Overcoming Anxiety – The Process
Overcoming anxiety is a process not a quick fix. It has many parallels to a course of antibiotics.
Antibiotics
- Fast relief from symptoms
- Failure to complete the course may result in symptoms returning
- You must follow the prescription. You cannot speed up the process by taking all of the tables in half of the number of day
Overcoming Anxiety
- Fast relief from symptoms
- Failure to complete the course may result in symptoms returning.
- It’s tempting to end the process as soon as you are feeling better. This is akin to trying to remove a rose bush from your garden by cutting off the flower heads. Unless you take it out by the roots then the roses will return every single time.
- Trying to speed up the process is usually counter productive.
The structure of the programme
While a series of 12 sessions is normal, if you are experiencing severe anxiety then we may see each other more often in the early part of the programme.
Stage 1 – Therapeutic intervention
Objective: Reduce symptoms quickly
- Approach is tactical and practical
- Expected result:
- You will be feeling much better in short space of time (starting to notice benefits usually in as few as 1-2 sessions)
- Your progress will be measurable using more than 30 metrics
If you fully engage in the process you will be entitled to a money back guarantee that you will have made significant and measurable progress in 4-6 weeks.
I’m feeling better, why should I continue?
Anxiety is not a random event. It has a cause and unless that cause is dealt with then the anxiety will return.
If your car has a flat tyre you can’t drive it. While you can pump it back up and be driving again within minutes if the tyre has a puncture it will go down again every single time.
Anxiety is usually caused by a metaphorical puncture. So as valuable, and necessary, as stage 1 is, its purpose is managing symptoms and building coping mechanisms not fixing the problem. To extend the metaphor, stage 1 is about getting enough air into the tyre to get you to the garage.
Anxiety robs you of your quality of life. Managing symptoms doesn’t give you back that quality, in fact just the opposite. Constantly managing symptoms creates an additional drain on your time and mental energy.
That is why we move onto stage 2 which is where we address the underlying cause.
Stage 2 – Personal Coaching
Objective: For you to become the kind of person who doesn’t get anxious in the first place.
There is a simple equation. If you don’t get anxious then you don’t need to waste time and mental resources in managing symptoms.
Our approach moves from being a therapeutic intervention to that of a coaching relationship. The work that we do, and the process that we follow are now 100% bespoke.
The structure of our time together moves from tools and techniques and becomes a series of coaching conversations.
You may have come across this famous Einstein quote:
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
That is so true of anxiety. In general if you want to become less anxious you need to change the way that you think about certain things.
During a coaching conversation I will challenge your thinking. Not because I believe it’s wrong (that’s not my business to judge you in that way.) I will ask you the questions that you haven’t thought to ask yourself. We will explore what, and how, you think. I’ll invite you to reflect on whether your thinking is resulting in your experience of life being the way that you want it to be. If it’s not then I’ll help you to come up with a different way of thinking and responding.
The goal is not simply for me to be your life coach. My job is to teach you how to be your own life coach. Some forms of therapy and coaching build a dependence on the therapist. That does you no good. I’ve done my job well when you no longer need me.
The End Game
Our high level goals have been reached when:
- Panic attacks are a thing of the past
- You have the tools to become your own anxiety coach
- Your thinking has changed
- You may experience some anxious thought or anxious feelings from time-to-time, everybody does. You understand what normal experience and accept it as a part of life
- If, at any time, you experience anything outside of what you would consider normal, you now understand why you are thinking or feeling that way. You have simple and effective ways to deal with it. No fuss, no drama.
This is not about trying to create a fairy tale life where nothing ever worries you and nothing ever stresses you. There will always be challenges and frustrations.
This is about creating a better way to live. When you feel happy or content more often than you feel stressed, when you start to enjoy the things that used to wind you up, when you find it easy to really switch off, when you no longer get upset about other people’s actions, when you can find joy and pleasure in everyday situations then life takes on a whole new meaning.
My goal for you is not zero anxiety. There is so much more to life than an absence of feeling bad.
My goal for you is to feel happy because happy people are rarely, if ever, anxious.