HerMoney Podcast: Fear Factor. It May Not Be Possible To Conquer All Your Fears Before You Take Financial Action. It's Also Unnecessary. (Episode 169)

If hermoney podcast fear factor is on your radar, this short guide cuts through the noise. Here is what is worth knowing, and how to put it to work today.

Key Takeaways

• Ruth Soukup: (01:55) Hey, thank you so much for having me.
• It’s great to be here.
• Jean Chatzky: (01:58) Congratulations on the book.

Ruth Soukup: (01:55) Hey, thank you so much for having me. It’s excellent to be here.

Jean Chatzky: (01:58) Congratulations on the book.

Ruth Soukup: (02:00) Thank you.

Jean Chatzky: (02:01) I know my team recently met you on your NYC book tour stop and that’s how we have you here today.

Ruth Soukup: (02:08) Yes, it was so much fun to get to know a few members of your team.

Jean Chatzky: (02:12) So for our listeners who are meeting you for the first time, take me back to the beginning of your journey. Who were you before you were doing it scared?

Ruth Soukup: (02:25) Scared little girl really. You know, “do it scared” has actually been a mantra of mine for a very long time and it sort of started back in my early twenties when I went through a really, really bad battle with depression. And actually attempted suicide multiple times and very nearly succeeded in that effort and just found myself in a place after two and a half years of really bad depression, almost very nearly dying with that. Just found myself bankrupt, all alone. I had dropped out of college, I was just a mess and really found myself completely at rock bottom in my life. I had no hope left and I didn’t really know where to go and it was the most terrifying place I could ever be in. I felt like I had ruined my entire life and I was 29 years old.

Jean Chatzky: (03:19) I’m so sorry. There’s a lot of depression in my close family actually. And so I can’t really relate to it myself personally, but I know so numerous people who have been where you were and it’s awful. So how did you take a step forward from that rock bottom?

Ruth Soukup: (03:41) You know, it was literally one very small step at a time. And I think so frequently people will ask me about that depression and they’ll ask me about that time in my life and I’ll say, oh, well surely there must have been some turning point for you, some magic moment where you realize that life was worth living and you made the transformation and it all became okay. And it really didn’t happen that way. It was very slow and painful and it was taking one small step and then another step. You know, I laid in bed for numerous months and finally, finally, finally my dad convinced me to start going to the gym. He said, please just go for three times a week and walk on the treadmill for 30 minutes. If you want to keep living in my house and laying in bed all day, you have to do this one thing. And so I did that one thing and that was just enough. Literally taking those steps on the treadmill, that was just enough to give me enough of something to call a new therapist, find a new therapist and say, you know what, I’ve just spent the last two and a half years talking about all the bad things that have ever happened in my life and it hasn’t helped. I am not better. I don’t even know how to live anymore and I just need help figuring out how to live. And that was what she helped me do. One very small step at a time. First it was getting a part time job and then it was getting my own apartment. And then it was going to the grocery store without freaking out and getting a dog and going back to school and all of these little steps that each one terrified me. Each one felt so big and so hard, but every time I took that one next step, it gave me the courage to take the next one and the next one and the next one after that. And I have found, you know, numerous years later I started my own business, which has since grown into this huge company that I’d never could have really dreamed of. But every step along the way as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, has been the exact same thing. Doing it scared, every single step of the way. Feeling like, I don’t really know what I’m doing. I don’t know if I can do this, but every time I managed to take one step, it gives me the courage to take the next step.

Jean Chatzky: (05:44) So what does it mean to do it scared?

Ruth Soukup: (05:47) It literally means that courage doesn’t mean that we’re not afraid. Courage doesn’t mean that we don’t feel the fear. Courage is actually taking the step, even when we feel afraid. It’s taking action in the face of fear. And I think so frequently we don’t actually recognize what we’re feeling as fear. Sometimes we look at it as anxiety. Sometimes we think that it’s just feeling overwhelmed with life. Sometimes we think it’s depression. There’s all these other names for it. Sometimes we call it fear, but not always. Sometimes it just is this feeling of being stuck and not knowing what to do. But it all comes down to fear and I think that we think we have to completely overcome it in our life and we have to figure out how to conquer fear and not ever feel afraid, but that’s not really realistic. If you can actually just learn how to take action despite the fear, to recognize that those feelings are going to be there and that you can feel the fear, but you can still take that step, that’s what makes all the difference.

Jean Chatzky: (06:46) What I think is so interesting is you did some research that found that fear actually looks different to all of us, that we don’t all experience it the same way. Can you tell us about your study?

Ruth Soukup: (07:02) Yes. So during the course of this book, what I noticed, first of all, the whole reason for wanting to write this book, was that so numerous people in my communities were facing fears and talking about it all the time and coming to me and saying, you know, I feel so afraid or I feel so stuck and I don’t know how to move forward. And it got me so curious. So I started asking questions and you got to be careful about asking questions cause you never know where that’s going to lead. But in this case it led to us doing this study of more than four thousand people. And through that, asking questions about how people were experiencing fear, but also how they were overcoming it, we started to see some patterns. And it was so much data. I had to hire a whole team of researchers to help go through all this data. But what we discovered is that fear does look very different for people. But there are seven very distinct patterns that happen, or seven distinct ways that fear tends to manifest itself in our lives and we call those the seven fear archetypes. And so each of us have probably a little bit of all seven of the archetypes within us, but for most people, there’s one or two that tend to be most prevalent. And those are probably the areas where fear is most holding you back or most effecting your life. And the reason why that’s so key is because so much of the fear that happens in our life happens subconsciously without us even realizing it without us knowing it’s there. And so we don’t experience it necessarily as fear. We experience it as truth or this is just the way that I am. And as soon as we can label it and start to identify those patterns in our life, to recognize it when it’s happening, that’s when we can actually start to do something about it. That’s when we can recognize that it’s happening and go, okay, my fear is telling me this one thing, but I know that it’s just my fear of talking. It’s not truth, it’s just fear. And now I can do it scared. Now I can take action even though I’m feeling those feelings.

Jean Chatzky: (09:05) Okay. I want to dig into those seven archetypes. I want to dig into those seven different ways that fear manifests itself. And I want to do it specifically as they apply to money because as I have been traveling around and talking to women in HerMoney Happy Hours and for my new book, I hear about the fear of investing. I hear about the fear of running out of money in retirement. I hear there’s so numerous financial fears that women have, so we’re going to dig in, but before we do that, I also want to remind everybody that HerMoney is proudly sponsored by Fidelity Investments. What if you could get past your fear and demand more from your money? What if you could make your savings work as hard as you do and what if that helped you reach your financial goals faster? That all starts with a financial checkup. It starts with an understanding of what you own and what you owe, and from there, the folks at Fidelity can work with you to evaluate your investment options and different ways to grow your savings. You can get started today at Fidelity.com/demandmorenow. I’m talking with Ruth Soukup, author of “Do It Scared.” So there are seven archetypes and you can have more than one I learned, but let’s talk about the biggies. What’s the most common?

Ruth Soukup: (10:37) The most common one is the procrastinator archetype, which is really just another word for perfectionist. I like to call it the procrastinator slash perfectionist archetype. But the underlying fear there for the procrastinator is the fear of making a mistake. And so the procrastinator slash perfectionist will frequently spend a ton of time researching or getting organized or preparing, but there’s this fear of getting started. There’s a fear of commitment. Frequently, because they don’t want to make the wrong decision and make the wrong move and move forward. It can almost lead to analysis paralysis and that is definitely number.

Jean Chatzky: (11:12) This one screams money.

Ruth Soukup: (11:12) Yes, oh totally. Yes, totally. So when, when it comes to, I mean, think of all the financial decisions that you’re making with your money and the fear of making the wrong decision prevents you from moving forward at all or making any decision at all, which is actually probably the worst decision that you could possibly make.

Jean Chatzky: (11:34) Right? And analysis paralysis. There are so numerous different choices that we have when it comes to our money and so much information about every single one of those choices that if you start diving in and trying to do your homework, as all the good girls in the world are told we are supposed to do, then of course never going to get anything done, because you’re constantly researching.

Ruth Soukup: (11:57) Yes, yes. That’s exactly, exactly right. And I probably should point out right now, before we go any further into archetypes, is that each of these seven fear archetypes have both positive and negative qualities. So if you are a procrastinator archetype, there are aspects of that personality type that have served you well. You know, you probably have excellent attention to detail. You’re very organized. You do really good work. You have a high quality standards for the work that you do. So those are all good things about your personality and about your fear archetype that are serving you right now. And the same goes for all of the other ones which we’re going to talk about in a minute. And so it’s really key when you think about overcoming your fears. It’s not about necessarily completely getting rid of those aspects of your personality. It’s learning how to leverage the good parts of that fear while learning how to mitigate the bad parts, the ones that are holding you back. Cause with every fear there’s something that’s helping you and something that’s holding you back.

Jean Chatzky: (12:58) So if you see yourself in this procrastinator/perfectionist archetype, when it comes to your money - and I think a lot of women listen to this podcast because we want to take action that we’ve been unable to take before - how do you break through?

Ruth Soukup: (13:15) Well, I like to tell people that you can work on this on both a micro level and a macro level. So on a micro level, which is probably the easiest cause it’s smaller, more manageable actions. The best thing that you can do is work on building up your immunity to this and that comes with practice. So you have to practice making decisions and making mistakes and doing things imperfectly. And so when it comes to your money, I would start with lower risk decisions that don’t feel like your whole an

Final Thoughts

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Originally published at savingswitch.com.