In The Zone

What If

I always felt blessed that I lived my life with relatively little anxiety. However, more recently, “anxiety” and I have become acquaintances. The Webster’s Dictionary defines anxiety as “abnormal fear that lacks a specific cause”. I have also heard it defined as worrying about the future or worrying about things that are out of your control. Venturing into a new career path has caused some anxiety to spark up in my everyday life. I have found myself saying, “breath” out loud more than once. Sometimes I think there is actually a little devil in my head that implants these thoughts to purposely drive me crazy!

For example, I hate making phone calls to people I don’t know. This is definitely something I am trying to work on. I won’t even order pizza because I dread the phone so much! Recently, I had to make a phone call to a woman to get some details on a presentation I was doing for her company. As soon as I thought about making the phone call, my mind starting running ahead with “what if’s”: What if she has a question I don’t know the answer to? What if I have to leave her a voicemail and then she doesn’t get back to me right away, should I call again? And if I have to call her again, how long should I wait before I make the call? What if I completely sound like an idiot on the phone and she decides she doesn’t want me to present? What if she isn’t nice? And on and on and on…so even before I picked up the phone, I had already sold myself that the call was going to go horribly wrong and I was going to lose the presentation.

What I came to realize is that I was getting myself all worked up and creating a lot of anxiety because I was letting thoughts creep in that had no absolute truth behind them. I had no idea how this woman on the phone was going to react so why did I automatically have to think the worst case scenario? In reality there are a million other scenarios that could occur. Plus, I was putting all of this energy (and time) into worrying about something that I didn’t have control over. It can be so exhausting!

What if instead of automatically generating negative thoughts or thoughts that produced worry, we pondered on all the wonderful possibilities? Maybe instead of thinking about all the horrible things that could occur in a 5 minute phone conversation, I can focus on the positive things? Or, I can just be in the moment, not in the future nor the past, and leave it up to the Universe to work out for me? Wouldn’t life be so much more enjoyable?