An anxious person is a person who worries about future pain. An anxious person is usually a person with a hypervigilant mind, meaning they think about everything that needs to be done, and all the potential probabilities of a situation, and all the problematic variables that could come from that situation in the future. A hypervigilant mind is a torture chamber without control, with control it’s a massive asset.
Worrying about the future in itself is not a bad thing, without a healthy sense of fear you’ll make bad decisions and not properly prepare yourself for what lies ahead. But too much anxiety means you suffer more than you have to.
To get your mind right you need to focus on 2 things:
1. Automation
The best thing you can do as an anxious person is to put your life on autopilot through getting insanely organized. All I do is wake up, look at my Wunderlist app, and do what it tells me to do. I know that all I have to do to get to all my goals and prevent future problems is to get my tasks handled for that day. Because all my goals are accounted for, and all future problems are projects I’m working on, all I have to do is wake up to win the day by getting my tasks done. You can see how to set everything up in my book how to get organized.
It’s the same way Walmart or Amazon works, Jeff Bezos isn’t sitting around worried about one of his warehouses not delivering a cat toy, he pushed through that in the early days by building the world’s best business systems, and now he has a team of top performers to constantly be tweaking and optimizing those systems. But your life is less complicated than Amazon shipping, and you only need one top performer monitoring that system every quarter – YOU.
2. Action dependence
Action dependence is a bridge between outcome dependence and outcome independence. Both outcome dependence and outcome independence are psychological strategies for approaching potentially stressful situations that cause many people to worry, like approaching women or doing sales calls.
Outcome dependence guys will tell you to worry, be hard on yourself and beat up on yourself for not closing. Outcome dependence guys close more girls and make more money in sales then outcome independence guys, but the price to pay for it is constant worry and periods of self hatred.
Outcome independence guys will tell you to detach yourself from the outcome, and because of this will never close as many deals as guys who go hard. Also the idea of outcome independence is a fallacy, in every scenario you want things to go a certain way, and in some scenarios you are dependent on outcome.
It’s easy to believe you’re “zen” and outcome independent when you’re talking to some girl on the street who doesn’t want to give you her number, it’s a different situation entirely where you need to close a big client to hit your revenue targets, and if you don’t hit target that month you’re going to be fired, in that situation you’re very much dependent on that outcome to eat.
Often times guys who are very outcome dependent live in constant stress, and guys who think they’re outcome independent often don’t properly prepare for the future, don’t manage their pipelines properly and don’t go hard enough.
The solution to that type of stress is action dependence. Using sales as an example, you create a sales system for closing deals, from marketing spend, prospecting, to work output, to the pitch, features and benefits, objection management, all the way down to your closes. You know to the letter how much you need to spend on marketing, how many calls you need to make per day, what you need to say on each call, and that you push for the close 5 to 7 times using creative high converting closes…and if that fails, you drop your pants and offer a discount.
When you have a top quality sales system in place, on top of a top quality life management system in place, all you have to do is follow the process. So instead of focusing on all the fear and pressure you feel on a sales call, focus on the actions you take. You focus on the pitch, pacing your prospect’s reality, isolating his objection and managing it, reiterating the benefits, asking for the close, pulling back to features and benefits and then gearing up to close #2 all the way until you hear a yes, a hard no, or you schedule a callback.
When you’re action dependent you know that all you have to do is follow your process to a T, push for your 5 to 7 closes every time, and good things will happen even if you don’t close that particular client, because you have a good system. And you don’t have to worry about what you should have said, or beat yourself up, or worry about your future, because you know that as long as you continue to take the right actions every day, you’ll succeed and get the good things you want out of life.
If you can’t close that day, you recognize that of course you wanted to close the deal, but you didn’t. You don’t allow yourself to argue at reality by being angry. And you don’t project future pain on yourself in the present by worrying. You release both those thought patterns and replace them with the idea that you followed your system, did everything correctly, left everything on the table, and all you have to do is consistently keep following that system and you will succeed. You worry only as much as necessary and no more then that.
It’s simple when you think about it, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. Any time you’re changing a thought pattern you can expect hundreds if not thousands and negative recurring thoughts that need to be reframed. One reframe isn’t difficult, it’s staying aware every minute of every hour of how you’re feeling and being vigilant with worrying no more then necessary. So in summary, automate, systemize, focus on taking the right actions not on feeling fear, and worry no more then is productive.
