Two Chaps - Many Cultures

Embracing the Unknown: Overcoming Fear to embrace Cross-Cultural Adventures

• Christian Höferle and Brett Parry • Season 1 • Episode 4

Share episode

Ever felt a twinge of unease at the thought of venturing into unfamiliar territory? Our latest episode peels back the layers of fear, the fear of the foreign, the unknown, the undiscovered. From a story of encouraging a loved one's trepidation towards traveling to a country, ew dig into the intricate web of influences, from the primal instincts of our amygdala to the vast, sometimes skewed, media portrayals that shape how we see the world beyond our borders. Together, we navigate through these instinctual fears with an aim to cultivate an eagerness for embracing new adventures.

Imagine fear not as a wall, but as a gateway to untapped strength and growth. We recount the story of a psychologist who, once bullied as a child, found resilience through his boxing career—a powerful example of fear serving as both a shield and a hindrance. As we dissect the acronym F.E.A.R. (False Evidence Appearing Real), we unravel the idea that our trepidations are often just distress signals based on what might never come to pass. This conversation is an invitation to share in the personal transformations that can emerge from reassessing the fears that once held us back.

We're not just your hosts—we're your coaches, ready to celebrate those breakthrough moments that redefine our lives. So, remember to hit subscribe, because every episode promises to be a mosaic of insights, experiences, and contagious curiosity for the rich tapestry of cultures that make up our world.

𝙏𝙬𝙤 𝘾𝙝𝙖𝙥𝙨 – 𝙈𝙖𝙣𝙮 𝘾𝙪𝙡𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚𝙨 is the world’s #1 show on the business of culture and the culture of business. Christian Höferle and Brett Parry ponder culture in short bursts and deep dives, featuring your questions and comments related to culture, business, and personal growth.

Be sure to check out and subscribe to our YouTube channel for even more great content: https://www.youtube.com/@TwoChapsManyCultures

Visit https://theculturemastery.com/ for more information about the skills for working in a global context.

The music on this episode is provided courtesy of Sepalot.
“Duum Diip” - Artist: Sepalot - Label: Eskapaden - Copyright control



Speaker 1:

A few years ago, I had an interesting experience with a family member. A pretty good experience, and it involved encouraging them to take travel to a particular country. Their initial response was quite negative and, as somebody who had been to that country, I thought that seems illogical to me. What could you possibly be scared of? And we're going to talk about fear. What makes us scared? What causes fear of other places, other cultures? Just an interesting topic, and we're going to talk about it today. Stick around.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to Two Chaps Many Cultures. In an increasingly globally connected world, it is vital to possess the essential skills of cultural intelligence. Listen along as we present the topics, tips and strategies you can use to develop the power of cultural understanding in your personal and professional life. Here are your hosts Christian Hufferler and Brett.

Speaker 3:

Parry, welcome back to another episode of Two Chaps, many Cultures. We're glad you're here. Make sure you subscribe. You know how this works Hit the bell or push the button or click that link or whatever it is your device does to make sure you don't miss an episode, that you always are up to date on the latest development on this channel and get the latest episodes. So today, fear, fear of the foreign that we don't know about. Should we do this?

Speaker 1:

Is this good, it's just. I was listening, as you know, when we do these episodes, oftentimes they come from just, they're inspired by certain things we've here, and I thought, and I was listening to your podcast about fear, the hidden brain podcast, and it's a wonderful podcast Many recommended highly, as long as and ours too, by the way. But the good thing about working with Christian here, my wonderful dear colleague, is that I can just throw a topic like this at him and he has this wonderful clarity of mind to be able to go yeah, let's go it like no fear at all.

Speaker 3:

Oh, you, you, I do have fears. I'm very careful how many of those I disclose. Oh, I think we all, we all probably have those family members or friends that won't follow us to a destination that we have been to before and we say, hey, this is fantastic, you should do that too. And they go, uh, uh, nope, hey, or here's why, and I don't like this I'm afraid of the people, the food, both the, I don't know the topography, the climate. Brett's been nudging me to go to Australia and I've been watching all these video clips about all all that nature has to offer down under and you're asking me not to feel fear about the spiders and ruse and all the other stuff that's crawling and slithering and hopping and bopping down under. Give me a reason to go.

Speaker 1:

Well, I'll get to the end of this story that I was talking about my family in a minute, but in the meantime I was just interested in like listening to some that which I get a lot right Australia, wow, the dangerous animals and all this kind of thing.

Speaker 1:

And as somebody who grew up there with a deep experience of navigating life around this apparently Jurassic Park of a place, um, it seems illogical to me. That's an illogical response, but it is A reasonable response when you understand that I don't understand the framework in which other people see my country through, and that is certainly media, but also a lot of documentaries which, you know, quite frankly, hype up some of that by design. It's a story, it's a narrative. It causes tension, and fear causes tension, driven by our lizard brain speaking of crawly things. Keep the same theme. We're trying to keep the same theme, but I don't know. I mean it is when we're confronted by the attitude of somebody else with our information, we oftentimes kind of react to it in a visceral way and say how could you possibly think like that? So what do you think is behind that mate?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, but the illogical thing that's, I get that because I am a cerebral kind of person. I like to be in my head and I usually reason with logic, and I'm married to a person who is a lot more emotionally expressive than I am and she will remind me to get out of my head and consider emotions, consider feelings, and logic and emotion sometimes don't communicate and our brains are designed to sometimes keep those two things apart. I'm not a neuroscientist. All I know is that we have, through our evolution, the way we became to be homo sapiens, we still have remnants in our brains from evolutionary times when we were not walking on our hind legs and developing language to express thoughts and emotions. So we have you used the word a minute ago reptilian brain.

Speaker 3:

Right, we have a part of our brain, the amygdala, that is keeping us safe from predatory dangers, from anything that could potentially harm us. It's the fight versus flight response that is very intuitive, instinctive knee jerk and we run away from potential pain and we run towards potential pleasure. And that is often done without taking into account what we might actually know or learn about a situation or place a country in the story that your family member had. Our instincts override our conscious brains sometimes, and it's there to keep us safe, right, it's not right or wrong. It's what helped us evolve to the beings that we are today. If we didn't run away from the saber tooth tiger, we would have been eliminated from the gene pool very swiftly, right, and we wouldn't be here today. So some of these biases serve a purpose.

Speaker 3:

So how can we then take our cognitive part of the brain and overwrite the reflex? How can we tell the fear that it's? Hey, it's not fear, it's the excitement. And apparently and then I was told this by neuroscientists, so forgive me if I'm butchering this retelling of what I thought I learned Apparently, the the chemistry in our neural synapses is the same, whether it's fear or excitement. What, what's happening between nerve ending seems to be the same thing. We, our brains, have decided to give it a certain meaning. We may have a memory of something that wasn't pleasant and we store that memory as something that is a threat that we survived. And next time we are confronted with signals that point towards the same, similar fear, we respond negatively. Right, but the the chemistry in our brain between the nerve endings is apparently the same, whether it's fear or excitement. So telling our brain that it's not fear that we experience, that it's actually excitement that might be the key to having a wider experience.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's, that's right. I like the fact you clarified when not, you're a scientist and that, but we and we don't even play them on TV, we just appear here on YouTube or on our podcast here, and but we do, as Christine says, hang around with a lot of really smart people. Another aspect of that was interesting you bought to mine somebody that said once that our fear response has no concept of time. So when we this is why traumatic memories are so real when you're faced with a situation that somehow is related to the current or a past experience, so you bring that experience very quickly into reality and that causes extra stress and there's no doubt that people struggle with this. It's a and it's a real challenge for a lot of people. So I don't want to diminish the impact of this, but it is when we're, when we have confronted with listening to somebody talk about or refer to something that we are so comfortable about and understand and have knowledge of, through a fear reflex we tend to miss. And you know, and I'm certainly guilty of that, even though we do this work and we are, we are taught in this work to be very open to the experiences and understand the fears and the trepidations and the excitement. So you know the the the whole thing about this environment is to learn about yourself. You know. I think that's what is causing those reactions. What have you seen bringing yourself into this?

Speaker 1:

Another example in that podcast, which is great, how the person was commenting as a psychologist. He said I remember in my boxing career I got to a high level of boxing and then in one particular circumstance I was confronted by an opponent and went back to my schoolyard bullying days where I was bullied. And he said his boxing coach clarified it very well. He said but don't ignore that past experience. Connect with it and say what would you tell that kid in that playground? Would you tell them how proud you are that you're standing here today with strength and skill to be able to? You know that you built because of that experience. And he said that really snapped him into reality of thinking.

Speaker 1:

There is a you don't squash these past experiences. You connect them to current day and I think any time that I've traveled to a place where I've maybe have not been before and and gone, you know I'm a little bit. I'm a little. You know I'm a little bit perturbed by this. I'm not sure what to expect. You know you can go back to other experiences where you've been into those those different places and gone. You know that kind of worked out. Well, what did I do then? How and what am I going to say to my family and my friends about my travels and how I push through those boundaries? And of course, this is really, you know, this is personal for me and with this family member because I didn't want them to miss out on the experience, the wonderful experience I had had in this particular country, and because I cared for them. So that was a reframing. Maybe you could talk a little bit about this kind of this reframing idea where you can kind of move something from one place to another.

Speaker 3:

I think a fear is limiting. That's what it is right. A fear might protect us from something that's potentially bad for us and it might help us survive. It also limits our experience. Right, because we don't do something that could be good. Right, there is, it works.

Speaker 3:

In the English language, I've heard people say fear is an acronym for false evidence appearing real. I know this is a bit of an easy, easy way out of this, but give it a second to sink in. So if we none of us know the future right, none of us know what will happen ten seconds from now. All we have is this moment right now. So fear is an anticipation of pain. So we anticipate that in the future there will be something unpleasant, but I have no evidence supporting that. It's only my presumption. Something in my brain some usually a memory, as you just said Triggers that fear right there. I had a bad experience sometime in the past and now I'm having similar data points that led me back to my memory bank, where it is stored that I should be afraid of this. But I have no way of predicting the future. So how can I keep myself safe and still go into it? Right, how can I tell my brain the same fear. This is anticipation. You're anticipating something, so would you be open to entertaining the option that it might actually be good? And that is easier said than done. It takes practice and, ideally, take somebody like you in the scenario that you encouraged your family members. I vouch for this place. It is not as bad or to be feared as you might think. So here are my data points I'm sharing with you. Take those into consideration. Maybe you will change your mind, or at least give it a try, and, if necessary, I'll be there to accompany you and protect you from what you might be afraid of.

Speaker 3:

There is different strategies to approach this. Now I like what you said about the, the memory right that we cannot change your past. Think therapists might be able to. I'm not a therapist, but therapists go into what happened in your past and maybe fix that. I'm sorry if I'm miss characterizing what therapists do, but we brought an eye. We're not therapists, we are coaches. We coach people to enter the unknown in a way that equips them with the resources they need to enter the unknown. So we're not addressing what's in the past, we're laying out paths for the future and saying you could go down this way and this is what you can expect, or you can go down that way and that will be the course of action potentially. So it's not trying to undo what happened and created the fear in the first place. It's opening up scope, opening up options, giving you more variety and, hopefully, removing the limitation, because Ideally, what we want for our clients, for people that Want to go deeper, wider, further, is to expand their experience, and those fears have a tendency to limit that.

Speaker 1:

Well, in that particular case certainly the story ends well, the and I guess back then you know it was a little while ago back then I was probably very, very early in my training and coaching career. I probably didn't have the skills that I have now to be able to kind of guide people through that. But that's an example where, maybe inherently, I went to no, hey, let me take a step back and understand that this person I love and I want to have this experience is coming from a different framework and just to encourage it by giving information, right Understanding, because I know that person and I know their values and their cultural framework, Of course then I was able to kind of take that to the next step and say now let's gather information, Now let's take what I know, take what you can find out on your own this probably follows a pattern in the work we do and take that an extra step, taking steps on your own to find out information, and then take that leap right that encourages you to take that leap. Information is power, as the old saying goes, and that's the ultimate outcome was, the family member went there and at the end of that trip I was really, really touched by the comment where they were still there in the country and we did a call and they actually said thank you for encouraging me to do this, because this trip has changed my life.

Speaker 1:

This has changed. This has been a life-changing experience. So that was an extra bit of kind of heartening for me because it was a deep sense that I led somebody to an experience that had had a pure effect on their life. And I try and do that every day in our work and Christian does the same thing. We take this work personally and any leader, any person who's kind of encouraging people to push their professional or personal bounds, I think should be encouraged when they see an outcome like that, to tap into that. We can talk about numbers and dollars and return, investment and profit and all that kind of stuff, but at the end of the day, the reason I do this work is for those very experiences.

Speaker 3:

And I want to address something that is easily discarded or disregarded or not considered enough by people who are personality types like Brett and I. Brett and I are kind of cerebral thinkers or in our heads and logic-minded. It would be doing those at a service who are more emotional creatures right To not address the fear would not help, right. So it's always important in that work to embrace the emotion that somebody has around the fear, to validate that and not make that wrong. It's not saying, hey, your fear is stupid because it's illogical. Well, thank you very much for not acknowledging what I feel would be the response most likely. So it's important to acknowledge and validate that emotion and also help the emotion to find different ways to give them a different channel to go through. And what you just said about that family member who called you from the country that they were initially so afraid of entering, I think it's hugely important in any type of coaching relationship or mentorship relationship that whenever somebody has experience that breaks through, whenever they recognize that the limitation that held them back has been removed and they actually did what they were afraid of, is that we, as those who nudge them gently toward that direction, we acknowledge the fact that they did. We help them celebrate that accomplishment, however small it may appear to us right. If, if that breakthrough goes, uncelebrate it, it will not be anchored in.

Speaker 3:

You want to help that person create a new memory, say, yes, you did this. See, wasn't that hard after all, was it? And probably feels good now that you've done it. Right. You were so. It's so comprehensive about it at first, and now look at yourself. You. That's where you are now. Isn't that fantastic? Yes, hi five, please, or whatever it is you.

Speaker 1:

You anchor that emotion and so it becomes a supportive memory for the future and you can share with that, especially if it's a family member or a dear friend that you can use going forward. So perhaps you know, as you look around in your life, when you're, when you're seeing people react in a fearful way or you see yourself reacting in a fearful way, some of these skills are really can be learned and and we enjoy teaching them. We enjoy learning them ourselves and we're always on a continuing learning journey here as well. So just leave in a comment after question anything you wanted in this episode. We always love to hear from the people out there watching or listening, and keep in mind just a reminder.

Speaker 1:

Of course, we now have the new podcast, the, the two chaps, many cultures podcast, available on all the good platforms, all the very best platforms that we only the good. Yes, we pay thousands and thousands of dollars to be listed on these platforms. No, but seriously it's. We value you as an audience and we want to thank you for listening in. Please don't forget to subscribe, as Christian said before, hit that bell, whether you're listening to us here on the podcast or on YouTube. That's another week, another episode of two chaps, many cultures want to. Thank you very much for joining us and we will see you next time and don't be afraid to follow.

Speaker 3:

Be very afraid.