Did you realise that because of anxiety, success is harder to achieve, so even if you are the head of your department, run your own business, been in a committed relationship for over 20 years, if you had never had anxiety, you would be even more successful, and found a route to success both easier and faster?
How do I know?
Well it’s like this.
Do You Want Success or Do You Want To Get Away From Failure?
In NLP in order to understand the motivation needed for success, the trainers focus your attention on something called towards and away from motivation. It’s the strategy we all use to help us attain what we want in life from a glass of water to being the director of your own business. What researchers found was that those who are more successful than the average have higher levels of a towards motivation strategy than their counterparts who have a higher level of an away from motivation strategy.
What this means is that a towards motivation is where you set a goal on what you want, an away from motivation is where you set your goal on what you don’t want, on what you want to avoid or get away from.
So can you see why if you have anxiety, it’s going to be more difficult for you to attain the level of success or change you’re looking for?
No?
Then read on.
Just Help Me To Stop Feeling Like This!
If you suffer from anxiety, albeit, social or generalised, where in order to cope with things you spend most of your brain space plotting how to avoid things, get away from things, get out of things, or not do things, because those ‘things’ trigger your anxiety, then what motivates you isn’t helping you achieve your goals, but helping you avoid your woes, and there’s a difference.
So, if you work for yourself and your thing is that you hate to sell, then you are less likely to go towards making money, but will wait for people to buy, which is less effective, but seemingly a more calming ways to sell your stuff.
If you are in a relationship and the idea of being honest with your partner fills you with horror because if you ask for what you want, (and you know it’s not what they necessarily want) then you risk disapproval or rejection, you may hint, or ‘expect’ them to know what you really want or need, and then to give it to you, and find resentment and other negative emotions starting to drip into your relationship, if they don’t.
If you are a manager and you need to give appraisals and your thing is ‘people pleasing’ to avoid feeling disliked, then you are less likely to want to give negative appraisals because of the fear of being disliked, or confronted.
All these scenarios have one thing in common, they all focus on what you don’t want and what you can do in real time to make sure that thing, you don’t want, doesn’t happen. BUT if you were a more towards motivated person, you would focus on what you do want and your mind would come up with a plan of action to get it, whereas an away from motivation style is to just come up with a plan of action about how to get away from what they do not want.
Can you see that with anxiety, and all the innate worry, fear, apprehension and anticipatory anxiety that comes with it, your focus can’t be on what you want but on what you don’t want, so you can end up anywhere, and this is why success is both longer to obtain, more frustrating and more difficult?
Abuse Happens More Than Once Because Of This
To give a graphic example- I have been watching a drama series called Strike, it’s about a private investigator and how he and his secretary solve cases. The first one in the series involved the apparent suicide of a model, and one of the characters who heard her and saw her fall to her death, was as we found out, being physically and mentally abused by her husband. She was shut out on the balcony of their apartment in her underwear in the freezing cold as punishment.
Later it transpires that when she got married he told her he didn’t want her to work, and he didn’t want children, so with one thing and another she turned to drugs and drink and his way of punishing her for her transgressions was to lock her out in her underwear to make her ‘sorry’.
Anyway, let’s say she had her goals. She finally wanted to get rid and she said to you
Route 1: I don’t want to be with him anymore, he’s abusive, he doesn’t love me and I don’t love him I want to get away from him as quickly as possible.
Or she said
Route 2: I want out of my marriage, it’s not been great and now I want a better life for myself. I want to be able to live in peace and be with someone who truly loves me and I love him.
You later realise that she thinks along route 1- I don’t want x … and you now realise with what I’ve said that she could still end up with another abusive man because her main focus was to get away from her husband. Her goal didn’t say what she wanted but what she didn’t want anymore.
Be Careful For What You Wish, Because What Do You Do If You Get It?
And it would be the same for you. If you find yourself in the same situation despite the changes you’ve made, this is the reason why, because you’ve been focusing your attention on what you don’t want to happen, what you want to stop happening and what you no longer like. All our character had to do was leave her husband and her goal was achieved, but that wouldn’t make her happy or anything else unless she focused on that being her goal.
But you might say, ah Elaine, I’m successful, even more so than my friends who don’t suffer from anxiety, how do you explain that?
What Really Causes Success For Anxiety Sufferers
Since we are only talking about external success, if you suffer from anxiety, not the fleeting type but, the lifelong, ‘I can’t seem to shake’ kind, and you are successful then there will be certain circumstances in which you have become so.
For instance, you can achieve goals but only if you work with someone and they lead and you follow. Or you can give appraisals but only if made to by your manager or legislation depicts. Or, You can make money but only if you make things ‘cheap’ or ‘affordable’ or give special deals. There will always be conditions under which you work well and succeed inspite of yourself and those circumstances will always be external to you.
So if those circumstances that made you successful are taken away, then you will find it more difficult to be successful again. Whereas if you don’t suffer from anxiety, you will have more tools in your tool box to be successful again because you are using more of your internal strengths, something anxiety sufferers do not use, and it’s this that allows success to happen predictably, easily and with less stress.
If You Are Fixed You’ll Suffer All The More
Let me be even more controversial and say that towards type motivation is a more flexible adaptive and easier way to achieve goals. An away type motivation is more fixed, less flexible and a more stressful way to achieve goals, if at all. You and I both know that if you are anxious enough you may never achieve your goals.
So given that you are following me here, what’s to be done about it?
The short answer is to change your away from mindset to that of a towards mindset. But the realistic answer is to work on giving you new perspectives to add to your own, that by hearing them they challenge how you see things now and make you change, by virtue of being made aware of another way to see a situation.
Basically you change your mind.
And if you don’t change your mind, then what you’ll find is that with anxiety, it’s so difficult to focus on what we want and that leads to another set of issues.
Do You Always Do What You’re Not Really Into?
I was doing my own set of belief changes and I had a ah ah! moment. As much as I thought that I focused more on what I wanted out of life, the process always shows me where my true focus lies, and the ah ah came after I asked myself, ‘ Do you always do things when you aren’t hungry to do them?’ and unsurprisingly my answer was a shocking YES.
I found my thoughts focus on all the times I had gone with what others wanted because I didn’t want to not seem friendly or sociable. I ask the other person what they wanted to do so that I wouldn’t seem selfish. I didn’t necessarily say yes when I wanted to say no, but I didn’t always voice what I really wanted to do and ended up doing things that weren’t horrible to do, but not what I would choose to do.
What Are You Willing To Do To Have An Easier Time Of It?
And it’s the same for all of my clients. They come to me to help them better handle their lot, but most of what they are trying to balance is how to do what they most want to do without having the other person confront them, or question them or make life more sticky for them, and so they find that they give in more, placate more, and not get what they want most of the time.
And though in theory it seems nice to put others first, to be agreeable, and easy going, to not mind what you do as long as it’s not something you hate, and not say what you really think to keep the peace, but each time you do so it chips away at your sense of power and you end up feeling as if you aren’t powerful and that you can’t cope or couldn’t cope with life if it got any harder.
So the Message?
What I want you to take from this is living with anxiety is no picnic, and experience has shown that life becomes harder for you because of where you are focused. It’s common sense to know that if you suffer from anxiety you worry more, fear more and have irrational thoughts than if you don’t suffer from anxiety.
Understand that you have the opportunity to choose how you want to respond to events, that’s what all the talking therapies are supposed to help you do. You can’t choose how things will turn out, or what people will say or do, but you can choose how you respond to it and how much you are willing to put up with.
And when you do choose, your life gets so much better especially when you start to be more forward focused and not looking in your rear view mirror hoping to avoid the pot holes you’ve just driven in, whilst not noticing the pot holes up ahead.
Here’s to manoeuvring around those pot holes and keeping your focus on the road ahead.
Speak soon
Elaine
