Today I'm going to reveal a book that is about to rock your world. Hello my name
is Clare and I'm a chartered psychologist with a doctorate in
clinical psychology and this is Generation Calm where you can learn to
reduce your stress and anxiety naturally in your own time so that your mind and
body feel great. Okay so the book I'm talking about is
Alter Ego by Todd Herman. So Todd Herman is a high performance
coach who works with athletes, he works with ambitious entrepreneurs ,he works
with these high-flying executives but there is one idea that he presents in
this book that I think is highly relevant for people with stress or
anxiety especially like a specific phobia like driving anxiety. It's all
about one idea about the alter ego which can help you kind of sidestep your fear
and start performing really well right now like you could use it this instant
and it would work for you that's what I'm really excited about. So sometimes
when you're anxious it's hard to be your true self, your anxious self kind of
takes over and you play small and you kind of sit on the sidelines. But you
could use an alter ego to step out of yourself for just a moment and perform
at your absolute best and let me show you very briefly some of the principles
in this book that can help you today. So decide on an alter ego that is specific
to you. So this could be a character of a book or fictional character in a movie,
it could be a superhero or a celebrity, it could be a family member it could
even be a combination of all the above it doesn't matter as long as this is
unique to and special to you. Because this alter
ego is who you're going to channel when you're finding times tough. So your second
task is to then figure out what the attributes of that particular person is.
So let's say for example you've chosen a celebrity like Helen Mirren, you might
think to yourself okay well she's very strong,
she's a go-getter, she says it like it is. And what I want you to do is get to that
point where you think to yourself oh well what would Helen Mirren do or what
would Dolly do what would Batman do? Now number three, task 3 is the final task
see see how simple this is. Find a totem for your alter-ego I'm
going to show you mine. It's a pen right! Sparkly pen, I'm not telling you who my
alter-ego is yet I'm not ready to reveal her but this is the totem that makes me
think of that person and I bring this pen out when I need to channel her
attributes. So when you're presented with a tricky situation, let's say you're
driving in a new town or you've got a meeting with your manager and you need
to be on par you can use this prop as a signal to take on board the attributes
of the person who is your alter ego. Make that prop small please like you don't
literally want to wear a cape every time you find a tricky situation you don't
want to wear the Wonder Woman tiara thing. Make it small and simple and
you literally just get it out when you need to channel those attributes and do
something really amazing and then you put it back afterwards. You literally use
it for minutes possibly up to an hour but just enough to be your best self
without anything getting in the way. It allows you to put all your negative
thoughts and beliefs to one side just while you need to to get the job done in
the best method possible. So there's a study about something called the Batman
effect, and it's basically some kids were shown a
really difficult task and they had to persevere with it. And the ones who were
pretending to be a superhero like Batman or like Dora the Explorer or whoever it
was, they were able to persevere more because
they were thinking to themselves 'what would Batman do in this situation?'
Well he'd keep going and that's exactly what we're doing here we're doing what's
called the Batman effect. You have to try this technique if you are scared of
anything. If you get a chance pick up the book it
will explain everything in much greater depth and in a much better way than I
possibly can do it justice. But I would absolutely encourage you to use the
principles of this book. So thanks for watching and I'll speak to you again
soon.