On January 1st, 2005, I had a sort of personal awakening. Many changes were being thrust upon me, and I had to make some bold decisions. Well, actually, I had just one decision, and that was to stop waiting for someone else to make my dream come true, and finally start being– however ignorant I may have been on the subject– that which I always wanted to be. And that was, an author and speaker.
Since that day, it has been an up and down ride. On the ups, I had premieres of my orchestral kid shows in Sweden, Australia, Guam, and The Bahamas. And I’ve managed to publish three books which people seem to like. That’s not bad.
But this has also been a journey that has had its share of downsides. When you get off the industrial salary system, your income arrives in “lumps.” And every once in while I have found myself in what can perhaps be called a “dire” situation, of wondering just exactly how I am going to manage to pay the bills. And typically, when that question comes up and there is no obvious answer to it, I have often felt this horrific wave of terror washing over my body and spirit.
Fear can be a great motivator, but since I am already working at full tilt, and doing everything I can possibly think of to make my life happen, this fear surge adds no extra performance/ output advantage. It just sucks energy out of me. So I got to wondering if I could manage this better. Since all my “life management” training to date has been horrible, I figured I could do no worse.
It dawned on me today that even though I have had these moments of terror on numerous occasions, the vision of the “worst case scenario” that brings it on has never once materialized. Something unexpected has always happened to stave off disaster. I could tell you amazing stories of this happening in the past, sometimes in the form of what I can only describe as divine intervention.
So I have come to realize that when I get in those positions where I can’t see a solution to a life/ budget problem right now, this does not mean that the solution does not exist. It just means that I cannot see it. And let’s face it, there are a LOT of solutions to a LOT of problems that so far NO ONE has been able to see. So there is no shame in not seeing all the answers right this minute. And I must retrain my mind to accept that.
Next, I am starting to think that these panic attacks have three causes.
One is training and tradition. Telling people to be afraid of the unknown it is a handy way of motivating people to do unpleasant work. They will much more readily accept a lesser station in life if you can get them to always focus on the limited (and seemingly more important) goal of avoiding worse circumstances. So anyone in upper management is always motivated to emphasize the infinite dire consequences of not following their orders.
Next is the misuse of the properties of fear itself. Fear is designed to either accelerate or slow down all other emotions. If I am trying to somehow stop the imagined negative energies from coming any closer by “playing possum” and freezing all my emotional energy, well, that will also serve to freeze my positive emotional energies– those that are hard at work right now drawing the distant unseen solution towards me.
Third, I used to think that my anxiety attacks were a natural reflexive response to external forces and they were beyond my control, but now I am starting to think that my fear is actually a strategy. I may, out of habit and training, be choosing to induce the fear myself as a means, however lousy it may be, of solving the problem. For example, “here, I am making myself feel really terrible by filling myself with feelings of sorrow/horror, so you needn’t hurt me any further.” This is best fix that a six year old can come up with. I think I can do better now.
In the “poor kid” school I attended, I was relentlessly taught to be terrorized when solutions are not obvious, even in such minor problems as homework not done. This usually drove me to a quick fix of someone else’s high price solution. But I see now, inducing that feeling of horror in hopes of it yielding some fix to the problem is just a lousy management technique in general.
Let’s choose to stay calm and work the problem. Fear an anxiety are not going to make me smarter, luckier, or more attractive. As a solution, it’s a lousy choice.
© Justin Locke
