How to worry less and reach your goals sooner

What is worry, anyway?

Worry is a verb.

Worry: to give way to anxiety or unease; allow one’s mind to dwell on difficulty or troubles.

So it feels active. And because you’re a guy, and a creative guy at that, you want to Get Stuff Done. Which means you live in verb-land; the zone of doing. And worrying feels like you’re doing something. It feels active.

But you’re not actually doing anything meaningful. You’re mostly standing still. Just because worry is a verb doesn’t mean it’s active. If you stop and think about this for a minute, you know it’s true. Worry is more like standing still while biting your nails. Which technically is doing something, yes: but come on, man.

Wouldn’t you rather actually move the project forward?

You can.

The first step is to formally acknowledge your worry. Which means, write it down. Until you write down what you’re worrying about, you’ll be playing in the NFL, (The Negative Feedback Loop) which is where professional worriers go to stand still and bite their nails.

Once you write it down, you can see it for what it is, and you can also do something about it.

Let’s look at an example.

Time to get up.

Let’s say you want to be more fit. And yet day after day you somehow don’t seem to actually do the exercises that would make you more fit.

So what do you do instead? You sit on the couch after dinner and occassionally pinch the fat growing around your middle. In other words, you worry.

It’s time to get up. Get up off that couch and do some pushups and situps. But that seems silly, right? It’s not the grand scheme of ordering the Peloton or going to the gym.

This is what’s holding you back: letting the grand scheme get in the way of taking one small step toward your goal.

The takeaway:

Stop worrying and get up. Take one small step toward your goal, and feel the momentum begin to build.

Read more.

I can help you worry less and reach your goals sooner.