Self Confidence Secrets: How To Overcome Anxiety and Low Self Esteem with NLP (5 page)

Let’s focus in on one particularly destructive way people meet their need for certainty: Negative self-beliefs or identity.

This story is about an old friend of mine Chris. No one has ever doubted Chris's intelligence. While he isn't the quickest on his feet he is intellectually smart and has a fantastic comprehension of big ideas. Chris's downfall has always been his fear of failure: His inability to handle the downswings.

In school Chris faced some difficulties in classes related to science or math. Chris could have acknowledged these classes would be hard and put in the extra hours to overcome the challenge. Instead his parents had him diagnosed with a learning disability. It wasn't that he didn't work hard enough. It wasn't that he "failed". In fact he couldn't fail, because it wasn't his fault. He was disabled and unable to learn. Phew.
Dodged that bullet.

For the record, I know Chris very well and I know that if he chose to he could excel in academics. I’m not dismissing the reality of learning disabilities, but I am dismissing using them as an excuse. Since school Chris has successfully adopted many identities to protect him from failure. He's been lazy, a
procrastinator and the guy that just doesn’t care. The truth is he’s not lazy or a procrastinator and he really does care: Sometimes it’s just easier to be a successful loser than a struggling success. Negative self-beliefs are quickly accepted and reinforced by one's peer group and eventually become very hard to break.

Are there any negative self-beliefs in your own life that could be holding you back?

What is one negative self-belief you're holding onto? What is one positive belief you could replace this with? (Section 1.6)

I have discovered one ingenious way to create certainty and avoid the pain of disappointment. It allows the user to never again suffer from passion, excitement or anticipation. The user is able to adopt a realistic viewpoint that protects them from disappointment, failure and embarrassment. What if you presumed everything that could go wrong would probably go wrong? What if you took on all the stress and anxiety of the worst case scenarios all the time? In this strategy the user does just that. A combination of assuming the worst and never giving in to one’s desire to dream insures a steady flow of certainty.

Do you know anyone who prefers to live at a level 3 or 4 instead of a 9 or 10 because it will lessen the fall if things go wrong?

How are you feeling so far?
Human needs is a powerful area of psychology and will positively impact your life moving forward. This chapter gave you a lot of information and time to reflect. You may want to re-read it and think through some of the questions again in about a week. Next we’re going to be getting very hands on! While Human Needs Psychology provides you with critical insight on your own behaviours and motivation, the ideas taught in the next chapter give you the ability to instantly change your emotions and put yourself in powerful states of certainty, confidence, excitement and joy.

Are you ready?

Did you enjoy the Human Needs material in
the previous chapters? Did you complete your exercises?

I hope you did. If you didn't, please go back, review that section, and finish the exercises. This book was written FOR YOU but it will not work if you do not play ball with me.

In this book we tackle anxiety in three different ways. The first is awareness. By learning how your mind and nervous system work you'll gain a higher level of control and actually find your emotions changing and levels of anxiety falling. The second way is techniques and tools you'll learn that can be used at any time in the future with anxiety rears its ugly head. Third, we take you through some processes that will make fundamental changes in how your nervous system is wired. The last section we went through focused primarily on awareness. This next section will combine all three approaches.

“
We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies.”
– Roderick Thorp, Rainbow Drive

Alright so let's continue moving forward. People, and this i
ncludes you and I, love to overcomplicate things. Rather than address the simple, fundamental issues behind our problems we create complex explanations and even more complex solutions! I think the last 20 years has seen tremendous growth in technology and yet a huge decline in our own mental health. As someone very familiar with mental illness I believe the increased practice of psychology, drugs and treatments we have witnessed is a very positive thing. While I applaud the progress we’ve made, I also think there is lots of progress to be made. Often we’re still guilty of attaching labels and complicated explanations to otherwise simple problems and we often make conditions or states of mind much harder to change. VERY often seemingly complicated mental states come down to a few simple beliefs or events.

VERY often complex conditions can be reversed quickly and simply by truly understanding the cause.

That is exactly what we are going to do here.

Let’s talk about anxiety. Where do you think anxiety comes from? What causes it for you?

Anxiety, and in it's more extreme form panic attacks, is essentially a fight or flight reaction to stimuli. If I am walking down a dark alleyway and hear a gunshot ahead I'll likely feel a massive shot of fear, adrenaline, and anxiety. Psychologists call this a fight or flight reaction. In the case of the gunshot it makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, the ways in which anxiety shows up for the vast majority of us, the vast majority of the time, does not serve a practical purpose.

Let’s pretend I have a huge presentation tomorrow in front of my boss that I haven't prepared for. It is an important presentation and failure could cost me my job. Around 1am fight or flight is definitely going to kick in. In this case it's a little less rational than the alleyway example, as there is no physical risk to my health, but the anxiety still serves a purpose of alerting me to prepare or get ready. In this case it is my unconscious letting my mind know that I am not prepared for an upcoming challenge and the anxiety is meant to encourage me to take action and prepare. The ultimate
purpose of the anxiety is for me to take action, prepare myself for the presentation and to do well. By doing well I’ll keep my job, my income, and my resources. After acknowledging this anxiety and taking action by reviewing my presentation and practicing in front of the mirror the anxiety fades and may even disappear completely.

Does your anxiety usually fade once you start taking action towards a goal or improving the anxiety causing situation?

In this past example the anxiety I felt was rational and served a purpose. It may have been more extreme than it needed to be, but the feelings still served to alert me to a future danger and lead me to better prepare for it. What if it was Sunday night and Monday was just another day at work? What if I felt an overwhelming amount of anxiety for no particular reason? Is it possibly to feel anxiety for no reason whatsoever?

I'm going to say that it isn't. There is always some kind of underlying reason for whatever we feel. It is quite common for people to feel a general sense of ambiguous anxiety. This is normal and something we’re going to tackle here together. I believe there are a few potential causes for this anxiety, and you better bet we'r
e going to explore all of them!

“
Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.”
– Leo Buscaglia

Our emotions are generated at an unconscious level. For some of us there is a strong mind-body connection and we're more attuned to our emotions and their causes. For others the mind and body are completely different worlds.

One explanation ties in with labeling and language. In the English language there are approximately 3,000 words to describe different emotions yet the average person self describes as experiencing about a dozen emotions every week...and the same dozen the next week.

The reason this happens is that we're quick to label our emotions rather than experience them. This process of labelling creates an interesting dynamic between our conscious and unconscious mind. Euphoric, joyous, and proud all become "happy". Excited, terrified, nervous and worried all become "anxious". Pretty soon, when we start to feel excited we feel the changes in our nervous system we quickly label it anxious and welcome the flood of feelings that accompany feeling anxious. Since we've used to word "anxious" to previously describe being terrified aspects of terror are quickly drummed up and mixed in with what was a feeling of excitement. We're now in a state of terror over a stimuli that was originally meant to make us feel excited!!

The reality is that most emotions start off with a similar basic feeling and many are quite similar all the way through. This is the reason some people describe the ambiguous sensations known as stage fright as terrifying while others describe the moment before they step on stage as exciting and exhilarating. What we want to do is learn to experience emotions and label them more accurately and in a positive light.

Think of yourself as an expert interior decorator for your emotions. Forget red, now we’re dealing with pink, rose, magenta, ruby and sangria! Blues out too, and welcome cyan, teal, ultramarine, midnight and iris!

What if you were to become more in tune with your own emotions? What if you were to label emotions, the positive and the negative ones, more accurately and with labels that would grow to serve you? This is exactly what is going to happen.

For this next activity you’ll find the Next Level Confidence Workbook extra handy (section 2.1). If you haven’t downloaded it yet, you can do so by visiting
www.thedanjohnston.com/moreconfidence/
Alternatively, grab a napkin or piece of paper to write on for this part.

Take a minute and think of a recent situation where you felt what you perceived to be anxiety. After you perceived this initial anxiety it seemed to expand and caused higher levels of discomfort for you.

Describe this situation?

Ok, now in your own words I want you to describe how you felt at the time?

Now, come up with TEN (use a thesaurus/dictionary if you have to) different words to describe the emotions you felt or emotions you could have been experiencing that would have felt similar. For instance, you may have said you felt devastated but really you were just a little disappointed or you may have perceived feeling nervous but you could have actually felt excited. Get the idea?

Do you have 10 words yet? Keep going until you get to 10!

OK, now look over the list of words you put down. Of the ten, which ones give you a more positive feeling about your
emotional state when compared to anxiety or the words you originally thought?

Write down just the more positive words from the exercise above.

Imagine the positive effect on your emotional state if you were to label your ambiguous emotional triggers (because let’s face it, many emotions feel pretty similar if not completely the same!) more accurately and more positively?

When you think about this event now, the one from the exercise, how does it feel? A little different I bet.

What effect would it have on your life if you were to apply the process we just went through to events on a daily basis, even during the actual events?

Phew. Now we’ve worked on eliminated one negative emotion that has been plaguing your life! If you’d like you can repeat this exercise as many times as you want and focus on a different emotion each time.

Individuals highly tuned to their emotions often claim their body knows things before their mind. This isn't as farfetched as it sounds. It has been shown that our unconscious really is exponentially more powerful (faster at processing data) than our conscious mind. Our unconscious communicates through our body, so it makes sense that we’re hit first by feelings, then by thoughts.

Our original communication system, our feelings, has served us well over the years but is not without its faults. The way it often works is that our unconscious will perceive a stimuli and will generate a level of stimulation (sometimes referred to as stress) in response. Our conscious mind senses these feelings and then scans the environment for stimuli to attach them to. In our historical environments this system served us very well. The amount of possible threats were fairly limited, as were our interactions, and much of our time was spent tuning on conscious mind for survival.

Fast forward hundreds of years.
We live in a time when it's possible to work with people you've never met and have 1,500 "friends" without leaving your house. Our threats and stimuli are both very different today. At the same time we spend only a fraction of our on tuning our instincts and aligning our mind and body.

This disconnection between stimuli and response, and our general mind body disconnect can have a wide range of consequences. One consequence you may have experienced is general or lingering anxiety.

If you're hiking in the woods and come across a black bear fight or flight will instantly kick in. Your heart rate will rise, your perception will increase, adrenaline is running wild. In this situation you'll feel these strong emotions and know exactly why. You'll also be forced into confronting the stimuli pretty quick. Whether you choose to run, walk or stay put…something is going to happen! The end result will be a relaxed yet exhilarating feeling you're left with...assuming you chose to stay put and act big and crazy (this is the right thing to do when confronted by a black bear). So in this situation you came across a stimuli, your unconscious reacted, your conscious took over, you dealt with the stimuli and the situation resolved itself. This is how the process is SUPPOSED to work.

So where do we go wrong? Well, we go wrong a few different ways. Leave it to us humans to overcomplicate things.

The first way we go wrong is constantly time travelling. Unlike our distant ancestors and animals, rarely do we find ourselves living in the present. Some people prefer to live in the past. They enjoy the "why did I?"s, "should have"s and "how could they?"s. Others prefer the future with the "What if?"s, "What will I do?"s and "What will they say?"s.

So what if you like to live in the past or the future, what's the big deal?

Think back to the story of the bear.

The whole process went something like this:

Feeling Normal.

Stimulus Appears.

You Have a Response.

You React.

There is a Resolution.

Feeling Normal Again.

The reason this works so effectively is that you have a stimulus, a response and an immediate reaction which leads to your resolution. Now if the stimuli you're dealing with is in the past of the future the process looks more like:

Feeling Normal.

Thinking about the future.

Stimulus Appears (in your mind).

You have a Response (likely stress!).

You React...wait. You can not react yet, because the stimulus is actually just in your head.

So now you've activated the stress related to the event but have no real way to resolve it. You're now stuck in a lingering state of stress.

This is not a good place to be!

So how to resolve this?

First off, stop living in the future so damn much!!

I'm serious, learn to say to yourself "My presentation is in two weeks and there is nothing I can do about it right now. Today my priority is to enjoy myself!" Learn to enjoy your weekends rather than spend them worried about Monday. Honestly, doing this is really just a matter of awareness, forming the right habits and discipline.