In my book, Say Yes to Less Stress, I write about the problem of needless worry. I use the word “needless” because there are, of course, things you should worry about. If some nut pulls out a gun in the restaurant where you’re eating, you don’t want to sit and think, “Now let me see, do I need to worry about this?” What you need to do is take off for the exit like a scalded cheetah.
The things that people worry about usually break down into two broad categories: Things they can control and things they can’t. Let’s take the latter first. If you’re worried about something over which you have absolutely no control, your worrying has no purpose. If you can’t control a situation, what’s the point in worrying about it? That’s needless worry. It means you’re increasing your stress level and shortening your life for no reason. On the other hand, if you’re worried about something over which you do have control, you need to take the appropriate action to rectify what’s worrying you.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Even in situations where you seem to have no control, often there is something you can do. Take the economy, for example (I wish someone would take it – right now, it sucks). If the overall state of the economy worries you, what can you do about it? Realistically, the answer appears to be nothing, but that’s not quite true. For one thing you can exercise your right to vote and help to change the balance of power in Congress and the Senate. Better still, you can improve your own little corner of the economy. If you’re struggling financially, you can find ways to cut expenses or earn more money – get a new job or start your own business. I’m not saying the solutions will be easy, but they are real options. You don’t have to do nothing and just sit around worrying. Here are the four steps to take:
1. Identify the things that are worrying you.
2. Decide which of them are beyond your control and see if there are any small steps you can take to improve your lot within the boundaries of the bigger situation.
3. If not, accept that there’s nothing you can do, stop worrying and get on with other aspects of your life where you can influence the outcome.
4. If the worrisome situation is within your control, take whatever action is necessary to fix it.
So what has all that got to do with self belief and confidence? The answer is that you have to believe in yourself, and have faith and confidence in your ability, to take the action needed. Otherwise you’ll procrastinate and do nothing, and the source of your worry will remain intact.
So there’s another huge benefit to building confidence and belief in yourself: It greatly diminishes worry and anxiety. And that’s another reason I’ve written a book about it. The book has reached final manuscript stage and now has a title: Life Beyond Self Belief: 12 Keys to Building Unshakeable Self Belief and Rock-Solid Confidence. It will be available soon, so keep watching this space.
In the meantime, if you need to do something about the worries in your life, think about buying a copy of Say Yes to Less Stress. Just click on the book image on this page to find out more. Until the next time…
from → Self Development
Picture this: You’re walking through open countryside knowing the destination you want to reach and sure that you’re taking the best route to get there. Suddenly, you come across a creek that’s about three and a half, maybe four feet wide. Normally you wouldn’t have any trouble jumping across it, but due to heavy rain the creek has now become a raging torrent. You hesitate, wondering if you should chance the jump and risk falling in.
You look along the bank and see a man sitting at a desk on which sits a brass plaque bearing his name. He waves you over and says, “I’m a creek jumping expert. I can show you a foolproof method that will guarantee you can leap across that creek without falling in. Millions of people have used this method successfully and jumped fast-flowing creeks all over the world. My credentials are impeccable. I have letters after my name. I’m a DCJ, which stand for Doctor of Creek Jumping. For a modest sum of money, I’ll show you my method, which carries a money back guarantee.”
You want to get across the creek so you pay the man and he describes his method. You believe his credentials and the impressive testimonials he has from creek-jumpers all over the world, but you still can’t make the jump. Why not? Because you don’t have enough self-confidence to believe that you can make it across without falling in. So, despite having a proven, foolproof method at your disposal, you can’t continue your journey using that route.
There are men and women all over the world sitting behind desks telling you they have foolproof methods that will enable you to realize your dreams. But all the proven methods in the world will be useless to you unless you believe in yourself and have the self-confidence to act on that belief. If you’re in that situation, the only method that makes sense is one that helps you build unshakeable self-confidence and rock-solid self-belief.
And that’s why I’m working on a book about… guess what… how to build confidence and self-belief. The urge to create such a book started when I discovered that the Law of Attraction didn’t always work for me, no matter how diligently I applied methods such as those Lynn Grabhorn advocates in her wonderful book, Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting. I needed to find out why LOA was only working spasmodically and I discovered that it never worked when I lacked the self-confidence to take the next big step needed to move me toward a particular goal.
So now I believe that confidence and self-belief have to come before methods and techniques. And here’s where I get hoisted on my own analogy – the book I’m working on advocates a series of methods and techniques for acquiring confidence and self-belief. Ah, well… I never did claim to be perfect.
Watch this space.
It’s been a while since I posted anything new to this blog. The gap is the result of moving house and taking a long time to get straight, and being hired for some big writing projects that have kept me busy and alive financially (Lynn’s belief system at work again). The final delay factor was working on a new book about how to build self belief and confidence, which will be the subject of future postings.
I continue to welcome your comments on Lynn and her work, but I have to take a different direction with my own postings. I hope you’ll join me on this new journey, which will begin shortly.
Before I take a vacation from the topic of Lynn’s work, I’d like to post a comment submitted by someone signed in as MKM. I know nothing more about this contributor than his or her email, which I won’t publish without permission. I thought long and hard about publishing this contribution, because I disagree with many of the opinions expressed about Lynn and I don’t like the tone that comes across in parts of what MKM says. But I believe passionately in free speech and that anyone who writes a blog should honor that right, providing a comment isn’t overtly offensive or abusive. Here’s what MKM said, reproduced with no editing:
I had “Excuse me” foisted on me by one person after another, only to watch the reality that life isn’t all a box of chocolates but a mixture of good and bad and random chance that you have no control over mixed with what you can control slowly dawn on them (basic logic we’re all born with but which we have to intentionally manipulate by throwing money after books and seminars).
The reason Lynn Grabhorn lost her mind is simple and two fold. First, I hear the people who claim to be Christians say that it was because “demons” got her, much like Lynn herself claimed. Which is like watching the two characters from Dumb and Dumber have a duel. There aren’t any little green monsters or invisible men in the sky/shamanistic animals/blah blah nonsense. What happens psychologically to a person who convinces themselves that there are “others” manipulating them is simple – schizophrenia. Cause and effect, anyone?
Lynn’s second problem should be obvious, but then it seems when people spend this much time trying to subjugate their original common sense nothing remains simple or obvious… She wrote a book that not only had the happy go lucky manifest the happy stuff but conversely claimed that anyone who experienced anything bad was “co-creating” it and to blame. So what happened to the guru herself when bad stuff started happening to her? Where could she put the huge burden of self-inflicted blame that she had created with her highly publicized philosophy? She couldn’t slough her misfortunes off to chance or tell herself or anyone around her that she was a good person who was experiencing one of the myriad random happenstances of life. No, she had to “admit” to herself and to everyone around her that she was the biggest failure of all. Try topping off your physical illness, which is already dragging your immune system down, with that kind of mental and emotional drain – that YOU yourself created with your self “help” feel good sell more books drivel.
Please feel free to respond to this posting as you wish. MKM, I thank you for taking the time to express your views. Here are my final words on this topic for now:
I’m very happy that people are communicating through the blog and offering to help each other. Many of you have raised similar issues, so before I move off the subject of Lynn’s work for now, I thought it might be helpful to recap a few of my personal beliefs about making her philosophy work. I would urge anyone who’s serious about using what Lynn taught to consider the following:
Keep reading Excuse Me Your Life is Waiting until you’re confident that you really understand its relevance to your life and it has become like second nature to think that way.
Practice makes perfect, but if you practice diligently and Lynn’s philosophy doesn’t work, this may not be the right route for you to take.
Buy the follow up book, The Excuse Me Your Life is Waiting Playbook, in which Lynn took the concepts from Excuse Me and transformed them into a complete workbook for self-empowerment.
Don’t try to “escape” negative thoughts – it’s impossible. If someone says, “Don’t think of an elephant,” what’s the first thing you think of? If you try to block out negative thoughts that will be what you focus on. Just accept that they will arise and then use Lynn’s “flip” technique to turn them back into a positive thoughts.
Don’t eliminate any of your wants because they seem overwhelmingly large. Right now, they may be too big to achieve all at once, but that doesn’t mean you can’t work toward them one step at a time. The greatest truism ever stated is that every journey begins with the first step.
As for the last two books Lynn wrote, depicting her so-called “dark side,” I’m taking the coward’s way out. I’m just not ready to read them yet. I haven’t explored Excuse Me deeply enough to want a diversion into a new train of thought. When I’m ready, I’ll re-open this topic on the blog and be completely honest about my feelings about those final two books.
Please continue to communicate with each other about Lynn’s work and your feelings about her. I will post any comments that don’t offend. I thank you all for contributing to the dialogue about Lynn, who is someone I regard as a very important and influential author.
I wish you happiness and peace of mind.
