Shero Cafe Podcast

041 - Fear or Love: Choosing Your Path in a Divided World

• Deborah Edwards and Debbie Pearson

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What happens when we constantly make decisions from a place of fear rather than love? How do we recognize when we're being manipulated by political rhetoric, media narratives, or even family expectations? This thought-provoking conversation examines the courage required to think for ourselves in a world designed to keep us anxious and divided.

At the heart of this discussion lies a powerful distinction: the difference between external responsibility and self-accountability. While responsibilities are often assigned to us by others (although we do assigned them to ourselves as well), true accountability comes from within. Here we offer practical wisdom for recognizing when we're abandoning our authentic needs to please others, sharing personal stories of choosing difficult truths over comfortable conformity.

One particularly valuable insight emerges as we explore our bodily reactions to information and demands. When something feels "restrictive" rather than "expansive," that's our inner wisdom signaling misalignment with our truth. This physical feedback system can guide us toward choices that honor our authentic selves rather than simply appeasing external expectations.

The conversation doesn't shy away from acknowledging how our universal need for belonging can lead us to compromise our values. Yet it also illuminates how developing deeper self-knowledge creates the foundation for living with integrity. When we understand what it truly means to love ourselves, we become immune to manipulation and capable of navigating life's complexities with grace.

Whether you're struggling with family dynamics, feeling overwhelmed by political discourse, or simply seeking greater alignment between your actions and values, this episode offers compassionate guidance for becoming "the captain of your own ship." Subscribe to join us on this journey of spreading love and self-care in a world that desperately needs both.

Thank you so much for the likes, love, and comments you leave. Not only does it mean the world to us, it helps other women who need to hear it be able to find it.

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---CONNECT with Shero Cafe---
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---CONNECT with Deborah Edwards---
Let's Connect on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/deborah.edwards.372
Self Care Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/624202641785785
Website: https://gratefulom.life/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deborahedwards-selfcarecoach/

---CONNECT with Debbie Pearson---
Website: https://www.debbiepearson.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/debbiepearsoncoach/
Email: deb@debbiepearson.com

Debbie:

okay, what were you? Tell me what you were getting ready to talk about. So I was actually getting ready to talk about politics, okay, okay.

Deborah:

So what I was, what I was talking about is now they're going. You know, he's talking about september 11th and he is going to now give this person, this kirk person, a medal of honor or something like that, right?

Deborah:

yeah, a medal of freedom, when it is absolutely not freedom that he was espousing. And you know, and so then he, all of these other people, that that really deserved it. They're not even, they're not even heard about they. They spent time during the time when we needed to be honoring these other people on this person, you know, and and and then, who sowed hate and division, go ahead, right, who sowed hate and division, and they're going to reward him and then, really, they're doing that only to keep his followers because he was so in in, you know, instrumental in getting him elected. And you know that the uh, the ambassador to england, they fired him. No, the uk ambassador to the united states, they fired him because he had a personal relationship with Epstein. Yeah, so they're just, it's all smoke and mirrors, it is. So what I'm thinking, that I want to talk about is forget, you know, just know that there's so much smoke and mirrors out there and just find a way to get with yourself to look past the smoke.

Debbie:

You know the question is how does somebody do that? It's like if somebody is like caught up in, like, oh my god, this one said that and I trust this person, like, say, a media personality, and I trust them, and they said this, and I'm so scared and I don't know what to do. Right, like my. I feel like my world is falling apart. Fear, right, like, what do I do to me? To somebody tells me, find a way to rise above it, or something like I don't know how I mean I do now, but that would be my thought, like, like, how, how does a person rise above it? What do they do? What do they look for? Where can they go? And it's like, well, you want to give me a clue. Like, I'm one individual, you're in Congress, like you were in DC, you have the power to do something. I'm one teeny, tiny little person. Now, I know every little bit helps, but give me a clue. I've never been a political person so apolitical, because I think politics is cray cray, but I feel like I can't be apolitical anymore and I don't really know what to do. Call your congressman, ok. So I call my congressman's office, which is the opposite political affiliation than I am. Well, it was the governor of the state or whatever, and I felt like they were just rolling their eyes at me the whole time and just let me talk Now. Did they tally my call? Maybe Did they tally it correctly, who knows, but I did not feel like I made any impact whatsoever. And so people say, well, what group do? Well, what group you want me to get with? I mean, how do you find political groups? I'm not an activist. I'm not somebody that has ever felt comfortable. I have done it, and I didn't like it. I was like, oh, this is bad energy. I don't like the energy, and I'm with the people that I'm on the side of.

Debbie:

It was about gun control. I think we should have gun control, smart sense gun control. I don't know why they fight so hard about it. I have a theory, though, because if Trump has tons of people on the street with tons of guns on the street, he can call his people up Like they got websites. Now you want to help ice, just sign up on this website. Yeah, they're putting that out there. It's like part of the thing might you got to bring your own gun? I got me 42 guns, mr president, like whatever you know. Yeah, and so it's very. They're more organized organized in the craziness and we're just peaceful people. I just want to be peaceful. I want there to be love. I'm not talking about utopia, but I'm talking about being accountable to your own actions. Stop making other people responsible for what showed up in your life.

Deborah:

Right, and really the one thing that I'm also thinking a lot about is showing up for yourself, not leaning into the fear, just looking, you know, just going, just being informed, you know, because a lot of things that we're doing is like someone saying you've got to be afraid of this, and then you're like, oh man, because a lot of things that we're doing is like someone's saying you've got to be afraid of this, and then you're like, oh man, I'm afraid of this, or you got to be afraid of this, and I'm going, oh my God, I got to be afraid of this. But then you don't ask yourself is this real, right? Smoke and mirrors, yeah, and so you're actually not caring for yourself, you're not loving yourself by not doing that due diligence and allowing that fear to rule your decisions. So what you can do is you can stay with yourself.

Debbie:

Yeah, you can feel it. You can really feel your body. If you stop long enough and take a moment and you could say I just heard somebody whatever say xyz, and you sit with it for a moment, you can actually begin to sense does that feel restrictive or does that feel expansive? The restrictive, obviously, is like a resistant, it's a push away from, and so honor that you feel pushed away from something. If it feels expansive, it's like like you want more of that, right, right.

Deborah:

And then having the understanding that there is a payoff for people to have you sitting around in fear.

Debbie:

Oh, so much so so much so yeah, oh okay, I got it.

Deborah:

Yeah, and and and. So, knowing that, that that there's a payoff for you to be sitting around in fear, who's going to benefit from my fear? You know asking yourself that question and what would their benefit be? I have seen so many people and I will you, you know, not just in politics, but in several areas, even in self-care that make decisions that are against your individual best interest, totally, you know.

Debbie:

So let's take a look for a moment at why that might be, because understanding why somebody might make a decision, thinking it's 100% the right decision, that it doesn't benefit you, and why it's okay to step back a little bit.

Debbie:

If somebody has a particular need, maybe to be accepted, to belong, and they know if they go direction A they're not going to get that, but if they go direction B they're going to get that. But if they go direction b they're going to get it from who I don't know. I don't have all the little pieces, parts figured out, but they know if they go direction b they're going to get it, but their need to be accepted and belong is super strong because it's the human condition universally we need to be to belong, um, so they go in a particular direction. But at that point, if they're going in direction b and you have a moment, that's where the restrictive feeling, the resistance to me comes in and I'm like, oh, that does not feel like the right direction for me. You may trust the person going in direction, but does it mean you have to follow them blindly? It means everybody. Everybody has the choice, the option, the right to choose for themselves.

Deborah:

And that's one of the things go ahead. But I have a note here. I'll come in in just the last piece.

Debbie:

It's like um, we have the right to follow what's right for us because just we may trust that other person, but just because it's right for them, for whatever reason, even if we may disagree with it, and we don't have to follow that person if we are following them because we don't want to hurt their feelings. Hurting their feelings or our fear of hurting their feelings may be the bigger point for us to look at. As opposed to that, they're going in a different direction. It's like what is it about me that would follow somebody in a direction I don't want to go in, just because I don't want to hurt their feelings or rock the boat or upset, because that means something else is going on.

Deborah:

And it will benefit us most.

Debbie:

To look at that so we can choose what is actually in our best interest and in what serves us.

Deborah:

Yeah, and one of the things that you know, you hear me talk about a lot, is when Deepak Chopra told me you know, you're the captain of your own ship, you are the one that makes choices in your life, and I feel that some of us are not kind of checked into that, that you abdicate your self-responsibility, the responsibility for yourself and for your choices, to someone because it's easier, because that's what you've always done. Mama and Dem said this is the way it should be done in the future. And you're like you know, okay, I want to be invited to Christmas, so I better do it, but so there's, there's, you know, like you were talking about that belonging. So, yeah, there's that belonging part of it, and there's that habit of you know of letting somebody else make your decisions and making the decision happen outside of yourself. When you are getting that feeling oh, this doesn't feel good, you ignore that or damn that down because it needs to. You need to be able to relinquish that responsibility to continue to belong.

Debbie:

Yeah, and I want to address the word responsibility that you used and I want to add a word to it accountability. If the way that I see it and let me know if you feel this way as well the way that I see responsibility is often not every single time, but often that's a job someone gives us, or a task or a concept, and we feel quote responsible to follow that, and if we don't, then somehow we're bad or wrong or whatever. But when we're accountable, accountability is just ourselves. I mean, we can be accountable to other people, but in the case of you're talking about going to Christmas dinner or whatever, if we follow the responsibilities we were given, we'll be invited back to family dinner because we did all the right things.

Debbie:

If we're accountable to ourselves and we don't necessarily follow those responsible things responsibilities I'm not talking about not communicating, definitely communicate but if we really choose something else, we might find that, yeah, it's going to be a little bit of a strain at Christmas time, but I'm being true, really genuine, and true to what's right for me, and I'm saying it this way because I ended up having to do something where I chose to not follow the what I'm going to call the family responsibility rules of participating in a certain way and I, I wasn't uninvited, I just wasn't invited and it was hard but it was also peaceful.

Debbie:

It was. There was a, a recognition that needing to belong kept putting me in a place of great discomfort and even there, yeah, I was in their presence but I didn't really belong. Very, very different, different right and so to to recognize that I wasn't in the chaos anymore and I wasn't in pretense. You know, oh hi, how are you when I really we just did not get along, but it was one of those things. So it was about I was. That's my story about that particular. Just because you said Christmas dinner and it like sparked that.

Debbie:

And you're like yeah, yeah, let me tell you about this one, but in reality I think there is a difference between the weight within us of the word responsibility, especially when someone else decides what our responsibilities are, and then self-accountability.

Deborah:

Well, no, I mean, I hear you, I hear what you're saying. I think that they're both I take responsibility for things that I want to do, or that I take responsibility for things that I want to do, or that I take response. So I think that responsibility isn't always assigned from the outside. I think I assign myself responsibility a lot of times. Oh, absolutely, I think they're both in play.

Deborah:

I think that you know, there's self-accountability and there's my deciding that this is my responsibility to myself. You know accountability to myself. So both of them are in play, and the point that I want to make with that is when you take responsibility for yourself, when you take responsibility for taking care of yourself, when you are accountable to yourself, that's where you end up being in peace, even when it's painful, even when it's hard, that's when the peace comes, and that's what I think that so many of us are missing, because we're staying in that frenetic fear and the outside is just bouncing us around in different directions. Instead, we need to go in within, connect with our own wisdom and start thinking for ourselves and maybe do some research and some things you know and maybe you know say, okay, you know what.

Deborah:

This feels kind of funny. This feels like I'm being put in a situation of fear. Let me look at what's real, just like you do with the. You know the potential spam that you see, or those emails that you get. You're like, well, that sounds funny, let me go in here and do some research to see if that's really what's going on. Or and so that is the kind of responsibility that I'm talking about is just taking that extra step to to protect yourself, to get right information and not sitting in fear, but take that extra step to bring yourself to wholeness.

Debbie:

Absolutely, and I'm glad you brought it back to the responsibility thing, because I think that maybe I didn't say it in such a way that made it clear enough. There is a responsibility is kind of like more of the task oriented thing, the thing that maybe you assign to yourself, like I got to go check that out or I got to be responsible to myself. What I was referring to was other people have also given us responsibilities, you know, typically family members or the businesses we're in. It's like this is what you will do, and in order to participate and be part of that, that is what you will do. Right, if I'm going to keep my job, I may have to do these 15 responsibilities, or'm not talking about your responsibility is to bring a casserole.

Debbie:

I'm talking about your place in the family, the expectations of you, right, and so it was talking about when other people assign us responsibility. That's when we have to look and see is this what I want in my life? It is awesome when we assign our own self responsibility, yeah, okay, and then to be accountable to ourselves for the responsibilities that we accept for ourselves. That's like the beautiful, that's like the Venn diagram, where they come together, and that's that middle where it's beautiful. So that's what I was saying before the responsibilities that other people assign us, what we do, yeah.

Deborah:

So so asking yourself is this, whenever someone is is assigning a responsibility to you, whether it is well, I won't say that, but you know asking yourself is this mine to do?

Debbie:

Exactly, and sometimes it's an authority figure in our life that's insisting, demanding, requesting, pushing, wanting us to do something, and it's like I'm not willing to do that behavior anymore, I'm not willing to participate there, and then there's a whole big blow up. And then that's where we have to be accountable to ourselves. I have to look at those things, just like that spam email. I got to go check this out. I got to take a look and see is that really what I want in my life now? Right, we also have to be prepared.

Debbie:

There may be consequences to our action, yep, and am I willing to accept what those consequences are? And if the answer is yes, then you get to move forward and your life is way more free. If the answer is no, no, no, I'm just going to do what they tell me to do. You're welcome to do that. It's your life is way more free. If the answer is no, no, no, I'm just going to do what they they tell me to do. You're welcome to do that. It's your life. You choose, because maybe that's the most appropriate thing for you right now. Um, but the beauty is getting to the part where you're actually choosing for yourself right, and you know that it's your choice.

Debbie:

And that brings us back to what we started with, with not allowing the news media, these podcasters that we may listen to. I mean, like the bro culture, if that's what it's called. I call it different things where there's these big name males typically white males have lots and lots of followers. You know I'm talking about okay and okay and, and they're like scooping in all these thousands and thousands of other men about how to be a man, or what you should let your wife do, or bringing people on and not really vetting the people or or not even fact-checking them while they're sitting in the chair.

Debbie:

So when you trust this say I'm just going to use one particular podcaster, I won't say his name you trust this podcaster and he brings in I don't know what do they call a guest and he doesn't fact-check that guest. You, the people listening, have a tendency to believe. You, the people listening, have a tendency to believe. Well, if this podcaster didn't fact check the guest, then the guest must be right. Instead of the listener saying I don't know, maybe I should check it out myself.

Debbie:

We get lazy, we let him do the work for us and it's like well, I trust him. That's not good enough, not in this day and age. That is not good enough. People, people we don't know what goes on behind the scenes. I'm not accusing anybody of anything, but it is possible that people are getting podcasters are getting paid to to slant something a particular way.

Debbie:

News organizations do it all the time. All the time, in fact, they talk about I'm not really sure what the difference between mainstream media and legacy media, I don't know. And then there's independent media. I go for independent media because I want some information, but I want to make my own decision, but nobody wants to do that. Some people I say lazy. I don't know if that's the right words. Maybe I'm accusing somebody of something I shouldn't, and I believe that we just we have to be. We have to be diligent in this world we're in right now, especially america, because I think it's going to be too easy to be swayed one way or the other and get caught up in something that we may not want to get caught up in, only to find out later we're on the wrong side, or that you don't even have any control over, find out later we're on the wrong side, or that you don't even have any control over, you know.

Deborah:

I mean you can get caught up in something that's taking over your life, your mind, your body, your spirit and you have no control over it.

Debbie:

I'm challenged with that one. I'm challenged with that concept.

Deborah:

What do you mean? You have no control over it. You have no control over the outcome of some of these things that we're spending so much time with, like the political dialogue, the political. You know you can't go up there, you know, tomorrow and say, okay, this is what I want, y'all do it, you know. I mean there's a process, but you're fretting over something that you don't have control over. So then we're coming to the end of our time today, but you know, debbie, I'd like to ask you this conversation that we're having, how do you relate all of these things that we're talking to to self-love, slash, self-care? I mean, what, what? One thing kind of, and I won't say one thing. But what comes to mind when you bring these, all this stuff together with self-love and self-care? What, what can you share with our audience?

Debbie:

For me it would probably be pretty much a one-liner. We either live in fear or we live in love, and almost every single action I say almost, I think every, even if it's a little innocuous every single action either comes from a place of love or a place of fear, and that is the feeling we can feel, that is the restrictiveness or the expansiveness. And, if you know, we do things because we want love, we want to receive some sort of love, maybe not just self-love, but love from another person, or some love, belonging, acceptance, whatever. And sometimes we will do something that we hope to get love, but it's not really a good option, but maybe we just don't know anything different, anything different. And so my thought, my offer, my invitation is learn more about what it means to love yourself, because once you know how to love yourself and you are not just self aware but you have a self knowing, nobody will be able to pull you off your course. Nobody will be able to pull you off your course.

Deborah:

Pull you off. I love that. I love that. Debbie, Thank you so much. I want to thank everybody so much for joining us today and I invite you to please click that like button and subscribe to the Shero Cafe so that you can stay informed and help us on our mission. And it is our mission to spread love, to move us to that place of love instead of fear and self-care. And, as always, we invite you to love and care for the Shero in you. Bye everyone.

People on this episode

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Debbie Pearson

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Deborah Edwards

Host