2. Heightened awareness of others’ reactions. I call this “the noisy room.”

“It’s so helpful to have that distinction between life-giving fear/awe and lizard-brain fear. I deeply relate to the quaking sort of energy that comes with inhabiting a larger space. I like renaming it yirah rather than fear—and now I know to follow that thread. Now, I soothe myself when the pachad is up and step on in when it’s yirah.”

few years ago, I came across a teaching that completely changed how I understood fear. I was reading the book Be Still and Get Going by Rabbi Alan Lew, a brilliant writer and spiritual teacher.1 Rabbi Lew explained that the Hebrew Bible uses two different words for fear. The first word is pachad. Pachad, Rabbi Lew explains, is the fear of projected

pure, childlike sense of wanting to discover and learn can’t coexist with fear. How to do it: In any situation where you feel afraid, ask yourself, “What about the situation can I become authentically curious about?” Let your curiosity lead you. When you notice fear creeping back in, go back to the question, What about this situation am I curious

“It’s a failure of imagination. If people haven’t been taught how to use their creativity, how to imagine, then they can’t create a dramatically different reality than what they know today, because they can’t imagine it.”

The human brain is hardwired to be overreactive to potential dangers.

Principle 5: Ask, What’s More Important to Me Than Praise?

voices we hear in our thoughts. We think they are all “us” in the same way. As you name the inner critic voice when it shows up, you begin to unbraid it from the other strands of “you”: your imagination, your aspirations, your wisdom. By saying, “Oh, I’m hearing the critic right now,” you can remember that’s all it is and move forward despite its

The antidote to all that hiding and stalling is a special kind of action called a leap. A leap is an immediate, experimental, simple act—the exact opposite of the overplanned, overthought, perfectionist action so many brilliant women are most comfortable taking. A leap stretches you into playing much bigger, right now.