Shake off that anxiety
“Ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away, it gets worse because you have no power over it – it has power over you.”
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Shake off that anxiety
We had such an interesting team session last week about how to handle anxiety. What we found was that the causes were varied and included everything from: The Unknown, Imposter Syndrome, Other people, Money, Work overload and more…
What we learnt was that anxiety comes in many different forms and that the simple act of talking things through brought relief.
It’s the top fear, the unknown, that I want to chat about today. In my experience it is often the very ‘unknown’ that is the driver of our anxiety. Our imagination loves to feed on the unknown. For example, if we are anxious about money we kid ourselves into believing that if we don’t think about it will not be a problem anymore. In reality, what happens is that we worry subconsciously day and night and our imagination fills the gap of the unknown with wild mental pictures of worse case scenarios. This is often worse than the factual truth.
The antidote is to make the fear known and visible. In the case of money this means writing down the reality of Rands and cents we owe and making a plan of action. For example, you might have been worrying about what you think is R10,000 that you owe yet on examination it is only R7,767, or it could be R12,456. Once you have an actual reality you are empowered to take action or get help. You have a real (not an imaginary) problem to tackle and can take real steps to solve it. Ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away, it gets worse because you have no power over it – it has power over you.
So, my personal power-tip is to stop and examine your fear so that you can come up with a real plan to solve it.
