In this intimate conversation, Dr. Sherry Walling explores our relationship with fear and why it is not something to override or dismiss.

Drawing from both psychology and her experience as a circus aerialist, Dr. Sherry explains how fear functions as a warning system in the body signaling potential danger, asking us to slow down, and inviting attention.

Rather than treating fear as a weakness or obstacle, this conversation reframes fear as information, a signal worth listening to.

This episode is an invitation to develop a more mature relationship with fear, one that allows it to inform decisions, clarify priorities, and protect what matters most, without letting it run the show.

• Why fear is often misunderstood as weakness instead of wisdom

• The difference between listening to fear and letting fear run the show

• Why emotional fears (shame, failure, rejection) deserve attention, not avoidance

• The role of fear in helping us prioritise what truly matters

#ZenFounderPodcast #DrSherryWalling #FearAsInformation #NervousSystemWisdom #EntrepreneurMentalHealth #EmbodiedLeadership #Presence

After more than a decade and a few hundred episodes, ZenFounder is becoming Permission.

I'm Dr. Sherry Walling — clinical psychologist, and the voice you've been listening to all along — and this is the next chapter of the show we've built together.

Somewhere along the way, most of us started waiting for permission: to rest, to change our minds, to want a different life than the one we built. Permission is a podcast for people who've done the hard thing — built the company, hit the number, raised the kids — and found themselves wondering what it was all for.

Each week I sit down with founders, entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, and creatives, and we go where most business shows won't. Some weeks it's permission to admit you got everything you wanted and you're still not happy. Some weeks it's permission to be led by pleasure instead of productivity, or to stop earning your worth and simply have it. And every single episode ends the same way — with a permission slip: one thing you didn't know you were allowed to do.

If you've been here since the ZenFounder days: thank you. You've sat with me through hundreds of conversations, and I don't take that for granted. This is the version of the show I've been growing toward for years, and I think it's about to get really good. I can't wait for you to hear it.

If you're new: welcome. This is a good place to land.

Jason Cohen has founded two unicorn companies, WP Engine and Smart Bear, and written at asmartbear.com for almost twenty years. His new book, Hidden Multipliers, opens with a founder lying awake at 4 a.m. feeling like a fraud — which tells you it isn't a normal growth-tactics book, and this isn't a normal growth-tactics conversation.

We get into why the people who love your work often love it for the things you'd call weaknesses, why Jason would rather have fewer followers who actually care than ten times the audience and a version of himself he'd have to fake, the three-word question he keeps on his daily note to save himself in meetings (does this need to be said, by me, right now), and the night a board member named the real reason he didn't want to step down as CEO: "You want the credit."

Underneath all of it: build a company, and a life, in the shape of you.

Jason writes at asmartbear.com. His new book, Hidden Multipliers, is at hiddenmultipliers.com.

New here? Welcome. And if you've been with me since the ZenFounder days, you're in the right place — the whole back catalog is still here.

Follow Permission wherever you listen.