What If Thinking About What Could Go Wrong Could Make You Less Anxious?

TRANSCRIPT AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED Hey, Hey, so this episode, I really want to talk to you about how choosing, not to think through what could happen in your business and make a plan for it. If needed it's actually creating more anxiety for you than you would feel if you sat down and made the list. This is A really common response that I get when I start to talk to people about contingency planning that if they open the can of everything that could happen in their business, the worms would go everywhere. They wouldn't be able to put them back in and their anxiety levels would be through the roof. What if the opposite is actually true. so in banking over a decade, I shutter to think how many hours I spent in trainings that I don't remember, skills, training, regulator, retraining, continuing professional development, all the things. The one training I do remember is David Allen coming to speak to us about getting things done. You may know of, or have read the book. And he asked us the question, how much time are we spending, trying to remember that thing that we need to do instead of just putting it on a, to do list and freeing up that mental capacity. So our brains are hardwired for completion. So when something creates an open loop for us, something that isn't finished, it creates anxiety and us and a drive for us to finish or complete or close that loop. That's how Netflix ensures that we say, Oh, I'll just watch the next episode. Even though we know we should be going to sleep. Because our brain needs to know what's happened and not knowing what's happened. Makes us feel anxious. What makes you feel more stressed? A completely full inbox when you open your email. Or inbox zero. One tells a tale of all the things we need to do. The other tells a tale of completion. And so by you choosing not to acknowledge what could happen in your business, you choosing not to write it down into a full list, not to brainstorm everything you can think of, not to make a plan for it, where needed. You're actually creating open loops or cliffhangers in your brain for each of those items. And there's a ganache effect, says that we pay more attention to incomplete tasks and completed tasks. So as much as you think, you're not thinking about it, your brain is actually working overtime to tell you that you have something you don't have a solution for. That's why you're thinking about it at 3:00 AM. It's your brain trying to work out well, what is the solution for this? And every time it asks you what the solution is for it, your solution is to shove it all down and pretend it's not happening instead of writing it on a list, instead of getting it out of your head, instead of getting it onto paper and then being able to forget about it because you know, you're prepared. Last week I was talking to Ebony, who's had their account hacked. Your brain has now gone. Oh, my account could get hacked. What do I do if you choose not to think about that, you have something left your brain with an open loop that it is going to revisit over and over and over again until it feels like there's been a solution. And the more of these open loops you create around these things that could happen in your business. The more anxiety you're bringing towards yourself versus taking it out of your head, writing it on a list. Making a decision, whether or not you need to worry about it acting accordingly, and then being able to forget about it until you need it. So I'm going to challenge you today to say, what if you're actually making yourself more anxious by not thinking about what could happen in your business than by sitting down and making a list of what could I invite you to close those open loops that you have in your brain right now?