My guest for this episode is Hannah Betts, Hollywood Stuntwoman, Professional Skydiver and more. If you watched the Superbowl this year, you saw Hannah land in a cruise ship swimming pool after jumping out of a helicopter. She shares some of the behind-the-scenes magic from that commercial, as well as some of the scarier stunts she’s done for other shows and movies. She’s had a number of scary things happen in her career – and the way she embraces things not going right is inspiring.

 In our conversation, we deeply explored the topic of fear from angles rarely talked about. Hannah has been to the other side of fear, and she’s bringing back the wisdom she’s earned to help the rest of us in our own journeys see fear as a companion, not an enemy.

Here’s what Hannah has to say about herself:

Hannah Betts has worn many bold titles—Outdoor Adventure Sports Instructor, Police Officer, Professional Skydiver, and now, Hollywood Stuntwoman. Beyond the risk and achievement lies a deeper journey—one of confronting fear and vulnerability head-on, rising above comparison, and letting go of the expectations to live a 'conventional life'. Despite what it may look like from the outside, fear walks with her every day. She just doesn’t let it lead. Hannah’s mission is to empower others to do the same - to lean into fear rather than run from it. Through the power of her story, she helps others break free from what holds them back, unfreeze the parts of life that feel out of reach, and boldly step into their unique potential.

My guest for this episode of the podcast is Julia Carpenter. This episode started unlike any other I’ve done. Julia read a passage from a non-published book she calls the Prologue to the Unwritten Memoir. The passage was a launching point for touching on many, many themes. Perhaps the most important was the theme of finding our true nature and purpose in this world.

 Julia also happens to be the wife of my last podcast guest, Bernie Harberts, and in this conversation, we touched on some of the same stories as Bernie’s podcast, but from the angle of the one staying at home. 

Here’s a little more about Julia:

Julia Carpenter is the founder of The Two Step Way, twostepway.com. The Two Step Way helps horse owners and caregivers learn how to be with their horses and how to really see them to promote connection, trust and health. Julia is interested in helping animals, particularly horses, heal from trauma and has studied intently with that goal in mind.

She grew up on a horse farm in Vermont and has been a licensed riding instructor and trainer working with racehorses, hunter jumpers, polo ponies and field hunters.

Julia has had a lifelong friendship and association, researching, training and caring for animals. She loves volunteering to help out animal rescues with her knowledge. She has a private practice helping people and their equines learn and benefit from her Two Step Way.

Julia has degrees in wildlife management and environmental policy from Boston University and Tufts and has worked in the wildlife and environmental fields. She is a painter, and her animal paintings have been shown in galleries and shops in the Boston area and western NC. She is the author of one little cookbook called Pet Food: 16 Dessert Recipes to Make You Smile.

Julia lives on a small farm in the mountains of western North Carolina with her husband Bernie Harberts, the Long Rider, filmmaker, and author, in addition to two rescue border collies, three mules, a rescue pony and her halflinger. She enjoys riding in the mountains around her farm and on longer rides with Bernie. She blogs about her life with the animals, equine rambling and the Two Step Way at ConsideringAnimals.com. She also blogs about working with horses at her twostepway.com website.

My guest for this episode is Bernie Harberts. We covered so much ground in this podcast, much like Bernie has done for much of his life. When I say covering ground, that’s for real. Bernie has taken several cross country trips with his mules over the years, covering over 10,000 miles and 1,000 nights.

In our conversation, he offers his hard-earned wisdom on approaching life on the road, life with horses and mules, and living a full and meaningful life in general. 

One of the themes that has helped him take to the road is giving up perfection and learning to live with vulnerability. We explored this and many of the themes that have informed his journeys.

Here’s what Bernie has to say about himself:

Author and Long Rider Bernie Harberts is the subject of the Emmy award-winning PBS North Carolina program “The Mule Rider” and the author of “Two Mules to Triumph”, about his 7-month mule voyage from North Carolina to Idaho.  Even though he has traveled both ways across the United States and Newfoundland by mule, he still can’t keep his mule Cracker from occasionally bolting. 

Bernie lives in a small cabin in western North Carolina with his wife Julia, two border collies, three mules, two ponies and eight thousand wild-caught honey bees. When he’s not writing or rambling, he enjoys bee lining, planting ginseng and 23-minute naps. 

More about Bernie’s books, films and journeys at RiverEarth.com.

This episode of the podcast is the last two chapters of Dancing the Tightrope. We have reached the end of the book!

You might hear me be a little choked up at the end of this reading. There are so many layers to unpack as to why. First, when I started reading this book, I didn’t expect to get much further than Chapter 1. Just reading twenty whole chapters felt like a huge accomplishment. For those of you who encouraged me to read another (and then another), I appreciate you more than you can know. Second, when reading these chapters, I was reliving my experience in some ways. Reaching some of these milestones felt unachievable when I began this journey. Now, they are everyday occurrences. Take away for you? Whatever seems daunting at the moment is just waiting to become an everyday occurrence if you are willing to break it into small enough steps. 

The conversation I’ve been having recently with several colleagues, clients and friends is about visiting the other side of fear. If you haven’t been there (and for years, I HAD NOT BEEN THERE), it’s impossible to understand how fear can squash us. It seems so rational to honor fear as the answer to the problem of the day. Until you look at it from the other side (get thee behind me, fear!), you cannot see it for what it is: information. Dancing the Tightrope calibrates the fear so that we can RESPOND rather than automatically react from what I call the “robot space” in this book. Just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we discover that the “great and powerful Oz” is simply our programming and conditioning, pulling levers like the little man behind the curtain. We’ve had the answers all along; all we needed was someone to show us the inner Tools we were granted at birth. That’s what I set out to show in publishing this book.

Reaching this point in the journey of reading the book, you may be wondering “what’s next?” I’m publishing Dancing the Tightrope as an Audible book in the next few months – timeline to be determined. The compiled version will include several things this podcast version did not. It will have the Introduction Chapter, which I did not include in this series. It will also include some “author commentary”, as I’ve come a long way since these words were written. It seems only fair to update the listener. I may also play with adding more quotes in the voice of the speaker where possible. 

Dancing the Tightrope will not be the only audiobook I publish. After this one gets out, I will publish both The Delicate Art and The Elegant Pivot in Audible format as well. Yes, the woman who swore I would NEVER do an Audible version is reminded that saying “never” is just the first step! You’ll hear more about that in the podcast coming out next week, with Bernie Harberts, author of Two Mules to Triumph and star of Amazon’s The Lost Sea Expedition. 

This episode of the podcast is Chapters 16, 17, and 18 of Dancing the Tightrope, the last of the self-awareness chapters, or as I call them the “C” chapters. In these chapters, we cover courage, congruence and clarity. Over and over again, I come back to these chapters to find what’s missing when I find myself stuck. 

My favorite quote from the Courage chapter is this one: “The beautiful thing about welcoming pressure as a catalyst is that we no longer allow the end goal to define us. Winning the game is nice, but it’s not the point. The point is the opportunity to cultivate our courage, or perhaps a better word is to unleash our courage.” I’ve even come to call the process of raising the pressure threshold “couraging” because we are building our courage.

From Chapter 17 on Congruence, I like this quote: “Like a tangled ball of roots, Rules wind their way into our guidance system, blocking the pathways to our personal truth. The interference makes it very difficult to find our voice. And here’s the strangest part of all of this. We are not aware that our Rules are interfering. Because all of these Rules have been with us for so long, they feel like a part of us. As they direct us out of our awareness, our Rules feel as if they ARE us.”

This quote sums up Chapter 18 pretty well: “Clarity starts with removing that which does not belong. Whether creating a simple picture for how my day is going to go or a picture for the horse on a trail or a vision for my life, the art of subtraction makes room for what is real and true. I can only afford to remove my protective armor when I’ve come to own my true inner strength and acknowledged my true nature.” 

We are nearing the end of the book! Next week, I’ll share the last two chapters of Dancing the Tightrope. Because I tackled this project Frame by Frame, step by step, it’s actually been fun. Hard to believe I dreaded it!

This episode includes Dancing the Tightrope Chapters Fourteen Commitment and Fifteen Curiosity. These are the first two of five chapters in the book outlining the building blocks of self-awareness. If you have listened this far, you have certainly heard me talk about the value of these inner “tools.” 

I decided to highlight the five building blocks of self-awareness at this stage of my story, because I found myself not always showing up in pressure situations the way I would have liked to. It was clear to me that sometimes I could reach for my tools, and other times I had to reach for my rules. Awareness was the difference, but there was something more. For several weeks, I became more and more aware of my awareness. 

It was through this focused attention that I began to see that I “fell off” at different points. Sometimes it was at the level of being committed. Sometimes it was lack of curiosity, or one of the other three layers, which I dive into in the chapters to follow. I revisit the lessons in these five chapters over and again, because they help me fine tune my awareness when I get off track – and the nature of the game is not being perfect all the time. It’s about having lots of ways of getting back on track. 

Speaking of curiosity, this podcast was created because of my budding curiosity to have a different kind of conversation, and you will hear about one of my early podcast guests Warwick Schiller, who has also been on a journey of self-discovery. Chapter fifteen has a special surprise in it.

This episode includes Dancing the Tightrope Chapters Twelve The Froth is My Friend and Thirteen The Art of Living. These chapters mark a turning point in my journey of making friends with pressure. To this day, I still find it difficult to explain how different this approach to pressure – and to life – is from the typical approach espoused in high performance coaching elsewhere. Rereading these two chapters several years later, I’m still pleased with how well these two chapters explain the “pressure as a catalyst” approach. However, it’s dang near impossible to understand it if you haven’t experienced it.

The best analogy I’ve come up with is what I call the “fish story.” Fish don’t know they live in water. Water is all they know. On the other hand, dolphins are aware of world of water and of course they are aware of air, since they must surface to breathe. Learning about the unseen forces that impacted the way I dealt with pressure was a little like being a fish who discovered there was a whole different world. In order to break the surface and breathe the air of life., I had to ask myself some tough questions along the way. 

These two chapters break down the distinction between pressure and the thing causing the pressure, and also those tough questions, which I believe apply to anyone seeking the signal of a genuine life amidst the noise of the modern world.

In this episode, I’m reading Chapters 10 and 11 of Dancing the Tightrope. If there is a theme in these two chapters of my journey, I have to call it “stuff happens.” I’m going along, expecting things to go as planned, and instead, something unexpected turns everything on its head. Of course something unexpected happened. That’s how the world works. Why would I think it should go any other way? As I say earlier in the book, this journey showed me that many of my assumptions about pressure, balance and how to develop mental fitness were upside or backwards. These chapters not only capture some of the stories that helped me see things differently, they also capture exactly what I was seeing in my mental process and how I changed it for the better. 

In this episode of the podcast, I am reading chapters 8 and 9 of Dancing the Tightrope. I'm starting to put things together, as you will hear when you listen. At the very beginning of chapter eight, I had a wild experience going out and learning the negative-positive poll in a completely new or deeper way. 

Let me tell you something that's interesting about that particular super tool as I call it. It is eight years later, and I am still BEGINNING to understand just how powerful this mechanism inside of us is if we learn to use it. If there's nothing else I have for you for this podcast, pay attention to that story and see how you can start using it for yourself, because this one is powerful. 

I'm also beginning to find out all the holes in my training and all the things I thought I knew that I didn't really know. Because if there's any distinction, especially around this time of the book, but maybe for the whole book, there is a big difference between knowing something and having the wisdom to know how to use it in the right place and in the right time.

I hope you enjoy these chapters of Dancing the Tightrope. 

In this episode of the podcast, I’m reading Chapters 6 and 7, The Decision – Sort of, and Imbalance is a Good Thing. As you will hear, at this stage of the journey, I’m somewhat flailing. Looking back on it, I’m still surprised that I took the path I did. Some part of me saw the promise of taking the more difficult path – something that was typically not my norm.

It has been fascinating for me to go back and read these chapters several years later. I typically can’t remember what I wrote last week, much less four years ago. In that way, it’s fresh. It’s also a little bit like reading a personal journal. I’m reminded of what I went through. 

I hope you enjoy these chapters – they will keep coming every week until we get through the book, and then my podcasts with guests will resume.