Hey professionals! When I was 19 I started struggling with anxiety and I mastered it to
the extent that I became high functioning but I still struggled with anxiety for 20 years.
In this video I'm going to tell you that story and in telling it to you I'm going to tell you
about seven really powerful lessons that I learned from that experience,
and more importantly the transformational thing that I wished I'd learned earlier.
My name's steve and I coach professional people just like you to create a happier
and more successful experience of your life and work. And a good place to start is with my
simple free 5-step process for mastering stress in the moment. So picture this I was 19. It was
my second year at university and up to that point I had been, yes, a serious-minded individual,
but also a free-spirited individual. What I mean by that is that yes I worked hard, I took my work
and results seriously but I lived in the world like a free-spirited soul, like I didn't have any
serious responsibilities. Now although I'd been working hard and had done pretty well at this
point it's fair to say that I developed the habit of doing things late rather than early and I was
getting a little bit complacent, and one night quite unexpectedly round about three o'clock in
the morning I woke up in a massive panic about my upcoming exams. It's like I suddenly realized how
close they were getting and I felt ill-prepared. It suddenly looked like there was a mountain
I had to climb and I felt overwhelmed, so with a massive sense of urgency I lurched at getting back
in front. I drunk too much caffeine, had too much sugar, and I burned too much midnight oil, and I
crashed. Physically and emotionally I crashed. My personality felt suddenly bent out of shape as if
a sheet metal over the edge of a table got whacked with a hammer. And as I came out of that crash
I had about a year or two of suffering really quite bad depression and anxiety. Now I got
through those exams and I actually did pretty well but I shredded myself doing it. And when I came
through the other side of that I made a decision. I decided I was never ever gonna let that happen
again. So having averted what seemed to me like a near-miss catastrophe I decided that for my third
year at university I was gonna get in front and I was gonna be super organized. I decided that
I was going to read ahead of the lectures rather than read behind them so that I was going into the
lectures with a pretty good grounding of what we were going to learn and the lecture itself would
close the gaps rather than be fresh learning that would have gaps. And I decided that if
there were going to be assignments I would do those assignments as early as possible not as
late as possible, so I'd go into my lectures having pre-read the material and when there was
assignment I'd pretty much go straight away to the library to do that assignment while it was
still fresh. Now that habit had tremendous results for me. I experienced my third year at university
as the easiest year I'd ever had in education even though it was meant to be the hardest,
and I got tremendous results in my final exams. Now here's the thing. None of that was because
I was especially clever. In actual fact I am not especially clever. I'm actually quite slow
on the uptake a lot of the time. It's because I got organized and I got proactive. That's all
it was. It was getting disciplined and doing things sooner rather than later.
So that was the first thing that I learned, that a great way to overcome overwhelm is to get in front
of your work. In a way this is where the anxiety I guess kind of served me. Now don't get me wrong,
it's not that I was happy to have anxiety. I would much sooner have discovered this without having
it, but it did thrust me with a sense of urgency, with a need to change those habits. Now that
habit which I learned through that third year at university still serves me today and I've enjoyed
a lot of professional success as a consequence of it, but here's the thing: it didn't actually deal
with the anxiety. So if the first lesson was to get in front of the workload, lesson number two
was that that actually doesn't make the anxiety go away. I hoped it might but in the same way that
stockpiling money doesn't actually make you more secure around money, getting in front of your work
doesn't actually make you feel more secure about life. Now I would get anxious about all kinds of
things. What if people don't like me? What if my work isn't really good enough? What if there are
sea changes happening in my industry that I'm not staying in front of? And despite doing well I was
on edge pretty much most of the time for the next calamity that would be creeping upon me from my
blind spot. Now in time when with no particular work other than patience the frequency and
intensity of those anxious feelings did diminish, but if I veered too close to what looked to me
like another possible close call calamity I could get yanked right back into it. Now to other people
they would see things I would get anxious about and they would know that actually that's not
worth sweating over, so lesson three, what you get anxious about isn't necessarily rational. It's not
worth getting anxious about and if you can build good relationships with people who can
spot you doing that point it out to you and pull you back, do so. I found it useful and
I know you can do it. And related to that is my fourth lesson which is that time helps, but it is
slow and you can get yanked back very easily. Now my twenties came to an end and I had a sub-optimal
experience of those years because of this anxiety. They could have been the best years of my life,
and my thirties were disappearing too. By the way if you're enjoying this video so far do give it
the thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe to the channel and click the notifications bell so that
you'll get notified when new content arrives. I didn't always show that I could get anxious.
A lot of people wouldn't have known. As the years go on you learn to live with it you get on with
it, you don't always show it, even though it's an unpleasant experience. And it's also partly
because, I learned this as lesson number five by the way, that you can develop things that you
are good at and you are confident doing them, even though you get anxiety. I became a really
confident it professional and I knew my territory. I also became a really confident public speaker,
which is kind of funny because public speaking is something that most people do get anxious about.
I was good at it and I loved it but I was the one labeled as anxious. Well I was anxious, just about
other things. Now I mentioned that my twenties disappeared and my thirties were disappearing
and I hadn't achieved the inner peace and the deep down happiness that I really wanted.
Part of me even feared that if I did, I would lose that drive and that motivation that made
me so good at some things. People recommended things to me nlp, meditation, spiritual practices.
Now at first I rejected all that because I thought this fluffy mind stuff probably wouldn't work,
but also I started to think that maybe I actually needed my anxiety. And that's the
sixth thing I learned from this experience, that you can develop a sort of stockholm syndrome
with your anxiety and make fear-based excuses for not doing anything about it. Now I'm fortunate. I
won't say lucky because I don't think it was luck, but I started to see that it was possible to live
and work from a deeper and more peaceful ground of being and I started to connect with people who
could show me that. I started doing work with my coaches and my teachers. Now lots of people
out there promise quick fixes and silver bullets and there are plenty of rapid change techniques
out there, but for change at the deep level that I was looking for, it did take some time,
but with work, and by the way although I use the word work I'm not sure it's the right word because
it wasn't really effortful, but it did require some consistency and it involved things like
peaceful meditations, deep inquiries, mind work and opening up to new emotional experiences.
And the cumulative effect of that work was that I became more peaceful. I can't really pinpoint a
moment where it happened but I started to realize that I was there. And I continued to deepen that
work. Now I'm not going to say that I'm perfect and I don't think perfection is even a thing with
this work, but certainly from where I started if it was here I moved a long way. And that's the
seventh thing I learned in this experience, that it might not be instant results but with work you
can develop a deeper and more peaceful ground of being to live and work from, and what I discovered
is that when you do that, when you live and work from a deeper and more peaceful ground of being,
not only do you feel healthier in your mind and in your emotions but it actually improves your
results it increases your impact and influence in the world, because you get this sense of
clear mind, clear thought, clear intention, and that space for clear action action coming from
groundedness and clarity rather than fear, ego and insecurity. Now I don't believe in regrets because
that's like carrying around all baggage that weighs you down, however if I could have given my
19 year old self a piece of advice it would have been to start with this work much sooner. Now if
you'd be interested in talking with me about this I would love to hear from you, but also watch this
video up here about when we can't stop thinking about work, or if you've already watched that
video then watch this video down here instead. This is steve wishing you health and happiness.