PP 259: Wiping Out Worrying

Book

• The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level by Gay Hendricks

Kim Sutton: If you haven’t read this book before, there will be a link in the show notes and I strongly encourage you to pick it up as soon as you possibly can. The book has been blowing my mind since the first page, and I can practically guarantee you that it will do the same for you. A big overarching theme of the book is to figure out what our upper limit problem is, and to eliminate the upper limit problems so that we can go on and reach the next level of success in our personal and in our professional life. Last night, I was reading a section about worrying and it greatly struck a chord with me. Just to give you a little background, when I was a little girl, the nickname that my step mom and dad gave me was Worrywart. I would worry about everything. And I can’t even give you examples, but just consider the word everything. My tendency to worry has carried with me into adulthood. And there have been so many times that I’ve worried about a ridiculous number of situations, which I had absolutely no control over. It is this precise point that Gay talks about in the book is your worry concerning something that you can affect and take care of right now? And if not, forget about it. Well, maybe not forget about it. But just don’t concern yourself with it. I’m not gonna give away all of his book, because I really want you to go pick up your own copy. But what I do want you to do today is stop worrying. In my adult life, one of the major points that I have given up considerable but not all worry about is finances, when we’ve hit a tough spot, and I’ve had collection agencies call us, I haven’t allowed myself to get overly wrapped up in those calls. I’ve known that I couldn’t necessarily do anything that day. So I finally took on the thought pattern, well, if I can’t take care of it today that I’m just not going to worry about it. I realized that financial advisors would probably scold me for this. But I’m not going to allow myself to get stressed out by a whole lot of situations and circumstances that I can’t do anything about. We can be worrying about how our kids are going to grow up, how our health is, where our next dollar is going to come from, what we’re going to eat for dinner, if there’s going to be a snow day tomorrow that keeps the kids home from school, but none of that should be creating stress on our life. We can do what we can do today. And the rest we can just hope to do better tomorrow. Before I close out the episode, I do need to share that yesterday morning, I was so completely stressed. I was worrying about a number of things and unfortunately, I allowed my worry to turn into a grumpy wife and mom for my family. As I sat at my desk trying to work out the worry, I decided to turn on a church service and listen to it because I realized that I don’t put enough of my life into God’s hands. Now I realize you may not be Christian or at all religious. So you may have a different coping mechanism that can help you get through situations like this. But I want you to know that it’s really important to find that coping mechanism, something that’s going to help you push past the worry. After listening to the service for an hour, I felt completely refreshed and worry free. And I realized that I was going about my day all wrong. I apologize to my husband and work to spend the rest of the day with my family without any type of stress associated with the day. Now it’s your turn to do the same. Find a way to move past the worry. And if you’re looking for a great technique, I strongly suggest you pick up G ay Hendricks’ The Big Leap. Now with all this said, go forth and make it a positive and productive day.

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