One of the most damaging aspects of social media is its ability to amplify negative emotions within you by constantly subjecting you to everything wrong that is happening in the world today. When this happens, it is all too easy to unwittingly let others who do not have your best interests at heart to control your emotional states in order to hugely influence the actions you take, actions which ultimately determine the results you get in life and how you end up feeling about yourself and life itself.
To get what you want from life, it is absolutely essential you learn how to take control of your emotions. There will, of course, always be events and circumstances outside of your control that will have a negative impact on your emotional state, at least temporarily. Regardless, there is a lot that you can do to minimise and manage feelings of anxiety, fear and doubt. All three of these feelings combine with each other to hold you back, preventing you from achieving the level of success you want and deserve in both your private and professional life. Before I explain how best to control these feelings, it is essential to first understand what exactly each feeling is, how each feeling operates and how theywork together to negatively affect the state of both your mind and your body.
Fear is an unpleasant emotion that arises in response to perceived dangers or threats. False Evidence Appearing Real is an acronym which suggests that we perceive threats or dangers as real or imminent, even in the total absence of actual evidence. Closely related to fear is anxiety, which is a worry about a future that has not even happened. Finally, doubt is the space in which you constantly fluctuate between feelings of certainty and uncertainty. This is what causes you to experience what is known as “paralysis by analysis”. This is when you find yourself in an extremely unpleasant and unresourceful state during which you don’t take any actions whatsoever simply because you are scared of making a mistake that you might end up regretting later. When this happens, you remain stuck exactly where you currently are and all the goals you have ever hoped to achieve remain nothing more than unfulfilled aspirations.
This, unfortunately, is exactly where most people exist. Operating from such a dysfunctional and unresourceful state causes so much of the frustration and heartbreak experience by the majority of people in society today.
Let’s talk about bad language
Pay close attention to how most people speak. You will quickly realise the words and phrases they commonly use in conversation precisely reflect their inability to think clearly and to take the decisive actions required for them to get the great results in life they want so badly.
Doubt is what causes so many people to say “I guess” in the middle of a sentence. Often within the very same sentence, they will also say “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure”. Not only are they totally unaware of their frequent use of these phrases, they are also completely unaware of the fact that the consequence of habitually speaking in this way is that they unconsciously speak a huge amount of uncertainty and doubt into existence. A confused and unclear mind never succeeds, especially in the long term.
Your thoughts shape the language you use when speaking to others but, most importantly, the language you use when speaking to yourself. Since your thoughts determine the way you talk to yourself, this will determine your daily habits, the decisions you make, the actions you take and ultimately the quality of the results you get in every area of your life.
It will be extremely hard for you to identify and recognise within yourself the erroneous and harmful language and speech patterns you habitually use. This is because like any other habits you have, they are hardwired within your brain. With every single repetition of the self-talk you obliviously use without any conscious awareness whatsoever, these detrimental speaking habits are strengthened and reinforced.
To fix this problem permanently, it’s a good idea to team up a friend and work together to help each other improve your speaking habits. Listen to each other when you speak and identify the repeated use of uncertain phrases such as “Em”, “I guess”, “I don’t know” and “I’m not sure”. Also, listen out for ‘crutch’ words such as “so” and “like” which are often overused and used inappropriately. Everyone has their own personal ‘crutch’ words or phrases which they usually use to fill unnecessarily fill in spaces when they are speaking. Saying “em” before a sentence, for example, totally undermines and diminishes the impact of what you say for the rest of the sentence. Identify this tendence and remedy it by pausing and taking a relaxing breath instead. Doing so will have a very dramatic and positive effect on how well what you communicate, whether you are engaged in a 1-2-1 conversation or speaking to a group of people at an important business meeting.
Realise now the enormous importance of the language you use both internally and externally and the incredible power it has to shape every area of your life. Regardless of whether you work a job or own your own business, your working day will largely consist of communicating with other people, whether they be in the form of customers, clients, co-workers or collaborators. To work effectively as either an employee or employer, you will perform at your very best when your energy levels are high, your mood is stable and you can work at the very highest level of your ability without you ever feeling overwhelmed by your daily objectives and challenges, together with any difficulties or setbacks you will inevitably experience along the way.
If you own a business, creating commerce requires making transactions with customers and clients. Your thoughts, together with your internal self-talk and the language you use when speaking to others, will have a massive bearing on the reality you end up creating for yourself. This includes all the people, situations and opportunities you attract into your life. Forget about “the world” being uncontrollable, unchangeable and permanently established. Instead, focus entirely on “your world”, which is absolutely and totally within your control. Once you adopt the belief that your world is your manifestation, you will behave in total congruence with this belief. You will stop self-sabotaging because you now not only believe that it is possible to achieve amazing success in your life, but also that you totally deserve to achieve amazing success in every single area of your life.
Success is an inside job. Once you truly believe this and apply this vastly improved way of subconscious thinking, the thoughts and ideas that will automatically and effortlessly pop into your head will be congruent and totally aligned with your future success. The outside world (a.k.a. the ‘real’ world) will respond to every single change you make in your inside world. Suddenly, you will start attracting better quality people, better quality relationships and better quality opportunities, all of which will combine to help you live the kind of happy and fulfilled life that you perhaps never dreamed even possible.
Success truly is an inside job and you owe it not only to yourself, but also to everyone else, because everybody will greatly benefit from you actualising your undeveloped true potential and becoming the very best version of yourself. Anxiety is so much more than simply feeling worried or stressed. If you often experience feelings of anxiety or panic, understand that it is actually a control situation created as a result of you trying to directly control the future, something which you ultimately cannot control.