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Here are some things you need to know about worry, including a more helpful alternative.
- Worrying doesn’t make things better. In fact, it’s counter-productive and serves only to make things worse.
- Worrying is a horrible waste of your time, and time is your most valuable resource. No one ever looks back and wishes they’d spent more time worrying.
- Worrying is infectious. It spreads from you to everyone you connect with; family, friends, clients and your marketplace.
- Worrying causes you to operate sub optimally. It poisons your thinking and causes you to make bad decisions.
- Worrying puts your mind into a fear focused state. This makes it harder to find the answers you need and easier, to miss valuable opportunities.
- Worry is a liar. The vast majority of things we worry about, either never happen or when they do happen, were nothing like as bad as we thought.
- Worrying causes you to feel worse… and worse and worse.
- Worrying is the lowest possible use of your amazing imagination. When we worry, we use our mind as a movie theatre, which plays the worst case scenarios of whatever we’re worrying about, over and over again. Instead, change the movie. Use your mind to create a movie of the outcomes you want, the solutions you need and the people and things you are grateful for.
A more productive way forward
Once we’re aware that something is worrying us, it’s time to switch on our resources.
It starts with reminding ourselves that we get to choose what we focus on. At any point, we can move our focus from what we’re worrying about, to the solutions open to us. We can list the people whose help or advice we need and reach out to them. We can then decide what action to take and when to take it.
These are difficult times for small business owners. That’s for sure. Thankfully, although we can’t control external circumstances, we absolutely can control how we choose to respond to them.