Overcoming Anxiety
Notes on Mel Robbins – lessons to learn, habits to acquire, things to do (and things not to do).
I recently discovered the work of motivational speaker and coach Mel Robbins. She has posted many videos up on You Tube. I watched three, taking notes and commenting as I went. Below is my first response, blending my own personal experience into the key points raised. It's a rough document, very much as written. I am a little short of time at the moment, for reasons that will become apparent. Reflection and revision will come later, after watching more videos.
I see that Mel Robbins is described as a “best-selling author.” That's an appealing description, for the very reason that I am a writer myself, a strange kind of writer who has chosen to publish in free access rather than commercially. That maybe ought to change.
I'll start with the first video, on anxiety, and take each point as it comes. I'll then move to a couple more videos, identifying a core theme and pattern as I go.
Mel begins by noting the obvious and familiar symptoms of anxiety: nervousness, restlessness, feeling tense, racing heart, sweating, having a tight feeling in your chest, the list goes on.
Every place I have worked with others, indoors in offices or on the shop floor, I have experienced these very things to an extreme level. Anxiety feeds on itself to create a vicious spiral. You become paralysed, trying to remain inert, in order to avoid sweating heavily, and it doesn't work. You start to worry about personal hygiene and any comments that others may be inclined to make. Which makes you even more nervous and anxious, causing your heart to pump even faster. The situation is bad for your mental and physical health, and potentially lethal, leaving you with a chronic health condition.
Identifying the symptoms is easy enough, acting on them, and acting effectively, is more difficult to do. I toughed it out for decades. Which is not the wisest course of action.
Mel makes it clear from the start that her recommendations are for most people but not all. People who suffer from acute anxiety need to seek professional help. I am a person who has suffered from acute anxiety my entire life. After suffering yet more issues with physical health I went to my doctor in 2019 complaining of 'psycho-social anxiety.' She listened patiently and suggested Asperger's or autism. In 2021 I was diagnosed with ASC. The anxiety I had suffered and continue to suffer is secondary to that condition. That said, I attended a couple of anxiety classes, one in 2019 and another in 2020, and learned plenty from both – being present and living in the moment, mindfulness, meditation, breathing techniques, keeping a journal to objectify or externalise your thoughts and then reflect back on them. Acquiring such habits and practising them daily can help. It turns out that I have since youth developed my own coping and survival mechanisms which work – writing comes as easily as breathing to me. I also love to hike or ramble, get outdoors into nature. But, as Mel makes clear later, cleaving to survival mechanisms can hold you far short of your dreams, desires, and potentials, ultimately thwarting your talents and making you unhappy.
The need to survive comes from living in the face of uncertainty. Such is life. In my case the uncertainty is made all the worse by the lack of internal filters and editors, meaning that the world is present to me immediately at all times as a whole. The result is sensory mixing and saturation, leaving me overwhelmed and in retreat and paralysis.
What's the quickest way to conquer uncertainty? Mel's answer to the question is to change the story you're telling yourself.
Mel's story reads as very similar to mine, except that I have never taken medication for anxiety. 'I have suffered from anxiety for most of my life,' she says. Me too. I barely survived school. I got through university simply by taking charge and taking over, dominating classes and tutorials. It was hard work. I had to prepare hard, entering classes with a battery of notes, all memorised to the last word. Imagine the time that that took, imagine the energy it took. The brain is high-maintenance. Although the brain is just 2% of body weight, it accounts for 20% of the oxygen, and hence calories, consumed by the body. You need to use the brain sparingly. Tendencies to over-thinking need to be checked by some kind of ending point. Without that check, the brain can run to infinity, exhausting the body (I know, because this is precisely my problem).
Mel mentions that she was on medication for two decades from the age of 21, describing it as 'a life saver' for her 'during some very dark years.' I have never been on medication a) for the reason I never sought help, simply toughed it out by grinding out results in my studies and work and b) I refused it when offered it 2020. I prefer to make changes in the way I live my life than rely on crutches. Mel says she suffered severely from a depression 'that was so bad I could not be left alone.' The question of depression cropped up with my doctor. The Patient Health Questionnaires I completed recorded 'severe' and 'moderate' depression at different times. Discussion indicated that the problem was less depression in myself – it takes nothing to bring me back to life and smiling – than in my very realistic and accurate appraisal of my objective circumstances. The conclusion I drew there is that it is less me that needs to change than the world … which could take an awful long time.
Mel continues: 'when I speak about mental health and the struggles many of us face - I have lived that nightmare, I have studied these topics.' Me too. She says she has cured herself. I'm still trying hard, and failing. I have spent the past couple of years reaching out for help only to find there is precious little, only plenty of hindrance.
I've seen death and destruction quite a few times in my life now. I was in the Hillsborough Tragedy which led to the deaths of ninety-seven Liverpool football fans. I went down the tunnel of death myself, but had time to turn around and find another entrance point. I watched the horror unfold from the next pen. I've seen some horrible things, and suffered plenty, including a near fatal heart attack. Anxiety is a wretched condition. Anxiety has been the biggest blight on my life, stopping me from doing a thousand things well within reach of my talents and abilities. Anxiety can steal your hopes and dreams, it can steal your life away; anxiety can end your life. With three degrees, from a first in history to a PhD in philosophy, politics, and ethics, I should have been a top-flight academic. I could never handle the workload. I would always over-prepare to make sure I had every part of the brief covered. I could never handle classes, I couldn't cope with constant demands and talking heads. Anxiety has cost me a lucrative career. Anxiety almost cost me my life. Take anxiety seriously. People who don't suffer from anxiety don't see the problem and hence don't think it exists. Anxiety is the worst. Once it gets a grip of you, it never lets you go. I fought it alone and fought it to a standstill. When something is wrong, you have to find the courage to admit to yourself and others that you have a problem you have to identify what is wrong. And then you have to find the courage to make changes, express vulnerability, and reach out to others for help. It's the most courageous thing to do, not least because most others are weighed down with struggles of their own and lack the time and energy to help you out. I preferred to go it alone and conquer stress and anxiety by racking up a series of achievements. The problem is that such an approach generates stresses and anxieties of its own. You end up on a never-ending treadmill that goes nowhere, treading ever the harder as time goes by.
So what is the way out? 'Habits' is a key word. There are good habits and bad habits. You need to identify bad habits and start the process of converting them into good habits. 'Anxiety begins with the habit of worrying,' Mel says. (I am one of life's worriers). Through the act of worrying you become locked into negative thought patterns that in turn trigger and incite physical conditions. You become locked into a flight or fight response, as if always being pounced on by lions hiding behind bushes. The physical symptoms associated with that agitated state are familiar - sweaty palms, racing heart, shortened breath. This is anxiety. There is good stress and bad stress. Good stress incites you into taking action in response to a threat. Once the threat has ended, the warning systems stop sounding the alarm. Anxiety occurs when the alarms continue to sound, leaving you in a heightened state of alert. Intellect takes over from instinct, you start to over-think and you never stop thinking. Energy is depleted and, in time, the body comes to be exhausted.
The feeling is normal, Mel rightly says. What is not normal is when the body doesn't come to fall back into a relaxed state.
What the quickest way to deal with it?
Mel says that the feeling can be 'manipulated.' By this, she means that you can change your thoughts and describe that agitated body state as something normal and exciting.
OK, let's explore further. This sounds like turning negatives into positives, which sounds good but is somewhat question begging. Positive energy, I would say, is energy that should be channelled positively and productively. That's not always easy to do when 'life' and its relentless demands absorb your energy in so many negative ways. I would recommend cutting out the negative and toxic as far as you are able, keep the unproductive if it involves something pleasurable or allows you to switch off and recharge.
Mel has something else in mind, asking us to stop being afraid of the unknown, to be curious and pumped to learn.
That may well work … Each person is different. As an autistic person, living in face of chaos and uncertainty and the unknown is the default position, leaving me to crave regularity, order, and stability. 'You're not nervous, you're excited,' Mel says. I like enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a great quality to nurture. But as an autistic person I get 'excitement' as a matter of course and need a little peace and quiet. It all has to be tailored and tempered for me.
But I do like what she says next: 'You're not fearful of the future, you can't wait to see what the Universe has next.' You have to try to avoid becoming locked into the past, as if the good or bad experiences long gone are all that your life could ever be. Embrace the future and see what you can do with it.
'Change the narrative in your head and your body chemistry will follow suit.;
It's a simple science, Mel says. As a philosopher, I would also say it is the basic Aristotelian ethics of habits, practices, and dispositions. Character-construction, settling human beings within modes of conduct and communities of practice. It is a key aspect of my philosophical work.
Mel is all about strategies for dealing with anxiety, showing people the way out.
I like the way that her words are comprehensible and that the habits and practices she recommends are accessible, within the reach of all who are struggle. You can fix this 'one excited positive thought at a time.' I like what she says next most of all: 'you do not have to do it on your own.' My biggest worry with many 'positive' 'self-help' happiness philosophies is that they can tend to focus heavily on the individual. Individual responsible is hugely important. Successful living, which we may call 'flourishing,' requires inner motive force and agency. At the same time, there is a need to recognize that human beings are social beings – we need each other in order to be ourselves. Being alone and striving alone is often more than half of the problem. I've done everything and more the self-help tough guys demand, and it has simply worn me down.
Mel encourages us to ask some questions before identifying ourselves as someone who has social anxiety. Sometimes, what seems as anxiety is merely a perfectly sound reluctance on your part to join in with activities which you don't enjoy:
💡 Is that reluctance to go out just a sign that you prefer to be home?
💡 Does the nervousness just mean that you’re more interested in deeper connections, not a frat party?
💡 Is the uneasiness about seeing people from your past just a recognition of how much you’ve grown?
She describes herself as 'a homebody at heart.' In a world made by and for extroverts, introverts experience great stress in trying to 'fit in' and participate in social action. That anxiety is the kind that can be dispelled easily. What is right for you is right and you don't have to measure up to the expectations of others or live in the opinion of others.
Her next comment resonates deeply with me: 'I feel both excited to see people I like, but also a weird feeling in my stomach about small talk with people I don’t know as well.'
I do little talk, big or small, with people I don't know well, nor with people with whom I seem to have little in common. I speak openly and excitedly with people I like. It's a select group. I'm not being snobby or elitist. People drain me. Social interaction and communication is difficult for me, involving an inflation of information in all directions. So I have to keep it tight to the select few I really like.
Mel's next sentence is key and crucial and should be underlined:
'It took me a really long time to embrace the fact that there’s nothing wrong with me.'
There is nothing worse than going through life having to pretend to be someone you are not in order to meet the expectations of others you don't really know and don't particularly like. Always remember to be true to your self:
The most common form of despair is not being who you are. - Søren Kierkegaard
'I just can’t stand small talk. And I don’t care for big groups. I prefer deep conversations with a handful of people.'
I love small talk with people I like; I can go as deep as deep can go with such people. I avoid large gatherings. In parties I will be the quiet one on the fringes wondering if I might be allowed to slip away now (now that there is no more to eat!) For me, it's less a case of small or deep talk as genial company.
The Secret to Stopping Fear & Anxiety (That Actually Works)
NOVEMBER 21ST, 2022 | 53:25 | E15
Let me move on to the next Mel Robbins video.
She begins:
'I used simple research from Harvard Business School and UCLA to tame my fear of public speaking and become one of the most successful keynote speakers in the world.'
Interesting. I went through university and academic life being scared stiff of public speaking, and I ended by being even more terrified. People told me that I would get used to it in time and I never ever did. At one point it led to a nervous breakdown. So as time passed, I reduced the speaking to a minimum and then stopped. By the end I was having to be dragged to speak in front of people.
You can overcome certain fears. Mel talks of overcoming her fear of flying. I had a fear of flying. I never flew until 2014. I overcame the fear.
Fears that hold you back from doing the things you want to do can be confronted and overcome. (Deep down, I know that I never actually wanted to speak in public or become a teacher or lecturer, so had little inner motivation to overcome the fears I had).
Your fears make you lesser than you are, limiting your horizons and diminishing your potential. 'Anxiety robs you of happiness and confidence,' Mel says. It robs you of all that makes life worth living; it can ruin your life. She thus seeks to coach people through their biggest fears. 'Stop letting your fear make your life small.' Agreed.
'Board that plane, step onto that stage, apply for that promotion, and never let your nerves stop you from living your life the way that you want to again.'
I think the key word there is 'want.' In the past, I had a tendency to try to overcome weaknesses by becoming good at things I didn't really care about. From being considered distinctly average at school, I became a straight A student. I went on to university. I loved the grades and the certificates but, it is clear, I saw them as forms of validation. I never enjoyed academic life. In life terms, these count as wasted years, years I could have spent doing something else, something I enjoyed.
I move to the next video:
If You Struggle With Anxiety, WATCH THIS! | Mel Robbins
Here, Mel begins by declaring that she was anxious, competitive, and insecure – describing this as a deadly combination.
She mentions that a lot of her attitude was an outgrowth of an incident at school. I suffered a lot of incidents at school. I was usually behind in classes, learning at a different pace and in a different way. That made me the target of abuse, verbal and physical. That abuse was systematic and lasted years. I suspect that one reason I became so addicted to good grades was because, deep down, I felt myself to be conquering my adversaries and proving them to be wrong. You need to come out of the tendency to live your life and exercise your talents in the opinion of others, whether confirming others' expectations or confounding them. Be true to your own potentials, your own dreams and desires.
Mel talks of dealing with internal conflicts we have never resolved, creating 'survival mechanisms' to keep you safe. The notion of coping mechanisms is familiar to autistic people, helping us to negotiate an often chaotic and noisy world, checking the ever-present danger of sensory overload. The problem, as Mel says, is that whilst such mechanisms can keep you safe and secure, you need to update the strategy as you get older. If your life becomes geared to the operation of coping and survival mechanisms, your potentials can lie fallow and go without realisation. You may survive that way, but you will never thrive. A life reduced to survival is no life at all. People need a meaningful life, a reason to live, a purpose that drives them forward, a direction, an enthusiasm. The problem with survival mode is that, at some point, you ask the reason why and, finding none, collapse exhausted.
Mel states that 'the number one thing that people are dealing with is unresolved conflicts when they were young.' It's arguable that I never get over bad experiences at school, developing as they did feelings of inferiority and insecurity. She records that she employed her survival strategy into adulthood. Again, I can see that I did the same. I can also see that I redefined it in public as a success story, each top grade, each qualification being presented as a triumph. In terms of a practical working life, my academic successes never actually led anywhere, except to more studying and more courses.
That competitiveness and striving is grounded not in confidence and in your own natural proclivities but in insecurity, in the need to prove yourself to others. Mel makes a very good point when she says that 'people don't catch your anxiety.' They see the outward signs of success and conclude that you are a successful and ambitious goal-getter. That is how I was perceived for years and I was more than happy to take the perceptions of others as proof that I was flourishing well. Publicly, I cut an impressive figure, privately, I didn't exist.
Mel next talks about grounding mechanisms comprising a number of techniques. These mechanisms are all about being present in time and space.
Technique number one concerns the physical aspects of living, holding someone's hand or giving them a hug, centring them by touch. This can also involve sitting close in front of someone and making eye contact. Getting close to someone physically is therefore technique number one, grounding a person by physical touch.
That may well work for most people. I have to add that autistic people may find such a technique challenging, but not impossible. It depends on the person. I tend to need a little warning but am fine with it all so long as I am expecting it.
A long walk in the country also grounds you and calms you down. I do this a lot.
Technique number two is ask people what they are feeling, emotionally as well as physically. There is no need for an answer to this question. The questions are not looking for answers and solutions but are merely about being with a person.
Anxiety is all about uncertainty and, typically, that uncertainty concerns something a person is unable to control in the present or the future. For grounding techniques to be applied, let alone work, you need a grounded and calm person in your life. Where are they?? And where do such grounding mechanisms come from. You can talk about Buddhist practices. There really doesn't have to be such discipline and training. People innocent of learned wisdoms, but steeped in experience, have learned the art of deep listening. Someone once asked me what the wisest saying I had ever heard was. I couldn't remember any one in particular so made one up on the spot: Keep your mouth shut and ears open, learn what others have to say (and learn that others do have something to say).
In the end it is simply about being in observance, with no need for judgement or resolution, opening your eyes, ears, and heart to others.
Mel emphasises that 'anxiety is not a disease.' By anxiety here she is referring to that general anxiety that most people suffer from, and not acute or chronic anxiety. The former can benefit from her techniques, the latter need to seek professional help.
Her principal lesson concerns action over waiting. It's about the actions you take. She insists that the more consistently you take action, the quicker you will start to believe in yourself, ceasing to be the kind of person who sits around feeling unworthy and unhappy.
She repeats the point over and again, it all starts with action.
I have some issues with the next bit. 'Who is the problem?' Mel asks, eliciting the response 'I am' from the audience; 'who is the solution?' she asks, 'I am' say the members of the audience. I'm not altogether sure that this is entirely true. Since human beings are social beings, both problems and solutions tend to be social in nature. I'm leery of personalising social responsibility, just as I am leery of socialising personal responsibility – this is a two-way process. You can't solve your problems alone – a point that Mel makes herself elsewhere. But she is right to say that a person is an active agent in his or her own problem solving. That is the important lesson that she is hoping to deliver here: remember that you are powerful, intelligent, knowledgeable, and courageous agents who are able to take the initiative and be proactive in seeking resolution: 'don't wait for others.' This is important advice. If you wait for others you will be waiting forever. I have actively sought out help from others, from various authorities and organisations – there is next to no help available, you are indeed on your own as far as the 'official' world is concerned.
Mel next comes to people who struggle with procrastination.
Procrastination is my middle name. I tend to defend procrastination as something that is creative, an exploring of the full range of possibilities before bringing an act to completion. Mel has something else in mind. She notes that the people who struggle the most with procrastination are PhD students, engineers, entrepreneurs, and such like, people who have a lot on their plate, people who are juggling a lot of things, people who are analytical in their approach, thinkers. Here I am! PhD philosopher and writer. I am thinking all the time. Struggling with procrastination can stress you out, Mel writes.
But procrastination itself is not the problem. She mentions the phone calls you have to make. You put them off, and spend the day worrying. You are exhausted by the stress but have got nothing done. But it is stress rather than procrastination that is the issue. With procrastination you are taking a break. The way she describes it here, procrastination is an avoidance strategy, an attempt to put things off until you feel strong enough to deal with them.
She now comes to something that is music to the ears of an Aristotelian philosopher like myself: habits.
Habits are important, habits are key. Flourishing well as a human being requires that the cycle of bad habits is broken and replaced by the regular performance of good habits.
Procrastination is a habit that leads to avoidance and evasion. The problem is that the break that you seek to take from stress can take over your life, building up more problems and more stress.
Mel talks about creating Starting Rituals, things that push you to start an activity. The trick to breaking a cycle is starting. She recommends only working for five minutes. Whilst this doesn't sound like being very productive, it works like a trick. 80% of people who commit to working for just five minutes will keep going. The trick is to get started in the first place.
The trick works by breaking the connection between the trigger, which is stress, and the response, which is procrastination. Whenever you feel stress, know that you have a choice and that choice is made in that five second gap. In that five seconds the habit of procrastinating and beating yourself up can take hold again, or you can choose to just get started.
Mel comes to what she calls 'hyperdrive.' She describes herself as an over-achiever, someone who was a super busy go-getter because it won her praise and attention. This is precisely my experience with my academic work. It 'also insulates you from other people,' she says. I ended up elevating myself over others, intimidating them, even, and certainly distanced from them. Far from resolving a problem, such an approach makes a bad situation a whole lot worse. The 'hyperdrive to achieve' comes from a feeling of inadequacy, she says. This accords with my own experience. I gained recognition, respect even, but not relationship. 'Being the best is annoying,' she says, 'a hangover from something in the past.' The push to excel in academia stemmed in part from an interest in the subjects of study, but largely from the need to prove myself powerful and clever. It all came from a feeling of inferiority that was developed into me at school. 'We walk around thinking the same stuff from the past,' Mel says. You have to let bad experiences from the past go. In seeking success as no more than a triumph over the past, you never move forward.
'There is a gap between the world and the things that trigger you and your response, and your entire life is that gap.' This is the five second window between instinct/stimulus and your reaction. Once you start to understand that your whole life plays out in this five second gap between fear and courage, between self-doubt and confidence, then you realise that you have the ability to control it. Response is where your power lies, in the possibility of choice - you get to choose what happens in this small gap. When triggered, you get to choose whether to succumb to an excuse or to push yourself forward.
She says that once you start to speak up you will be 'shocked' and 'surprised' at the way you will close the gap and make choices, exercising conscious control over how you live. The magic happens in that gap between stimulus and response.
A lot of times the problem concerns the pattern of negative thoughts which tell you that you are not good enough and not smart enough, and have you worrying that this or that may happen. Ask yourself how such thoughts help anything. A productive worry is a worry that motivates you to take action. Good stress operates the same way. A destructive worry is a worry that has you circling the drain mentally. You need to interrupt destructive worry as soon as it starts to happen and send it packing. If you are always thinking that you are not good enough, then you are never going to believe the mantra that you are good enough. Mantras work not by repetition but by belief; they don't work if you don't believe them to be true. You need to break the chain of destructive thoughts. Mel thus emphasises the power that lies in creating a meaningful mantra. You need to be able to identify the patterns whenever they appear and create a meaningful mantra. This is empowering and serves to lift you up.
You can be paralysed by fear. The key is to break the pattern.
The next part is of personal and very present interest to me. Mel asks us to identify the 'one thing you have been thinking about that you have stopped yourself from doing.' She speaks of you being terrified of putting yourself out there. She gives starting a business as an example. Yup. I've been dealing with Business Wales these past three months with a view to setting up my own publishing company, selling the dozens of books I have written but made available in free access. I've been stalling, looking at all the work it involves. It can be done. It needs to be done.
'If you are still paralysed,' she says, then 'you have not been able to change your thinking pattern.'
This paralysis is changed through action. 'Because if you sign up for that class or go on that retreat, if you post that blog, start that business, then you will be proving to yourself through the actions that you are taking that you don't care what other people think. Try that today.'
OK … but … I would phrase it differently. The action needs to be something that you really want to do, rather than just proving a point. That's possibly what she meant. It's just that in not caring for what others think, there is no need to even mention others.
'What you are stopping yourself from doing and what you are committing to doing today?'
Good questions. But be careful of seeing 'action' as such as a solution. Action in itself can often be a neurotic response to pressures, feeling the need to be busy to put your mind at ease. But the general message is sound enough: find your interests, dreams, talents, and desires and start to act on them. Identify what you want to do and start getting it done – that's the surest way to break the paralysis.
Mel next comes to an old bugbear of mine, the distinction between the things you can't control and the things you can.
There are things you can't control in the social or objective world, and the things that you can control in your thoughts and actions.
I've never liked this distinction, for the reason it shifts the onus of responsibility upon the person, completely ignoring societal and institutional transformations that need to be made to make personal responsibility and action possible, meaningful, and productive. We live in a social environment. By placing the emphasis on changes that we can make as persons, the social and institutional context is ignored. It requires both. Many problems that we face have their origins outside of us, in relation to others or in respect of social bodies and institutions. Often, the emphasis on personal transformation reduces to accommodating oneself to a world that inhibits and impairs your potentials. There is a social and institutional agnosticism here that is tantamount to resignation and cowardice. I know this from past dealings with various organisations and authorities, employment agencies who shift all responsibility to the individual agent when it comes to finding employment, autism bodies which emphasise all the changes an autistic person can make to adjust to an uncaring and unchanging world. I've been here and done it to death. It can only work to a certain extent, maybe enough of an extent for enough people for its adherents to justify it as the best available approach. I've always been one of the 'odds,' one of the exceptions, one of the people whose talents get unrealised and wasted. And, for the record, I have done everything required of me by various organisations and agencies in the cause of self-help. They haven't worked and have come close to wrecking my mental and physical health. It's not enough. The social and institutional dimension has to be factored in rather than ignored. It is lazy to simply claim that these cannot be controlled. A distinction such as this makes a politically and sociologically illiterate distinction between two essential aspects of human nature – individuality and sociality. The social refers to human beings in their collective identity. Whilst it is true that this cannot be controlled individual and lies outside of the individual's power, it can be transformed collectively. But that's politics. Teamwork makes the dream work.
In terms of what the individual can do for himself or herself in the here and now, the advice is sound enough. Whilst the individual can't control the supra-individual events and forces going on in the social world, he or she exercise control in the gap between what is happening in your life and work and what your reaction is to it. That gap, Mel says, is five seconds long. 'If you understand that you can change what you think, that you can change your habits, you can pivot and change even the philosophy of your company, changing decisions, managing your reactions, you will be unstoppable.'
Possibly.
There are aspects of your life that are energising and aspects which are depleting. If you are not careful, you can get trapped in sterile grooves that tire you out and keep you confined in a lane that takes you to a place you don't want to be.
Everyone has a place to be; everyone needs to know their place and know how to get to where they need to be.
Mel describes her career as a public speaker. For all the money she was making, it was 'depleting the hell' out of her. 'It's so important to pay attention to what is energising you about your own business, because that's the secret of seeing around corners.' She started to look around the corner. 'To get to the next level of your business, you have to decide right now what habits do you have as a leader do you have to change now. Because you will not see around the corner, you will not engineer the next quantum leap, unless you personally change.' This was the process by which she went from being a speaker to writing a number one book on Amazon. She did this by 'constantly innovating myself.'
'I am the biggest single problem in my company, and if I don't constantly pivot and evolve what I am focused on, I am going to be my blockade.'
Think where you want to be and identify what habit you have to change to get there.
This is of direct personal significance to me. I describe myself on my business card as a speaker and tutor. I created that business card for my e-tutoring business, Peter Critchley e-Akademeia. I no longer tutor and I have long since given up public speaking, and didn't do much of it in the first place. Speaking and tutoring are not things I enjoy and not places I need to be. I am a writer. I have written over one hundred books and made them available in free access. I am investigating possibilities of creating my own publishing, “Writing Voice Publishing,” to sell my books and make myself some well-earned and hugely deserved money. Mel Robbins here has plotted my course. It needs to be travelled. I need to get started.
You have to let go of the past. If your mind keeps returning to the past, for fear of an uncertain future, then you are going to be depressed. Because the things that happened in the past cannot help you now. You can neither change nor control the past, the only change and control that is available to you lies in the here and now. Likewise, it you are living in anticipation of the future, whether hopefully or fearfully, then you are going to be in a state of constant anxiety, for the reason that you are constantly thinking about things that haven't happened yet and more than likely take place in ways that contradict your expectations. 'Being in the present is where the gold is,' Mel writes. 'Being in the present moment is where you will have the greatest control, where you will have the most ease and where happiness will flourish.'
40% of happiness levels are set by genetics, 60% you are in control of.
Mel states that it doesn't matter what has happened to you in the past. She claims that some of the happiest and most grateful people in the world are those who have had the worst things happen to them. Anyone who has read concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl's 'Man's Search for Meaning' can confirm this. I can confirm it from personal experience, having survived the horrors of Leppings Lane in the Hillsborough Disaster.
The happiness that you are in control of comes down to your thoughts, your mindset, and your attitude and you are 100% in control of those things. The key is to develop the skill of being present in the moment, not in the past or future, attuning your thought processes to the here and now where we all live.
Be present.
You can learn the discipline of being present by checking yourself whenever your thoughts start to drift back to the past or forwards to the future, showing a tendency to stay there. That's not where you are and not where the people who can help you are.
Being present doesn't necessarily mean that the people you need are going to present themselves immediately. They are there somewhere in the here and now, I am told. They are few and far between in my experience. But they are there and nowhere else. People are also stressed by struggles of their own. Time and energy are scarce resources, and people tend not to have much to spare. But here is the crucial paradox to grasp and hold on to: energy, like love and power, is expanded by being shared. By looking to others to lift your burden, you can help to lift theirs in turn, establishing practices and processes of mutual aid. As a result, we come to expand our being outwards in relation to others.
That's my concluding thought. You can do much by realising the power of your own agency, you can be proactive and take charge and determine to turn your life around. I will go with plenty that Mel Robbins says, and hope that the little clauses and qualifications I have added don't cloud and confuse issues to such an extent as to encourage a lapse back into bad habits. You can take charge and take action, that's both simple and true. But, speaking as someone who has been proactive my entire life, as someone who has set high ambitions and realised them, someone who went from the building sites to university and PhD, who managed to just about cope with the stresses and strains of autism, going undetected until just a couple of years ago, I'll just say that there is no substitute for establishing warm, affective, mutually supportive and meaningful bonds with significant others. Social and emotional support is essential for flourishing well. And, often, in the main, even, such connections merely involve the presence of sympathetic others. Those others don't necessarily have to being doing anything; usually, simply being there is enough. I have took part in two courses on anxiety in the past, one in 2019 and one in 2020. I learned plenty from both. I made notes of the things that can be done and ought to be done, which are plenty. I saw some people in those classes who were in despair. One woman was clearing tearing her hair out and picking at her scalp. It must have taken enormous courage for her to simply turn up to class. That first step is always the biggest one to take. She took the information home with her, paid attention, joined in the exercises. The same with regard to another woman who seemed depressed as well as anxious, suffering grief at the loss of her mother. But my point is this: it was less the information on anxiety that they received than the simple fact of joining with others to express their concerns and share their experiences that was the most uplifting thing of all. The truth is that human beings, as social beings, need each other in order to be themselves.
The classes came to an end with the beginning of Lockdown. I shudder to think what became of some of those poor ladies in the isolation that was to become our common fate. But I praise their courage and bravery in joining with others in public space to reveal their vulnerability and fragility. We can talk about empowerment and agency and affirm our talents and abilities to take charge and take action. And I would agree that we can 'body-build' our capacities to be successful and self-determining in the world. It is healthy and appropriate to stress the qualities for successful living. But establishing warm and affective bonds with others is at least as important a quality to nurture as any other. The members of the anxiety classes I attended came to life in the company of others, making it clear that they had been starved of sympathetic ears. Everyone has a story to tell. The tragedy is that not everyone has someone in their lives who is prepared to listen.
I have also noted the extent to which anxiety seems to affect women more than men. That might just be a coincidence, an accident of my own particular experience. I attended two different courses for anxiety, with just one other man present for one, both courses led by women. Either anxiety affects women more than men, or men are much less brave than women, choosing to tough it out and hence suffer alone. It's not the right way. I agree with philosopher Martha Nussbaum who writes about 'the fragility of goodness':
"To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility."
Martha Nussbaum, "The Fragility of Goodness"
I know all about anxiety and what it does to you mentally and physically. Living with a relentless anxiety wears you down to such an extent that you tend not to ask for what you really want, out of expectation that your desires will not be met, having rarely been met in the past, and for fear that refusal will destroy the little locked-away hopes and dreams that keep you alive.
But, maybe, there are risks worth taking, exchanging saving illusions for rich realities. A greater joy lies that way. If you have the courage to believe that life could ever get that good.
"Ever tried. Ever failed.
No matter.
Try Again.
Fail again. Fail better."
~ Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
In my assessment for AS, I said that over time I learned to keep trying, to keep working hard, so that in the end I came to fail so beautifully that most everyone took it to be success. I knew I was falling far short of all that I could be and all that I ought to be.
You can turn that around.
Take anxiety very seriously. Anxiety is a debilitating condition that can steal your hopes and dreams, ruin your life, end your career, even end your life.
I write further on anxiety here
And here on my anxiety classes
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