The Fear and Anxiety Solution (33 page)

When it comes to firmly integrating your empowerment, how can you keep yourself on track, motivated, and engaged without becoming overwhelmed, bored, or worn out? How do you switch into consistency mode? As with glassblowing, the answer is to stay committed to what you have started.

The word
commitment
may give you night sweats or cold feet. Although you understand the need to commit to maintaining and expanding your growth and empowerment work, you have a hard time subscribing to a specific routine. Your plate is already too full, and you can’t imagine adding one more chore to the have-to-do list. I completely understand. However, by staying committed to your inner work, you solidify and strengthen what you’ve accomplished and you also deepen your level of trust in and love for yourself.

You’ve turned the tables. You no longer stay on the sidelines, watching your subconscious spinning in old patterns of fear and anxiety. Instead, you’ve established a collaborative and mutually supportive relationship between your conscious and subconscious mind. However, as is true for every relationship, this connection can only deepen and flourish with trust. The best ways to build trust are through consistency and commitment.

Let’s say you want to remodel your home. After a diligent search, you entrust your house to a contractor, who assures you that the costs will not exceed X number of dollars, and he’ll easily complete the job in X amount of time. Along the way, however, your contractor tells you with a shrug that somehow unforeseeable complications arose and that the job will cost more and take longer than estimated. Then maybe one day the workers don’t show up, and the contractor doesn’t return your inquiring phone calls. How quickly would you lose trust and confidence in the person you’ve hired?

Now think about how many times you’ve treated yourself in a similar way. How often did you discard your plans, not show up for yourself, and abandon your good intentions?

Don’t feel too bad; most of us have been guilty of letting ourselves down, but we need to realize the damage we cause by doing so. Every time we go back on our word and break our self-commitment, we lose trust and faith in ourselves—consciously and subconsciously. Our word holds no power. Since we don’t appear reliable and trustworthy to our subconscious mind, it may reactivate old, protective patterns, which consequently lead to more fear and insecurity. Now the good news is that the opposite is also true. Consistency and commitment are some of the most potent healing forces for the subconscious mind. They allow us to fortify our foundation of confidence rather quickly. After all, confidence comes from the Latin word
confidere,
which means “to trust and have faith in.” And who better to trust and have faith in than ourselves?

One of my clients, Lisa, struggled with commitment to her self-growth. Overall, her drive and motivation in life had been nothing short of extreme. She was a very successful entrepreneur, and she had completed several Ironman triathlons, each consisting of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and, for dessert, a 26-mile run. Despite all her accomplishments, she was plagued by a deep-seated anxiety and insecurity, which she, like most overachievers, constantly tried to beat by achieving more. Now, considering the impressive level of dedication to
her work and athletics, I was pretty sure that Lisa would breeze through her twenty minutes per day of self-empowerment assignments. But she didn’t. Feeling overwhelmed already, she couldn’t commit to one more obligation and gave up, proving to herself once again that she wasn’t really good enough.

A closer look into Lisa’s history revealed that her older sister, despite her multiple problems and misbehaviors, received all the love and attention from her parents, whereas Lisa felt seen and appreciated only when she earned straight A’s or was the fastest on her track team. As an adult, Lisa continued to treat herself with the same conditional acceptance, but by that time her own expectations were so high that she could never reach them.

In one of our sessions, she shared with me that the only person she felt had truly loved her was her grandmother. “Grandma didn’t have to tell me that she loved me,” Lisa said. “I just knew. When I was at her house, she focused only on me. I was the most important part of her world. Of course, she had rules and expectations, but I didn’t feel pressured, and it was easy to meet them. I loved her, because she was so kind to me and always showed with little gestures that she was thinking of me. She really made me feel that I mattered.”

When I asked Lisa to imagine looking at herself through her grandmother’s eyes, she started crying. Those tears weren’t only for her long-gone nana; that moment during our session was the first time since her childhood that Lisa could see herself as a loveable and valuable being. I suggested to Lisa that she start her daily self-empowerment homework from the same place: viewing herself through the eyes of her loving grandmother. This made all the difference for her. She stopped thinking of working on herself as just another burden or opportunity to fail. Instead, Lisa treasured this time as “her daily pauses for self-love”—and for the love for her grandmother.

It’s difficult to commit to your self-improvement practice if you consider it a chore or a sign that there’s something wrong with you. However, if you approach your growth and empowerment commitments from a place of love and self-appreciation, you’ll open your heart to yourself more and more and, thus, make this inner work the most precious gift you can give to yourself.

Medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky became famous for his research on
salutogenesis,
which investigates the reasons why some people can stay healthy and well despite the most difficult circumstances. In the 1970s, Antonovsky studied the
health of women who had survived concentration camps in Nazi Germany. He found that only 29 percent of the survivors had adjusted to life and attained mental and emotional stability. How were these women able to overcome the horrific experiences they went through and regain their health and wholeness? When Antonovsky interviewed these women, he noticed that they all approached their lives with great confidence or, as he called it, a “sense of coherence.”
¹

Coherence
is defined as a state where various parts integrate to a whole through logical and systematic connections. Antonovsky described a sense of coherence as the “extent to which one has a pervasive, enduring, though dynamic feeling of confidence that one’s environment is predictable and that things will work out as well as can reasonably be expected.” In other words, a sense of coherence is a sound mixture of confidence, control, and a positive, optimistic attitude. This sound combination provided the concentration-camp survivors with the foundation and the strength to heal the past and build a new, self-empowered life.

Remember when you used to feel overwhelmed with worry, doubt, and insecurity—when you believed you were powerless and not good enough to successfully deal with everyday challenges? At that time, you probably felt the opposite of coherence—disconnected, fragmented—and believed that your emotions and your life were beyond your control. By working through the various steps and processes in this book you’ve changed and grown; you now have the insights and tools to deal with future situations that could trigger fear and anxiety. But to achieve a solid sense of coherence in which your newfound confidence, inner congruency, and peace with yourself are deeply ingrained in the fabric of your being, you need to further integrate these positive changes and growth into your daily life. You may have already experienced coherence in different areas of your life, such as with your family, at your work, or in a fulfilling hobby. But imagine how it would feel if you could approach your entire life with such a strong sense of empowerment.

In his study, Antonovsky found that a sense of coherence consists of three basic components:

     •
Comprehensibility,
which describes the belief that we can make sense out of our life and approach it in an orderly and structured fashion.

     •
Manageability,
which is about believing that we have the resources, skills, and abilities to take care of ourselves and own our lives.

        
•
Meaningfulness,
which is characterized by finding purpose and value in what we pursue and commit to.

Antonovsky’s theories resonate strongly with me because they reflect the essential message of this book: true confidence and empowerment require continuous conscious awareness of our ability to choose our thoughts, emotions, and actions (comprehensibility); trust in our potential and resources (manageability); and a deep appreciation of our own worthiness (meaningfulness). So I’ve designed the following forty-day commitment program to anchor the three building blocks of coherence in your conscious and subconscious minds.

The daily practice will provide you with a structured routine. By reinforcing patterns of self-reliance and empowerment, you’ll fortify the belief that you can manage any challenges that come your way. And by approaching this program every day with love, care, and appreciation for yourself, you’ll infuse it with deeper meaning.

Through your commitment to the following forty-day program, you will:

     • Establish a structured self-empowering routine

     • Solidify and expand on the results you’ve already accomplished so far

     • Integrate your new identity into your daily life

     • Practice self-love and appreciation

     • Build a strong sense of coherence to pursue the journey of your life with unshakable confidence

Completing the forty days will leave you with a strong sense of coherence about how to manage fear and anxiety. But even more important, you’ll have established a solid, self-empowering strategy for approaching life in general—with structure, confidence, and purpose.

And best of all, the program takes only twenty to thirty minutes per day, plus a bit of time for focusing on and attending to your daily intentions. Isn’t this the best investment of time and energy you can make right now?

Regardless of whether we’re learning to play the piano or tennis, a foreign language or ballroom dancing, the three key ingredients to achieving excellence are
focus, repetition,
and
acknowledgement.
The mind, and in particular
the subconscious, thrives and excels when it receives consistent guidance and, at the end of the day, some positive strokes. I’ve based the forty-day program, CARE (center, align, reinforce, and enhance), on this premise.

Since ancient times, a cycle of forty days has carried great significance. The Egyptians devoted forty days to embalming the deceased. Moses spent forty days on Mount Sinai, and Jesus wandered for forty days through the desert. In yoga teachings it is said that if you dedicate yourself to a specific focus for forty days, you can break and replace any old patterns and habits, which is exactly what you’re aiming to do with this empowerment program.

The four parts of CARE, which should be done daily and in sequence, provide you with an easy-to-follow framework for forging your life with awareness, confidence, and self-worth. You begin this forty-day empowerment program every morning with the
centering
and the
alignment
steps. The centering step deepens your connection with your core essence. Through the alignment process you strengthen the new, empowering belief and identity you established in
chapter 10
and install it in your cellular memory. Focusing on the
reinforcement
topic throughout the day gives you an opportunity to master the tools and skills you’ve acquired so far. And at the end of each day, you
enhance
your growth and empowerment through positive reinforcement and appreciation.

I’m sure you know this feeling: You wake in the morning feeling discombobulated at the thought of all the obligations and errands that require your attention that day. You move through your morning routine on autopilot, barely noticing what you’re doing as you take a shower, get dressed, and grab a cup of coffee on your way out the door. And it goes downhill from there. You only get more distracted as the day goes on.

Over the course of a day, we’re pulled in many different directions. A client once said, “At some point during the day, I feel that my life pushes me aside and grabs the wheel—and I no longer have any say on where we’re going.” And at the end of our day we come home, feeling spent and spread so thin that vegging out is all we have energy for or want to do, even though there may be more obligations waiting for us.

Even at the gym—where running on a treadmill or striding on the elliptical machine should be all about being with and in our body—we often occupy our minds by reading or watching TV, and we avoid paying attention to anything
happening inside ourselves. As we continue to live “outside” ourselves and lose touch with our core, we feel increasingly ungrounded, imbalanced, and out of control. As a result, we’re much more susceptible to fear and anxiety. So it’s very important to re-collect our mind and energy and bring the focus back inside—every day. For the forty-day self-empowerment program, I suggest using two methods to center yourself and stay connected with your core.

Long, deep breathing for ten minutes.
This is the easiest way to regain your center and balance. “Take a deep breath”—we’ve all heard this friendly advice when we’re overly excited or stressed and our breath becomes short and shallow. Deep breathing, as a way to relax and release internal pressure, is something we instinctively do right. While a racing mind speeds up breathing, consciously slowing our inhalation and exhalation has a calming effect on the entire nervous system. Just as the breath follows the mind, the mind can also follow the way we are breathing.