Navigating your un(Balanced) Life Character: The Fearful Loyalist

Welcome to scare confident. I'm your host, Tiffany Sauder. Okay, so here's what we're gonna talk about. I've been going through different examples of what it sounds like when our unbalanced character is the primary, like, narrative in our life, when our unbalanced character is really present. So if you haven't listened to my other episodes on this concept of your unbalanced character, let me give you a quick overview what the three are, and then we'll jump in. So, in our life of hand, it's when we're in equilibrium in three areas of our life event, our career, our family, and ourself. Now, that doesn't mean that each one of those buckets is exactly equally full. There are different seasons and different contexts in which our life has to be decided.

Tiffany Sauder [00:00:51]:

Our priorities need to be decided. Maybe that's a better way to say it. So it changes, right? There are seasons where work is in priority. There are seasons when your family needs to take priority. Like Sam right now is like getting ready to have a baby. That's a really consuming thing. There's a lot of preparation. There's a lot of social events that happen when you're getting ready to have a baby.

Tiffany Sauder [00:01:11]:

And then she'll take twelve weeks off of work. I mean, family is taking up an inordinate amount of time for her right now because she's going through a season where the context in which her life and her priorities live is in the context of them adding another kid to their lives. Using that as an example to give you an idea of what I mean. So when we're living in our life of and our family, our self and our career are served at our chosen choice of the volume, where we're not reacted to anything, we're proactively driving our lives outside of our life of and when we fall out of this life of and we oftentimes fall into one of three places on this Venn diagram where we lose hold of one of those areas of our life. So we've talked about lonely achiever. A lonely achiever is when you have primary hold of your career and yourself, but you lose hold of family. And if you think about, again, a Venn diagram where those two circles overlap or yourself and your career, you're really achieving out into the world, but you feel very alone and very untethered from your family. That's the only achiever.

Tiffany Sauder [00:02:19]:

The second one is fearful. Loyalist, we're going to talk about this one today. So this is when your self and your family are fed, tending to prioritized, but you have a harder time knowing how to step into a career. And I'll define this word career a little bit more as we get into this one. But that's the fearful loyalist. It's like, hey, I feel whole. I've got time with friends. I've got time with hobbies.

Tiffany Sauder [00:02:43]:

I've got time for my running or fitness or whatever you're doing for yourself, video games, whatever it is, whatever it is, whatever your thing is, you've got time for that, and you've got time for your family. But when you think about stepping out to the outside world, it feels big, scary, hard. Fear is like screaming at you all those kinds of things. That's fearful, loyalist. And the third is the grumpy servant. And this is where you naturally prioritize your career and your family, and you let go of yourself, meaning it kind of sounds like I don't have time to work out. I don't have time to myself. I'm doing everything around here.

Tiffany Sauder [00:03:16]:

You know, that talk track, it can be a familiar one for me. Those are the three what I call unbalanced life characters. It's the character that we become like, we become almost like a caricature of ourselves, a character where that's not who we want to be, that's not how we want to show up in the world, that's not how we want our kids to describe us. Those are not the words that we imagine coming out of our mouth when we thought of ourselves as being a mom or a dad. Like, this unbalanced version of ourselves is not a good version of us, and we don't have to live in that all the time. So what we're going to double click into is the fearful loyalist. When I asked for your questions and feedback a few months ago, I know I'm riding this horse so hard, but it is so interesting to me and so helpful to me. When you send in questions and want to know what you want to hear about, it makes my creative brain just light up.

Tiffany Sauder [00:04:06]:

So thank you for those. So there were two questions that I pulled out that to me, feel very much like a fearful loyalist, where, again, you know what? You need to stay whole for yourself. Maybe you're very good at keeping your commitment to yourself for, like, tending to yourself emotionally. You're very good at tending to yourself physically and your fitness. You're very good at taking care of that, and you're very good at serving your family and understanding those needs. Those are two places where you feel an enormous amount of confidence and competence in those two areas, yourself and your family. And then when you think about taking your talents into the outside world, and I use the word career because most of us are working outside of the home. But it can look, to me, this career circle, maybe you have a better word for it.

Tiffany Sauder [00:05:00]:

Maybe it's vocation. I don't know. Like, it's too complicated, I think. But what I mean is it is like the application of your time and talent in any capacity outside of your home or yourself. Application of your time and your talent and your resources in an application that is outside of your time that you're serving yourself and your family. Something external. So it could be volunteering. It could be service at church.

Tiffany Sauder [00:05:24]:

It could be your job. It could be leading a Bible study. It could be coaching at a crossfit gym. Like anything that you're doing in the outside world, that is applying your time and talents in an external way. That's what I mean by that circle of career. And when you think about. When fearful loyalists think about moving into that circle, they panic and they feel fear. And I'm going to read two questions, kind of, I don't know, just things from listeners, and I want you to listen for the emotional words that they chose when answering this question.

Tiffany Sauder [00:05:59]:

What is hard in your life right now? That was my question. What is hard in your life right now? And these are two of the things that were sent back. Okay, listen again for the emotion words. I feel stuck. Emotions and verbs. I feel stuck because I know that starting anything new in this season of life with a baby will pull me away from precious moments with them. Do I soak it in the sweet miracle of a baby and trust that God's going to provide a way? Our oldest is already in their teens. I know that time goes quickly.

Tiffany Sauder [00:06:30]:

Do I diligently take small steps? I don't know where to begin. I'd love to start a business where I could use my creative passions, but maybe I should do something more practical, help. So let's do this real quick. So they said they felt stuck. They don't know what to do. I don't know where to begin. I don't know. So, like, uncertainty that comes forward, pull me away from, like, stuck, pull me away.

Tiffany Sauder [00:06:57]:

Don't know where to start. That's like, the energy of this. Like, look for the fear. Just fear is coming forward for me in those phrases and words. Okay, next one. I am anxious and scared all the time. My life is objectively great, and things are going well. I've made a lot of strides to improve my family, my financial situation, my career.

Tiffany Sauder [00:07:20]:

But it's a ton to juggle and I'm anxious about it all falling apart. I wish I could just enjoy where I am and not worry so much about where I'm going. So again, for me, this person, like, actually said the words more acutely. Like, I'm anxious, I'm scared. Another anxious. I worry. And, you know, this is less about, I guess. Let's start with the first one.

Tiffany Sauder [00:07:46]:

They're feeling stuck in what is. And I would suspect if I talk to this individual, I don't know who they are. I've never met them before. So I am definitely conjecturing quite a bit here. But I have been in seasons where I felt very stuck and it had less to do with the external environment and what was going on and more to do with the internal narrative for me and that inability to say, because right now I'm at a place of, I would say, confidence and competence just in life. I'm like, not because I'm good at everything, I'm just like, I think I care a little less, I think I understand the journey a little more. I just think there's just maturity playing out. And so it's one thing to feel stuck, it's another thing to say, you know what? What I know I want to.

Tiffany Sauder [00:08:35]:

It's like, how do you capture and contain what energy you do want to put towards where you're going? I think we think about it so binary. Like, if I start working, it's going to turn into 60 hours a week. I'm going to be gone for my kids all the time. I'm going to be traveling like 40% of the time. I don't know. I think our minds when we're in a fearful place makes any choice feel very extreme and big and like, it's going to require wholesale change. And all of these, like, but what if. And then this could, and then it might, and then it would, and then I would have to give up this, and then this thing and all of this tumbling down the mountain of like, where your brain is just like creating this future.

Tiffany Sauder [00:09:18]:

It's being more formed by your fears of being away from the kids, of what if it's a failure? What if I'm not fulfilled? That is what is painting the picture of your future for you. Your fear is. And so then as a result, your present day self is like rebelling against. I don't want that to happen because fear is the thing that is painting the picture of the future for you. What if instead of allowing fear to do that and like staying inside the safety net of your family and the things that you like know about? And again, I'm not saying you have to leave those things, but what I'm saying is, I think we all have a combination of calling to, of serving our place and our family and ourselves and the outside world in some way. For me, it looks like a career and it looks like a paid profession, but it can look differently than that. So what I have found is when I allow an abundant mindset, when I allow my confident self that says, you know what, I'm in control of my future, I get to decide what that looks like, I get to decide what it becomes. I am in charge of that stuff.

Tiffany Sauder [00:10:30]:

I am not a victim to the outside world and its circumstances in this project, of growing this podcast and creating the course and all of the things that come with that, I am building that so differently today, as I would say, just a more mature business person in my forties, we have a different financial picture than we did when I started element three. I can spend some money on some things to give me my time back, because it is important for me to be there for my kids in some ways that are really, really flexible. So I could say, hey, I wanna protect this choice to be with my kids and to be available to them. And so as a result, I'm gonna put no new projects in place or in my life until all my kids are out of the house. Well, for me, because my kids are so far apart, that would be like another 15 years from now, Quincy's only three. That's a really wild amount of time for me to say, hey, I'm going to sit on the sidelines and I'm not going to grow in any professional capacity because of my choice to want to be with my kids. But when my abundant mindset self says my life, my heart of Anne said, how do I get all of these things to be true? What are the choices that I need to make to test into this career environment? So this first one, they said, should I do something that reflects my creative passion? Or maybe I should do something more practical. If this was me, what I would do is I would test both of those things.

Tiffany Sauder [00:12:03]:

I would get clear with myself and with my spouse, and I would say, okay, let's think about things that could pay me in this creative lane. What are some things that I could do? I don't know if this person is writing or visual creative. I don't know. I'll use my sister in law. She's doing some really cool stuff right now. She is stay home mom. She's super creative, and so she has started creating patterns that would be printed on fabric. So, I don't know, a couple hours a week, she gets out her iPad and her fancy stylist and the fancy software that she uses, and she has started to sketch different patterns, and she's included her kids, and they go out in nature and they, like, find inspiration.

Tiffany Sauder [00:12:45]:

How cool. So that's fueling her creativity. She has the opportunity to sell some of these pattern designs to fabric manufacturers. They'll, like, buy them, and that's a way that she could make money still inside the confines of the time. She wants to dictate to it. She doesn't need to get childcare for it in that situation. And it could potentially pay her. What a creative way to use your creativity in a way that could make money.

Tiffany Sauder [00:13:16]:

And so she's, like, making dresses for her little girls. I think you can do, like, limited run fabric runs. So she's doing samples, she's making dresses out of them, and she's posting them on Instagram. So smart of her. She can do this all with her kids and the hopes of maybe she can sell it or it gets picked up or she gets noticed by somebody. So that's an example. Like, she could just sell those dresses individually for probably $120 apiece, because they're, like, unique, one of a kind, like, crazy. So what I would do, I'm going down a little bit of a rabbit hole, but what I want you to see is, with the constraints of, I don't want to do childcare, I want to stay home, but I want to make money and use my creativity.

Tiffany Sauder [00:13:58]:

That is an idea that came forward for her because she's looking at it through a lens of, well, how could I? Versus what are all of the negative things that could enter our family into our home, into my time, if I go and take a risk and try something. So I would make a list of what are all of the ideas you have about how you could use your creativity if you want something creative that is paying you, and then I would do the same thing with the more practical, whatever that means. Maybe it's something you got a degree in. Maybe you're a dental hygienist. I don't know, something like that. Make a list of those things, and I would begin to quantify how many hours a week can I feasibly put towards any of these things? Do any of them allow me to afford some amount of childcare. Is that something that I'm open to, and how can you test into it? One of the key concepts from Jim Collins, I believe it is good to great. One of my very favorite business books is he uses this analogy of bullets and then cannons.

Tiffany Sauder [00:15:05]:

So he talks about when, if you're an army and you're at war and you have a limited amount of gunpowder, well, what you can do is fire off a couple of cannons. And so then you probably have one, maybe three different shots that you can fire. And if you aren't right the first time or really close, you don't have very many times to calibrate when you're firing cannons to hit the enemy or to, like, hit your target. If you're using so much gunpowder with every single shot, you just run out of ammunition, you run out of fuel, you run out of the ability to be able to, like, fund and finance what you're wanting to do, and the exact same thing. He uses this analogy in businesses, but I use the same concept in my life of how do I test into it? What is a bullet sized effort that I can take towards this thing? I think I want to do that. I have an idea around what is a bullet sized effort that I can make towards it to just say, did that test pass or fail? And am I getting more or less market feedback that says, this is a good idea or this is a bad idea? I have this, like, apparel idea, and I don't know for sure if I'm gonna do it or not, but the only thing I've really done is I made a sample and I wear it. That's the one thing I've really done. I wear it.

Tiffany Sauder [00:16:28]:

I wear it. It's, like, kind of in the fan gear, like, sports stuff. Like, you know, I go and cheer all my kids on to all this stuff, and I don't really like the gear that they tried to sell me, like, a long sleeved, dry fit t shirt. I don't like it. So I've got some ideas of maybe how to disrupt that category. I don't have time to put towards it, really right now, but the one thing I did do is I made a sample, and I sold a couple to one of my daughter's teammates parents. And so it was like, that was a test I could run. I probably have spent 10 hours, maybe 15 hours total on this project in the last six months.

Tiffany Sauder [00:17:05]:

Like, it is a very, very, very light lift, but it allows me to keep testing the idea a little bit and saying, hey, when I wear this, do people compliment me. What are the different ways that I can wear it? Does it make me hot? Is it useful? Is it hard to pack? Like, I'm just living in it, living in the product as a way to kind of test and get some market feedback right alongside the rest of life that I'm doing. So what I want you to hear in all of this is not my specific examples exactly, except that when fear is the thing that is clouding our vision of our future, it sees only all the things that could go wrong and all the things that will be taken from you. When a heart of abundance and a clearly defined understanding of what are the values I'm going to protect for our family, like, things like, I'm never going to be gone during the week for this project. Or I'm never going to need to have somebody come get the kids off the bus. I don't know. Pick your things, whatever they are. What are the boundaries that you're going to put to the time you're going to put against it, and the financial so that you can run a test and go do the research to understand how much could you really make? How long would it take you to make a significant amount of money? What will that money be used for inside of your family? Are the trade offs worth it? But do the work to understand the math.

Tiffany Sauder [00:18:31]:

People say no to stuff way before they actually go and, like, get on a phone call and gather the actual data about what would it take to do this. And again, when we are fear filled, we oftentimes look at it in the most extreme way. And through a lens of what could go wrong. Instead of a lens of what could go right. So if you find yourself sitting in this fearful loyalist seat, take a beat and begin to ask yourself the question, but what if it could work? What would it look like? And then ask yourself, and then, where can I start? And if that is something that your brain has a hard time doing, where can I start? How could I define a bullet sized effort. To begin doing something towards this idea or this new thing I want to learn. Or this career change I want to make, or this business I want to start. Or whatever it is? These little seedlings inside of us are not random.

Tiffany Sauder [00:19:36]:

I think they are God's gift to our creativity, to our inspiration, to our purpose, to our sense of meaning. Like, I believe those are literally God's gift to us. And when we allow those to be watered, when we allow those to be heard and seen and freed in a lot of ways. By having the courage to speak them into the world. They grow and beautiful things happen and I am, you know, this is like my life story of starting stuff, growing it and then allowing it to have impact. I just love this. So anyways, don't sit in this fearful loyalist spot. Have the courage to begin asking yourself the question what if it could work? And then if you can't see where to start, call me, call a friend and start to outline.

Tiffany Sauder [00:20:24]:

Where would I start? How could I get started and take one courageous step forward and I promise you it will make the next step a little easier and that step will make the next step a little easier. Keep running passionately towards this life of and. It is not easy but I promise it is worth it. Thanks for listening. Thank you for joining me on another episode of Scared Confident. Until next time, keep telling fear you will not decide what happens in my life. I will.