that when you think about it, it's a little like, “Oh my God.” But you're also a little bit excited about that. There's a little part of you that is somewhat excited about it.
It's not to the point where you are crying and anxious because maybe that's not right. Or maybe you need to talk to somebody professional in the mental health space to work through that. But if you are sitting back from putting yourself forward because you feel like, “I'm going to lose it on stage, I'm going to sweat profusely, I'm going to be the worst speaker.” All these things that you tell yourself, which are just not true, and you can't factually say they're true because you haven't done the thing yet, then I would urge you to think about how can I start exposing myself to that in a safer environment. That might look like doing a podcast because a podcast for a lot of podcasts, they are still recorded at home. You can choose to be on the phone, you can choose to be on Zoom, you can choose to be on all these different platforms that are out there for recording podcasts.
But a lot of the time like if someone came on my podcast and said, can we turn the video off? I'd be like, for sure. And a lot of the podcasts that we used to do were without video just because of the way it was recording and I was worried about internet issues. But most of the time it is a casual conversation. You can also ask for the photo, for the questions upfront, or ahead of time. We always send ours ahead of time so that people have a little bit of time to prep. You can also ask them for the recording before it goes out. We don't tend to send that very often, but if somebody was worried and said, “I'm a little anxious, could I listen to it first?” We would of course do that and edit it if they so felt.
There are a lot more safety measures in place as opposed to jumping straight into, let’s say doing a keynote for whatever trade show or event that you would like to be a keynote speaker at. But starting with that small step and thinking about how could I expose myself to this fear that I have and see if there's any truth in it in a safe environment. And for me, when I started catching the spiders in the spider jar that we have, my husband was there, he has been amazing. He is not scared of spiders whatsoever. There are other things that he's scared of, but not that. When he caught one, he caught a massive one the other day in his car, it seems to be the season for spiders in cars in Melbourne.
He showed me, and he said, “This is massive. Do you want to hold the jar?” And I was like, “Nope.” But he came close to me with it and he is helping me expose myself more and more to spiders. When I caught a couple of those first ones, it was with his help, but also my eldest son who is not scared of spiders, I have to say massive thanks to my husband for that. He has been like “Mom, you can do this.” And has helped me immensely with this. Look at how you can do this in a safe environment first. Maybe if you're doing a podcast, and you have your best friend in the room with you when you're recording, they have to be silent. But maybe you have somebody else there, or maybe you call your best friend before you get on and straight after, so that you have that support system.
But I would urge you to think about what is holding you back and do you have some fear that hasn't been realized and you have no evidence for that thing going to happen? How can you start exposing yourself more? Again, I want to stress, I'm not a mental health professional. If you have serious anxiety about things, I would work through that with somebody. I have looked at actually working with a psychologist or a hypnotist or whatever on this. But I feel like I've had to just live the exposure because of where we live and where we have chosen to live and having kids. I think having kids has forced me to expose myself to having to catch spiders. That is it for today, and I know it's a little longer than the usual tip episode, but I hope that it helps you and I hope it asks you to think about what are you worried about in life that is holding you back.
Me living to choose to live in the area that I do in North Warrandyte is saying I need to get okay with spiders. They are part of living in the bush, and I have to be okay with them and I have to be okay, particularly in front of my children so that I'm not passing my fear onto them. I've done lots of meditations, I've done lots of things about this fear in particular. I hope that that has helped you. I hope that if you feel like my fear is way bigger than this, please go and see your GP. Please go and get some mental health help to work through those. I am feeling stronger. I'm feeling like one day I'm going to catch a huntsman and put it on Instagram and be like, “Look at me. I am a superwoman.” That is it for today's not-so-quick, quick-tip episode. If you wanted to check out the show notes, you can do that over at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/305. Thank you so much for reading. Good luck with your fears, and I'll see you next time.
