Farnoosh Torabi
speaker
72 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Farnoosh Torabi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
As a woman who has been laid off twice, the first time it happened, a lot of Bridget Jones diary, a lot of Chinese dumplings. And you should allow yourself a pity party. Like, that is to be allowed. But... I say, you lost the job, you lost the income, but what did you not lose? What are the things that you are still taking with you?
And that is your experience, your network, your accomplishments, even the failures are assets. You learned a lot. And that is the stuff that you're gonna be able to take into your next move. Um, so we lose sight.
We think that our accomplishments, our measure of value is just in these sort of tangible things, you know, our income, our title, our job, but it's also in the life that we have lived, all of these experiences and the people and the network and the health that we have, this is all, these are all assets. And so when you're in that
terrifying moment of feeling lost and life is uncertain, the fear is telling you, hold on to what is certain. What is certain? And I think you will find the courage and the motivation that you are lacking.
This is a good one because my gosh, what is more American pie? What is more American dream than buying a house, right? And I would say to that person, let's first unpack why you're afraid you'll never be a homeowner. What is it about? Are you worried that you're not going to... It's too expensive. Well, yes, but more than that, that if you don't buy the house, you won't be wealthy.
You won't build wealth. You won't have security for your family. You won't be able to be considered a financial adult because we associate so many of those things with the act of a home purchase in our culture. So I think that also there is also a fear of like, if I don't do this grand thing with my money, if I don't buy a home, am I really financially mature?
Am I really going to be doing the right things with my money? Rent? Oh, I've just heard that that's money down the drain. So I would look at that. I would examine that and go, why do you think this? Who told you this?
That's a real fear. That's a real fear because the cost of living, there's so many unknowns in retirement, the cost of healthcare, and we're living longer. So we need more money to support us in retirement. So if that is your fear, then I want you to imagine, go to the dark place. You're 75 years old. You still have to work.
You don't want to be working and you're tired and you don't get to see your grandkids. You don't get to see your friends. Well, this sounds sucky.
Are you motivated to do something after hearing this? I hope so. This is what I'm trying to condition you to be inspired to do. Don't just sit in the what if. Go to the place where things have really fallen apart for you because you are scared now. But I'm going to tell you, there's a lot scarier things for you waiting for you if you don't do something today.
And that's what we have to sort of hold fear in balance. You know, what you fear today versus the scary place you might be in five years from now, 10 years from now, because you didn't act healthfully with this fear. You didn't use this fear to motivate you to take some steps that could help you make some progress.
I mean, Mel, that story you gave about the restaurant going out of business and you were afraid. And what did you do? You went out and made a ton of money and you worked and worked and worked. And it wasn't sustainable, but... And it wasn't a ton of money in the beginning, let's be honest.
So I don't really like to talk about how to stop fearing it. What I want to reframe is how to have a conversation with your fear. So we tend to go through life reacting to fear, often in knee-jerk ways. We freeze, we fly, and we... What's the third one? Freeze, fly, fight. Fight. I want to offer a fourth option, which is figure it out.
That's my fourth F. And by figuring it out, I mean like realizing that maybe fear showed up for a reason. And I'm not talking about like fear of heights or fear of, you know, I'm talking about like when you're at the crossroads of life and you have to make a financial decision and the stakes are high. If you're afraid, there's probably a reason because you're worried about risk.
You're worried about losing money. This is not a small thing. And so in that moment, I offer queries in the book. Here are things that you can ask yourself that can help you create some sense of a roadmap for where to go next. Like fear does not want you to keep you stuck. Diane Fossey, she studied apes. She was a primatologist and she said,
essentially taught us all that fear has an evolutionary purpose. It's here to protect us. She wandered around with apes in one experiment and realized that inevitably there was always a subset of apes that were always on the periphery. They were always like sleeping with one eye open. And she wondered, well, what if we remove them from the community?
And when that happened, the community was obliterated. And she realized that In culture, in society, there's always sort of like a border of people who are always like sort of on the fringe. I'm the Tarsu in Farsi. It's like the fearful one. And I'm proud of that because for me, it's how I protected myself. And as we've evolved as humans...
you know, maybe we're no longer in primitive era, but we have evolved and fear has evolved with us to be there for us when we're trying to make decisions that are more self-aligned, that we can feel like protected doing something that is scary. So honor it. And how you honor it, we've talked about it already a little bit, is like sort of trace it to its root, figure out how it got here.
What's the story? Fear is, of losing money, could this have been sourced from when you were younger and you saw your parents go bankrupt? You saw your father lose his job or your mother lose her job. And now you have carried that fear into your adult life and you don't believe that you can have it any better. Sometimes that's important because it's a wake-up call.
of losing it all, imagine losing it all, like go to the dark place. Because what we have found is that the fear of losing money it takes place, that fear sort of bubbles up in the same place as like physical pain in the brain. And what do we want more than anything when we experience physical pain? We want a solution. We want to fix it.
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