Letting Our Wildness Out
(The Surprisingly Normal Cost of ‘Shitting Bricks’)
Susie Kindred
‘Shitting bricks.’
Aussie slang for ‘nervous as all get out’. Let me use it in a sentence.
When I was delivering my first keynote to a group of 100 people, I was shitting bricks.
This was going to be an inspirational article for the year of horses and letting the wildness of ourselves out. But it turns out that at the very centre of living boldly is a common experience that we can’t ignore.
And it’s shitting bricks.
You see, living out the wilder parts of ourselves leads toward freedom, bravery, strength. It asks us to try things just beyond our comfort zone. But the romantic language of awe, wonder, and adventure often skips over the ‘shitting bricks’ part. Those experiences almost always arrive alongside uncertainty, risk, and the deeply human sensation of feeling exposed.
Ask yourself now - Can you think of an act of freedom, courage or adventure in your life that didn’t involve uncertainty, risk or the possibility of getting it wrong?
No one wakes up and feels ready to go. No body feels totally confident with zero anxiety before big events. It’s not how it works.
This is the price of admission of doing something that matters to you.
In my work, I have the privilege of meeting with people at their speartip of distress and at their speartip of excellence. I’m a clinical psychologist by training, now coaching in sustainable high performance with athletes, actors, leaders, and everyday driven humans.
Across disciplines, industries, and ambitions, the sensation of discomfort isn’t the barrier to bold living. It’s the attempt to shapeshift around that discomfort to make it smaller.
Most of us hold the capacity for far more wonder, awe, and adventure than we often allow ourselves. The shift begins in how we relate to our internal world - learning to carry discomfort with us as we move toward what matters and do hard things.
Humans have two deeply wired tendencies when discomfort appears. We either move toward something we want or we move away from what feels threatening.
Horses, interestingly, are masters of reading this tension. In equine therapy, horses are the experts at responding to our nervous system. They sense when someone approaches tightly coiled, all the fibres of their body holding tension. The horse will respond differently when it senses this internal threat, and calls the human toward a deeper understanding of what calm, connection and presence actually feel like in the body.
As with horses, so with life.
When we pursue goals, relationships, or challenges, there is an internal posture underneath shaping how we move toward them. We might be stepping forward with openness, or sometimes with pressure, fear, or holding something back.
To truly move toward our goals without holding back requires a willingness to notice what is happening internally without trying to control it, to develop an attitude of acceptance. It means paying attention to our present-moment experience instead of drifting into autopilot. Instead of avoiding the things that make us uncomfortable, we learn not to be pushed around by our thoughts and feelings. And it means knowing what matters to us and doing what it takes to live that way.
It’s been a long time since I’ve swung a leg over a saddle, but I was reminded of these principles when I booked my first surf lesson last year at 35. I knew that when we get lost in our heads, our bodies tighten.
So before the lesson started, I made a decision to go all in. (And then I kept making the decision. Trust me, it needs to be done repeatedly while you spectacularly backslap into the water off the board.)
At one point when I really wasn’t getting the hang of it, I found one thought that oriented me back to letting go: “ the wave wants to be ridden”. I made an unnecessarily triumphant hand signal to my instructor each time I rode the wave in after that.
Maybe waves don’t quite read our nervous system the way horses do, but the principle extends. Both invite the same thing: a willingness to stay open, aware, and fully engaged with what’s unfolding rather than tightening against it.
When we pursue goals while trying to avoid discomfort, we tend to play not to lose. It’s a question that often surfaces in my work with athletes:
are you playing not to lose, or are you playing to win?
When we learn to stay open to effort, risk, and imperfection, our dear companions courage and vulnerability will arrive.
One of my clients knows perfectionism intimately. She has achieved incredible goals over the past few years, yet she described the last year as living with constant anxiety. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of letting people down. Fear that she was somehow undeserving of where she had landed.
She told me she was heading to New Zealand with a friend who had floated the idea of skydiving. She laughed when she told me she wouldn’t do it.
And then she did.
She followed a small impulse and ended up stepping out of a plane. When she told me about it later, she was in tears, because the event did not bring terror but awe, freedom and gratitude.
“I felt less anxiety jumping out of a plane than I do in day to day life.”
In her life she had been tightly seeking control, but here she described feeling both completely out of control and deeply trusting at the same time. There was nothing she could do except free fall. It was terrifying, yes, but it was also freeing.
This is a beautiful example of the gift of letting our wildness out, and reveals something important about courage.There is no courage without vulnerability, because courage is the willingness to show up fully when the outcome cannot be predicted.
We lean in, we experience discomfort, and in return we receive freedom.
And this is where many of our everyday patterns become clearer. Playing small, holding back, perfectionism, people pleasing, defensiveness - these are reactive tendencies driven by anxiety, rather than by purpose or by vision.
At some point, you will need to make a radical decision about how you relate to doubt, uncertainty, and expectation. There is inherent chaos and change in life - we don’t get a choice in that. We do get to choose what we do with it.
Letting our wildness out is a process of who we become while we go and do something that matters.
Sometimes that pursuit does look like chasing down an impossible goal - something that stretches just beyond what you currently believe you are capable of. These goals are more vulnerable, more meaningful, more exciting, and rarely more comfortable (see above, ‘shitting bricks’). They ask something of you. And over time, they tend to ask you to update the story you hold about who you are.
Your identity is doing its job when it tries to keep you the same. It is designed to preserve familiarity and keep you inside the boundaries of what feels known. But living bravely almost always requires stepping beyond those boundaries.
A creative life, or a creative career, isn’t about climbing the mountain once. Steven Kotler describes it as always climbing the mountain, a commitment that demands the ultimate expression of creativity: the consistent reinvention of self.
I believe curiosity, creativity, play and compassion are the precursors to being able to test new versions of ourselves. Expanding who we are rarely happens while the inner critic is loud. Our most expansive thinking tends to emerge when we can follow a different line of questioning - less preoccupied with what might go wrong, and more interested in what might unfold.
For me, wildness has started to look more like full participation. It looks like letting my kids unwind my adult composure. Fart jokes and pulling faces and being present for longer, rather than gifting a minute between responsibilities.
It has meant having the bravery to step outside of professional titles I spent a decade earning and building. It has meant accepting that courage and vulnerability are inseparable.
Wildness, I’ve realised, isn’t about becoming fearless. It’s about becoming willing. Willing to stay open while afraid, and to try again while uncertain, and to let life be a little messier.
And if sometimes that willingness feels a lot like ‘shitting bricks’.
Well that probably means you care.
And caring is usually where the interesting stuff starts.