Pure Inspiration

This column is devoted to sharing stories of success and inspiration with others. If you have a success (big or small) that you would like to share with our newsletter community, please forward a paragraph or two to me with your first name (disguised if you feel the need for more anonymity) and job title and/or the field you work in and I will include it in a future newsletter.

We can all be inspired by stories of success and victory, and it is a way for all of us to celebrate the courage, commitment, and effort we are putting forth to get beyond the limitations of this fear.

Here is a great inspirational video clip with Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love) as she speaks about giving your fear less importance and special attention:   

http://www.oprah.com/oprahstour/Elizabeth-Gilbert-on-the-One-Way-to-Move-Past-Fear-Video

The Mindfulness Solution for Fear and Anxiety

Over the summer I attended a great Mindfulness and Meditation workshop given by Ron Siegel, PsyD, who teaches extensively on the topic of mindfulness. Ron spoke about the importance of strengthening our capacity to bear all of our difficult feelings, including feelings of fear and anxiety, so we become less afraid of these feelings.

While our tendency is to do whatever we can to reduce, avoid and eliminate these unpleasant feelings whenever possible, the mindfulness approach teaches us to accept and allow these difficult feelings. It helps us to increase our capacity to feel whatever we are feeling without trying to run and hide from it. It teaches us to observe our feelings without judgment or trying to control or change what is going on within us.

As we increase our capacity to bear difficult, unpleasant and intense emotion, we naturally become less frightened by these feelings. And, as we become less frightened by these feelings, they naturally begin to ease on their own as we are not fueling our inner discomfort with our fearful reactions to what we are experiencing.

Ron spoke of avoidance behavior playing a big role in the cycle of fear and anxiety as it teaches us to be afraid of our fear, especially when it feels very intense, and to feel overwhelmed and overpowered by it. We try to avoid situations that may provoke these feelings so we can avoid the feelings themselves, as we are afraid we cannot handle such intense emotion.

The antidote to all of this is to allow (and even welcome) the fear and anxiety and practice bearing intense unpleasant emotion. It doesn't sound like much fun, of course, though it actually leads to freedom when you can stop running from these feelings and hoping and wishing the fear will not grab hold of you.

Building your capacity to bear intense, difficult emotion reminds me of lifting heavier weights at the gym. It definitely doesn't feel great at the time, though it makes you stronger and more confident in your strength to bear heavier weight.

One way to increase your ability to bear more intense feelings of fear and anxiety is to practice deliberating creating these feelings through vividly imagining the things you are afraid of. Ron calls this exercise "Stepping into Fear".

The way to do this is to take a few moments to yourself in a quiet place and focus on your breath so you feel grounded. Then begin to think about and imagine a situation you are afraid of (for our purposes, it would relate to speaking or performing). Vividly imagine yourself in this situation. Once you start to feel anxious, ramp it up some more to make it even more frightening to you.

Continue to increase the intensity by making the thoughts and images scarier and scarier until you go as far as you can go in your imagination. (You can imagine more than one situation as you ramp up your fear and anxiety if this helps to increase the intensity of the feelings.)

As you do this exercise, keep breathing, accepting and allowing the increasing discomfort without trying to control it. Focus on increasing your capacity to bear the discomfort rather than make any efforts to reduce or manage the feelings.

While this exercise may sound pretty unpleasant, it can actually begin to give you a sense of freedom as you learn to face and bear these very difficult feelings and learn to not be afraid of what is going on inside of you. Paradoxically, as we allow and accept what is happening within us, and trust in our capacity to handle these difficult feelings, we relax more and don't worry so much about what is happening to us. This ultimately leads to not fearing the fear, which helps free us from the vicious cycle we have been in with our fear.

As an aside, I was listening to a speaker recently who mentioned there is a gene related to a dopamine receptor that allows those people who have this gene to tolerate risk better and have a higher tolerance for fear and anxiety. I would like some of this gene, as I feel I have a pretty low tolerance for feeling fear and anxiety, at least as it relates to public speaking.

For those of us who don't have this gene, it seems like the next best thing is to deliberately build our tolerance for bearing fear and anxiety so we are no longer so afraid of the intensity of these feelings.

If you want to learn more about mindfulness, you can take a look at Ron Siegel's book, The Mindfulness Solution (listed on my web site here) or do some further research on this subject. The practice of mindfulness can enrich your life in many ways, well beyond learning how to work with fear and anxiety and other difficult emotions.

Action Steps:

1. Practice the "Stepping into Fear" exercise to work on increasing your capacity to bear higher levels of fear and anxiety. You can do this a number of times to work on increasing your tolerance for these feelings. Notice if your feelings of "fearing the fear" begin to shift as you learn to better tolerate these uncomfortable feelings. *If you are not able to vividly bring on these feelings in your imagination, no worries. You can also practice this approach any time you have anticipatory anxiety or real-time anxiety related to speaking or performing.

2. Consider taking a Getting Over Stage Fright Workshop and/or having Private Coaching Session(s) with me to help you become much more effective in dealing with this challenge. This provides a great way to break avoidant and self-defeating patterns and helps you move a big step forward in your progress. Please contact me at jesposito@performanceanxiety.com

3. Please take a few moments to write a review of my book(s) and/or CD on www.amazon.com