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Hi there. Welcome back to the podcast. Glad you could be with me. I'm going to walk you through a couple of different coaching sessions today that I did with two different clients, one with social anxiety issues, another with test anxiety issues to illustrate to you a specific strategy that if you can implement it, it can really help you with your anxiety. Okay, so my first client, who I'll call Jenny, she had been struggling with some different social anxiety issues. She'd been feeling really anxious about different interactions with friends. She was a college student, and so she wasn't living at home with her family. She didn't have that family connection support daily. So she was really immersed in this environment where friends were even more important. But she was distressed by the relationships that she had with her friends because she felt like they were not sincere, that her friends were not dependable, and that the relationship wasn't intimate. She couldn't, it was superficial. She couldn't be vulnerable with them. They didn't talk about things that really mattered to her. She didn't feel like she had any real significant support from these friends. And so because of. The unpleasantness of these interactions and relationships. Her tendency was to withdraw and to just not interact with people at all, not be social, but then she would end up feeling unsatisfied and isolated and lonely. And so that wasn't a good option either. So she wanted to coach with me on how to get out of this trapped situation. So I asked her first what were her goals socially, what is it that she imagined as the best case scenario? What is it that she would like to see happen in her social life? And she talked about how what she really wanted was to have friends who would be the kind of friend that she felt like she was. Friends that were dependable. Friends that were sincere. Friends that were real. Now, it was important to ask her what her goals were, because this is gonna be a real key in understanding her emotion of anxiety in the moment. We've also talked about how Our brains are prediction machines, and they tell stories about how this particular situation is going to affect our goals and our needs and our desires. So it's really important to understand what our goals are in the situation if we want to change our emotions. So that's why I asked her what her goals were socially. So when she explained to me that her goal was to have friendships that were dependable and sincere and real, then I knew what goal her brain was using as it predicted the future, how it was measuring the situation. Her brain was saying, how is this situation going to affect my goal of having these types of friendships that I so desire? . So the first way to find a way out of this situation for her was going to be to manipulate this goal that she had, to reframe it and repurpose it toward a different goal where she would have more control.

We started talking about how when we have goals that involve the behavior of other people, that this is going to trigger anxiety because we can't control other people's behavior. And so we're in a realm where we are powerless, and that is gonna make us feel anxious. Remember how anxiety is really related to our brain's appraisal of the demands and the resources? And if the demands in the situation look too big for our resources, then we will go into anxiety. So when we have a goal that has to do with other people's behavior, we'll feel anxious because the demands in this situation are too much for our resources. We don't have the resources to control other people's behavior and so we will feel anxious. So I talked to her about really the first step was learning how to find a goal that would address her behavior. Not the other people's behavior. So to help her start thinking in this vein, I asked her to imagine herself in 30 years. She was in her twenties at this point. So in 30 years she would be in her fifties, think of herself in her fifties, and think of herself looking back on her college experience at that point, and, and ask herself, you know, what would that future version of me want to have remembered? what kind of a friend would she want to have been if she's looking back on it later? So she thought about it for a while and she realized that she wants to be a dependable friend and she will want to have done fun things with other people during this college time. These were two goals that she came up with that regarded her own behavior, her own choices.

So we started to zoom in on these goals a little bit more. These goals are going in the right direction because they're focusing on more on her sphere of control. But these two goals I explained to her are really about outcomes. They're about results, right? Especially this one about doing fun things with other people. When we have a goal that is related to a result, we're gonna have less control than if we have a goal that is related to the journey or the process toward that result. Because in an outcome, there's a lot of elements we don't con, we don't control. For example, this goal of having done a lot of fun things with other people, in that goal there includes the behavior of other people, right? Whether or not they're gonna accept it, whether or not they're gonna have fun with you at the same time. So there's elements in that goal that she wouldn't control. So, so I really started to help her hone in on thinking about the journey rather than the result. The process rather than the outcome. And when I, when we talk about process goals, we're really talking about specific actions that you can take this week, next week, in this month to take steps toward this outcome that you have in mind. But we're focusing on the journey and not on the end point. So I asked her, now this, this idea of you wanting to be this dependable friend, what are some specific actions? We're focusing on the when, what, and, and how of some specific actions that you could take in the next month that would help you to make progress toward this idea that you have that, that you would like to achieve. And she thought about it and realized that she could, to be this dependable friend, she could sit down and organize the rest of her semester and get it all out on paper when she had what test and what assignments so that she could know ahead of time what her time constraints were, so that she would know what social time she would have so that she could be dependable in her social invitations and in accepting or not different invitations that she received. This was a way that she came up with to schedule her own time so that she could be a dependable person. So this was a specific action in the a specific process oriented goal that she could implement to be this dependable friend.

We moved on to the other idea that she had of wanting to have done a lot of fun things with other people. I asked her, what are some specific actions that you can take in the next month toward this idea, toward this desire that you have to do fun things with other people? And she realized that after having sat down and organized her semester and looked at her schedule and her calendar and knowing what her time constraints and her commitments would be that she could schedule an activity in the next month to invite some friends to, like a game night at her house. So she continued thinking about the different process oriented goals that would help her toward these two things that she had come up with. This idea of being dependable, this idea of doing fun things, to make the list longer, so that she could focus on her own choices. And this really helped her to switch out of that trapped victim anxiety spot where she was socially, to focus on the, the sphere where she was powerful, where she had control.

Let me tell you about another client who was dealing with some test anxiety. We'll call him Mike. He was also a college student, he was nearing the end of his semester and feeling really anxious. He only had a couple weeks left in the semester feeling really anxious about it. He told me about how he had some really important tests coming up and that he feels like he overthinks and second guesses himself on tests and doesn't test well. So he was really worried about that. So again, we started by asking, what is your ideal scenario? What is your goal? What is the thing that you would like most of all here? And he said, well, he wanted to be able to end the semester strong, meaning, you know, I, I asked him to unpack that a little bit more, and he realized that he wanted to do really well on these crucial tests that were coming up. There were tests that were going to determine, in some ways, a large part of his opportunities in the future. And so he really wanted to do well on these tests, but that he was worried about it because of these issues that he had where he would get anxious and not test well in the moment. So again here, see how I did the same thing where I asked what was his ideal scenario so that we could see what his goals were in the situation that his brain was using to measure this situation? So his goal was to do really well on this final test, right? That was an outcome that he wanted. So now we know this is the goal his brain is using to predict the future in this situation. And he's feeling anxious, which means that with this goal in mind, his brain feels like the demands are too much for his resources. So we're gonna try and do the same thing here that we did with Jenny, where we are going to try and help his brain get into focusing on what is actually within his control. So again, we talked here about the difference between outcomes and processes and how when your goals are related to outcomes, like doing really well on this final test, you will feel anxiety because there's a lot of things involved in that outcome that you can't control. He can't control what questions are gonna be on the test. He can't control what the test environment is going to be like on that day. He can't even totally control how he's gonna feel in the morning when he wakes up. If he will have felt, feel really rested, if he'll feel like he has had great sleep. I mean, there's some things he could do to make that more likely, but it's, there's a lot of different elements in this situation that he can't 100% control. And so when you don't have control, the demands look really big, your resources don't look big enough, and you feel anxiety. So I talked about how we should focus instead on setting a process oriented goal. So again, the process oriented goal focuses on the what, when, and how of specific actions that he can take to make steps toward this outcome that he envisions. But he's focusing on the process and on the journey, not on the end point. So first we talked about what, what are some process oriented goals that can help you toward the test? Well, one thing he came up with was to study really well, but that was something he was already doing. That was something that he already had implemented. It was a habit. It was under control, so that wasn't going to be the focus where we would really reduce his anxiety. So I asked him to think about the moment of the test. What about, in that moment when you're testing, what are some process oriented goals, some actions that you can take in that moment, toward this goal of being able to do your best on the test? He said, well, I can go with my first intuition about the answer instead of second guessing myself, and I can have a goal to limit my time on each question, to look at the total time that I have in the test, and And allot a certain period of time for each question, and not allow myself to go over that amount of time for each question. He did that during his test and it helped him tremendously with the anxiety that he felt in the moment and helped him to test better.

So I use these two illustrations to help you to understand how a lot of times when you're in a situation feeling anxiety, it can be all different types of anxiety, social anxiety, test anxiety, you name it, any type of anxiety, probably you have a goal in that situation that your brain is measuring the situation against, a goal that is not within your control. It's a goal that involves a lot of other elements that you can't determine. So you're probably focusing on some type of an outcome rather than on the process, rather than on the journey, the steps that you could take, the specific time goals, specific strategies, specific habits that you can implement in the next weeks. So sometimes just explaining the principle doesn't help that much, but seeing the examples can really help you to understand how it works. So try this for yourself. A lot of times when you first start out, it can be kind of tricky to figure out how to extract your own story that your brain is telling and how to extract from that story your goal that your brain is measuring the situation against. And that's where coaching can be really helpful. Sign up for a couple of coaching sessions and I can help you through this initial process. Once you start to get the idea of it, then you can start to do it on your own. But I wanted to make sure you understood how this works so that, so that you can see that this is something that you can do that will really change your relationship with the situation that you're in, just by rethinking your goals, repurposing them. Framing them in a way that sees specific actions within your control and how you can implement them.

That's my idea for you today. Thanks for listening. Now we'll have our kindness narrative. Please stay tuned. It will help you with your gratitude practice, which gives you a myriad of benefits. If you want to turn those benefits up by a hundred, submit your own kindness narrative. It will really help us and it will, even more, it will help you. Thanks a lot for listening and bye-bye.

My mom passed away four years ago and she was just a really good person and just showed us so much love. And when we knew that she was going to pass away, she gave me several papers and notebooks, things that she needed me to have. And one of them was a notebook full of some pieces of family history that she had been working on, 'cause she liked to do that and she knew that I like to do it too. And so she gave it to me and she said, these are the things that, that still need work. I need you to work on these in the years to come, and start at the last page because that was the most recent. So start on that page and then go backwards. And I, and I said, okay. And then after she passed away, I, I had kind of put all this in the, in the corner and hadn't looked at it as she was passing away. But then she passed away and several weeks after she passed away, I got these papers and this notebook out, and this notebook with the family history. I flipped to the last page. And then I turned from the last page to the second to last page, and on the bottom of the page she had written Mom Loves Susie, and that's my name. And she had taken arrows and drawn arrows at it and drawn exclamation points all over it. And I can just picture when she knew that she was dying and she just wanted to write this little teeny message as, as a way of reaching beyond the grave to me to remind me that she loved me. And I was so grateful, not only just to have such a good mother who loved me so much, but that she would take the time in her sickness and pain and in that death process to reach out to me. So just so grateful for that.