Reid has a great talk that he gives about walking towards the gun. When he talks about relationships and he talks about how to move your relationships forward, and this also applies to moving your life forward.
Join relationship expert Reid Mihalko from ReidAboutSex.com and Cathy Vartuli from TheIntimacyDojo.com as they talk about walking into your fear in relationships and life.
Reid: What’s next?
Cathy: Reid, you talk … you have this great talk that you give about walking towards the gun. Can you share a little bit with us?
Reid: I’m Reid Mihalko from ReidAboutSex.com
Cathy: I’m Cathy Vartuli from TheIntimacyDojo.com
Reid: Cathy’s got a gun. Okay, walking towards the gun is my … when I talk about relationships and I talk about how to move your relationships forward, this also applies to moving your life forward. I talk about walking towards the gun rather than running away from things that you’re afraid of. This analogy comes from back when I was in the martial arts which I was in for a long time. As a martial arts student and also as an instructor, one of the things that we worked on was from a self-defense perspective and a street combat perspective, when you’re in a situation where somebody draws out a gun.
Unless they are already very far away from you, or you know them to be a horrible shot. Statistically speaking at a certain level of confidence around self-defense, your chances are better the closer you are to the gun. Ideally you want the gun touching you. For a lot of different reasons that I’m not going to get into in this video. That being said, it took a lot of training for me to rewire my reptile brain to automatically have me start walking towards a dangerous weapon, specifically guns.
Cathy: We’re not recommending you run … you walk towards an actual physical gun without adequate training.
Reid: Yes, just stay away from guns in general if you can unless you’re a hunter and you’re hunting targets, things like that, things that can’t fight back. No, that didn’t sound good. What I’m saying around relationships is what you want to do is you want to figure out what you’re afraid of and walk towards those things. If it’s a conversation that you’re scared to have with your girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse or friend or boss, figure out a way to have that to initiate that conversation, and start practicing having those conversations.
Cathy: We recommend the difficult conversation formula and there’s a video on that as well.
Reid: Doing those kinds of things, walking towards the hard stuff, the things you’re frightened of in your relationship is one of the best bits of advice I can give anybody, there’s lots of different ways to learn how to defend yourself better in the situations but the idea that you want to start looking at is what am I afraid of, why am I not bringing these things up with the people that I care about and how can I get support so that I can bring them up to the people I care about.
This is also a life skill so like if you’re not doing your taxes because you’re afraid of taxes, how can you get support to have your taxes done. You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to be making progress.
Cathy: Yeah. Expanding your comfort zones and reaching out into the things you’re afraid of can be really powerful and makes life a lot more delicious. I know for a while I was going through some stuff and I kept avoiding the things that were scary for me. I noticed my world kept getting smaller and smaller, I had to avoid more and more. It was actually really stressful, it took a lot of energy to remember to avoid all those things and to just walk around them all the time.
Once I started facing them again and it took some courage and I started with small things. Once I started expanding my world, I felt so much more confident and capable and confident in the world. It’s a lot easier to be happy and have a good life when you’re not avoiding the very things that make life interesting.
Reid: Then when you have that kind of courage and you built up those muscles, you start automatically walking towards the scary things and getting them done and handled without really even noticing it as much. Then your life does have that freedom and openness and there’s a lot more room for play when you have those scary things handled.
Cathy: Yeah. Good luck. Let us know what you think.