Understanding our Survival Team and Growth Team is one thing. Learning to recognize which part is leading us in the moment takes practice.

When fear shows up, we don’t need to push it away. We can use it as a signal to pause and bring the rest of our resources into the conversation.

I like to think of it as five simple steps:

Notice → Pause → Listen → Invite → Choose

Notice

Begin by recognizing what is happening.

My Protector is here.

Simply naming it creates awareness. Instead of becoming the fear, we begin to observe it.

Pause

Give yourself a little space between what you’re feeling and what you do next. It might be one breath, ten seconds, a walk around the block, or sleeping on a decision.

The pause doesn’t make the fear disappear. It gives the rest of your team time to join you.

Listen

Get curious about the message underneath the fear.

What is my Protector trying to protect me from?

There may be something important here. Or your Protector may be responding to an old experience that resembles what’s happening now. Either way, we can listen without immediately reacting.

Invite

Now invite the rest of the team into the conversation.

❤️ Heart: What would compassion or connection offer here?

✨ Visionary: What else could be true? What haven’t I considered?

🧠 Thinker: With this broader perspective, what actually needs to be done?

Notice that the Thinker comes back into the conversation. We’re not trying to escape our Survival Team and live permanently in our Growth Team.

We want access to all four.

Choose

Now ask:

What response feels aligned with who I want to be?

This is where reaction becomes choice. We can hear our Protector, use our Thinker, access our Heart and invite our Visionary before deciding what comes next.

And every time we practice this, we’re building evidence that we can trust ourselves.

Self-trust grows when we learn that fear can have a voice without having the final say.

Practice the States You Want Available

Our brains become more familiar with what we repeatedly practice. So if we want curiosity, compassion, awe, wonder, creativity, play, and calm to be available when life gets difficult, we need to spend time experiencing them when life isn’t difficult.

This is training.

Notice a sunset. Play without needing to accomplish anything. Get curious about something simply because it interests you.

Play for the sake of playing.

Look for moments that create awe or wonder. Practice compassion when the stakes are low.

Each time we intentionally access these states, we become more familiar with the resources of our Growth Team, making it easier to find our way back to them when our Protector gets loud.

We’re training ourselves to remember that there are ways of experiencing life beyond protecting, achieving, analyzing and anticipating.

🛡️ The Protector

The Protector is not bad. Its fear, anxiety, anger and other powerful emotions aren’t our enemies. They carry information and help us recognize, learn from and respond to our experiences. But when fear is activated, it can narrow our view and make something happening now feel connected to something that happened before.

Every second of every day, this part of the brain, along with the body, is asking one important question:

“Am I safe?”

It’s comparing what is happening right now with everything you’ve experienced before.

• Have I felt this before?
• Did this end badly?
• Should I be careful?
• Do I need to protect us?

It does all of this in less than fraction of a second, often before we’re even aware it’s happening.

Isn’t that incredible?

Without this part of our brain, our ancestors wouldn’t have survived.

They needed a system that could instantly recognize danger and prepare the body to respond.

Fear isn’t a mistake.

Fear is a gift.

When the Protector sounds the alarm, it has a very capable teammate ready to help.

🧠 The Thinker

The Thinker analyzes, organizes, plans, remembers details and solves problems. When the Protector says, “Something might be wrong,” the Thinker naturally wants to figure out why and what to do about it.

The Protector sounds the alarm. The Thinker tries to solve the problem.

We’ve become exceptionally good at using this part of ourselves. Much of Western culture rewards analyzing, planning, productivity, achievement and getting the right answer.

These are valuable resources.

But they’re not the only resources available to us.

That’s only part of the story.

Understanding why fear exists changes our relationship with it.

We don’t need to get rid of our Protector. We don’t need to stop thinking. And we certainly don’t need to become fearless.

We need to learn how to recognize who’s leading the conversation—and remember that we have an entire team of resources available to us.

But understanding something and living it are two very different things.

So how do we actually do that?

How do we catch ourselves when fear takes over?

How do we pause long enough to invite compassion, curiosity, perspective and possibility back into the conversation?

And perhaps most importantly, how do we learn to trust ourselves when we don’t know what’s going to happen next?

That’s where we’re going next.

Part 3: From Fear to Self-Trust
Learning to trust not that everything will go according to plan, but that we have what we need within us to meet what comes.

One of the most helpful ideas I’ve come across comes from Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroscientist and author of Whole Brain Living. In the book, she explained what she calls the 90-second rule.

When an emotion is triggered, there is a chemical response that moves through the brain and body. If we don’t continue feeding that emotion with our thoughts, that first emotional wave naturally moves through us in about 90 seconds.

That idea stopped me in my tracks.

Because if that’s true, then what kept me awake all night wasn’t the original emotion.

It was the story I kept telling myself.

This does not mean emotions are not real. They are very real.

Fear is information.

Anxiety is information.

Anger is information.

Sadness is information.

The question becomes:

Are we responding to what is happening right now… or are we reacting to a story the past has reactivated?

Before you keep reading, I’d like to ask you something.

Have you ever considered that what you’ve been calling stress, perfectionism, procrastination, people-pleasing, feeling small, anger, or overthinking might actually be fear?

The mind can become incredibly good at disguising fear. It can take so many forms that we often miss it, judging the behaviour instead of recognizing the protection underneath it.

Fear doesn’t live only in our thoughts.

It can speak through our thoughts, our bodies, our emotions, our relationships, and our behaviours.

The more we learn its language, the easier it becomes to recognize.

Here are some of the ways fear can appear in everyday life:

Fear in Your Thoughts

Sometimes fear sounds like a conversation happening inside your own mind.

☐ Overthinking
☐ Racing thoughts
☐ Worst-case thinking
☐ Self-doubt
☐ Imposter syndrome
☐ Needing certainty
☐ Comparing yourself to others
☐ Intellectualizing
☐ Judgment of yourself
☐ Seeking approval
☐ Trying to prove yourself
☐ Feeling small
☐ Feeling trapped
☐ Feeling unsafe
☐ Feeling exposed
☐ Feeling like you must disappear

---

Fear in Your Body

Sometimes your body notices fear before your mind does.

☐ Tight chest
☐ Shallow breathing
☐ Stomach discomfort
☐ Nausea
☐ Lump in the throat
☐ Jaw clenching
☐ Headaches
☐ Fatigue
☐ Trouble sleeping
☐ Restlessness
☐ Panic
☐ Hypervigilance
☐ Emotional numbness

---

Fear in Your Emotions

Fear doesn’t always feel like fear.

It can look like…

☐ Anxiety
☐ Anger
☐ Irritability
☐ Shame
☐ Guilt
☐ Embarrassment
☐ Sadness
☐ Dread

---

Fear in Your Relationships

Fear often influences how we connect with other people.

☐ People-pleasing
☐ Reassurance-seeking
☐ Over-explaining
☐ Apologizing too much
☐ Withdrawing
☐ Isolating
☐ Clinging
☐ Jealousy
☐ Mistrust
☐ Conflict avoidance
☐ Criticism
☐ Sarcasm
☐ Judging others
☐ Trying to keep everyone happy
☐ Feeling responsible for everyone
☐ Rescuing others
☐ Avoiding intimacy

---

Fear at Work (and in Life)

Sometimes fear shapes the opportunities we do—or don’t—take.

☐ Procrastination
☐ Perfectionism
☐ Avoidance
☐ Not starting
☐ Not finishing
☐ Delaying decisions
☐ Quitting before being judged
☐ Avoiding visibility
☐ Not speaking up
☐ Undercharging
☐ Avoiding success
☐ Avoiding failure
☐ Avoiding change
☐ Avoiding commitment

---

Fear as Protection

Some of fear’s masks are surprisingly clever.

They don’t always look like fear.

☐ Control
☐ Micromanaging
☐ Defensiveness
☐ Shutting down
☐ Freezing
☐ Numbing out
☐ Staying busy
☐ Busyness as avoidance
☐ Checking and rechecking
☐ Grandiosity as protection
☐ Saying, “I don’t care,” when you actually do

Looking at this list, it’s easy to realise that fear isn’t just one emotion.

It’s often the hidden driver behind many of the behaviours we struggle with.

Before we can change the hold fear can have on us, we have to recognize it.