How to Shift Anxiety

Transcript

Hey guys! For coaches, practitioners and healers, here is a little bit of an understanding for you around anxiety and worry.

I just shared it in a live group coaching call for a program that I ran with Bianca on Food Freedom.

And this is the kind of information that I will be able to share with you in the Growth Collective, which is opening tomorrow for the Lion’s Gate.

I’m super excited to open this up for you tomorrow and share more information like this.

So, the structure of anxiety, let’s look at it and unpack it so that you know how to help unwind it for your clients.

The thing about learning and doing training and improving your professional knowledge is that it helps you save time.

It helps save you time going around and around in circles with your clients, trying to figure out what’s going on, trying to figure out how to help them and trying to help them make a change.

You can go around and around in circles trying to figure it out yourself, or you can learn the system and the structures that underpin certain things that are pretty common across human brains and the way human brains process things.

Here’s a structure for anxiety that will help you with your clients.

Anxiety. The structure of it is making a mental picture in your mind about a negative future, creating a future that is worse than your current situation.

And so then when you make this big big movie in your mind of some negative future of something bad happening, which may have been influenced by something bad happening in your past, so you take that something bad happening in your past and you imagine it happening in your future.

Then there’s a few different ways that you can unwind it.

But what happens is that when you play that movie in your mind, your sympathetic nervous system gets all, “Arghhh!!!” Like stressed out. Cortisol runs through your body, your prefrontal cortex turns off, you can’t think straight and your lizard brain goes on overdrive of like, “How can I keep things safe?”

So you shut down certain responses and you start to stress out. Maybe your breathing changes. Lots of different things.

There’s a few different ways that we can start to unwind anxiety from a multi-faceted approach.

From a coaching approach, here’s one.

We want to understand the structure of awfulising, like making a problem bigger than it needs to be bigger than it is.

There’s three processes that happen when we awfulise something, when we catastrophize over it and make it bigger than it needs to be.

1. You take the problem and you make it personal.

“Oh my god, this bad thing happened. I’m a bad person. I did this bad thing.”

“I’m really awful. This is awful. I can’t do this.”

“I’m a terrible person. I can’t believe I did this.”

When you make something personal then you’re taking one problem or one mistake and making it about you. And that’s one way that anxiety makes things worse.

2) You make it pervasive.

So there’s this one thing that’s happened:

“I didn’t eat a healthy meal”
“Oh, I missed my exercise session”
“Oh god, I’m such a fat slob. I’m so lazy.”

You take that one particular problem or that one mistake or that one “bad” choice and say, “This is awful. My whole life is awful.” You make it pervasive through different areas of your life.

3) You make it permanent through time.

“Oh my god, I didn’t do this right.”
“Oh my god, I’ll always do this.”
“I’m so awful. I’m such a failure.”

There is one word that can counteract these three processes.

Want to know what the word is?

It’s just.

This is just this thing. It’s not you. It’s just this choice. It’s just this area of your life. There are other areas of your life that are wonderful.

Like, what are the wonderful things that are happening in your life simultaneously to this problem?

It’s just this one area and it’s just for now. It’s just now. This too shall pass.

So just starts to shrink down that awfulising process that can blow out your anxiety.

That’s one way from a coaching approach.

From a kind of neurophysical approach, we could do some deep breathing with a focus on the out-breath.

From a biological approach, you go, “Okay, so I can have this anxious movie in my mind, but if I do this deep breathing with a focus on the out-breath….” you will activate the vagus nerve, activate the parasympathetic nervous system.

When you focus on the out-breath, then it shifts your body from sympathetic of like there is danger into parasympathetic.

“I’m safe. “ Like it physiologically tells your body you are safe.

So take some deep breaths with me now.

If you’re watching this, lord knows you’re probably carrying some stress.

The other way is focusing on dropping your jaw.

A lot of times we can clench our teeth and have tension in our jaw that tells our body that we need to grip onto something, white-knuckle grip it.

So just drop your shoulders, drop the back of your jaw so that can unwind anxiety from a physiological standpoint

From a mental picture and mental self-talk standpoint, anxiety is making these big pictures of bad things happening in the future.

What you could do if you’re tuned into those mental movies is become aware of the movie that you’re playing and start to shift the movie that you’re playing.

You get to shift the movie that you’re playing by shrinking it down. This is using submodalities from NLP.

You could shrink the movie down and imagine that it’s far away. You could turn it into a
black and white movie. You could make it sepia like it’s some old Western movie

So you then reclaim the power of being the director of your own mind movies.

When you shrink it down and you make it sepia, or maybe you might like to put yourself in a funny costume and make it ridiculous, then your body doesn’t feel anxious. It might start to feel peaceful or even like, “This is funny.”

When you remember that you are the director of your mind movies then you could create different mind movies. You could create a future where the positive thing happened rather than the negative.

And so then when you go into shifting that like, “Imagine what would happen when this goes right?”

The NLP process for unwinding anxiety is going out into the future to just a few seconds after the successful completion of whatever it is that you’re anxious about.

If you’re anxious about giving a speech, go out in your kind of time-traveling mind out to after the successful completion of your speech.

You can’t be anxious about your speech because you just did it. Right?

So we get to control, we get to have precision about how we use this amazing body-mind tool that we get to experience life with.

And when you have precision around how you can operate your machinery – the machinery of your body, the machinery of your mind, the machinery of your breath
and your emotions – then you get to have a better life and you get to support your clients in having a better life.

This is the kind of information that I’m going to be sharing in the Growth Collective.

The Growth Collective

The Growth Collective is an ongoing monthly membership for coaches, healers, practitioners, personal trainers, who want to move into health coaching.

If you are actively coaching others, whether you are trained or untrained, and you would like to gain more precision in how you approach different problems that your clients face and understand different approaches and different modalities…

And you would like to be supported in a non-judgmental supportive space that supports all different modalities and respects that one problem could be approached in hundreds of different ways and every different way has validity and importance…

And if you care about making a difference for your clients and you would like to learn how to get better and more precise. Just upgrading your skills…

If you’d like to learn how to get better, to grow yourself personally and professionally, then keep an eye out for the Growth Collective.

I am doing a soft launch of the membership tomorrow. There will be specials. It’s a low monthly membership. And we’re going to have live group coaching supervision calls where you can bring your client issues.

I’ve got 15 years of experience as an NLP coach, meta-coach, ph360 coach, Theta healer, Spiral practitioner, all of the things, so I can support you with my knowledge and experience – and we’re creating a collective of coaches, healers and practitioners who want to support others to help others and get better along the way

I’d love to see you there!

If you liked this tip and you would like more, then keep an eye out for the Growth Collective and I will share it with you tomorrow on the Lion’s Gate.

So exciting!

I’ll speak to you soon.

Kylie x