Why Fear Shows Up When You’re About to Grow & How to Break Free from Self-Sabotage with Mary Marantz
Episode Notes
What if fear isn’t a warning sign—but a signal you’re stepping into something that matters?
I’m joined by the brilliant and creative Mary Marantz to explore why fear often shows up right before a breakthrough—and how to stop seeing it as a reason to back down.
We also get into:
* How fear hides behind perfectionism, people-pleasing, and procrastination
* The surprising link between fear and creativity
* Why grief is often the first step in learning to trust yourself
* What it means to become the “grown-up in the room” for your own healing
* How naming your inner critic can help disarm its power
Check out Mary’s new book Underestimated!
📞 Don’t forget—We want to hear from you! What’s one area of your emotional, mental, or spiritual health where you’d like to grow? Call 307-429-2525 and leave a voicemail with your name, where you’re from, and your answer. Your voice may be featured in a future episode!
Resources:
- The Mary Marantz Show
- Check out Mary's earlier books: Dirt and Slow Growth Equals Strong Roots
- Underestimated: The Surprisingly Simple Shift to Quit Playing Small, Name the Fear, and Move Forward Anyway by Mary Marantz
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- achieverquiz.com
- Get the first chapter of Underestimated at marymarantz.com/underestimated
- @MaryMarantz on Instagram
- Dr. Alison on The Mary Marantz Show
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 10: What are Limiting Beliefs and How Do I Overcome Them with Mary Marantz
- Episode 20: Making Peace with Yourself (& Facing Your Fear of Disappointing Other People)
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to Quince.com/bestofyou for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order!
- Save an additional 10% on any NIV Application Bible and NIV Application Commentary Resources by visiting faithgateway.com/NIVAB and using promo code BESTOFYOU!
- Visit GoGeviti.com to learn more about how you can start optimizing your health without leaving home today and use code BESTOFYOU.
- Give your loved ones a unique, heartfelt gift you’ll all cherish for years—StoryWorth! Right now, save $10 on your first purchase when you go to StoryWorth.com/bestofyou!
- For 20% off your order, head to Reliefband.com and use code BESTOFYOU.
Editing by Giulia Hjort / Music by Andy Luiten / Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2025 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. Before we dive into today's episode, I wanna share something new we're trying, because I'd love to hear from you.
We're opening up a space for your voice on the podcast. We wanna hear your questions, your comments, and from time to time, we wanna hear your input–what's going on in your life, what you're noticing, where you wanna grow, or where you're gaining wisdom.
For now, the question I'd love for you to answer is, what is one area of your mental, emotional, or spiritual health where you'd like to grow right now? To answer the question, call 307-429-2525 and leave a voicemail with your first name, where you're calling from, and your response.
This is something new for the show and I'm really excited about it. There's something powerful about hearing your voices and weaving your wisdom and questions into future episodes. So again, that number is 307-429-2525. I can't wait to hear from you.
And now for today's episode. Have you ever felt like fear shows up right when you're finally stepping into something meaningful? Or maybe your inner critic with its tired, familiar scripts is waiting in the wings to remind you that you're not quite enough?
Today, I am joined by the brilliant and wildly creative Mary Marantz. You may know her from her own podcast, The Mary Marantz Show, or from her earlier books, Dirt and Slow Growth Equals Strong Roots. She's back today with a brand new book, Underestimated: The Surprisingly Simple Shift to Quit Playing Small, Name the Fear, and Move Forward Anyway.
What I love most about Mary is how she brings together soul, deep honesty, and storytelling that makes you laugh, cry, and recognize yourself in the most unexpected ways. In today's episode, we talk about why fear shows up right when the work really matters and how to recognize the many faces fear wears–perfectionism, people pleasing, imposter syndrome, and more.
We talk about what it means to become the grownup in the room, the one who can be trusted, and how a moment from reading my book, The Best of You, became a meaningful turning point in Mary's own journey. You'll also hear us talk about how grief is often the very first step in learning to trust yourself again.
This conversation is filled with deep insight, eighties metaphors, and some seriously powerful truths about reclaiming your voice, trusting your timing, and facing fear with courage and compassion. I'm so thrilled to share my conversation with Mary Marantz.
***
Alison Cook: I'm thrilled to have this conversation with you, Mary, about this incredible book. I know you've been on the podcast before, but for those of my listeners who are new to you and your story, I wanna start with your background, because you talk about growing up in poverty and being the first member of your family to go to college.
It wasn't really even on the docket for you, and yet you end up at Yale Law School. You have this saying, “growing up without a lot does something to your brain”. Tell us a little bit about that.
Mary: Yeah. I don't know if maybe it's the prefrontal cortex still developing the neural pathways over time, but these bad generational thoughts turn into bad generational patterns. Maybe it's inhaling all the mildew. But there's something that happens in your brain that makes you expect to fail before you even start.
It is this idea that no matter what you do, you will never be enough. And what's interesting is, man, there's just so much nuance to this, Alison, and before I even jump into that, thank you so much for having me here, for endorsing the book, for believing in this book from the very beginning.
As I'm sure we'll get into, it was a conversation with you that sparked the book idea. So your fingerprints are all over this. But one of the things that I think you know about me, about the books I write, about the conversations I have, and I think it's very true of you as well, is there's a lot of nuance in what we talk about.
Things are not just an easy yes or no. It's not black or white. There are a lot of shades of gray. And so even that word poverty gets really interesting. One of the things I learned through writing my first book, Dirt, is that there are a lot of different kinds of poverty. There is poverty of food, like food insecurity, and I never personally experienced that, but I would say that I had poverty of home, like the home condition.
The condition of the trailer was in really rough shape. The ceiling was caving in, it was raining as hard on the inside as it was on the out, the floorboards were caving in, and there were mushrooms growing out of the carpets and every imaginable bug and undesirable animal you can imagine.
Then there's poverty of love, there's poverty of family, there's poverty of parenting. I didn't have those in particular either. I am from a region of Appalachia where we would bristle at that–”ooh, could we even call that poverty”? But as a grownup now standing on the outside, looking back at my condition, I can say, yes, there were parts that were poverty.
If that sort of living condition existed in New Haven, Connecticut, somebody would intervene. That's not acceptable or normal in this part of the country. So we're really proud people. We're really stoic people, and we’re underestimated. I write a lot about how that has influenced me, walking around in the world in this very self-sufficient turned self-sabotaging way.
I don't want you feeling sorry for me. I don't want you averting your eyes from me in some sort of sympathy shame on my behalf. I do not want your advice unless specifically asked for, because it burns in my ears and tastes like condescension. I don't want you to worry about me. Then I'll have to worry about you worrying about me.
And so it really does shape how you walk around in the world. There's a lot of nuance there.
Alison Cook: I can hear the different parts of you wrestling with it. There's an honoring, and I love that about your work, Mary, an honoring of the way you grew up. And also, there are ways it really created some neural pathways in your brain that, to this day, that's a big part of the new book that you’re wrestling with.
Tell me a little bit about fear as one of those voices that shaped some of those internal messages.
Mary: One of the things that I have learned, both in my own life and through my work coaching women who wanna write books, people who wanna have businesses, who wanna build courses, who wanna speak on stages, is they need a signature talk. I started to notice that a lot of the same kinds of sentences were flying out of their mouths at a lot of the same parts of the process.
Fear can be so frustrating and resistance can be so frustrating. It got to the point where I was like, right on time, there we go. Of course fear's gonna show up and say that right there. Of course, that's what he does right now. It led me to pick up my phone one day and hop on Instagram a couple years ago.
I filmed this video outta frustration at fear, and then posted it, and it took off. It was like, it's all been done, it's all been done better, it's all been done by somebody the world actually wants to pay attention to. I can't start until it's perfect. I can't start until I am perfect. What if I start and I don't know all the steps in the blueprint? What if I start and I can't stay consistent with it?
What if I don't have the bandwidth? What if I start and the critics come? What if they say, who does she think she is? What if my voice doesn't matter? What if I don't really matter? What if it's already too late?
This was like a head-exploding-emoji moment in my life. It's the kind of high that every writer dreams of. It's that moment when two dots connect in your limbic brain in a way that we've never seen them connected before quite this way. And it was, what if fear attacks creatives in particular, because it is jealous that it itself is not creative at all?
It is not tethered to muse or melody or the force of all creation. The only gift it is imbued with at all, is this ability to throw its voice and pretend like it is your own. So it attacks creatives because it is not creative at all, and it's jealous of that fact. Fear is not a creative guy. But he is a productive guy and a busy guy.
Like any productive overachiever, he's learned how to prioritize and he's gonna only show up if the work you're about to do really matters. So we can actually use that if fear shows up–good. You're about to do work that matters.
Alison Cook: Okay. There's so much in this. The first thing I love is the personification of fear. We do a lot of IFS work on the podcast, so I'm thinking about the movie “Inside Out”. Fear in the way that you're describing it becomes that ubiquitous voice.
Mary: Yeah. I love that. And I love that's where your brain went, because for me it’s very similar. In the book. I actually made a joke about it–I want you to picture nothing short of the Grinch making his to-do list: stare into the abyss, solve world hunger, tell no one. That's the productive overachiever whose heart is three sizes too small, that I imagine fear to be.
Alison Cook: Ugh. That's so good. That's so good. Fear is there. It's there for all of us.
I love that you're highlighting that these messages were so consistent because when that voice is in our own heads, it feels very unique to me.
Mary: That's right.
Alison Cook: This is all about me. This is very personal. I'm not good enough.
Mary: And you start noticing, wait a minute, the voice of fear is very similar.
Alison Cook: It’s not creative. It shows up particularly when we are being our most creative,
and then give me the reframe again.
Mary: He's not a creative guy, but he is a super busy guy. And like any good productive overachiever, he's learned to prioritize. If you're already playing small, if you're already hiding in plain sight, a little maintenance by fear, a little self-sabotaging, a little perfectionism sprinkled in, and you're all set.
But show up and actually do the good work that's been prepared for you in advance, the work that's actually gonna change lives and help people? You’d better expect fear to show up, teeth bared and snarling in this entirely different version of itself.
I did this Instagram post a couple days ago actually, where I took this and ran with it a little bit and I said, what fear doesn't know is that we've actually pulled a classic rope-a-dope. We've pulled him in close enough to wear himself out, and as our Rocky 4 soundtrack swells, we're getting ready to hit him with the knockout punch.
If fear is the most boring, unoriginal, uncreative, predictable force out there, now we use that weakness against him to predict when we're on track, because he wouldn't show up if the work we were doing didn't matter. He would just sprinkle some perfectionism on us and let us go. And so now it's like, cool, fear's in the room. Great. I'm on the right track.
I've really used that in my own life. Every day of my life at this point, I'm a little bit afraid, and I'm like, great, that means I'm doing stuff that matters.
Alison Cook: That's such a powerful reframe. I think you say, fear becomes an invitation instead of a stop sign. I think this is a quote from you–”you must really care about this
to feel this afraid”. So fear becomes a cue. “This really matters to me”. Okay, so how is fear different from this inner critic I believe you've named in your life John?
Mary: Dear John. Dear John.
Alison Cook: Tell us a little bit about that.
Mary: Okay, so one of the things for your listeners to know that's really cool is fear is a boring liar, and it wears the same sorts of faces and names for each of us. It attacks us with the same boring, busted scripts. Each chapter then tackles a different face of fear. So we have self-sabotage, second guessing, not-enough imposter syndrome, overthinking, perfectionism, people-pleasing, procrastination, failure, criticism, distractions, and even success.
One of the things that I learned in my previous career being a photographer and a photography educator where I would build courses for people, we learned very quickly, I have a very natural teacher's heart. I speak fluent movie quotes, so this stuff started coming outta my mouth organically.
But we started to notice how people would really latch onto it and they would pick up on it, and it would hit them in a way that straight technical jargon never would. And so we are wired to learn by story. We are wired to learn by metaphor. We think about the greatest teacher that ever walked the planet, who taught by story and metaphor.
And if the first story or metaphor didn't totally make the people understand, he wouldn't be like, okay, here's what I was doing there. Let me explain it. He would be like, here's another metaphor. And so for each of these different chapters, the different faces of fear, I have used all of the powers of Mary.
My friends have joked, because I'm bringing my IQ and my EQ, my movie quotes and my deep thinking. The tug on your heartstrings, we're gonna cry for a while, but then we're gonna laugh in a really sharp, edgy kind of humor way too. And I'm giving each component a really visceral visual for you to remember.
And so when we're in the criticism chapter, we're talking about both criticism from other people, but then we're also gonna talk about that inner critic. This is dear John. And that part begins by talking about Ryan Reynolds giving an interview to Hugh Jackman, where Hugh Jackman said, hey, you've been really public about talking about having anxiety. How does that affect your work?
And Ryan Reynolds said, anxiety has such an ecosystem of awareness. Whew. Anxiety has such an ecosystem of awareness. When I'm making a movie, I am not just the actor saying the lines. I am also the harshest critic sitting in the chairs, sitting in the seats going, nope, I don't like that. I don't buy that. That's not good enough. And he actually uses that ecosystem of awareness to push himself to be better.
I'm not saying you gotta do that, but I think the ecosystem of awareness is interesting. And I so resonate with that, because I'm so aware of my own worst critic sitting in the audience, that I've given it a name. Dear John. And I say, dear John wears khaki pants or jeans creased from the iron. He wears a shirt with a boring, beige, plaid crisscross of colors, but nothing too bold or bright.
None of that Vineyard Vines nonsense for dear John. Only ecru and taupe and eggshell. And he doesn't like anything that has color outside of his boring beige lines. Anyway, it goes on and on from there, basically talking about this character who hates when I walk into the room and have any kind of self-confidence at all, any kind of belief in my own worth, any opinions about the trajectory of my career.
True to his name, he wants to get me to break up with my biggest dreams, because a dear John letter is a breakup letter.
Alison Cook: So dear John and fear are intimately connected
Mary: Yeah. I would say dear John is a different face of fear.
Alison Cook: Again, what I love about the book and you're saying it so well for the listener. I laughed, I cried. There's wisdom and then the way you write, in the way you're sharing it with us now, you make all these great connections that we see the humor in ourselves a little bit too. It's such a fun book to read in that way.
There's so much life in it and so much of you in it and it's very different from many books that you might pick up, in the sense that it's not a memoir by any stretch, but it is personal and it is an exercise in creativity. It's fun to read. It's a real delight.
Mary: Because I get pictures in my mind, and that's what a story does. I get a picture of the inner critic and fear can show up in that inner critic who has got a different tactic for keeping you down.
Alison Cook: It is rooted in “don't get too big”. And again, it exposes it, it pulls back the veil a little bit to go, oh, I see you there. I see what's going on there.
Mary: Yeah, so something a friend of mine said who's gotten to read the book early, she was like, Mary, this is like a 74,000 word Taylor Swift lyric. And I was like, I'll take that. What a huge compliment. Yeah, it's that metaphor and imagery. If you love plays on words, you're gonna love this book.
Alison Cook: You're a wordsmith. Yeah. You're a poet. Even the way you speak, I hear the rhythm of it. And again, to your point, I could imagine fear has, throughout your life said, oh, don't do that, trying to keep the lid on what is really a superpower.
Mary: Oh, a hundred percent. I love that you said that because, okay, here's a really fun one. This is gonna make people understand what I mean about we're bringing all the parts of Mary to this book, more so than even my previous two books. I gave myself permission to be a hundred percent Mary in this book.
In chapter two, which is “Fear’s a broken script”, it kicks off by me talking about when I was a kid. I knew I wanted to write a book since I was five years old, and I was this decidedly different sort of kid. To give you an idea of how different I was, most kids were thinking about which Care Bear they wanted to own.
Come Christmas morning, I was thinking about which Care Bear I would turn into if I was ever somehow sucked into the television through the giant NASA size satellite dish in our overgrown yard, outside our single wide trailer, a 1980 status symbol if ever there was one.
Everybody wanted to be Cheer Bear, the pink, bubbly one with the rainbow on her belly. But I was doomed to be boring, brown, Tender Heart because Tender Heart was the leader. The leader shows up wearing their heart on the outside, where they run the risk of getting hurt, and they have this ability to look ordinary on the outside, to shine a spotlight on others.
And then full circle moment in the Fear chapter, I talk about how Dear John was like hissing on my shoulder, being like, are you serious? Are you really gonna talk about Care Bears in a very serious thought-leader book? Who is ever gonna take you seriously that way? And having to be like actually, for my people, the people I was created to serve, that's gonna actually make them trust me more.
That's gonna make them love me more. Maybe they also grew up in the eighties and also wondered which Care Bear they would be. But they're gonna know that I have been thinking about what it means to be a leader since I was five years old, and I don't take this lightly.
Alison Cook: Ooh, that's powerful. I'm sitting here thinking, wow, I didn't realize. That's a pretty deep metaphor among the Care Bear creators of the Tender Heart leader. There's so much to that. Again, to your point about story, the best stories, the best children's stories, even toys, light up our imaginations.
Mary: Right. Yeah. Valentine Rabbit–you're only ugly to those who don't understand. Yeah.
Alison Cook: I've thought about the Grinch a lot. That metaphor is really powerful. So Mary, this leads a little bit to my role in the book. You're talking about your adult self and how you, again, even in that moment, pushed back with Dear John, like, it is a thought leader book.
You're also incredibly generous with not only your almost photographic memory for movie lines and scripts and all that, which is so fun because we grew up in a similar era, but also your generosity to give credit to folks you've got ideas from. To the point of the thing about fear, there is no new idea under the sun, but there's no one else but you who can give voice to certain ideas in new ways.
And so that's the beauty of creativity. The flip side of “somebody's already done this”, is “Mary has never done this. Mary will do it completely differently”. To the point of you learning to push back on some of those narratives, no one's gonna like this, there's a line in this book where you say you got this from me, from The Best of You.
There's a grownup in the room who can be trusted, and that grownup is you. Why was that so pivotal for you?
Mary: Woo. Okay. I've been thinking about this all morning, and I knew this part was coming and I was like, oh boy, Mary. Hold it together. Okay. I'm gonna set the scene for everybody listening. It needs a little tiny bit of a backstory. We were set to record to talk about The Best of You. It was our first time recording together. You've now been on my show a couple times.
I've been on yours a couple times. We had met recently at a retreat in Arizona, where ironically I'd also cried there the whole time for about three days. Anyway, that's irrelevant, but we need to honor that for a second. And for everybody listening, I first have to admit to you my very guilty pleasure.
Most people have the Kardashians, or Bachelor in Paradise, or whatever. I follow really cheesy success accounts on Instagram. The ones with a lion and a Lamborghini that say, “roar until you get everything you came for”. Mostly because I like to mock them in my head, but one day there was one that went by.
It was a quick scroll by and I wish I could have found it again to give true credit to whoever posted it, but I've never been able to find it again. And it was a picture of a shot glass and it said, if you think you have the capacity the size of a shot glass, then anytime you get a little bit more than that, you will subconsciously shrink yourself until you, and then I added this part, fit yourself back into the tiny containers you believe you belong in.
I brought that up in our episode and I said, Alison, how do we stop doing this when most of the time we're doing it subconsciously? We don't even realize we're doing it. And we pulled up this long form quote from The Best of You that was talking about if you didn't have a lot of stability in your childhood, if there was a lot of chaos, that you've never been taught safety, you will live in an internal place of chaos and survival mode.
And the way that we break this is by setting small but important commitments to ourselves. They can't be too huge. It's gotta be small steps, but they also have to actually matter to you and then you actually keep them. Then you looked me in the eye through the screen, like we're doing, and you said, as you do that you are showing yourself there's a grownup in the room who can be trusted. That grownup is you.
And I burst into tears on the spot. Because I think there are so many of us who had hard stories. Listen, if you are listening right now and you feel like your whole life has been this series, this running metaphor through all of Underestimated about pushing a boulder up the mountain, almost being at your breakthrough moment.
We can taste the rarefied air and at the last minute, when we realize all the eyes on us looking from home, like Wiley Coyote about to get his comeuppance, for a second we defy gravity and then the bottom drops out. We lose our grip, we lose our weight, and the boulder rolls all the way back down the mountain and we keep starting over.
Meanwhile, other people can implement, execute and achieve like it's no big deal. Elle Woods–what, like it's hard? And if you have felt that your whole life, it's because maybe there's something in your story that taught you it's not safe to trust anybody, including yourself.
And so for you to actually give a pathway forward of small but important commitments where day by day, you are reestablishing a sense of safety and showing yourself there is a grownup who can be trusted with this more to steward this. It's you. It kicked off the whole idea for the book.
Now every chapter ends with a small shift based around that idea. Everybody thinks you quit playing small by taking a big leap, and the net will appear, but paradoxically, some of the most important work we'll do is small shifts.
Alison Cook: It means a lot to me, first of all, that you so generously honored my work in that and my role in that, because I had no idea. I knew in the moment you really took that in–
Mary: –from the sobbing.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I knew that, but to see then, how you went on and presumably began to retrain that trust of yourself in that way, with those small micro-steps–it's so true. You and I both know that's part of the issue with self-sabotage. Again, back to your point about nuance, these big messages of “Do it scared”, I love that metaphor, that one really spoke to me in the book, but what if you're someone who's done it scared and then the boulder goes all the way back to the bottom time and time again?
That can feel like I'm the problem, as opposed to, what do I need to do to train myself to be more prepared to really keep that boulder going at a steady pace? There is actually a different way to do it and I might have to do some retraining along the way.
You did that. And then the fruit of it in this book, you see the more whole picture of who you are, that you know, I'm not gonna play small here. I'm talking to you about it and I'm also showing you all of who I am.
Mary: Yes. Yeah. I love that. It informs this whole book, because each chapter is a deep dive on why we are the way we are. Why do we actually procrastinate? What's happening on a scientific level when we overthink and we wanna switch from the hard problem to the easier win? That's actually a science thing.
Your brain is self-preserving. There's glutamate building up in your prefrontal cortex, and it's reaching potentially toxic levels that are affecting brain functioning. So as a survival technique, you will switch into a more immediate gratification win. You handed me this baton and it set off a million different ideas and a million different ways of what it actually looks like to trust yourself in the face of each of these different versions of fear.
Because fear's like a chameleon, like that shapeshifter–it can throw its voice. I should add, the other gift it has is changing its face. But when you think about that, that kinda reminds me of a horror movie. This enemy that's taking on all these different terrifying faces. It's gonna haunt you in your dreams.
So then it was like, okay, all right, fear, I see you now. What if I actually go toe to toe with you, chapter by chapter, for every face you try to put on?
Alison Cook: As you began to internalize that idea of “I am the adult in the room”, what are some of the early steps that you took to retrain the way that you interacted with yourself?
Mary: I'm gonna be honest with you, the first step that it took for me, and the first step it's gonna take for a lot of people, is grief. You're gonna have to grieve the 20 or 25 years, or however long you feel like you've been stuck in this place of perfectionism or procrastination or pushing the boulder up the hill. However long you've been living like that.
I actually have these scenic overlooks in the book as places where we pause and rest and we pay honor to how far we've come. We also prepare for how far we still have to go. And one of them is that grief is a story not yet lived, and it talks about mourning how much further along we would be by now if we hadn't had to stop to do all this healing first.
And even in the end of the first section, in chapter one, it's talking about how we forget that we don't all start at the same starting line. For some of us, we've believed the lie our entire lives that more would one day be our downfall. We have these limiting beliefs tied up like heavy weights around our ankles, and we wonder why we keep getting tripped up.
The work involves healing decades-old traumas and generational beliefs about what happens to a person when they finally get more. So there's a grief to it. You gotta spend some time mourning how long it's taken to even get to this point, to start to trust yourself.
Alison Cook: Oh, that's good, Mary. That's a good word because it's honest. There is a reckoning with reality that's both liberating and comes with grief, and to let it have a seat at the table versus trying to work around it.
Mary: Yeah. Because in chapter three, the star of the show is self-sabotage, a shot glass. And it's not about drinking, it's about the tiny containers we put ourselves in. We like to sip ourselves, –a little light self-deprecation among friends never hurt anybody. We prefer it in tiny doses, where nobody starts to take notice.
Chapter four is second guessing. Self-sabotage is a shot glass. Second guessing is a missing handbook, and it's for all of us who feel like we’re not given that handbook for life that everybody else seems to have gotten when they were eight years old. Chad, pass the mashed potatoes and oh, by the way, make sure you understand compound interest.
And we therefore spend our whole lives feeling like we don't have all the information. We don't know all the things other people somehow inherently need to know. So somebody else should always be the one trusted to go do the thing. Somebody else will always show up better. And I go into great detail describing the missing handbook.
It's from the 1970s, the color of an old school national park pamphlet, and page 47 is the missing secret formula for how to get the shiny, perfect Pantene hair. I've never been able to get this wild thing untamed. I go on to say, for those of us with the missing handbook, we feel like we're walking around the world without all the pertinent parts.
Edward Scissorhands drops down in the middle of some pastel suburban hell, scars now on full visible display in the midday sun, bumping up against all these pastel, pretty smiling ladies with their powers of blending in where we don't know the rules. So we're always breaking the rules and we are somehow the ones who die by a thousand cuts.
Now, for somebody who feels like, why am I always second guessing myself? Why do I always feel like there's somebody who's gonna show up better? They now have this imagery of Edward Scissorhands. So the next time they're doing that to themselves, they can go, Edward Scissorhands alert. We've been here before.
That's the biggest work this book does, is giving incredible visuals that you can recall, and you capture fear right in the middle, mid-sentence, and say, I know what you're doing. It diffuses all the power out of the room.
Alison Cook: I'm not alone. I cried at that part, because I'd forgotten that movie. When you described that experience, you're like, I can't help the fact that I have scissors on my hands where everybody else has nice red fingernail polish. It makes sense that when you're inhabiting that and you've felt that for so long, this idea of, oh wait a minute. There's an adult inside of me that can gently help me learn how to put the scissors down.
It's such a beautiful part of you. And also, let's figure out not how to camouflage, but I wanna help you actually show up vibrantly as yourself. It doesn't have to come from outside of me. There's one other kind of theme in the book. There's a lot to it. Again, it's the many faces of fear. You've said 'em, perfectionism, people pleasing, but how there really is at the root of it, this fear.
There's a theme that I really wanted to ask you about before we close down, and that is, you say, proving other people wrong is a powder keg. There's a fine line between finding your own agency, empowering yourself to become who you really are, and trying to prove other people wrong.
Talk to me a little bit about that. I think there's a lot to that and I think it's really important, especially in our culture today.
Mary: Yeah. Okay. So really quickly, going back to what we were talking about earlier with the grownup in the room who can be trusted. That grownup is you. And we had mentioned that chapter on criticism. “Criticism is an inside job” is chapter 12. And you had mentioned Internal Family Systems, IFS, and in digging into that, I start to introduce internal family systems a bit.
I'm sharing a few things from Dr. Martha Sweezy. She gives a script that we reference but don't directly quote, where she tells you how to walk through introducing grownup you to the inner protective part of your inner critic. And you ask that inner critic, how old do you think I am right now?
And it's I don't know, five, seven, 10, somewhere in there. It's gonna be shocked to find out you're actually a grown woman. And she says, as you begin to introduce that inner protective part to your grownup self, you can ask it to make some room for that version of you, and you will feel yourself become more expansive, calm, relaxed, grown up.
As those other parts make some room, this is the true version of you that emerges essentially. And so the way I lay it out is, you feel expansive, calm, grown up, as those other parts make some room. I love to reward our people who have listened long into the episode, because this is such a fun, my head exploded moment, that I wanted to make sure you knew.
I was staring at it and I was like, oh my gosh. There it is. There is a grownup in the room. That's right. Who can be trusted? That grownup is you. I'd always thought it was like the physical rooms we were walking in, but it's this room up here. And my head was like, what am I seeing? Like, you're in chapter three all the way in chapter 12. You're coming back around.
Alison Cook: Yes, there's a grownup in the room. Even here. Yeah. I love that.
Mary: Okay. Powder cakes. This is in the last chapter and it's really getting into, what is this fear of success actually about? And that chapter kicks off with “the underdog is the role of a lifetime”. What I mean by that is, if we are not careful, we could spend our whole lives playing that part, and proving other people wrong is actually a really terrible form of jet fuel.
It's explosive. You'll see some really big surges ahead, but it will leave you as this hollowed out, burned out shell of yourself in the process. It is not a renewable fuel source, and I started talking about this sugar factory that actually exploded in Georgia. I think it was in 2007, 2008, and it killed a bunch of people, burned a bunch of people.
It's a really horrible accident. Afterwards, the CEO of the company said that it was caused because when they were processing the sugar, all of this sugar dust settled in the silos in the basement. They weren't doing the housekeeping to clean up that mess. And the sugar dust acted like gunpowder.
It was a sugar dust turned powder keg. I won't read it word for word outta my brain, but there are excerpts from both Dirt and Slow Growth where I'm talking about achievement being like the Pez dispenser. Keep the candy coming, God doling out hit after hit. Will I ever feel like I matter?
In Slow Growth, some days I think I might disintegrate altogether, these million atomized molecules floating like sugar dust. And if we're not doing the housekeeping to clean up that mess of more sugar, more achievements, more gold stars, maybe that'll make me matter, maybe that'll make them choose me, maybe then I will belong, that sugar dust can turn into a powder keg and we are the ones who get burned.
Alison Cook: It's so good. You see it where that becomes an identity for years. You get that visibility through energy through proving other people wrong. That's so interesting and honest. Wow.
Mary: Yeah. Oh yeah. At the end is perfectionism, “hiding with better PR”. That's chapter 10. I talk about how I started using perfection as a weapon when my mom left when I was nine. I wanted to make her sad. She missed how good my life turned out. Oof. Now we're really getting real.
Alison Cook: That's a gut punch. Because it’s also so understandable at nine. That makes sense. But again, and this is where these young parts of us that have been so hurt, that adapted with these strategies, again, as we get older, it's like oh, but there's an adult in the room. That adult in the room can help you reframe that strategy. Again, without shame, but there’s that re-parenting piece that is so important.
Mary: Yeah. In Dirt, I talk about the rest of that excerpt. It reminds me of a daisy growing wild in a scorched earth wasteland. Sure, you can grow beautiful things out of the ground of revenge, but how long can it really survive that way? That was the moment when I had to decide–if I'm gonna build a beautiful life, let me not do it out of revenge,
Alison Cook: Mary Marantz, you are a wise poet. You really are. There's a such a lyrical way you paint these pictures for us. And I'm so grateful. I'm really grateful for the way you use your talents, for the way you're stepping into even more of your voice. It's gonna help a lot of people. Tell my listeners where to find your work, where to find the new book.
Mary: First of all, I'm gonna say thank you for saying all that. And I know at this point in book launching, that was a lifeline to me. I feel like I am powered up. We always joke that one of our golden retrievers is a super extrovert. Addie, when he meets people on the seawall outside our house, you can literally watch him like Mario Brothers get a power up.
So I feel like I powered up over here. Yes. Okay. A couple places I wanna tell your people about.
One is that I started talking about these characters in Slow Growth, but they carry over into Underestimated. And they are all these different ways we can perform to try to prove other people wrong or achieve for our worth. Or they actually end up turning into us playing small.
There's the performer, which is what I am, who's always on her toes to show both herself and other people how far she's come. The tightrope walker could care less who's clapping, but they need higher and higher death-defying feats in order to feel the same amount of good. The masquerader hides in plain sight and shoves other people into the spotlight.
The contortionist is our classic people pleaser, which is chapter nine. They contort because it's easier than to be criticized. The illusionist in the distance, that's chapter 10, she waits for herself and all the conditions to begin, to be perfect before she thinks she can even start.
If you go to achieverquiz.com, it takes about two minutes to take the quiz, 10 minutes if you really overthink it. The questions are super fun. And in true Mary form, the results go super deep. We talk about each type, why you are the way you are, why you play small, why you get stuck, and how we move forward. So that's achieverquiz.com or marymarantz.com/quiz.
Then if you go to namethefear.com or marymarantz.com/underestimated, we have the whole first chapter free for you up right now. You can grab it and start reading today. If you wanna pre-order, because pre-orders are so huge for authors, especially newer authors or ones who are still trying to get the stores to pick up the book, the first three chapters are available for you, and also the audio book.
So it's getting two books for the price of one, and I read it. So if you've enjoyed hearing me wax poetic for the last hour, you will love the audio book with all of my movie quotes and quirky Care Bear stories all the way through. So that's namethefear.com or marymarantz.com/underestimated. I’m @MaryMarantz on Instagram–come tell me what achiever type you get, or if you liked the episode.
Alison Cook: I love it. It is truly a delightful book about a hard topic. I was like, gosh, for all these things that I really struggle with, I'm having a lot of fun reading through this, which is such an art. I couldn't sing your praises enough and the book’s praises enough. You're the real deal and I'm so grateful for your time to share your wisdom with us.
Mary: Thank you for your time and sharing me with your audience. I know that's a sacred space to invite someone in. So it means the world. As a podcaster myself, I know what goes into that and it means the world. Everybody go listen to Alison on my show too!
Alison Cook: Yeah, we'll link to it. Thank you, Mary.
Mary: Thank you.