Developing a high-performance resilience mindset; Know anxiety, know yourself.

A resilience-architecture guide for professionals

“Awareness is in and of itself, curative” Fritz Perls

The field of human development and reframing anxiety

Development isn't comfortable because it doesn’t exist inside of your comfort zone. But you already knew that at some level, did you not? But, do you embody this principle in your everyday waking life, particularly when you put yourself under pressure?

I set out to write this e-book as guide for the high-performance sports athlete, who has a very different relationship to anxiety and resilience than most others. Then I thought – do they though? I took this thought into a coaching session with a CEO of a multinational corporation, who was at the time, challenged with the same struggles as the high-performance athletes I coach. I realised this was a high-performance challenge; an opportunity for people who had decided to challenge themselves at the highest levels of their capabilities.

So, I decided to broaden the focus to resilience in the face of the anxiety, in all high-performance contexts.

Back to development.

Development from an integral* perspective is about becoming objective to our subjective experience. In other words, awareness is becoming objective to what you are subject to; the mental thoughts and feelings (states upon states, or Meta states), that drive our Neuro-Semantic experience and create our cognitive biases.

*Integral refers to the framework created by the philosopher Ken Wilber et al of Integral Theory – a study of the intersection of eastern philosophy and developmental psychology and its application to the field of adult human development.

Awareness in this context means becoming aware of why you react (internally and externally) the way you do in certain contexts and not others.

Let's stop a moment and look at how habitual you actually are:

Fold your arms how you normally would and take a snapshot (of exactly what you did). Now precisely and completely reverse that. Does the reverse feel uncomfortable or wrong somehow? Usually it does.

If you can do it, notice how uncomfortable it feels to reverse your arms, and notice the kinaesthetic pull back to the status quo (how you normally fold your arms).

What if we told you that the discomfort was your leading edge; your potential…

What if we told you that the anxiety arises from the discomfort of facing difference and indeed the unknown, was healthy? That it can be framed as your potential arising in the moment.

Have you ever felt anxious about what isn’t possible?

What if anxiety had a positive intention; to reveal the possibility rather than the probability of you?

Are you intentionally testing and driving the leading edge of yourself in terms of your thoughts and feelings; the cultural norms that govern you, your actions and behaviours and your conversations and interactions? Are you intentionally leading yourself?

If not, you aren’t alone.

This is the status quo, the comfort zone - it’s also called homeostasis.

Homeostasis refers to the theory of systems; that they seek to maintain themselves, however dysfunctional. This is only true because at some level, it is intended to be functional, and may actually be partially functional. It’s like your immune system – which can actually reject what is good for it – in service of protecting the status quo. Developmentalist Robert Kegan calls this the “Immunity to change”.

Human Development, caught through the eyes of the Developmentalists – Jane Loevenger, Cook Grueter, Hegel, Fowler, Graves, Maslow, Wilber et al. means:-

Constantly questioning the status quo, to transcend and include it (like stepping up the rungs of a ladder – the climber transcends previous rungs, while simultaneously taking the latter view of the higher rung), by gaining the space to see what’s actually happening, integrating the learning, releasing the view, and growing by moving on.

This e-book is designed to help you transcend and include previous understandings of anxiety and resilience in a way that seem counter intuitive. Victor Frankyl (author of Man’s Search for Meaning) calls this ‘the paradoxical embrace’. This is actually how we transcend old beliefs and values that no longer serve us – it’s your organic processing – you are already doing it.

 Anxiety is a process, not a thing

Anxiety is a nominalisation (of a process). It is a linguistic meta-move that takes a verb and turns it into a noun, but not a real noun like a car or a chair, but a pseudo-noun.

Let's qualify this; have you ever found some anxiety? I mean, really, have you ever tripped over some on your way to work or found some in your pantry at dinnertime? Probably not! So, this is the first new thing to learn about anxiety; realise that anxiety is not something real or solid, it is not a noun, it’s a verb, a process, a set of  actions, more accurately, a strategy that you and I run in mind about reality; a map, not the territory.

In other words, rather than the old Stimulus --> Response (S-->R) model* We now understand from the works of Korzybski, Bateson, Satir, Perls, Erickson, Chomsky et al. that the model is closer to Stimulus --> @ ---> Response, with the about (@) symbol representing how we represent the wold internally in our mind’s eye. This is known as the “map”.

*Stimulus-response (S-R) theories are central to the principles of conditioning. They are based on the assumption that human behaviour is learned. One of the early contributors to the field, American psychologist Edward L. Thorndike, postulated the Law of Effect, which stated that those behavioural responses (R) that were most closely followed by a satisfactory result were most likely to become established patterns and to reoccur in response to the same stimulus (S). This basic S-R scheme is referred to as unmediated.

The map territory distinction was created by Alfred Korzibsky (founder of the field of General Semantics and author of Science and Sanity ,1933). Alfred founded the theory of abstraction; that we human beings make sense of the world through the process of abstracting reality and representing these abstractions in mind as reality.

Anxiety then is a process of abstracting and representing and meta-stating* (thoughts and feelings about previous thoughts and feelings).

*Meta-stating is a term coined by Dr Michael Hall to describe the process of subjective experience; how humans create representational maps of reality and then filter reality through these maps.

Anxiety then is not a primary emotion or ‘feeling’

One of the most common misconceptions in the field of clinical psychology and psychiatry in our view, that really prevents healthy people from growing and addressing the challenges of the inner game of emotion; is confusing their thoughts and thinking with their feelings.

If you think anxiety is a feeling, and it is not, you are much less equipped to deal with it directly. Let me share some examples of this confusion:

-       I feel disappointed (this is a thought, not an emotion or feeling)

-       I feel let down (a thought not a feeling)

-       I feel uncomfortable (a thought not a feeling)

-       I feel sad (this is an emotion)

-       I feel angry (this is an emotion)

-       I feel confident (this is a though, not a feeling)

-       I feel really anxious (a thought not a feeling)

There are feelings associated with anxiety (eg. fear, sadness, etc.) but anxiety is actually a thinking process; the cause of the feeling/s. Your feelings are simply symptoms of your thinking, and the way you code your thinking (movies in mind) with meaning.

The anxiety formula

(Causality) thinking about the future in mind, in a pessimistic (awfulizing) way, and thinking about what that future potentially means for you; IE. potentially not achieving your hopes and dreams --> leads to, and = a feeling of (EG.) fear (Symptom -->/= Effect).

So, the feeling of fear is the likely feeling that arises when you think anxiety.

The coding of anxiety

The brilliance of the NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) Communications model is that it reveals that we abstract reality; we delete, distort and make generalisations about reality and create movies in mind about reality. That is, we don’t deal with reality directly through our senses, we evaluate about it and abstract it in mind.

The key distinction in NLP is between sensory experience and evaluative experience.

-       It rained during the game and the players dropped the ball more than usual (sensory description)

-       The rain made the game messy and difficult (evaluative)

In the coding of anxiety, we mix up our sensory experience with our evaluative mind and feel our evaluations as commands to our nervous system to re-act based on the fear we are feeling, which is actually generated through our evaluations, not our sensory experience. In other words, we become anxious about the future we are generating in mind and re-act to that as-if-it-is-reality!

Anxiety as a skill – the power of positive intention

If you personally do anxiety, then you have a skill, you are capable of performing the strategy of anxiety. A person can get better and better at a skill, even to levels of mastery that are world-class.

Skills practised become habits. Anxiety like other skills can become a habit. Habituation simply means practising until the process runs itself unconsciously.

This unconscious processing more often than not has a positive intention. As human beings move toward pleasure and away from pain (motivation), all behaviour has a positive intent (for the person enacting), regardless of the outcome. In other words, anxiety has a positive intent, regardless of the impact upon us.

For people in high-performance contexts, that is usually their motivation strategy for growth and development. Sounds a little crazy at first but stay with me.

Positive intention – a case study

Take Karen.

Karen is a high-performance athlete and can play sport at an internationally elite level in front of tens of thousands of people without an issue. Karen is very skilled at being in flow in playing her sport of choice. She rarely makes mistakes and more often than not, is honoured with player of the game. However, Karen becomes very anxious about the thought of being interviewed or giving public speeches. In fact, Karen is terrified of speaking in public.

This is an excerpt of a transcript of one of our coaching sessions (permission has been granted by Karen* to use this *not her real name).

Karen: I’m terrified of speaking in public, and it’s becoming a real problem for me and since I’m being offered the privilege of captaining the team into the future, I can’t see how I can take on the role, even though it’s my life-long ambition; and you know how ambitious I am Jay (laughter)

Jay: I hear you referencing past experiences (and coding them with fear) and projecting this into the future as a probable truth. Are you aware you are doing that (process)?

Karen: I am now.

Jay: If there was a positive intention for doing that, what might it be?

Karen: There’s nothing positive about it!

Jay: In the experience, sure, but if this were a strategy, with a positive intent, what might the intention be?

Karen: Errrrr, Ok maybe… to avoid failure. To make sure I am fully prepared, ready with the answers for any question they might ask, the media just want to catch you out you know!

Jay: And you believe that?

Karen: Yes, absolutely! They are just waiting for me to stuff something up, so they can pounce!

Jay: And you know that is their intention, beyond any doubt, all the time?

Karen: Maybe not all the time…

Jay: So, the positive intent of the strategy is to be prepared for anything, always… Does it work?

Karen: No, it doesn’t… I show up with a quivering in my voice, I’m nervous, sweating and… ah I see what you did there.

Jay: What do you presuppose is going to happen if you don’t run this strategy?

Karen: I’ll look like a fool!

Jay: How do you look now, when you go and try and speak in public, with this strategy?

Karen: Foolish (laughter, followed by a sigh of realisation). So, it’s not working! How do I change that then?

Jay: What do you believe about failing?

Karen: I hate it. Failure defines me.

Jay: So, you identify with failure?

Karen: In this context I do! I can’t believe that! Time to change that!

Karen’s challenge had nothing to do with the symptom (anxiety) and everything to do with how she motivated herself based on her identity as not good enough in a given context. We discovered that Karen was referencing childhood memories of not being good enough for her father in the context of speaking in public at a school assembly. She released herself from that coding (by interrupting the strategy) and no longer struggles with anxiety about speaking in public. On the contrary, she relishes it!

You can’t do anxiety if you stay present

Being present means being here in this moment, in uptime, with your sensory experience. Your body is very intelligent; it is always here in the present moment. It can’t do tomorrow, next week or next month. Your body is an anchor for and to the present.

As anxiety starts to play out in mind, grab both of your knees and bring yourself here to this real and present moment. You can ask yourself, what problems are here right now that I need anxiety for? It is not possible to be anxious or do anxiety about this present moment. You can experience fear about right now, and you can do something about that right now, can't you. That is ‘fight or flight’, accessing courage or discernment about this moment and taking actions.

Changing your self-talk

In the field of developmental psychology, self-talk is referred to as the super-ego. This is the voice of morals and ethics, modelled from your parents, as part of your moving from childhood to adolescence. Each of us creates a superego, so that we can take over from our parent’s in growing ourselves up, as part of the individuation and maturation process. However, the super-ego has a dark side as well as a light side. It will both chastise us and simultaneously motivate you. When a person has an overly strong super-ego, the processing of that (superego) can become self-sabotaging and even internally violent.

For example, people who struggle with anxiety will often say things to themselves like “I’m useless”, I’m hopeless”, “I’m worthless”, “I’m not good enough”. They tend to use absolutist language like “always”, “never”, “nobody”, “everybody”, “everything”, “my whole life” etc. This absolutist language was, according to Korzybski, originally designed in human language to generalise about reality, to speed up cognition and therefore reaction time, to meet with the ever-increasing complexities of reality. In developmental psychology, absolutist language becomes prevalent in children at the age of around 7-12 as part of becoming an adolescent. At later stages of development, adults tend to transcend and include this language (and let it go) in favour of more nuanced language, in order to communicate more complex ideas.

People with an overly strong super-egos also tend to awfulise and catastrophise about the future. They imagine (make movies in mind) about how things are probably going to turn out. In our experience, this catastrophising has a positive intention, but negative outcomes. For example, the positive intention might be to get myself prepared for any eventuality (if I can imagine the worst, it can only get better in reality). An example of the negative outcomes is that you are more likely to create the worst-case outcome by focussing on it (cognitive bias).

So, what can you do?

1.    Meditate and watch your self-talk – become aware of what it says and inquire into its origin and its intention for you?

2.    Journal your self-talk – become aware of what it says and inquire into its origin and its intention for you?

3.    Change its voice to a favourite cartoon character or movie character and run exactly the same dialogue with their accent.

4.    Do this for 2-weeks and at the end of each week, identify 0-10 the quality of your mood changes throughout the week.

5.    Keep practising until your mood changes

 One increasingly popular habit which could potentially help with increasing access to positive states is journaling 3 things a day that went well, that you can be grateful for (counting).

Count yourself and your resources

Whenever you feel anxious, identify the movie playing in mind (video, soundbites, self-talk, feelings, sensations, etc and of course, the imagined future event). Once you become aware of the event and the movie about it you are running, take a moment to start to count the amount time you have before this event. Start to notice the fact that you know what to do (or you wouldn’t be anxious, you’d be feeling something else), you have the skills and abilities to do this, and if you don’t, you can gain them. Count that you have people around you and that they are able to provide resources and support. Count that someone has asked YOU in particular, providing you with the opportunity. So let's recap what you are counting:

You are counting the time you have from now till then; the event.

You are counting the skills and knowledge you have already.

You are counting the people and resources you have to help.

You are counting that someone has asked you.

Finally, you are counting this as an opportunity for you, today!

Know anxiety as your potential

So, a very interesting phenomenon arose for us some years ago around the fact that anxiety is actually an energetic expression of your potential and possibility. Let me give you an example by giving you a task that you can try to do anxiety about:

So, the task for you is within 24 hours of right now (whatever time this is) I want you to be physically standing on the planet Mars. How is that, how much anxiety are you doing able to do? None right? Your skill has fallen away.

In fact it is because you know that you cannot do it, that you cannot do anxiety about it! Your potential lies in this too then. You can only do anxiety about something that you actually know you can do!

It is reasonable then that your anxiety is actually an indicator of what you can do, not of what you can't; let this inform you today. Lean into that fully.

Anxiety as motivation

As with Karen’s story, many people use anxiety as a motivation strategy.

In our experience, coaching thousands of people (mostly professional people too), many people experience anxiety when they are faced with a seemingly difficult or challenging task. Be that, personally challenging, professionally or simply against the clock of the time they think they have available.

If you are one of these people who use anxiety to focus you or identify the worst case so it can only get better, you are also friends with anxiety’s sibling; procrastination. Using anxiety as a formula to get things done may seem effective, however it can be an emotionally difficult, distractive and risky affair.

It looks like this:

(A.)

1.    You receive a task or request with a deadline that you say yes too. (micro-tip; try saying “no” more often).

2.    Apply Anxiety

3.    Distract yourself for the entire period leading up to task or event just 6 hours out from the start.

4.    Its 2am get up and write that speech presentation, paper etc. as your life now depends upon it and you have no choice.

5.    6am task completed and ready to deliver; success!

(B.)

1. Receive NEW request…

2. Start at A again!

Identity and anxiety

The ‘eternal question’, you know the one, (‘who am I?’) can take a while to answer, even lifetimes. In the gap of that, we, people, tend to all too easily allow their self-sense or Identity to fill up with imposters and substitutes. ‘I may not know who I am, however, at least my (insert x - your name, body, condition etc.) allows me some sense of me.

If you label, recognise and identify yourself as an ‘anxiety sufferer’, eventually you will stop recognising this self-identity and become a someone that ‘has’ anxiety, at the level of your own Identity.

Identification with anything is one of the most effective strategies to lock anything and everything inside of you. From here it starts to grow and find a life and voice of its own; its starts living YOU!

The good news? You are not a condition, an issue or struggle, you are a human being.

3Ps and 3Ts

Psychologist, author and educator, Martin Siegelman created a theory of learned helplessness. “Learned helplessness is a term specifying an organism learning to accept and endure unpleasant stimuli, and unwilling to avoid them, even when it is avoidable.” Martin created the 3-Ps of learned helplessness; personal, permanent and pervasive. To personalise is to make it about you (identity). When we make something into a static rather than a process (of learning for example), we make in permanent in mind. When we see this as pervasive (across contexts), we engage cognitive bias and lock it in.

The answer? The 3-Ts – That (event outside of me), (happened) There i9n location, and Then in time (it’s no longer happening now). Seeing through this framework turns the event or problem back into a process of learning and development. In high-performance sport, we call it “learning how to lose” or in other words identifying the opportunity for growth and development in the event or problem.

Anxiety about anxiety; the professional meta-stated formula

In his ground-breaking book “Science and Sanity, - 1933”, Alfred Korzybski identified that our consciousness is self-reflexive. That is, we can build a meta-state (a state about a previous state) by applying the former to the latter. This is highest level of doing anxiety, when you have developed the capacity of experiencing anxiety about your anxiety. What we call professional anxiety.

That is doing anxiety about how anxious you are. This applying anxiety to itself (meta stating) can make anxiety seem deeply, real, personal, permanent and pervasive!

At this professional level of anxiety, a person becomes masterful at imagining even being asked to step out of their comfort zone of life.

The movie mind has you in its grip, you are playing movies about situations that are not even probable, only possible, in the distant future – and believing they are happening or are convinced they are going to happen. What is this professional strategy on behalf of, what’s the point in doing such thinking? In our experience, people plan ahead for many possible futures and to ensure they are ready and will be okay. This presupposes a lack of trust in yourself, to become resilient and resourceful, to learn and grow.

Conclusion

Anxiety is your potential. Anxiety is your body’s tuning fork guiding you to where your potential lies. By facing up to your potential; and leaning in, you will begin to self-actualise. That all begins however with permission. Permission to fail, to learn, to grow and develop as a fully fallible human being. Do you have permission to self-actualise by allowing yourself to fail and learn? How else do you learn, since learning presupposes not knowing ---> leads to knowledge.

Think about how you learned to walk. You fell down (you laughed, you cried), you got up and you tried again, and again, and again…