Transcript

Ani
Hi and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Good morning, Brian. Good morning, Ani.

How are you?

Brian
I’m doing well. And you?

Ani
Good. I’m really good. I’m enjoying the fall and the fall weather.

It’s one of my favorite times of year. It’s starting to get a little chilly.

Brian
Getting chilly.

Ani
But yeah, good.

Brian
Exactly. So this week, this week, we are asking the question, how do I overcome my fear of speaking up?

Ani
Hmm. We have overcome our fear of speaking up. We’re hosting a podcast.

Brian
Yes we are. Well, I actually have a story about that.

Ani
You do?

Brian
Yeah, I do. Tell us. Tell us all.

Story time. Story time. So I, in my, when I was young, when I was young, I had a- Little Brian.

Yeah, I had a pretty profound fear of speaking up.

Ani
Did you?

Brian
But I didn’t, here’s the funny thing. I didn’t realize it until I was in high school.

Ani
That’s so funny. I thought you were like the orator person. Didn’t you like win an award for this?

Brian
Well, here’s, but here’s the thing.

Ani
Okay.

Brian
Here’s the thing. So I first became aware of this when I was in math class in my senior year, my senior year. So I was in pre-calc, pre-calc and calculus my senior year.

And I can distinctly remember wanting to raise my hand in class to ask a question and having sweaty palms and pounding heartbeat and dry throat and a lot of anxiety around that. And then I don’t know why that was the first time I kind of, I became self-aware of it at that point. And then, so I never, I never asked any questions.

And I started thinking back in my, like all through school, I never raised my hand. And I also, when people would ask me if I understood what they were saying, I always said yes, even if I didn’t. It was chronic for me.

Then I’d have to go to figure out what they, what they were talking about in my own time.

Ani
Right.

Brian
So I spent a lot of time studying and it wasn’t because I was necessarily, I wasn’t really particularly smart person, but I studied a lot because I had to try to catch up and understand what people, I taught myself to understand what people are talking about because I was too afraid to ask them. And so I spent a lot of hard time working at my own kind of trying to figure it out when I just probably could have asked and got an answer. So I grew up with a pretty deep fear, especially of asking questions and around, um, uh, not wanting to feel embarrassed really.

Now I did give a couple of, uh, a couple of talks when I was in like in high school, but actually also grew up reading in church.

Ani
Right.

Brian
And so it’s a little different because you have everybody’s attention and you actually kind of are in a position of, I guess, authority because the expectation is that everyone’s going to listen to you when you’re doing the reading, right?

Ani
Yeah. That’s interesting.

Brian
But I do remember doing some of those readings and actually mispronouncing words and having the fellow altar boys kind of make fun of me afterwards for that, which didn’t feel good either. Right. So there were those kinds of things, but, but asking, putting myself in a situation where I could be embarrassed, which just shut me down.

Absolutely. I was actually incapacitated by it. And that lasted all the way through most of my professional career too, which I have to say wasn’t great.

Cause I’d be in like rounds, like as a physical therapist, I’m in rounds. And the doctor asked me if I knew what he’s talking about. And I said, yes, even though I didn’t, then I’d have to go look it up.

Ani
Totally did that.

Brian
Right. And so this was worse. So I never wanted to look foolish, but sometimes that would come back and bite me in the ass actually, because then I would become embarrassed when they realized, “You didn’t know what I was talking about.

Did you?” And I’m like, oh, kind of have to try to make, so I really kind of, um, move pretty far, uh, along my path of being able to say, listen, I don’t know what you’re talking about right now. Can you actually give me a little more information on that?

And that’s been a huge kind of thing, but even ask questions now and say, Hey, I don’t know in front of a room of people. See, I don’t understand what you’re talking about. That took me a little while to kind of figure that out of how to do that.

And, um, and that’s kind of what we’re talking about today is like, how do you actually overcome that? Because it can be debilitating for people. It certainly was for me.

Ani
Yeah. I think that the, that fear of, um, visibility being visible is a huge thing. I’ve got to be honest with you.

I think it really, we’ve been in business together for like 13, 14 years. And I think it wasn’t until like two years ago, I really started to recognize what a big deal this was for our clients. Um, this visibility, because it started to come out in all kinds of areas.

Like it’s not just professional, but it’s also at home and speaking up is a big part of that.

Brian
Yeah.

Ani
It’s a big part of that.

Brian
Yeah. So much into kind of, um, what my experience was, and this is why I really understand this. I I’ve lived this experience.

So when people have this experience, I’m like, I totally get this. I totally understand where this, uh, how this fear kind of manifests itself. Right.

It’s really a fear of, of, uh, of expressing ourselves. Um, it’s a fear of again, looking foolish or not, not looking like we know what we’re asking or what we’re talking about sort of thing. Um, and it’s really a belief that something painful will happen if we speak up, if we express ourselves, that the inevitability is going to be not good for us.

Ani
I think I had a similar experience that showed up in a different way. People would say, speak up. I mean, in my personal and professional life, and I would say, well, I don’t have anything to say.

Brian
Ah, yeah.

Ani
And I thought I didn’t.

Brian
Um, I mean, anybody who’s ever actually met me knows that I have plenty to say. That doesn’t make sense.

Ani
I always have plenty to say or too much sometimes. Um, but yeah, I didn’t have anything to say. I think that was my subconcious protecting me.

Brian
And yeah, you know, actually another memory just kind of came back to me too. Um, when we first started our, our businesses, one of the first institutions that we launched was the Institute for Rehabilitative Qi Gong and Tai Chi. And that a lot was based on, um, my sharing, uh, using Tai Chi and Qi Gong practices for physical rehabilitation as, as a PT.

And so when we first started launching that, uh, that Institute, I would go on to a different groups on social media and, um, you know, and promote what we were doing. And it’s interesting on one of the platforms I was on, there were a couple of different groups that were Tai Chi and Qi Gong groups. And you might think that people who practice Tai Chi and Qi Gong, um, regularly might be more, um, open and curious and supportive.

No way. They were like cutthroat. It was cutthroat.

It’s like, no, that’s not how you do that Tai Chi. You do it this way. That’s wrong.

There’s like a lot of judgment and blaming.

Ani
And I’m like, that must’ve been hard.

Brian
But I knew that’s where I needed to present what we were doing because that’s potentially where the people were that might be interested in what we were doing. And so I remember when I started posting on, on those platforms, I was just like a mess. I was a mess.

I was shaky and sweaty and all that kind of stuff. And, um, that’s where that, where our, uh, where our core runs remodeling program came from is from that experience. Like I actually used, um, Qi Gong somatic practices actually to develop an embodiment program to build confidence from the bottom up.

And it worked. And I was actually, then I was starting to post and, um, and receiving what people were saying about it, both the, both the supportive and the not so supportive, right. Kind of thing.

And I found ways to meet everybody with a sense of, um, acceptance and humor, but it took me a little while to do that. But, but if I hadn’t had that physiological kind of chakra supportive program that we created, I wouldn’t be here now because that gave me the confidence to really put myself out there.

Ani
I think you, you bring up something really important and maybe you said this earlier, but part of the reason we don’t want to put ourselves out there is because we don’t want the negativity or the black back. But the thing is both come back. There’s always the balance of the supportive and the challenging to think that we’re going to put something out there and we’re only going to get accolades.

You know, that’s not gonna happen unless you’re just talking to AI. We were talking about that last week. Um, but yeah, um, this comes up all the time with clients because they’ll finally put their voice out there.

They’ll finally teach, they’ll finally give a workshop, they’ll finally run a retreat or something. And then feedback comes back, whether it’s solicited or not. And inevitably there’s one person who thinks you’re the sun and the moon and the stars.

And one person who’s like, you know, this just wasn’t really good.

Brian
This is a total waste. Yeah.

Ani
And what happens is we, we, our focus goes to the person who said this wasn’t good and it just eats us up about it.

Brian
That’s what we’re filtering out, right?

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
So our subconscious is filtering.

Ani
Yeah. So for you to continue to put yourself in that position over and over again and be able to build up your capacity internally, not just to go out there and do it and then get potentially flack back, but to, to do it over and over again and start to have a more kind of, um, balanced internal system around the fact that you’re going to get people who love it and you’re going to get people who don’t love it. Because when you told that story, the first part that came out was I did this and people said crappy things to me. Right.

But then as you went on with the story, you were like, I was able to meet whoever said whatever. Right. So you’ve built this internal capacity to, to meet the wholeness of the situation.

Brian
Yeah, exactly. But so we have to kind of find that way to keep moving forward. And that’s kind of what we’re talking about today.

But the first thing we want to understand is that a fear of speaking up is a learned fear. It’s not a fear we’re born with because you know, babies aren’t afraid of speaking up. Oh no, they’re not afraid of speaking up.

Ani
They can be loud.

Brian
They can be loud. They’re going to their lungs for hours until they get what they need or, um, can, can, you know, verse you or they just babble and you know, those kinds of things also sort of thing. Right.

But babies are not afraid of speaking up.

Ani
So we’re not born with it.

Brian
We’re not born with it. Not born with it. Right.

It’s something that you learned. So if you have a fear of speaking up like I did, um, it sounds like maybe like you did, like you weren’t born with it, you know, born with this fear, you learned this fear some way. Okay.

So, um, the, the best way to really overcome any fear is to prove it’s not real. That’s kind of like the shortcut.

Ani
Okay.

Brian
Right. You have to just kind of prove it’s not really, you have to kind of keep, and there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of therapeutic paths to doing that. People go to therapy and get coaching and all that kind of stuff to overcome their fears, to prove the fear isn’t real, to adopt a new belief.

I mean, that’s basically like the whole change paradigm, no matter who you kind of work with. So maybe we can talk about a little bit from how we work it here at the Somatic Coaching Academy.

Ani
Yeah, sure.

Brian
Cause that’s where, that’s kind of where we are. Right.

Ani
Yeah. And then that it’s not real. Is that awareness building?

Yes. You know, because as humans, we get very polarized and focused onto what we think reality is. And so it’s widening our perspective, uh, to accept there might be alternate realities, other ways to see things and think about things.

Brian
Yeah. And so any fear that you’ve learned, you can change because it’s not, it’s not like an inherent fear, right? It’s not like we’re born with it.

Those kind of these born fears are, they’re there. They’re part of our wiring as, as humans, but anything we learned, it means it could be changed. So if you’ve got that fear, Hey, listen, there’s the positive here.

Opportunity to change it is, is relevant. So let’s talk about how we’re going to overcome these things. So at the Somatic Coaching Academy, right?

We approach things both from the bottom up and the top down.

Ani
From the body to the brain and the brain to the body.

Brian
And we tend to start with from the body to the brain.

Ani
Because that’s how the brain works, by the way.

Brian
Yeah. That’s how the brain is wired. So we’re just, we’re just kind of stepping into kind of the natural flow.

Now there of course is some top down control of the fear centers of the brain or the limbic centers of the brain. The parts of the frontal lobe can do some top down control, but like in my case with being so afraid, I was going to raise my hand, palm sweating and, you know, armpit sweating and can’t say anything.

Ani
I mean, my, the system’s regulated.

Brian
Yeah. I wasn’t not able to overcome that because I became so dysregulated.

Ani
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The cortical centers or whatever can’t regulate the dysregulated system. You have to regulate system first and then exercise control.

Brian
Right. So when you’re experiencing this fear of speaking up, and as we pointed out, it’s a learned fear. So you can say to yourself right now, oh, it’s a learned fear.

It’s not who I am. It’s something I learned so I can change it. Okay.

So what am I going to do to change it? Well, very often the first thing that we always say is you got to regulate your nervous system. That’s kind of right.

That’s kind of it. You have to be able to regulate your nervous system, get some supportive structures in there so that then you have a little bit more top down control and have a little more intellectual framework, a little more intellectual understanding of what you’re dealing with, but you really have to find a way to stabilize your nervous system itself.

Ani
I just want to say something about regulation for a second, because we talk about it all the time, obviously. When you know what it feels like to have a regulated system, oftentimes you have the experience or have had the experience many times of being dysregulated and then moving to regulated, and you know what that feels like. So if you’re listening to this kind of thing and you’re thinking, okay, number one, regulate the nervous system, take three deep breaths.

Like, hang on a second. Go have the experience where you actually move into a place where your nervous system changes, where you go, oh, that’s a regulated nervous system. Because then you know, then you really have experience.

I remember the very first time I had a regulated nervous system experience and I said to myself, oh, that’s what people have been talking about.

Brian
Got you. Got you.

Ani
Right? So anyway, I just wanted to mention it because we talk about it all the time and it’s important to kind of know what that looks like.

Brian
Yeah. And you can certainly boost or shortcut, let’s say, the speed or time to having a regulated nervous system if you actually kind of take yourself out of environments for a short period of time that tend to dysregulate your nervous system, which is why like retreats and those kinds of things are so powerful because you’re not only going someplace that helps foster regulation, but you’re also removing yourself from places that might tend to be dysregulating.

Ani
Absolutely. And I think most people don’t have a, a lot of people don’t have an awareness of how dysregulated they are most of the time. And so you go out of your regular everyday experience and like you were saying, retreat or something like that.

And then you recognize like, wow, I didn’t recognize, I didn’t realize how jacked up I was.

Brian
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure.

Ani
Okay.

Brian
Thanks. We have to regulate the nervous system. So we know that.

Now there’s also, whenever we approach fear, where does the top down come in play? And so the top down for me comes in really in terms of understanding like the frameworks of fear, like understanding kind of what it really is so that we can work better with it from the bottom, bottom up. And when it comes to specifically the fear of speaking up, if we talk about this from a, from a chakra standpoint, and I know you know, we haven’t talked about chakras a lot on the podcast, but we should talk about it more often.

So chakras are kind of from the Ayurvedic kind of philosophy of these energy centers that exist within the body. And we would also say that they are not amorphous, weird, intangible centers. They’re actually matched with neural plexus.

So chakras are actually anatomical structures if you understand how the physiology works. So they’re, they’re real things, folks, they’re real things. And in our trainings, we go pretty deep into why they’re real things and talk about that, but you can look this up.

And so chakras have to do also with your development as you go through your life, right?

Ani
Which makes sense because your body develops. Yeah.

Brian
Yeah. Your body’s developing. And based on the neural plexus that come out of the spinal cord and innervate all different parts of your body, as you go through neural development, you know, think about a newborn to a seven-year-old, there’s like totally different, right?

So many different changes happened. And so the first four chakras are developed before the age of seven. And then the fifth, sixth, and seventh chakras are developed after the age of, after the age of seven.

And depending on our experiences in our early lives will form and develop our chakras, how our neural endocrine system works, but also how we relate our beliefs and our physiological kind of attachment to those beliefs are kind of governed through the chakra system. If you look at this through that kind of Ayurvedic kind of perspective. So I know that’s kind of just a really quick introduction on chakras, but looping back to fear of speaking up, those are primarily imbalances in the first, third, and fifth chakras.

First, third, and fifth chakras. So every different kind of fear is going to kind of have a different chakra profile, but speaking up is specifically first, third, and fifth. Not that the second, and the fourth, and the sixth, and the seventh aren’t totally involved, but that’s primarily where we see things happening.

Ani
Right. And the second and fourth actually support the chakra that’s, you know, above them. For example, the second chakra is supporting the third chakra and things like that.

So everything’s all mixed up and connected.

Brian
Everything’s all mixed up and connected. So when we approach this, when we approach this through our programs here, we’re really approaching this at the idea of balancing and re-fortifying the chakra systems because fear is a very primal experience, especially something like the fear of speaking up, which almost always gets looped into our system before the age of seven. So there’s a lot of lived experience that happens after the age of seven that kind of gets built upon these imbalanced chakra patterns that continue to purport the problems with the speaking up.

So when we go back to the body, we actually do things like the Core Resonance Remodeling Program that actually rebuilds the chakra system along with the intellectual understanding of what’s happening. I’ve found that to be the fastest way to help people overcome that fear specifically of visibility and speaking up.

Ani
100%. I think one of the things that happens for people is they’re grown adults and they can’t figure out how to get themselves to do X, Y, and Z. I mean, especially when you’re a business owner, there’s a lot of speaking up that needs to be done and you just can’t figure it out.

And the person will say to themselves, I don’t know why this is so hard. I don’t know why this is so hard for me. Why can’t I get myself to do this?

And it makes a lot of sense because it’s literally wired into your physiology before the age of seven and you have lived all this life experience on a system that has developed and then further confirmed these issues. So it’s actually like a bigger deal than you think it is, I think. Just because it’s a big deal doesn’t mean it has to take forever to shift.

And that’s why the bioenergetic stuff is so important because when you shift the bioenergetic stuff, you can get right at the conditioning from when you were young and you don’t have to sit in therapy for a hundred years and talk about it. And by the way, that still might not fix it. You just get right to the wiring.

Brian
Yeah. Yeah. And this is, again, a difference between the top-down and bottom-up models.

And so the top-down model is going to have you intellectually process why it is that you have that fear. But the bottom-up model that we do, it actually has you modify the sensations of the fear itself. So you’re actually changing what the fear, what you’re calling fear in your body.

Because we kind of keep reducing it down. We’re not even changing the fear in your body because we’re working at it with sensations. We’re not even calling it fear anymore.

We’re calling it a sensory pattern that you’ve had adopted associated with certain external circumstances. And we can get underneath that and actually change the sensations associated with that external circumstance. Then now you have actually re-patterned previously what you were calling fear.

So that’s what we do with our sensation-based model, our coaching.

Ani
What you were calling fear, what your parents were calling fear, what their parents were calling fear. Because the other thing, this is actually a really big deal, is you learn to feel those ways when you were under the age of seven, because your parents taught you to feel those ways because they feel those ways. And they were taught by their parents who were taught by their parents.

We’re talking like lineage stuff. So that’s why these kind of methodologies work so profoundly and efficiently.

Brian
Yeah. Especially for this particular issue of fear speaking up. It’s like, we’ve got this one pretty dialed.

We really understand how to help people overcome this.

Ani
I remember I was using our core resonance remodeling system one day, Brian, it was really early in our business because we were in our first wellness center. I remember the room I was in and I had to make a really important phone call at this time. I don’t remember what it was.

It felt very important at the time. And I think it was like, it was like kind of a big deal. Any other day of the week, I would have been so afraid to be rejected for making this phone call.

And I did my core residence remodeling and I had the phone right near me. And it actually was like those phones with the base. I think it might’ve even been before.

And I made the call and I did it and I got whatever response that I got, which I believe was a positive response to wherever I was trying to go. And then I hung up the phone and I was like, how did I just accomplish that massive feat? It was like, I slipped into some kind of different skin or whatever, because all of a sudden I had plenty of confidence where if I had just tried to make that phone call without getting my system ready first, no way, no way, no way.

Brian
So there’s some additional kind of pieces of overcoming actually any fear. So let’s just make sure we have a kind of a complete conversation about this. So these bioenergetic practices really help to stabilize, enhance, bring a lot of awareness.

They take us through all our steps of become aware of decode, modify, and reframe from the bottom up. And then what we really need to start doing is doing some kind of some graded exposure kind of practices. So you have to take that new confidence around speaking up and actually go out there and start testing it a little bit, but it’s important to test it in kind of a graded way.

So if you took that new kind of confidence of speaking up and jumped onto a stage with 10,000 people in the audience, like that may likely be crippling for your nervous system. And then you’d get the feedback that you’re not good enough. It doesn’t work and those kinds of things.

Whereas if you took that new confidence and went and spoke to a couple of people that you knew were going to be supportive, then you’re going to get that feedback. So there’s that whole process of you need to kind of take it out there in the world and do some graded exposure with it. It needs to be just the right amount of exposure, not too much exposure.

Some coaching professionals will kind of suggest you just like jump off the deep end and go big.

Ani
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that can work a fraction of the time and it can also really cripple a lot of folks, you know, because it’s traumatic.

Brian
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. As I said, it can really overwhelm the system.

So you have to work with coaches who know what the sweet spot is for you to be able to grow, to stretch, to be challenged, but still supported sort of thing. And that’s really about your nervous system more than because intellectually they might be like, yeah, I’m going to go for it. I’m going to do it.

And then when you get there, your subconscious mind just implodes. Like that’s not going to be good to you. You have to kind of know that balance.

That’s really important. Getting feedback from the community is really important.

Ani
The community?

Brian
Yeah. Well, from a community that you’re working with is really important, but also from the people that you’re speaking with. So feedback is really important, but you’re seeking that balance of both support and challenge in terms of the feedback because that’s also going to help you grow, which is really important as well.

Got to gather evidence of the positive direction that you’re moving. So it’s like if you have an intention to be a confident asker of questions or confidently say, I don’t know, or confident at speaking or speaking up sort of thing, which is a little different now that you mentioned it, I think there’s a difference between the overcoming the fear of speaking or speaking up.

Ani
Okay.

Brian
Right. When you asked me earlier about speaking, so speaking, like when you’re speaking and there’s everyone, there’s an expectation that people are just going to listen to you. That’s speaking, but speaking up is potentially it’s in a situation where there are intangibles, disruption, that kind of stuff.

Anyway, so that just occurred to me. And then you got to repeat it. You got to gather evidence and do it again, gather evidence and do it again.

And it’s all about then kind of putting that in that cycle so that you start to build momentum and just continue to gain confidence. But it really starts, really starts with a different quality of sensation in your body.

Ani
Yeah. Yep. And Hey, if you’re listening to this episode and you’re like, I want to do that.

We encourage you to come join us at the Kripalu Institute for Yoga and Health. We’re going to be there in January, 2026, leading the Endless Confidence program. And we’re going to do all of this stuff.

And we’re going to be there for about a week. We’re going to do the core essence remodeling. We’re going to get your nervous system all set, the bioenergetic work, the subconscious reprogramming work.

It’s an incredible way to start your year. And also what’s really important to me about this is get out of your house and come have a different experience with us live and in person. I think we’ve kind of forgotten how important this is, especially since COVID you, cause we think we can have the same experience over zoom, but when it comes especially to the bioenergetic work and the nervous system rebalancing work, being in person is not the same as being online.

So whether you’ve studied with us a bunch of times, or you’ve wanted to do something with us and you haven’t yet come join us at Kripalu. It’s going to be a fantastic opportunity for you to start your year off strong and, and get this confidence, especially for speaking up. It’s a fantastic program.

Brian
A hundred percent. We’re so excited to be there. We know this is such powerful work and we just love to be immersed in that energy at Kripalu and help people just be able to step into the absolute best version of themselves, the most confident version of themselves for 2026 and beyond.

Ani
If you’re looking for information about the program, go to our websites, somaticcoachingacademy.com, and then go to events and it’ll be on that page. It’s also, you’re going to find it in our social media bios. And I pretty much guarantee if you follow us on social media anywhere, you’ll see us promoting it over the course of the next few months or so.

Brian
All right. So, you know, set your time. We’ll see you at Kripalu middle of January.

Ani
Yeah. And until then we’ll see you next week.

Brian
Bye-bye.

Ani
Bye for now.