Mindset
My friend Tony Blauer, one of the world’s foremost experts in self-defense and tactical defense systems coined a great acronym for FEAR.
F-alse E-expectations A-ppearing – R-eal
I found myself awake at 4 am, unable to go back to sleep. Worrying about the possible implications of business decisions, the future of our lives, the impending economic doom and gloom.
These days, it’s getting harder to get away from it.
The noise, the chatter.
Everywhere you look; your in-box, your social channels, your streaming media, and good old fashioned TV, you can’t get away from the doomsayers.
It feels at times like the world is going to blow up, burn up, flood, or just simply get too expensive to live in.
Personally, I think it’s all just the same as it always has been, it’s just amplified by all the noise, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to digest.
You can’t ignore it. You can’t forget it exists.
But what you can do is realize that it is all just a story we are creating, and those who are writing, reporting, and posting about it are creating.
Stories can either serve you, or serve to constrain you or destroy you.
In previous posts, I’ve talked a lot about Story, and how it manifests. How everything we believe is just a form of story, and most of it has been served to us by our circle of influence over many, many year.
Worry, well that’s just a poor use of our imagination.
Our imagination is so powerful if we let it focus on what we can do rather than on what we can’t do, or what we feel could or might happen to us.
Do we need to have insurance for a rainy day?
It’s a good idea to have insurance to cover your important stuff, but once you’ve covered your important stuff (and one could question how much of it really is important!), the rest is just compensation for our FEAR.
So how do we stop this incessant worrying disorder that wakes us up at night, or keeps us up at night, or possesses our daily internal dialogue.
Replace it with stories that serve. Imagine the possibilities. Imagine your outcome or the story you wish to live.
Imagining what’s possible, even if at the moment it seems impossible, can create a fracture in the glass ceiling.
We all have one, a ceiling we’ve created in our minds that holds us back, prevents us from reaching higher. Simply allowing yourself to imagine more begins to push it higher.
Keep doing it in your formal or informal journaling and eventually you will crack it, break it, and reach higher.
There is no service in worrying. There is no benefit in creating false expectations that appear real. There are benefits to creating images of the beautiful possibilities.
So the next time you wake up thinking about the doom, shift your narrative to what’s possible, not the expectation of what’s probable because that’s just not real. The negative is no more real than the positive.
The positive just serves to inspire and activate you, the negative just serves to anger and constrain you.
Don’t worry, be happy 😉
