Everyone can relate to it. Stress and anxiety are extremely negative feelings that can overcome us. These negative feelings can cause a variety of symptoms in our bodies and even more serious psychological impacts. What stress does is take a situation (difficult or not) and expand it in our minds until it’s huge.
This is the reason why it’s especially important to find ways of taming these feelings. We must find ways of making them work for us, not against us.
Stress and anxiety correlate to fear. We may be fearful that things are not going to go the way we think they should, causing us anxiety.
I want to share with you the acronym FEAR that my teacher Jack Canfield uses in his book The Success Principles: “Fantasized Experiences Appearing Real.” Feelings of fear are imagined experiences that I have created in my head and made to appear real.
Nobody else can control your thoughts. Not the government, not an illness, not your debts and not the electricity provider. Nobody can control your brain. Only you. If we consider this fact, everything else becomes really simple.
So, let’s take 100% responsibility for our lives and 100% responsibility for our thoughts. We can tame our thoughts and our anxieties and do whatever we want with them. I’m going to tell you how to do it, but it requires work. It’s something we’ve been working on intensively at the Global Academy of Coaching.
Actively Choose Your Emotion
Every time stress overcomes you, it’s purely self-induced.
Ask yourself, “Who is talking? My higher self or my ego?” Your ego.
“Are those thoughts helping me?” No, they are not.
While your ego is talking, you are going to make a decision. “Right now, ego, I am making a decision.”
The decision is to feel inner harmony. “I choose to feel inner peace at this moment and have confidence that everything is going to work out.”
Self-confidence has been shown to decrease competitive anxiety and performance stress, and I believe this theory can be applied across all aspects of our lives. To me, confidence also means having faith that everything around you is happening exactly the way it should. You’ll get there on time, even if that time is different from what you thought it would be. You’ll find a way out of a stressful situation, even if you find an unconventional solution.
Choose the emotion you want to feel, and eventually, you’ll be able to release your negative thoughts.
Remember To Breathe
Something else that’s extremely important is taking a deep breath. When we get stressed, we may feel as if we lose our breath. This can also happen when we feel fear. In fact, there’s a scientific correlation between those who have anxiety and those who report breathlessness.
Primitively, we likely stressed over whether we were going to survive. Now, we stress over the smallest things. We go around saying: “I am stressed; I am stressed.” You can choose not to be stressed!
Take 100% responsibility for your life. Talk to your ego. Show it love; tell it, “Thank you very much,” and take a deep breath. Take 20 deep breaths if you need to. Many times, I do.
Another way of dealing with your ego is to step aside for one minute and think about the worst thing that’ll happen if things don’t go the way you planned. From my perspective, there’s never a case where you’re given something that you can’t face.
So, I encourage you to build your faith. Make the decision to reject stress. Control your thoughts so that your mind works for you and not against you.
My clients, students and I develop more and more every day in this new state of consciousness. The results are life-changing. I know you can achieve this, too!
