The Fear and Anxiety Solution (13 page)

We all have an enormous potential inside us that has helped us reach two of the most challenging milestones in life: learning how to walk and to talk. Can you imagine how difficult it was to move your whole reality from the horizontal to the vertical? And what effort it must have taken to form words with your mouth and vocal cords? At that time, you didn’t have a mind-set of doubt and limitation. Otherwise a few painful falls on your face and unsuccessful
attempts to communicate would have been enough for you to decide that it was all too difficult and that you simply didn’t have what it takes to grow up. When you were a baby or toddler, succeeding was the only option, and you pursued your goals with a relentless tenacity and a steadfast belief in yourself. Nothing could stop you. Sure, there was frustration, but there was also the enormous joy of discovery, learning, and mastering each phase of these challenges. So you already know that you were born with enormous potential.

I’m certain that walking and talking haven’t been your only successes in life. You’ve probably just failed to acknowledge your wins. Unfortunately, this is a very common oversight, which has been often disguised as modesty and humility. Don’t get me wrong—being modest and humble can be virtues and signs of character. However, many people believe that they can’t appreciate their successes unless they make the news or do something massively beneficial to humankind, such as finding the cure for cancer or solving the world energy crisis. Anything less than that is just “normal.” How uplifting and encouraging is that? If you want to get ready to break through fear and anxiety, now is not the time for making yourself smaller. Now is the time to examine your past successes and identify the strengths, knowledge, qualities, and tools that enabled you to achieve them.

If you’ve ever explained to someone how to tie shoelaces, swim, or ride a bike, you know how challenging it is to teach these “ordinary” skills. You may even recall how challenging it was for you to learn them yourself. When all the frustrating trials and tribulations were finally over and you had reached that sweet moment of success, weren’t you overcome by an almost intoxicating mixture of excitement, joy, and pride? Well, if you don’t remember that, you may at least have witnessed with great elation your own children passing through these milestones. You’ve had countless successes and achievements in your life—the first time you were able to write your name, the first time you went to school by yourself, the first time you drove a car—most of which you ignore or belittle. All of them have one thing in common: you made them happen by applying your personal success strategy.

Your strategy for success is the combination of the specific qualities that have helped you move from the questions to the answers, from problems to solutions, from challenges to achievements. In fact, you’ve developed a strategy for pretty much everything: how to brush your teeth, how to show your spouse your affection, how to barbecue a hamburger. Over time, you’ve probably improved and perfected your approaches to achieve better and more satisfying results. So
when it comes to learning more about your success strategy and how to reach your goals, you can refer to a large number of past experiences. All you need to do is to ask yourself the right questions.

What are your successes? what goals have you already been able to reach?
Again, don’t think in terms that are too grandiose. Every test you passed, every obstacle you overcame, every new skill you learned can be included in your list.

Which of your personal qualities ensured your success?
For example, do you like to analyze and evaluate your options thoroughly to avoid running into obstacles? Are you at your best when you begin right away and figure things out as you go along? Are you quick on the uptake and able to learn from others’ success strategies? Was it your tenacity or your creativity that made you achieve your desired outcomes? Were curiosity and your talent for thinking outside the box part of your success strategy? Were you relying on your ability to stay up all night and mobilize the necessary energies when it mattered the most? Do you know how to ask for help, or are you proficient at delegating?

It’s a very good idea to also ask the people who know you well for their opinion about your success strategies. You may be surprised what your parents or siblings can tell you about resources you already had as a child but may have forgotten about.

How can you now benefit from these qualities
? Which of your strengths and strategies can support you during your breakthrough? And how specifically can you utilize them as you’re moving forward on this journey of self-empowerment? For example, your analytical capabilities allow you to thoroughly examine how to apply the insights and tools of this book to your life in the most effective way. Curiosity and tenacity can keep you motivated, focused, and help you to make your healing and growth a priority. With your ability to ask for help, you can engage a friend to become your accountability partner and help you to stay on track.

As you answer the preceding questions, treat yourself with generosity, encouragement, and open-mindedness. This way you will gain the awareness and confidence that you have what it takes to make your goals your reality.

Rest assured that, at this point, it’s perfectly OK for you to still have thoughts such as “I’d better not get my hopes up. I’ll just get disappointed again” or “Others may be able to succeed, but not me” or “My problems are way too big to ever get resolved.” As you know, a part of you has been struggling with doubts, insecurities, and the fear of failure. Let’s start talking to this part.

W
E’RE CONSTANTLY TALKING
to ourselves, but it might not be out loud. Some inner self-talk can be a way to consciously work through a problem, analyze what just happened, evaluate the pros and cons before we make a decision, or rehearse how we’ll act or respond in an upcoming situation. Conscious self-talk allows us to cheer ourselves on, listen to an internal mentor’s voice of reason, or review the kind words of a supportive friend. However, a large portion of our self-talk bubbles up from our subconscious mind without us being fully and consciously aware of its details. It appears more as background noise or mind chatter—like the humming of the refrigerator, which we try to tune out and ignore because we find it annoying.

And then there is negative self-talk, which plays a major role in how we create fear and anxiety. You’re probably familiar with that voice that rises from somewhere deep inside your subconscious. For some, it sounds worried and insecure; for others, it sounds nagging or whiny, critical or angry. At times it doesn’t even sound like your own voice at all; it may remind you of a scared child, a parent, or a teacher. You don’t seem to choose the limiting, anxiety-triggering, or self-sabotaging thoughts, nor do you seem to be in control of them.

Negative self-talk can also be more obscure than the previous examples. You know how every now and then out of the blue you can feel completely overcome by anxiety? You start frantically searching for obvious reasons for your worries, but nothing around you has changed enough to warrant this emotional tailspin. So how and why did you end up in it? You may be surprised to discover
that, most of the time, a series of anxious, negative thoughts that were subtle enough to fly under the radar of your conscious mind preceded the feelings. In other words, you freaked yourself out without even noticing it.

I distinguish between three different types of negative self-talk—three different subconscious voices—that trigger fear and anxiety:

        
1.
“What if” and “what was” talk

        
2.
Self-bashing talk

        
3.
Bashing-others talk

This inner voice says history was a disaster that will only repeat itself. Or it tells you that, this time, whatever it is you’re doing or about to do will definitely go wrong. It lays out in painful detail why you or those you care about are destined to failure, pain, and suffering—and why it’s probably your fault. Sometimes anxiety-triggering thoughts can flash through your mind in terrifying images that are too incoherent to comprehend, too rapid to distinguish one from the other, and too many to escape from.

A client once told me that she often feels as though her mind is like a runaway merry-go-round, spinning faster and faster as if trying to outrun itself. As it spins, she becomes increasingly anxious and confused. Her mind stops racing only when she finally falls asleep after an exhausting day of circular and often catastrophic thinking. As soon as she wakes up the following morning, the ride begins again. Sound familiar?

Regardless of whether the negative self-talk races so quickly that we can’t catch the words or follow the train of thought, or whether it moves more slowly, its concerns, doubts, and fears usually circle and cause us to obsess about a fairly small number of topics. The chain of negative thoughts can start with a mere reflection on an event in the past, present, or future. This can be followed by a self-doubting “I should have” or “I can’t,” which creates a sense of unease. Further accelerating the downward momentum are deep regrets about things that already occurred and worried, what-if assumptions about the possible disasters and failures that haven’t yet happened.

The arguments feed off each other, confirming and expanding on the negativity of the previous ones. And all the while, you’re losing touch with
what is
and getting lost in the “reality” of
what if
or
what was.
With every thought, the emotional charge increases, taking you on a slippery downward spiral of potential problems and limitations that ends in a dark pit of gloom and doom. By the time you hit bottom, you feel utterly inundated and deflated by anxiety about the fictitious facts that a part of your subconscious mind has just created.

As you probably know too well, self-talk, by nature, can be very judgmental. You doubt and criticize yourself, constantly wondering what faults and flaws other people may discover about you. Let’s be honest: how often have you been rude to yourself, calling yourself stupid, fat, ugly, a loser, not good enough? How often have you blasted yourself with derogatory insults that you’d never dare fling at anyone else because your words would hurt them or because they’d cut you out of their lives or would punch you? How often have you shown respect and consideration to others and treated yourself with contempt and disregard?

I routinely ask my clients to carefully listen to and actually write down their negative thoughts. Most of them are surprised to realize how frequently unfriendly thoughts about themselves flash through their mind. But what really shocks them is what they hear themselves saying about themselves. “How can I be so mean and cruel to myself?” is a very common reaction.

Another form of negative self-talk is judging and bashing others, which at first may appear less self-destructive than judging and bashing yourself. What most people don’t realize is that the subconscious mind takes
everything
personally. So when you’re on the road yelling at an obviously clueless driver or you’re at work contemplating the utter incompetence of your new coworker, your subconscious registers only feelings of anger and disdain. It is unable to determine whether you’re upset with somebody else or yourself. This explains the old saying, “Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”

Judging others doesn’t have to lead to anger to count as negative self-talk. Whether you’re judging others through comparison, gossip, envy, or
Schadenfreude
—a German expression describing glee in response to another’s
misfortune (we Germans must be good at it to have invented a word for it)—from the perspective of the subconscious, you’re just bashing yourself. And when you consider that, in most cases, being judgmental of others actually stems from a deep insecurity within yourself, you can imagine the detrimental impact such a mental diet can have.

• • •

You might say, “Well, I just can’t help it. My self-talk is automatic, from some place in my subconscious and, therefore, out of my control.” But is that really true?

Some schools of thought suggest that negative self-talk stems from our ego, or the “monkey mind,” which is best ignored or fought by saying to ourselves, “Delete, delete, delete,” or “Stop! I don’t want to listen to you,” or simply, “Shut up.” Ignoring or fighting negative self-talk may work sometimes for some people. However, rejecting a part of ourselves doesn’t really lead to a greater sense of wholeness and self-acceptance. Instead, wouldn’t it be better if you understood where these insecure, doubtful, critical, and anxious thoughts really come from and what they are trying to achieve? Once you do, you’ll probably realize why ignoring or scolding this part of you doesn’t work in the long run.

Ryan is a good example of someone who felt trapped in negative self-talk and the feelings that came with it. He was a young salesman who had everything going for him: a promising career; a loving wife; two healthy, beautiful children; a life that seemed filled with exciting new possibilities. However, Ryan’s internal world didn’t reflect that life at all. Since he’d started his own family, he’d struggled with negative, self-defeating thoughts: “Life is hard. I don’t think I can ever have what I want. What if I don’t meet the next quota and get fired? How will I take care of my family? Maybe they don’t care about me anyhow. Maybe they will leave me when I can’t provide for them—just like all those ‘friends’ who don’t call me back.”

These negative self-talk loops seemed ever-present, regardless of whether Ryan was working, playing with his kids, or trying to enjoy a game of tennis. This constant negativity and shifting between anxiety, insecurity, and depression consumed his energy so that on weekends often all he could do was stay in bed. He saw therapists and had tried antidepressants, but nothing seemed to make a difference. Eventually he started to get frustrated with himself for not
being able to make himself feel better, for turning into what he saw as a useless member of society who was just taking up space.