Releasing Anticipatory Anxiety

We'll be right back. It is the Daily Boost. It's me, Scott Smith. Good to have you. Thanks for stopping by today from motivation2move.com. All the stuff I have is over there.

Just go to motivation2move.com. That's where you'll find it. If it's your first time, thanks for stopping by. You might be thinking, what am I going to get?

Well, about a coffee mug worth is some practical, some tactical, some inspirational, some motivational thoughts. I'm not going to say advice, but you can take it that way if you want to.

Real stuff in a real world that always looks at the world in a very positive way. A coffee mug. Why? I have a logo for a coffee mug. I rarely talk about this, but why?

Because about 20 years ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop. My late wife was there, Cheryl. She was alive then. And I said to her, I said, I just want to have a coffee shop so I can talk to people and maybe just solve the world's problems.

And the wisdom of the wife popped up. She goes, you don't want a coffee shop, man. You don't like to get up that early. You just want to talk to people.

And about six months later, the podcasting thing was invented well before iTunes had it. I saw it when it first came out. I said, that's a good idea. Let's do the daily boost.

And so the coffee mug went on the logo at the very beginning. That's what happened. Anyway, good to have you here today. Thanks for stopping by. I'm lucky to be alive today.

I really truly am. And okay, that's a little bit maybe a little drama there. But I thought I was going to die for just a moment. Actually, I never thought I was going to die.

But even worse, I thought I was going to pass out. I was at the gym today and I worked out a really hard weight workout with a friend. And then did some cardio, got on the stair machine where the steps rotate and stayed on there for about 30 minutes and just really pushed it hard.

And then I went in the sauna for like 35 minutes, toughen my body up a little bit. And suddenly you have that moment in a sauna where you're like, I need to get out of here.

That moment where you're, they got to get up to cool weather fast, the cool temperatures fast. And I was sitting there, man, I'm going to pass out here.

Unfortunately, my friend Billy was hanging around. He made sure I was okay. I wasn't even seeing stars. I mean, I was right on the edge of going out. And then the guys that worked at the gym brought me some ice and they brought me their own personal Snapple.

They didn't take one out of the thing. They brought me their own. I owe them one now. I'm okay. It's okay. It's such a neat experience to push yourself to the point.

And then part of the conversation today was preparing for the unexpected. My friend Croy is running across Death Valley in August. And that was a question I had. I said, are you preparing for the unexpected?

things that could happen to you. Because sometimes that's what happens. You're just moving along and suddenly something happens and boom, it's like getting a flat tire in a car.

Some people don't prepare for that. Others do. I ride a motorcycle. I have practiced and prepared for what if my tire goes flat? I've prepared for that.

There's all kinds of things I haven't prepared for. Sometimes it's those things that just pop up that just totally derail our life. And sometimes in a really bad way.

My thing this morning, totally voluntary, totally self-inflicted. I did it. I was in the sauna too long. And the body starts to do that nervous system shutdown.

You know the kind where you're seeing stars. You can't quite stand up. You feel like you're going to throw up and you feel like it's going to come out the other end too. Body shutting down.

You're like, man. And all that matters at that point is staying awake. That's about it. I look at life like that often. I do. I just like, you know what?

When it's good, it's really good. But often that stuff that shows up that's unexpected, that teaches us lessons. Can you stop them? No, they're going to keep coming.

But it will wake you up a little bit, won't it? But during the conversation today about facing the bad stuff, because again, my conversation with Croy running across, it's called the Badwater Crossing.

I think he's going the first week of August. It's 142 miles. It's about 130 degrees. He's going to do it in 48 hours, towing a 200-pound trailer, going to try to break his own record.

He set the record one time. Somebody else beat his record. Now he's going back to try to break it again. So he's in training for it right now. And so we've been having lots of conversations.

He's on our Face Your Passion call a couple of days a week as we kind of go with him and help him train for this. And as he's beginning to do this, he's running long distance. He's running, you know, going fast and going slow. He's going to be going up a mountain.

He's got to carry 200 pounds of water with him. I mean, it's crazy stuff. And that question today was, what do you do when the unexpected happens? And so another person on the call, as I'm talking about the unexpected, he goes, that's kind of depressing.

I mean, that's why are we talking about that? And he's in kind of an interesting place right now with his life as well. A job loss situation. And so who knows where he is, probably take a week or two to kind of settle out of that.

What was really interesting is when he told me, he said, this is kind of depressing. Why are you talking about this bad stuff that could happen to you? Why do you want to focus on that?

I wasn't focused on that. But it is wise to focus on that stuff. If I pull back a little bit, sometimes the anxiety or the worry that people feel, it never is going to happen. You might've heard that before, about 90% of what you actually feel.

Think is going to go bad, doesn't go bad. But people don't want to think about it. I actually have something called a pre-planned response. It's the same thing.

All that means, usually it comes up in the context of talking to somebody else, that I think every possible scenario that I'm going to have in a conversation with somebody, every angle I can possibly think of, the good, the bad, and yes, the ugly.

And I pre-process it. That way, when I get in a conversation with anybody, I'm never surprised by what comes up. I even pre-process, well, what happens if I'm surprised? How do I respond to that?

It is the same thing for me saying, what could happen crossing Death Valley? What could go wrong? Could you get a stone in your shoe and suddenly a blister and suddenly you can't make it?

And he's spending a lot of time thinking about that, but that happens with a lot of people and it's not a depressing thing. Usually, If you will turn face first into the thing that might be scary to you and just look at it and deal with it, you mitigate it. It goes away.

The anxiety drops. A lot of coaching calls I do, many of them, probably the vast majority of them, most people get to me because of the way I see things, kind of between the lines very clearly. I can walk them through it without making them panic. But really what they need to do is look at the things that potentially are scaring them that are stopping them from, as I like to say, facing their passion.

And when I can finally get them to look at it very clearly, we take an inventory of what's going on. We figure out where the potential pitfalls are, where the good stuff is.

And suddenly you get really excited because you've released all that tension. So the term for it is anticipatory anxiety. And usually some people say they're anticipating the problem. That's why they're freaking out.

What they forget about is when you anticipate it, but look into it and try to figure out what's really going on, you release the tension and life is good.

Not worried about it. You just deal with it. I ride this motorcycle. I do all kinds of stuff. Go all twisties everywhere. I go fast. I can ride. I know how to ride a bike.

I am always anticipating there is going to be a problem. Always. I'm training for it, trying to figure it out. And always saying, well, what could happen?

I'm not dwelling on the bad stuff. I fly airplanes. Pilots are known to be kind of negative. You know why? Because we're always studying crashes. Always.

What are you studying in the crash? So we don't do it. We're anticipating it could happen. So we're studying the scenarios that were in place leading up to that point.

And you can always figure out what happened. You can get rid of, back to the motorcycle thing. About 98% of all the things that could kill you on a motorcycle can be mitigated simply by you looking at it in advance and making some different choices. Been proven again and again and again.

Every single time they come out with these studies, simple things. The simplest one, wearing a helmet, right? The other one, don't speed. Things like that.

Really simple things that when you... Look at it closely, the thing that maybe scares you. And then if you want to do, and I think it's the point of this program today, is being willing to look at it and say, I'm not even anticipating it. It's not even there.

It's just kind of a thing. When you take all the stuff around you and say, hey, I'm just going to go walk around the block. Is there something that could happen?

Something that could happen? Is there a reason to take your phone? It's a reason to have some communication and just deal with it for a second. Suddenly you have control.

Now, why do I say all this stuff? Because I spend my whole entire life not in the motivation, inspiration world. That's part of what I do because everybody needs it. Because when you get stuck, there's nothing like motivation, inspiration to get you out of it.

So we use that as a really powerful tool. But ultimately, I spend my whole life helping people do three things. I help them face it. So whatever's going on in your life, whatever's scaring you, whatever's exciting you, whatever it happens to be, it doesn't really matter.

If you don't turn face first into it and face it and say, take it on as a challenge, get the courage to go after it or smile and say, finally, I'm here. I don't care what it is.

If you don't take whatever is dogging you, whatever is dragging you down, whatever dream has been put back, whatever fear has been put back, whatever it happens to be, bad marriage, and you have just not decided to turn face first into it and deal with it. A bad job you hate and you haven't turned face first into it. Or maybe everything's great, but you haven't gone for the thing. You can't even verbalize the thing is that you want for more impact in the world.

Really common. Had a conversation like this today. Smart people, wealthy people, really smart people. They can't visualize what the bigger thing is. The thing they actually want to face and go do that makes this life something they feel like they have an impact with.

So the first thing I always am working with people on, always, including you today, is what's stopping you from facing what's back in the back of your mind?

First thing we have to do is face it. Probably some anxiety, right? Just don't know. Or maybe you do know and you're afraid of it. Doesn't matter. Got to face it first.

What's the second thing I focus on? Great. Let's build it. Let's build it. And build it, by the way, could be deconstruction. There could be things you face you got to get rid of, right?

Got a bad job you got to get rid of. So building your new life could be part of that creative destruction, getting rid of the old job that doesn't work for you anymore. It could be getting rid of the marriage that doesn't work for you anymore. But we're not focused on that part.

We're simply focused on building what we want and something's got to go. So we face it first and then we decide what we have to build. And along the way, some things have to go. We got to get rid of the friction.

More is on the other side of less. The things that are dragging us down need to go away. You know it, I know it, everybody else knows it. And eventually you will change when you wear yourself out and you will say, okay, you're right, Scott, let's get rid of this damn thing.

And finally, after we face it, after we build it, then we live it. We live whatever we've decided to do. And this is really probably the hardest thing to do. I mean, it seems like it's harder to actually make the change and face it and build it.

That seems hard to do, but not really. What's hard to do is maybe where you are right now. You built something that's pretty good. Things are going pretty well right now, and yet you're not really living the life you think you want to live.

You've gotten complacent. Things have changed. You haven't updated stuff. All the things. Living it is the hardest thing to do. You know why? Because when you finally get rid of all the friction, when you finally get in the direction that you want to go, you tend to have some space.

And if you don't fill that space with things that really just are part of what you've imagined being in your life, you just go back to what you used to do and you break it all over again.

I'll stand on this one. I'll die on this hill. I've seen it so many times in the tens of thousands of conversations I've had. This is what always happens.

Now, getting below that and getting able to work, that's a challenge. Possible, I'll do it every day. But that's what you're facing. So if you have some anticipatory anxiety, remember, it can be used for good, not just evil.

It doesn't have to scare you. It can free you. But when you face it, you build it, and you live it, your life changes fast. Ooh.