The Fear and Anxiety Solution (10 page)

To move out of the inertia of being stuck and consistently forge on toward your goals and the fulfillment of your dreams, you’re best served by employing a combination of toward and away-from motivations. If one force pushes you away from the pain and suffering of your starting point and one pulls you toward your destination with excitement and desire, you will be able to reach your goals more quickly and easily.

The following exercise will help you to consciously build, direct, and apply away-from motivation and toward motivation to generate the energy you need to break through fear and anxiety and expand into your empowered self. By answering the questions below, you’ll define a goal with inherent momentum, which means that it’s equally motivating and exciting for your conscious and subconscious mind and will inevitably lead you to success.

The goal-defining questions are:

        
1.
Where are you now?

        
2.
What do you want?

        
3.
How will you know that you’ve reached your goals?

        
4.
Why do you want to reach your goals?

        
5.
Who is this change for?

        
6.
What will you lose if you get your desired outcome?
What will you gain?

        
7.
Which of your qualities and strengths will help you reach your goals?

Let’s look at these questions and how to address them in more detail. Take a deep breath, open your mind and heart, and begin.

This question is all about building a strong away-from motivation, but it is not meant to focus your attention only on the external circumstances you’re unhappy with. As you’ve probably noticed, anxiety tends to direct your attention toward potential dangers and problems outside of you and beyond your
immediate control. And because you can’t change what’s beyond your control, you feel a greater sense of powerlessness. You might even feel victimized.

However, if you want to harness the power of the away-from motivation to break through fear and anxiety, you need to shift your focus away from dwelling on the failures of the past or worrying about the other shoe dropping in the future, and toward the negative impact these emotions have had on you and your life. So let’s take an inventory and define the starting point of your journey of change and self-empowerment.

List all the things that no longer work for you in your struggles with fear and anxiety. Focus mainly on how you feel inside and not so much on what is going on outside of you. For example, “I feel drained, empty, anxious. I have no self-esteem left …,” rather than, “My life sucks. My boss is horrible. I’ll lose my job, and I won’t have enough money.”

Answer the following questions. Don’t contemplate or analyze; just write the first answers that come to your mind. Again, you want to gain momentum and build away-from motivation and not feel discouraged or even paralyzed by the blocks and burdens of the past.

     • 
What emotional and behavioral responses to certain people or situations pose a problem for you?
Examples: I worry when my kids are out with their friends. My mind is racing with self-doubt and judgment. My entire body aches with tension before I enter a board meeting.

     • 
What did or do you not allow yourself to do because of anxiety?
Examples: I didn’t speak up when I was treated unfairly by my colleague. I don’t tell my spouse how I really feel because I am afraid he (or she) would criticize me. I stopped calling my friends because I believe they think I’m no fun to spend time with.

     • 
How much have fear and anxiety cost you (not necessarily monetarily)?
Examples: My life has shrunk to the size of my office and my bedroom, and I feel really limited by my shriveling world. I’ve stopped trying to advance at work, which makes me feel like a loser in the eyes of my family. I’ve gained weight because I eat comfort food to make myself feel better.

     • 
Which aspects of your life have been negatively affected by your fear and anxiety? what will your life look like in five years if you don’t change now?
Examples: I’ll have lost my job, my marriage, and most of the things that are important to me. My health will be even more affected by the stress and worries. I’ll have no hope that I can ever have a different life.

How do you feel after answering these questions? Do you notice an internal push building, telling you that the time is now to start moving away from the fear and anxiety that have kept you stuck?

In addition to creating breakthrough momentum by using the away-from motivation, there’s another reason why this first question—“Where are you now?”—is so important: keeping track of where you started will become even more significant to you as you make progress toward your goals and after you’ve reached them. In the process of making progress, we often forget where we actually came from and how far we’ve come. The human mind is conditioned to always want more, which, in itself, is a very good trait. On the downside, it can also lead to ongoing discontent and impatience. It often astounds me that as soon as people feel better, a kind of amnesia eclipses the memories of how miserable they were a mere few months prior, and they stop appreciating the amazing changes they have been able to achieve.

Cathy, one of my clients, called me one day because she felt that she really hadn’t progressed, that she was still in the same place she’d been when she started working with me. During our first session, a few months before that call, she wasn’t even able to go on walks because of pain and an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. She felt paralyzed by anxiety and low self-esteem, and she was isolating herself more and more from her friends and family.

In that first session, Cathy told me that she’d pretty much given up hope of ever spending quality time outdoors again. When she recently called me to complain that nothing had changed for her, she’d just returned from a fabulous weekend of kayaking and camping with friends in the San Juan Islands. After the kayaking trip, the discontent that prompted her call came from not yet having found a romantic relationship. All Cathy was focusing on was what was not yet working in her life, making this lack her reality, rather than appreciating how far she actually had come. When I read to her how she’d replied in our first session to the question “Where am I now?” she became very quiet and finally said, “Thank you. This really helps. Now I realize how much I’ve
actually healed and what amazing potential I must have inside. If I was able to overcome these physical and anxiety problems, I can solve any other problem, as well.”

After you’ve worked with and broken through fear and anxiety, look back on your journey and appreciate the progress and the achievements you’ve made. This increases your sense of confidence and self-appreciation, and it will also motivate and encourage you to continue to grow and expand your life.

This is probably the single most important question when it comes to any form of change, and for many, it’s also the hardest one to answer. As I’ve already described, our subconscious has two main areas of focus and motivation: (1) to watch out for potential danger and avoid pain and (2) to look for opportunities to experience joy and pleasure.

Have you ever tried to break through a one-inch wooden board with your bare hands? Even if you haven’t, you can probably imagine how your first instinct is to focus on the hard obstacle. The problem is that if your focus stays on the board, you can’t break through it, because right before your hand reaches the wooden surface, something inside of you yanks back, just for a few milliseconds, as if to say, “Are you sure that you can or want to do that? Are you sure that this won’t hurt?” As your hand slams painfully against the hard surface without affecting the board at all, these fears seem to be confirmed. Then the next time you try to break through the same board, it appears even thicker, and this doubtful voice is probably even louder and more assertive. While your resolve and your strength weaken, the only thing that seems to break is your belief that you can actually smash this board into pieces.

To succeed with any breakthrough, you need to focus on the space beyond the board and imagine that your hand can cut through the wood as if it were butter. What matters is the destination that is five inches beyond the obstacle.

In a fairly recent study, participants were tested for the level of pain stimulated by a computer-controlled heat pump.
¹
Researchers told the subjects to expect different levels of painful heat at specifically timed intervals. The shortest
interval (seven seconds) signaled the least pain stimuli (and therefore the least discomfort); the longest interval (thirty seconds) signaled the most severe heat-induced pain stimuli. The researchers used fMRI to measure the changes in subjects’ brain activity.

After one or two days of training, the researchers began to mix up the signals without informing the participants. Based on what they’d been told and had experienced, the subjects expected a certain temperature, but they actually received a higher or lower temperature stimuli. The fMRI results showed that when people expected to endure severe heat, they sensed a significantly higher level of pain than when they anticipated only mild discomfort. You’ve probably experienced this phenomenon yourself. When you’re told—for example, by your dentist—that something will hurt, you focus on the pain you’ll feel, and you’ll wait for it to show up.

In the same way, the more we expect to feel anxiety, the sooner we’ll feel it. What we focus on magnifies. When we believe that we’re incapable and insecure or that the world is a scary and unfriendly place, we subconsciously look for evidence that can corroborate these limiting ideas. Most of us spend more time and energy focusing on our problems than asking ourselves what we would like to have instead and how we could achieve it. This way, we don’t provide our mind with a new goal, and we don’t mobilize and utilize the pulling force of the toward motivation.

Think about a time in your life when you
really
wanted something, whether it was a new car, a house, or that amazing person you were attracted to. When you made up your mind about what you wanted, you probably saw the exact car everywhere, noticed “for sale” signs on numerous homes, or felt your heart skip a beat when you spotted in the crowd someone who looked similar to that special person. This is one of the great benefits of consciously defining your goals: when you know what you’re looking for, your subconscious mind searches tirelessly for opportunities for you to get it.

“What do I want?” I know that for many, this question appears almost too large to contemplate, especially if you had been fixated on what you don’t want. I can hear you asking, “What if I don’t know, or what if I want the wrong thing?” There is no such thing as a wrong answer; however, some answers may be more in alignment with your conscious and subconscious mind than others. So let’s address this question in steps to fully engage and excite your head and your heart.

1. Choose the opposite.
Go back to the inventory you just compiled, the list of all the feelings and aspects of fear and anxiety that you’re eager to change. On a separate paper, write the exact opposite to each item you’ve already listed. State the desired outcome in positive terms. If you define your outcome as, “I don’t want to feel afraid anymore,” or “I want to be free of anxiety and doubt,” a large portion of your energy and focus will still go toward fear and anxiety. So phrase your intention in a positive way, such as, “I want to be at peace” or “I choose to feel calm, centered, and confident.”

2. Imagine your future. What will it be like? What will you allow yourself to do?
Now go beyond the lists from question 1 and focus on other ways you want to feel about yourself and your life. Choose words that aren’t too abstract. “I want to be happy” seems to be a desirable goal, but from the subconscious point of view, it may be too vague or too generic and, therefore, not as strong a motivation as it could be. The goal is to be as elaborate and specific as possible about what breaking through fear and anxiety will mean to you. Go through your daily life and create a new future vision of yourself. For example, “I wake up in the morning rested and rejuvenated. I feel positive and energized and look forward to what the day will bring to me. I experience myself as a person who is full of potential and able to meet any challenges with ease and competence. People enjoy my company, and I am fully present in the now, enjoying every moment …”

3. Describe what you will feel about yourself and your life when you’ve moved beyond fear and anxiety into self-empowerment.
Will you be calm and relaxed? Optimistic and hopeful? Confident and self-accepting? Will you be excited about the great opportunities life brings? Appreciative for the blessings you already have? At peace with the past?

4. Engage your senses.
What will you see, hear, smell, and taste when you’ve reached self-empowerment? By imagining these things, you’re adding sensory substance to your goals, which makes them even more desirable and “real” for your subconscious mind. For example, you aim to approach your life with more confidence and ease. Imagine your body feeling relaxed and comfortable while you get dressed, the smell of freshly brewed coffee or tea greeting you when you enter the kitchen, the self-assured sound of your voice as you talk to your boss, or the warm sensation in your heart when you look into the smiling eyes of your loved one. The more vividly you can imagine being your new, empowered
self and the more excited you become about this vision, the more your subconscious will support you becoming it.