The Wheel of Fear: Rhonda Britten’s Path to Fearless Living

[Dana] (00:01)
Welcome friends, whether you’re out on a walk, running errands, or relaxing at home, it’s wonderful to connect with you. Joining us today is Rhonda Britten. She is an Emmy Award winner, repeat Oprah guest, and master coach. She has changed lives in over 600 episodes of reality television, authored four bestsellers, including her seminal work, “Fearless Living,” which has been translated into 16 languages. She founded the Fearless Living Institute, which is the home of the Fearless Living Life Coach Certification Program, considered the Ivy League of Life Coaching Training. Rhonda, welcome to Phoenix and Flame.

[Rhonda] (00:51)
Thank you, I’m so excited to be here.

[Dana] (00:53)
This is amazing. Now you speak a lot on fear, and for people who have listened to prior podcast episodes on Phoenix and Flame, they know I love talking about fear, I love talking about boundaries, which weaves into just about everything. So tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to this place in your life.

[Rhonda] (01:19)
Well, as we all know, the worst days of our lives are really the seed of our destiny. Now, we don’t know it at the time when we’re crawling through glass, but once we move through them, most of us can look back and see how all the dots connect. My first dot, my journey started really when I was 14 years old on the worst day of my life. I grew up in a little tiny town in upper Michigan, 365 inches of snow. In fact, this year it snowed in May, they had literally a blizzard the first of May, got like 20 inches or something crazy. It had two restaurants, Douglas House Buffet Hotel and Big Boy, no McDonald’s, that was too fancy for us. My parents were in the middle of getting separated, and it was Father’s Day, so my father was coming over to take us all out to Sunday brunch. My mother was in her bedroom fluffing up her beehive hairdo, putting on her rose-colored lipstick, blue eyeshadow. My two sisters are in our one bathroom fighting it out. My dad walks in the back door, “Come on, come on, come on,” because that’s what dads do. Me and my mom start walking out, my sister’s still in the bathroom fighting it out. As me and my mom and dad start walking out, it starts sprinkling, so my dad looks at us and says, “Well, I’ve got to get my coat from the car.” Now this coat is a tan Naugahyde leisure suit coat, and for those people old enough to remember the leisure suit coat, you know that was a good-looking coat. My dad, in his polyester pants, his plaid shirt, and his Naugahyde coat, looked good, right? So he’s opening his trunk, and out of the corner of my eye, I notice he is not grabbing a Naugahyde leisure suit coat, but he is grabbing a gun. And he starts yelling at my mother, “You made me do this, you made me do this.” And he fires.

[Rhonda] (03:08)
And I start screaming, “Dad, what are you doing, dad? Dad, stop, what are you doing?” And he cocks the gun again, and he looks at me and he blinks, and I blink, and he blinks, and I blink. And then my mother, literally with her last breath, screams out, “No, don’t.” And my father, in that moment, realizing my mother’s still alive, takes that bullet intended for me and shoots my mother a second time. And that second bullet goes through my mother’s abdomen, out her back, lands at the car horn, and for the next 20 minutes all we heard was that. And then my father cocked the gun one more time, put it to his head, and fired. So in a matter of less than two minutes, I was the sole witness of watching my father murder my mother and commit suicide in front of me. Now, I don’t know how other people would respond, but this is how I responded: it was my fault, because I was literally the only one there who could have physically stopped it, and I didn’t. I didn’t grab the gun, I didn’t kick my father’s shins, I didn’t even jump in front of my mother, all I did was say, “Stop, dad, stop.” And so on that day, I like to think of it as I split into two people: the outside Rhonda, who’s palatable to everybody else and I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine, and inside Rhonda, the one that never gets to be happy again, because when you don’t save your mother, happiness is off the table, and self-hatred, regret, guilt, you name it. And so for the next 20 years I lived in this split frame. On one hand, I was getting a full ride to college, and on the other hand, I was becoming an alcoholic. And after being an alcoholic, I started getting DUIs, got three of them, tried to kill myself three times. And it was that third suicide attempt that I realized something. I realized that I am not very good at killing myself. Not good at it. And I got to figure this out, because those 20 years, remember, it was a split: on one hand I was doing everything I could, I was going to therapy, I was reading books, I was going to workshops, I was doing everything somebody’s supposed to be doing to change their life, I was doing it all. And in that third suicide attempt, by the way, when you try to kill yourself three times, they do put you in a psychiatric ward for evaluation. So they put me in a psychiatric ward and they deemed me not crazy, they let me go, and I go to my little studio apartment, I live by myself, not a good idea when you’re suicidal. And I remember realizing I had a lot of knowledge, right, I had done all this work and I had a lot of skills, a lot of tools, but I didn’t know how to apply them, and I couldn’t get past the fear, even though I didn’t name it that at the time, the fear that was holding me back. And so on that day I remember so vividly going, “I have to start over,” because everything I’ve done, while it’s been good, it hasn’t changed my life. So I said to myself, what do kindergartners do? Well, they get a calendar and gold stars. So that’s exactly what I did. I go down to the store, I get a calendar, I get some gold stars, by the way I still have this calendar in my office, and for 30 days I put a star next to anytime I did anything good. And we’re talking about getting angry and not breaking anything, or having a drink and not getting drunk, okay, that’s where I was, on an evolutionary scale. And at the end of 30 days…

[Dana] (06:09)
Nice. I love it, I love this.

[Rhonda] (06:32)
I had a calendar filled with gold stars, and that gave me the seed of courage to keep going, because I knew also that day: if I’m not dying, I’m meant to live, so I better figure this out. So I went on to do more work on myself, but more importantly, I started to investigate fear, because for those 20 years, you know, I grew up like I said in Upper Michigan, I’m 100% Finnish, we don’t feel anything, and we definitely don’t have fear. So if you would have asked me when I was in the hospital for suicide, if you would have asked me when I was drunk, if you would have asked me the day after my parents died, if I was afraid, I would have said no. I had no relationship to the word fear, afraid, scared, zero. And for 20 years I would have said no.

[Dana] (07:27)
That you didn’t have fear.

[Rhonda] (07:29)
That I didn’t even understand what it was. Like, “fear? I’m not afraid.” And I really, really believed that. And I think this is true for many people: they think they’re not afraid, because they think of fear as, you know, shaking in your boots, or heights, or snakes, or spiders. That’s what they think of fear. They do not understand or know the difference between physical fear and emotional fear, and they don’t understand what emotional fear is.

[Rhonda] (07:59)
So that awareness of fear, and my day-to-day willingness to surrender to the fact that I might have some fear, and what do I do now, is really what continued my journey and what got me here today.

[Dana] (08:18)
That is amazing. What you’ve gone through is just incredible. And I like the fact that you’re talking about the timestamps, because sometimes people have this idea that we go through this horrible thing and then we blink our eyes and it’s all been fixed. I know years and years, decades sometimes, of struggle. And I say that so that if there are listeners out there in that desert right now, it’s okay, they’re not alone. There’s something I hear a lot, and I’ve experienced this myself on numerous occasions. The question is this: is there anyone alive that somewhere deep down inside doesn’t have the basic fear that “I’m not good enough”?

[Rhonda] (09:11)
I would say most people have that. I think people with brain injuries, things of that sort, maybe that one, two, three percent may not have that. Narcissists, et cetera, I mean deep down they do, but on the surface, and how they interact in the world, they don’t. So yes, everyone has a fear of not being good enough. And not being good enough is a generic way to think about fear. For me personally, talking about fear in a generic way did not change my life.

[Rhonda] (09:41)
I had to personalize it, I had to know how it operated for me. And that’s why I created what I call the Wheel of Fear and Wheel of Freedom. So yes, while everyone does have what we want to call “not good enough,” there is actually a unique fear that you have versus what I have versus what Cheryl has, what Don has. We all have a fear that’s literally driving us, that is virtually invisible, because the way our neurobiology works, it has to stay hidden, otherwise it can’t do its job. Its goal is to stay hidden, it doesn’t want you to find it. So when we go to a friend or a therapist or a coach and ask, “Why am I like this? Why, why, why? What happened to me?” Well, one, it’s not one event. And two, neuroscience now says that fear may very well be handed down through our DNA. So it may not be something that happened to you specifically at a particular age, instead it’s an accumulation of events, an accumulation of things you’ve surrounded yourself with. And by the way, psychology says it’s formed by the time we’re seven. So even though my parents died when I was 14, I already had what I call my Wheel of Fear, it was already locked and loaded. It just had its way with me. It had more permission, because I was now in survival mode for the next 20 years.

[Dana] (11:06)
Got it. So the Wheel of Fear, talk a little bit more about that, that sounds very interesting.

[Rhonda] (11:11)
Thank you. Well, the Wheel of Fear is what saved my life, because once I understood how fear really worked, not from an ethereal way, not just a psychological way. We can talk about neurobiology all we want, and we all know, if we do our neuroscience, that biologically we’re wired for fear, that’s been proven over and over again. So we’re wired for fear, and then we think that we don’t have fear. Just think about that. When we’re in the present moment, like we have a present problem in our lives, unless we use our frontal lobe, unless we’re able to move beyond the fear, we are going to automatically look in the past for a solution to the present problem, believing that we will create a new future. And we all know how that works, because we’ve all been on that hamster wheel, and that’s why I called it the Wheel of Fear, because that literally is how we feel. So the best way to talk about the Wheel of Fear is reading a quiz to you. Do you mind if I give you a little quiz? For the people listening, if you’re able to, I want you to nod your head if you do any of these things or feel any of these things. And if you’re not in a safe place to do that, that’s okay, just do your best you can.

[Dana] (12:15)
Go ahead.

[Rhonda] (12:35)
And if you’re surrounded by people, go ahead and shut your eyes so you don’t notice them. Okay, so: do you ever isolate? Do you ever pretend everything’s okay when it’s not? Do you ever hide out? Do you ever whine? What about settle? What about compare yourself to others? Do you ever secretly manipulate? What about get defensive, or judge? Do you ever complain, procrastinate, worry? Do you ever struggle, blame, deflect, try to control? Do you ever feel bitter, powerless, entitled, resentful? Do you ever feel guilty, disappointed? Are you ever a perfectionist or a people pleaser? What about irresponsible, or overwhelmed, or ignored? What about irritated, like probably you feel right now with me reading these words? Right, Rhonda, be quiet already, you’re calling me out, lady. What about getting caught in self-pity, or annoyed? Or the ultimate victimization: do you ever feel like a victim?

[Dana] (13:38)
You know Rhonda, I think if anybody could get through that list without saying yes, then they’re probably a cyborg. I’m just saying.

[Rhonda] (13:47)
That’s right. Well, let’s just say, whether I talk to an audience of a thousand people or a hundred people, over 90%, over 95%, most people shake their hand, nod their head at pretty much everything. I was teaching a class the other day, giving this quiz to a group of speakers, and there were a couple of people who said 30% or 50%, and I said, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

[Rhonda] (14:17)
Because let’s just step back a minute. Let’s just say we have nine areas of our life, one’s career, one’s intimate relationship, another’s family, et cetera. You might already be on what I call the Wheel of Freedom in eight out of nine areas of your life, so you may not nod your head on these things if you’re thinking of those areas. But I want you to be thinking of the area that’s not going well for you, the area where you beat yourself up, the area where you just wish, “What is my problem, why can’t I get this,” where you really can be described as your own worst enemy. In that area of life, your Wheel of Fear is in charge, and these are the words that show up. These are what I call fear responses, and what most people call them are their problems, their character defects, the things they have to get over: “Oh God, if I could just stop judging, I’d be such a better person, I don’t want to judge, I got to give up my control, I got to give up that procrastination, I got to give up my people-pleasing, I got to put boundaries in place.” All those things are lovely and well, yet you’re going after the wrong thing, because you’re going after the symptom. It’s like changing the chairs on the Titanic. You’ve got to actually go down and get to the root, because you don’t get overwhelmed unless you have a fear underneath. You don’t get overwhelmed without a fear, you don’t get irritated without a fear, you don’t feel powerless without a fear, you don’t complain or judge without a fear.

[Rhonda] (15:43)
And although the self-belief work you do, self-beliefs are actually simply fear responses, they’re the things we’ve created to make sense of that invisible thing we don’t even know is fear. So even if you have a belief and you do your belief work, again, good work, underneath it, it will just create a new thing. It doesn’t care if you’re a procrastinator, it doesn’t care if you judge, it doesn’t care how it stops you, it only cares that it does.

[Dana] (16:13)
That is amazing. I’m also wanting to hear your take on the amygdala and the trauma responses. People typically think about fight or flight, but then we also have freeze, we have fawning, and those are fear-based, those are when we feel threatened and we’re afraid, and then we’re going to respond. And when that happens, the neocortex that has all the logical, reasonable thought pops offline and we don’t have the ability to think.

[Rhonda] (16:29)
That’s right.

[Dana] (16:43)
I’m just kind of wondering what your experience has been with that, and the people you’ve talked to.

[Rhonda] (16:48)
Well, if you think about everything I just read to you, all the fear responses, they’re part of fight, flight, fawn, fake, freeze. All of those are under those categories. But when I’m in a fight with somebody, or a client comes in and says “my life is ruined,” and I say, “Well, you’re in flight,” that’s not helpful in the moment. It’s like, “Oh my God, I’m in flight,” talking to your mate, for most people, it is not helpful.

[Rhonda] (17:17)
Instead, we actually want to bring it down to earth and actually talk about the behaviors, the thoughts, the feelings that somebody is experiencing in the moment, because that’s real to them. And you and I both know that unless it’s real to them, it’s just a psychological exercise, a logical exercise of “I’ll just figure this out.” No, that’s not how it happens, because when your back is against the wall, when you’re at the crossroads, logic goes offline.

[Rhonda] (17:44)
Instead, we have to understand what’s happening to us so that we can actually take our brain back, take our frontal lobe back, so we can make better decisions. But it’s not because you’re stupid or lazy or weak or incompetent or foolish or worthless. All this work on imposter syndrome and worthlessness now, those are the new hip ways to describe what’s happening, and that’s lovely, but that’s actually not the issue.

[Rhonda] (18:13)
Right, so that’s again just a way we label it to help it make sense to us, but we want to go underneath it, because the Wheel of Fear will just keep creating new fear responses.

[Dana] (18:25)
What do you feel, Rhonda, are the core fears? If we keep unpacking and digging, digging to get at the root ball of it, what has been your experience, your research, with the core fears?

[Rhonda] (18:58)
Thank you for asking me that. I have been doing this for 30 years, and over the last 30 years I’ve just noticed this theme, so to speak, and I’ve narrowed them down to 10. Let me just say this beforehand: when people discover their Wheel of Fear, there are four components to it, and right now you and I are talking about what I call the core trigger. That’s the thing you peel back, peel back, peel back, and every trigger you think is your trigger is really on top of this core trigger, the thing that really runs your life. If you are not aware of it, it is going to run your life, and it’s the motherlode, right, underneath it all. So I’m going to tell you mine, and by the way, when I discovered this, when I realized it with my best friend, she did the work with me when I first started 30 years ago.

[Rhonda] (19:56)
And we started uncovering all this, and I realized what my core trigger was. Most people, when they nail their core trigger, either go, “That’s not true, that’s not true, that’s not me,” they push back, or they start crying, or they go into shock and confusion, “I don’t get it, I don’t get it.” Well, for me it was like a punch in the gut, I could not believe this was it, because I had spent my entire life, and this is what’s true for everyone, making sure nobody thinks this about them, that nobody even smells this around them. So my core trigger, the thing I’m most afraid of, when my life isn’t going well I run to it, mine is “loser.” Now, I was a straight-A student, I was president of my class, I was soapbox derby queen when I was 13 years old, I was teacher’s pet.

[Rhonda] (20:53)
I got a full ride to college. I was the youngest member, and the only woman, on the finance committee of the University of Minnesota, the largest enrollment school in the country. Accolades, right? And so, “loser,” I have never been called a loser in my life to this day. And that’s the other thing, people come to me and go, “Well, I know what mine is,” and I go, “Really, do tell.” And they go, “My mother called me stupid my whole life, it’s stupid,” and I go, “Oh honey, no, it’s not, stupid is a fear response, there’s something way underneath that.”

[Rhonda] (21:23)
That’s driving you, because you’re used to stupid, stupid is palatable, “Yeah, my mom calls me stupid,” that’s just a fear response. Like most people say fear of rejection or fear of failure, most of those are just fear responses. Most people don’t have a core trigger of rejection. So mine is loser. What happens when I’m in an environment that may bring that up? Right now, mind you, I’m aware of it, I understand what’s happening to me now, so I don’t get hijacked, because I know what’s happening. Let’s say I go into a party, an environment, a networking event, and I walk in, and before I knew this, if I walked in and the first person I saw looked at me, maybe they’re over at the bar getting a drink, and I’m sitting at the door and I don’t know anybody, and I’m by myself, and they look over at me and give me that dirty, dismissive look, I would have been out of that room. I would have told myself I don’t belong, that these people aren’t my people. I would have made up some excuse not to go in, or another response I could have done with my loser trigger is gotten loud and obnoxious and tried to prove to that guy that I’m so amazing, and started bragging, to show everybody that you’re the loser, not me. So we have a lot of different fear responses that we use in order for our Wheel of Fear to stay protected. We do not want anyone to know this about us. So the core trigger, mine, like I said, is loser. If I smell it, again, this is happening automatically until you really start working with it. So if I find myself doing any of the fear responses I talked about, then I, Rhonda Britten, know now enough, my frontal lobe doesn’t go offline, because I know what’s happening, and I can say, “Rhonda, Rhonda, Rhonda, Rhonda, Rhonda.”

[Dana] (23:19)
(laughs)

[Rhonda] (23:20)
“What’s going on with loser here?” And lots of times I’ll be like, “Loser, there’s nothing… no, Rhonda, where’s…” and I call it tracing back. I can trace back and pretty much find the moment. And again, that’s not even the important thing, if I don’t find the moment, that’s okay, because I know what to do, and that’s to get on my Wheel of Freedom. Because when you’re on your Wheel of Fear, when you’re acting from your Wheel of Fear, your Wheel of Freedom is unavailable to you, it goes into hiding because you can’t reach it, you can’t access it. So just like the Wheel of Fear has four components, the Wheel of Freedom has four components. And just like the core trigger is the driver of the whole Wheel of Fear, the essential nature is the driver of the Wheel of Freedom. So when I was growing up, 12, 13, 14 years old, I was reading self-help books, I wanted to be a minister, and I was keeping what’s called a commonplace journal, but I was just keeping my poems and my favorite sayings, and my favorite quote, I’m going to butcher it because I never remember it exactly, but it’s an E.E. Cummings quote about the hardest thing you’ll ever do is be yourself. And I would write it over and over again: “Be yourself, be yourself.”

[Rhonda] (24:47)
Well, my essential nature, when I am not on my Wheel of Fear, is authentic. But when fear shows up, authentic goes out the window, it’s the first thing that disappears. It is not safe to be authentic, because the way I’m wired, if I’m going to be authentic and I’m in fear, then I believe that you’re going to actually know I’m a loser.

[Rhonda] (25:15)
You’re going to know I’m a loser, because if I’m authentic, then it’s up for grabs, you’re going to know it. So being authentic is absolutely the number one thing I cannot be, I have to be everything but. And that’s why growing up, even in college and beyond, even in my 30s, if you’re my boyfriend and you like music, I like music, if you like Mexican food, I like Mexican food, I would be a chameleon, I would just try to belong, try to fit in, to get that love, because I couldn’t be myself. You couldn’t love that, right?

[Dana] (25:47)
I love the way you’re presenting this, because it gives people space to be observational and really approach their thoughts, feelings, and belief systems from a point of curiosity, “isn’t that interesting,” rather than judgment. It creates that space, gives words and gives them the wheels, so they can have that space and not feel like they have to come in hot or with prickly things on, they can just go, “Huh, this is interesting that I think I’m doing this, and I wonder why I’m doing that, and what do I do about that.” That creates a very wonderful, non-judgmental space.

[Rhonda] (26:24)
That’s right. And people can, one of the things people get from finding their wheels, I hear this the most, is when they find out what their Wheel of Fear is and what their Wheel of Freedom is, it’s basically like they have a life review, and they go, “Oh, now I know why I went to college, why I didn’t go to college, why I got married, why I got divorced, why I broke up with that person, why I didn’t break up with that person, why I stayed here, why I didn’t go there, why I have the relationship I have with my mother.” It helps it all make sense. And like you said, it helps people become the observer, and it also takes away the guilt and shame and the blame that there’s something wrong with you. Instead, it’s just a mechanism that we all have, and yours responds a certain way based on how you grew up, mine responds a certain way because of everything that’s happened to me. But it’s not personal, the Wheel of Fear isn’t attacking you personally, it’s not you, it’s everything, it’s literally our neurobiology, how we’re wired. So that does give that observer, that witness consciousness, to come in so you can go, “Oh wait, you don’t have to heap on the blame, what’s my problem, why am I broken, what’s wrong with me.” Instead you go, “Oh, I’m on my Wheel of Fear. Oh, I can get on my Wheel of Freedom. Oh, how do I do that? Oh, I go over to my essential nature.” And from my essential nature I do what I call proactive behaviors. So I help clients get to their essential nature and make sure they have productive behaviors, because as you and I know, people need to know what they need to do, whether they’re on a date, alone with their family at Thanksgiving, in a room full of strangers, you’ve got to have that written down on a piece of paper, because if you don’t, you’re going to go into overload again, you’re going to go into freeze, flight, fight, and you’re going to be like, “What’s happening to me?” I tell my clients: stop, do not react. Get in that bathroom and take 10 breaths and look at your list and go, “Okay, which one do I do now?” Because you cannot speak. You must get in the bathroom, and you can be anywhere doing anything and say, “I need to go to the bathroom,” nobody can argue with that.

[Dana] (28:56)
That’s right, that’s right, they can’t.

[Rhonda] (29:05)
You got to go. And I ask my clients to write down the top five proactive behaviors, because there can be more than five, but I want them to have the top five memorized and on a piece of paper in their wallet, in their purse, on their phone, and go into the bathroom, pick one that’s appropriate for the environment, and do it.

[Dana] (29:05)
If you got to go, you got to go. And see, there’s a lot of beauty about that. One of the things I like about what you just presented is that it decreases anxiety, because we know beforehand what we’re going to do. If we’re not fully prepared and then we get all emotional, our brain shorts out, we can’t think, we can’t figure out what we’re supposed to do, and up goes the anxiety.

[Rhonda] (29:51)
We can’t do it.

[Dana] (29:54)
But if you know beforehand, if you have your little cheat sheet in your pocket or on your phone, slip into the bathroom, take some breaths like you said, pull it out. When you know what you’re going to do and how to apply it, you can walk out of that bathroom and it’s a game changer.

[Rhonda] (30:13)
And you’re still going to be nervous maybe, you’re still going to be like, “gulp, gulp, gulp.” But what you do know is that it’s a behavior and an action on your Wheel of Freedom, you know you’re creating a new neural pathway, you know you’re strengthening the pathways that are on the freedom side. So yes, you still might be shaking in your boots for a minute, but you know they’re actually strengthening your neural pathway, the one that’s setting you free.

[Rhonda] (30:43)
That’s the point, it’s not about feeling calm and cool and amazing while you do these behaviors, it’s about knowing what they’re doing for you.

[Dana] (30:44)
That’s it. And I love the way you’re presenting it, that we can feel our heart rate going up, we can feel our heart doing a little bit of extra work. I like to tell people, sometimes I literally will just reach down with my hand and pat my heart, and I talk to it, I say, “It’s okay, you can beat fast if you want to beat fast, I understand you’re trying to pump that adrenaline, you’re trying to deal with it, I appreciate what you’re doing, you just keep doing your thing while I’m going to do this over here.”

[Rhonda] (31:27)
That’s right. Love ya, love ya.

[Dana] (31:28)
And you just, you’ll calm down eventually. It’s just that acceptance, and knowing we don’t have to wait until we’re all calm, we can do these things anyway, even if we’re a little damp in the pits, even if our heart rate is going a little faster than normal.

[Rhonda] (31:41)
No, I was on a date once, and I knew about the Wheel of Fear and Wheel of Freedom at this point, and I had recently divorced, and I was on a date, and me and this guy were driving in his little convertible, and we’d just had a weekend together, and he hadn’t told me he loved me, and I was beside myself, right? So on the way home from this romantic weekend…

[Rhonda] (32:23)
I was hyperventilating, I was shaking, and we’re in a little tiny MG, right next to each other, and I knew the Wheel of Fear and Wheel of Freedom, and I was like, “Okay, I must be authentic.” So this is what I said to him, and I teach my clients about prep sentences: I said, “I need to say something right now, and I’m probably going to say it really bad, and I really just want you to listen to me until it’s done. I might say it really sucky, but would you listen until it’s done?” And he’s like, “Uh, okay.” By the way, I’m looking out the window, because I can’t make eye contact, I am literally every part of me petrified. But I keep my wits about me, I know what I’m doing.

[Rhonda] (33:20)
But my body is responding a certain way, and again, me taking an action on the Wheel of Freedom is going to eventually calm my body down. So I’m looking out the window and I’m like, “I just need to know how you feel about me.” And I have to tell you, that is one of the proudest moments of my life, because I was in a high-stakes situation for me, feeling very fragile and vulnerable, just gotten divorced, this is like one of my first dates, feeling like I just spent a weekend with him and he’s not telling me how he feels. Coming home, knowing that if I was being authentic I would ask him how he feels about me, and I didn’t wait until I was all together, I did it because I needed the answer so I could calm down, so I could move into freedom for myself. So I have to say, me shaking, looking out the window, not even making eye contact with him, crying the whole time, getting my breath out, sounding horrible, that is truly one of my most proud moments.

[Dana] (34:32)
I’m going to tell you what I love about that, and then I’m going to make sure we get a website for my listeners to go to, because I know they’re going to want so much more of you, Rhonda. One of the things I love about what you just presented is that you were going to calm down not based on what he said. The answer to your question wasn’t what was going to calm you down, it was your ability to acknowledge what was going on inside of you, your knowing the Wheel of Freedom, your ability to sit there, and even though you were kind of talking like this, looking out the window, the fact that you did it, that’s when you crossed the finish line, that’s when your body was going to calm down. What his response was, was largely irrelevant, informational, but largely irrelevant.

[Rhonda] (35:06)
“I’m at the window!” That’s right, it’s completely irrelevant. By the way, he wasn’t ready to be in love with me yet, just FYI. It’s so funny, because then I went on TV and wrote books after all this, and I ran into him at an airport, and he comes up to me and goes, “I just want to say I’m sorry,” and I’m like, “20 years too late, buddy.” But yes, because people think…

[Rhonda] (35:51)
…that they have to have it together before they set themselves free. In order to pick the lock on your Wheel of Freedom, you got to act now, whether you’re shaking, whether you’re crying. But again, I knew what was happening, I was aware, I had awareness, I knew what was happening to me, and that’s the benefit of the Wheel of Fear and Wheel of Freedom, because you know what’s happening to you. It’s not confusion, “Why am I like this?” I’ll tell you exactly why you’re like this: there’s a thing called the Wheel of Fear and the Wheel of Freedom.

[Dana] (36:17)
And that knowledge is, God, that’s so much power, and there’s so much liberation and freedom that comes from just the knowledge itself, it’s just a huge game changer. Okay, so Rhonda, we’ve got to know: the website that I have, because I know you said there were several different websites you could give, is FearlessLiving.org.

[Rhonda] (36:39)
FearlessLiving.org is my website. Yep, FearlessLiving.org, go there. And I also have a gift, one of my students’ favorite classes: if you have a dream, a goal, something you want to make happen, I want to gift your listeners and viewers the course called Stretch, Risk, or Die. That class is going to support you in seeing how the Wheel of Fear and the Wheel of Freedom go into action, and why you’re not making movement on the things you want to and why you beat yourself up. It literally breaks it down. And by the way, I’m doing this class in front of a corporate audience, so you also hear their questions, so much interaction, and there are three 15-minute videos. At the end of the third video I actually go through my Wheel of Fear, you see me literally drawing the whole thing out, you see how everything connects. It’s called Stretch, Risk, or Die, and this is the way to build confidence: go to that URL, fearlessliving.org forward slash risk, R-I-S-K, put your name and your email and you’ll get access to the platform and the course. And again, it’s 45 minutes, it has templates and worksheets for all the different areas of your life, whether it’s relationship, money, or your body, I’ve got helpful templates for you. I’m going to walk you through it step by step so you can really start taking new action today. So fearlessliving.org forward slash risk.

[Dana] (38:22)
Love it. Rhonda, thank you so much for your time, your energy, your information, your history, your story, everything you’ve brought to myself and my listeners on Phoenix and Flame today. Thank you.

[Rhonda] (38:37)
Thank you, and be fearless everyone. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just fear. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just fear. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just fear.

[Dana] (38:45)
Listeners, I know you have heard so many things today that you’re thinking, “Oh my gosh, I have a best friend, I have a family member, I have a coworker that absolutely needs to hear what Rhonda Britten is saying.” By the way, I’ll be putting her four books in the show notes, no worries about that, you’ll be able to get those very easily. Take this podcast episode, copy and paste the link, put it in a text, send it in an email, put it on your favorite social media platform, so we can grow our Phoenix and Flame community and let people know: you are not alone. I hope your day has been fantastic, I hope the rest of it is great. I’m Dana, on Phoenix and Flame.