Episode 5: Working With Your Mind

EPISODE 5

Working With Your Mind

Radical Recentring with Nonie White

This is Radical Recentring with me, Nonie White. The show for ambitious women who are done pushing, proving and performing, and who are ready to build something unshakeable from who they are at their authentic best. If you're at an inflection point, ready for your next level of success, personal power and impact, and you want to do it differently, you're in the right place. Let's go.

In the last episode, I asked you to notice the shoulds that you're living by. To ask yourself, is this belief or this value mine or did I inherit it from somewhere? But here's one thing that I didn't say. That question is actually very hard to answer when you're super tired, when you're stretched thin, and when you're running on empty. Because when you're depleted and something triggers you, your default operating patterns will likely kick in. So you immediately start to operate from a place of fear and self-protection, reacting from autopilot rather than intention. Psychological fitness is the capacity to stay steady when old patterns get loud and to choose your response instead of defaulting to reacting to your conditioning.

So today, let's talk about what you can actually do when fear takes over.

What's actually happening? When you're well rested and resourced, when your foundations are solid, you can catch your conditioning. You can notice the should. You can pause and choose to think and feel and behave differently. But when you're already tired, overstretched and running on empty, and something really tricky occurs, in that moment, you don't often get the luxury of reflection. Your default operating patterns take over. The ones that are driven by fear. Fear of being judged, of being not good enough. Fear of letting people down. Fear of being found out, fear of things falling apart, fear of failure.

One client described being overstretched and overwhelmed as, my brain's just not working properly. Another shared that this happens when her stress bucket is overflowing. And a third shared that when she's really under-resourced, she gets so overwhelmed that she finds she can't concentrate on anything. This then kicks off a downwards trajectory of negative emotions and everything suddenly feels worse. So she gets really stressed, she gets distressed. She starts criticising herself, and from there she starts doubting herself.

You lose the gap between what happens and how you respond. You react from instinctive protection, not intentional clarity. All of these patterns are from conditioning that you picked up long ago. They're not from who you're becoming.

One of my clients, I'll call her Bella, was a senior leader in a fast growing company. She had a big team. They were building real momentum. And from the outside, it looked like she was smashing it. But then her co-founder went on maternity leave and she immediately began to unravel. So one day she came to me to a coaching session and she was in a massive tizz. And when I asked her how she was, she said, I feel overwhelmed. God, it feels good to say that. I feel really overwhelmed.

So Bella was the leader of a big team. She puts pressure on herself to know everything and to be completely perfect. So she couldn't share with anyone that she was feeling overwhelmed. She described 3am wakings worrying about decisions that she'd already made. She was constantly worrying about team performance. She described herself as running around like a headless chicken, firefighting everything, but feeling like she wasn't actually solving anything. She was sending messages she hadn't thought through, so people thought she was on it. But then she was lying awake replaying every conversation, every interaction, every email, convinced that she'd got it all wrong and everyone was thinking that she was actually a terrible leader. She started to interpret her colleagues' short replies as evidence that they'd lost faith in her too. She said, I just felt so low on confidence, like really incompetent, like I couldn't get anything right.

She was massively depleted, stretched beyond capacity, and her default patterns had taken over. The ones that were telling her that a good leader never shows uncertainty and a good leader never gets it wrong.

So we started with the basics, because when your system's really activated, you just can't think your way out of that situation. So first we calmed her nervous system with some breathing exercises. Then when she was calmly in the room, we did a big brain dump of everything that she had going on in her head. We got it onto paper. From there, we focused on the areas that she could directly control, not all the gazillions that were outside of her control that are stressful, but the ones that she could directly control, before swiftly delegating or ditching the rest. Suddenly her workload looked manageable and decisive.

Then we had a look at her thinking patterns. Was the short message personal? No, her colleague was stretched thin themselves. Was the short attitude or her interpretation of it a permanent thing? No. Was everything actually falling apart when she looked clearly? Again, no. She'd just got herself into a bit of a pickle when she'd fallen into overworking patterns, neglected her wellbeing, got overwhelmed. And in truth, it was just a bit of a wobbly transition period. So she reminded herself who she was and that her wellbeing must come first because that impacts her thinking patterns, her performance and how she works and how she manages her team.

Six months on, Bella's team did a 360 degree feedback exercise. And the same words came back from multiple people calling Bella a calm, inspiring leader. Bella was obviously delighted. And what was interesting was that this wasn't what she was trying to project. It was who she'd genuinely become.

The tools to learn how to respond rather than react from old patterns is exactly what we build inside the Unshakeable Method, my four month one-to-one coaching programme. If you're listening to this and you know it's time to do this work, you'll find more information about how you can work with me in the show notes.

Creating space to choose. The goal isn't to never feel overwhelmed, because that's not realistic. The goal is to recognise your needs and then create space to pull yourself back into focus and consciousness so you can choose your response instead of reacting on autopilot.

So with Bella, we started with the basics. When fear has taken you over, your body is activated, your heart's racing, your thoughts are spinning, you're in fight or flight, you're in protection mode, you're trying to keep safe and you can't think clearly because your system doesn't feel safe. You don't have the cognitive capacity to solve all the problems because you just want to be safe. So sometimes before you do anything else, you need to breathe. You need to ground yourself in the present moment to tell your body you're safe. So you feel your feet on the floor, your bum on the seat, hands on your chest, and you take three deep breaths, getting really present with all the sensations in your body as you breathe in, and then you try and lengthen your breaths out.

It sounds too simple to work, but it interrupts the fear response and it creates just enough space for your thinking brain to come back online for you to start being able to think clearly again and calmly.

The reframe. The spiral didn't disappear forever for Bella. She's human, but she learned to put things in place to stop it happening so frequently. And when it did happen again, to catch it sooner, to recognise that fear was driving and to use these tools to come back to safety and to come back to clarity.

This is psychological fitness. It's not about thinking positive. It's not about becoming perfect in any way. It's about being human and being equipped. Because when you have self-awareness and your foundations are stronger, as we talked about in Episode 3, you get triggered less often. And when you know your conditioning, when you have that self-understanding, as we explored in Episode 4 and today, you recognise your default pattern sooner. And when you have tools to work with your mind, you know what to do when fear takes the wheel.

Together, these build your ability to lead yourself, even under pressure, even when things are all going wrong, because you can't do the deeper identity work, knowing who you are at your authentic best, if you're constantly stuck in survival mode. You need to be able to manage your mind first, and only then will you be able to access your true self and build from there.

So here's my question for you. What patterns come up time and time again when you feel pressured? What does it look like when you're operating from a place of fear? What happens? And what would change if you could catch it sooner?

In the next episode, we're moving into your identity, not the performed version, not the conditioned version, but who you actually are at your authentic best. How you are when you're using your unique superpowers and making your highest contribution, your values, your strengths, your natural way of being. Because that's where the real deep grounded self-confidence comes from, the internal self-confidence that stays stable even if everything else is changing. That's what we're building toward.

Click in the show notes to watch a short video and to discover how the Unshakeable Method actually works.

I'm Nonie White. This is Radical Recentring. Thank you for listening and I'll see you next time.

Thank you for being here. If today's episode resonated with you, check out the Leadership Identity Quiz. The link is in the show notes. It's free, takes two minutes, has 10 questions, and it will show you exactly how you're leading yourself and others now, as well as which patterns might be stopping you from reaching your next level of success. And if you know you're ready to do this work, there's a link to find out more about the Unshakeable Method, my four-month one-to-one coaching programme. I'm Nonie White. This is Radical Recentring, and I'll see you next time.