Anxiety Coaching

Anxiety coaching helps you:

• take back control of your life
• reduce or remove unpleasant feelings
• stop you overthinking
• makes your thinking more positive and solution focused
• find inner peace
• regain confidence
• work towards positive outcomes in the things that matter most to you.

What Is Anxiety?

Anxiety – “A feeling of worry, nervousness or unease about something with an uncertain outcome”.

Anxiety is a perfectly normal emotion that almost everybody at some point in their life will suffer from.

These physical, mental and emotional reactions are harmless provided they last for a relatively short amount of time or aren’t too intense. Anxiety only becomes problematic when it increases in intensity or it’s suffered for a prolonged period.

At this point anxiety can start to affect your physical as well as mental and emotional wellbeing and start to change (and not in a good way) who we are, what we think we are capable of and how we deal with things.

The great news is it’s entirely possible to take back control and get back to thinking and behaving much more like yourself far quicker than you think.

Just before I start to outline how we eradicate or massively minimise anxiety, we need to first of all have a better understanding of how anxiety works. To do this we need to start by understanding the purpose of emotions.

Why Do We Have Emotions?

Have a think about this? Do you know the answer? We all have them (except psychopaths) however most of don’t really know what our emotions are for. Emotions are our guides. They are one way we have of navigating our way through day to day life.

Pleasant emotions are designed to move us towards things and people. Unpleasant emotions are nature’s way of getting our attention and our brain saying to us – PAY ATTENTION, this may be a problem for you.

Notice I didn’t say emotions are good or bad. I said they are pleasant and unpleasant. ALL emotions are positive in their intent – they mean well. The purpose of your emotions is to keep you alive, so when you experience an unpleasant emotion, that’s natures way of trying to tell you something potentially important to your survival and wellbeing.

Why Do We Become So Anxious?

There are 4 scenarios that play out that individually or collectively will result in us really suffering from anxiety.

1. Prolonged Exposure To Something Potentially Threatening With No Resolution

Over a prolonged period of time we put up with and ignore something(s) negative, essentially suppressing the accompanying unpleasant emotions. We often tell ourselves we’ve put that emotion in a box inside us. We only get away with this strategy for so long before these unpleasant and by this point harmful emotions start to seep into how we feel on a day to day basis.

The shift inside us is gradual but left unchecked eventually the emotions end up “screaming” at us to get our attention and say to us – “I need you to deal with this”.

When we get to this stage life is extremely unpleasant and we often find that we either don’t know how to improve things or we don’t believe we have the power to change things.  This can leave us feeling helpless.

2. A Single Stressful Event

We experience an extremely powerful negative life event that hits us so hard that we are knocked out of our own orbit. This leaves us feeling like we can’t be sure of many (maybe even most) things anymore.

3. Multiple Stressful Events One After The Other

Sometimes it takes a number of events to really “do the damage”. We may manage to survive one extremely tough life event, but if you experience 2, 3 or more over a relatively short space of time then this can knock the stuffing out of us.

Most of us are not designed or well equipped to cope with multiple “emotional blows”.

4. A Combination of 1 & 2 or 1 & 3

When this happens FEAR (the emotion at the root of anxiety) is running the show and you are no longer in control of you. You don’t feel like you, you don’t think like you and you don’t even behave like you anymore.

Getting to the Root of the Problem – ONE VERY SIMPLE QUESTION

At the root of yours or anyone else’s anxiety is one very simple question that your brain is asking all the time and it’s this:

Q. CAN I PREDICT A FAVOURABLE OUTCOME?

If you think you can, then anxiety will settle down. If however you are uncertain or you don’t believe things will be OK this is when your body and mind will start to cause you all sorts of problems and what you experience as anxiety occurs.

Here’s a great video well worth your time watching for a more in depth understanding of what happens when your brain asks this question and it doesn’t get an answer it likes!

TRI-UNE BRAIN THEORY

Having watched this I’m sure you will recognise a lot of your own behaviours and thoughts. In fact most people who watch this tell me that I’ve described them almost perfectly.

This is an extremely valuable insight and here’s why.

Anxiety Is Not Your Fault

If you are suffering from anxiety you almost certainly think that there’s something wrong with YOU and that YOU should be able to figure this out and do much better with it. In short, you think anxiety is some kind of failing of YOU.

One of the key things I want you to get from this video is that it couldn’t be specific to YOU because I don’t know you. I could only so accurately describe whats going in within you because it’s not a YOU problem – It’s a problem ALL humans have if you put them under certain stressful conditions.

So let me assure you – the anxiety you suffer is NOTHING to do with you being weak. Anxiety is NOT your fault. Instead, anxiety often shows up in people who have “got on with things” whilst suffering terribly in the background for often months and sometimes years. The person doesn’t start weak – instead the strong person eventually becomes weak as anxiety wears them down.

Anxiety Has Two Parts 

Anxiety has 2 components that make it up. It’s Physiological: your feelings and sensations in your body and it’s Psychological, the stories you tell yourself (and often others too).

It’s important you know anxiety has two parts because discerning which of the two component’s (physiological or psychological) is at the root of your particular type of anxiety very much relates to which solutions will work best for you.

Thought based approaches such as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) will be useful where the problem is primarily psychological, whereas approaches based on being able to change your “physiological state” will usually be more effective for anxiety where the root cause is strongest physically.

Regardless, everyone’s anxiety has 2 parts and a combination of approaches almost always works best.

The Solution To Anxiety 

In order to help you get the real you back and stop you suffering needlessly you’ll now understand we need to change two main things.

We need to change how you feel and we need to change how you think.

Now you may well be thinking duh – well I KNOW THAT, however most people don’t know HOW to:

• HOW to change how they FEEL.
• HOW to change how they THINK.
• HOW to do both consistently until they both become a habit and part of you.

And that’s where anxiety coaching comes in.

Anxiety Coaching – Brief Overview

TOGETHER we will develop and then work through a personalised solution tailored exactly to your own specific needs and circumstances.

You will learn HOW TO take control and change your feelings and emotions.

You will learn HOW TO think more positively and become solution focused, rather than continually focusing on the problems.

You’ll also learn HOW TO challenge (and change) your own thinking by asking 3 very simple questions of your anxiety provoking thoughts.

So we start by adding KNOWLEDGE People often say that knowledge is power, however I’ve found this isn’t usually true.

KNOWLEDGE without IMPLEMENTATION usually just equals more pain and you saying something like:

“I know what to do but I just can’t seem to do it.”

So this programme isn’t just about knowledge acquisition. Knowing more about anxiety won’t allow you to be free from it.

Instead we will combine KNOWLEDGE with consistent IMPLEMENTATION.

IMPLEMENTATION is where you practice and develop the skills needed to change how you feel and think.

This will allow you to recognise and experience low level anxiety, take control, take appropriate action, tell yourself helpful “stories” and get back to feeling like yourself again.

Like anything, the more you practice, the better you’ll become and the more confident you’ll feel.

Investment

The minimum number of sessions typically required to do a great job of minimising anxiety is 6 sessions.

The price for this block of 6 sessions is £600.

More sessions can of course be beneficial and I can’t say for certain at what pace you’ll progress because everyone is different however I’m extremely confident you’ll feel much much better and far more in control after 6 sessions.

Disclaimer

Anxiety coaching is not a magic cure. It’s not me doing all the work for you! YOU will still need to do the work. I simply guide you though the the knowledge and skills necessary, supporting and nudging you back on track when life gets in the way.

This means the next time it comes to asking that anxiety provoking question: “Can I predict a favourable outcome?” you’ll KNOW the answer is yes because you’ve learned how to do it, you done it before and implementing the solutions to anxiety has become second nature to you.

*Testimonials and before / after shots are used as examples. Your results may vary.