Tapping into Mental Strength to Overcome Fear ft. Amy Morin

Hi everybody. Jen Hatmaker here, your host of the For the Love podcast. Welcome to the show. I’m so glad that you’re here. We’re in the middle of a series called For the Love of Facing Your Fears. It felt like the right time to do that. It felt like a conversation that a lot of us are having already in the community. So I thought, let’s coalesce around it, and let’s bring this to the show, and let’s bring onboard some profound voices into this idea of facing our fears.

We all have things that scare us and that’s not because we’re doing life wrong. I mentioned this to my guest today, but fear itself is a normal emotion. We can craft no such life to have no fear. Rather this idea that we’re all going to experience fear and it’s not because we’re doing something wrong or we’re managing something poorly, it’s just because that’s the human experience. So then what do we do with it? That’s really what this series is about.

I have had recent experiences with fear. This is also something I talk about in this particular episode, but I didn’t grow up as a really scared person. Fear was not a part of my worldview or my personality. Fear has been something new to me in the last three and a half years, and I have deeply had to handle this conversation. This is so under the skin for me. A huge portion of my life was, “Oh my God, I’m scared now. I’m scared of things I’ve never been scared of. I’m scared of things I didn’t know to be scared of. I don’t know what to do with fear because I have no practice here.” So this is a conversation that’s near and dear to me. 

We’ve got a guest today who will be walking us through some strategies for facing our fears genuinely in a healthy way by showing us what habits mentally strong people employ in their lives. How we can train not just our brains, but our bodies toward happiness and identify where we are being guided by fear and what to do about it. Today we have Amy Morin. She is a renowned psychotherapist. She’s a bestselling author. She’s devoted her whole career to the exploration of what it means to be mentally strong. She had a talk called The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong and it’s recorded as one of the most impactful TEDx videos to date. 

Her work focuses on the importance of emotional intelligence, and resilience, and also on understanding how certain bad habits, like indulging in self-pity or surrendering our power to things we’ll talk about today will undermine our mental strength. 

A bit about Amy. She thought she was going to teach other people about mental strength based on what she learned in college but about two years into her career as a psychotherapist, she experienced the very early and unexpected loss of her mother. Then, just three years later, she lost her husband and found herself in a place where she realized she needed some mental strength just to live and get on with her life. She kind of set out on this personal journey to learn as much as she could about grief, mental health, mental strength, and what ultimately gave way to living her life fully. You’re going to hear about that today. Her story is fascinating. So buckle up because Amy doesn’t pull any punches here. This is a direct, straight communication. A bit of tough love, but in a way that I respond to. She tells us the truth here, and I found myself just fascinated with her research and her experience. Without further ado, please enjoy this incredible, useful discussion with the delightful Amy Morin.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: 

The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong – Amy Morin’s TEDx Talk

13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do by Amy Morin (Article)

13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do (Book)

The For the Love Podcast is a production of Four Eyes Media,
presented by Audacy.