Anxiety and Influence

Understand this Anxiety vs Confidence Matrix to free yourself from restrictions in personal power

I was a young man.

At my local supermakret. Filled with anxiety.

I had beome aware – aware of people’s choices – and of my own.

If health really is important… if what I put into my body effects it… if lifestyle choices contribute to the quality of life I enjoy or suffer…

Comfort, satisfaction, fulfilment, sexiness, peace, passion, vitality

vs

Disease, discomfort, boredom, frustration, sadness, depression, disappointment, pressure

And if life is made up of a series of individual choices, and moment to moment events…

…then by way of example, what I fill my shopping basket with every week is a simple and significant choice. Yes or no?

• Walking through that supermarket, looking at the sea of faces, the rows of food options, I began to choose against the crowd. I found the foods that would nourish my body.
• In the bookstore I found books to nourish my mind.
• In my dreams, aspirations and visions, I found hope that would nourish my spirit.

But hope was a two edged sword.

Blind faith, irrational and empty, allowing me to accept conditions worse than I should put up with, because of a rationalisation that the future will be better if only I just stick it out for the time being…

The present seemed pretty bad. A broken home. An inquisitive mind. A circle of friends that did not share the same vitality for growth and success.

“Among them but not of them, shrowded by thoughts which were not their thoughts” -

I thought a lot about myself in comparison to other people.

I became sensitive to how other people felt, thought and behaved.

This in turn made me sensitive to how people responded to me, and how I felt compelled to adjust my self so that I would not pressure, confuse, or even influence others. This only served to make me overly sensitive of others in a bad way – Fearful of confrontation – Overly self-conscious of what others thought of me.

My notes on Anxiety and Influence

Begin from the immortal words of Frank R Wallace, author of Neo-Tech:

“the anxiety of influence presses corruption upon the brow of consciousness to smother honesty, rationality, and self-responsibility.  That anxiety — that fear of responsibility and honesty — constitutes the barrier to endless riches and romance.

“in an anticivilization of mysticisms and irrationalities, the resulting corruptions bring mounting compromises and torpid diminishments that shrivel the passions for life.

…German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) postulated that man dwells in three realms: (1) what he is, (2) what he has, and (3) what others think of him. In today’s anticivilization, realms 2 and 3 control — realm 1 is derivative. In tomorrow’s business/science/art civilization, realm 1 controls — realms 2 and 3 are derivative. …What causes the difference between those two civilizations?

What causes the difference between existing as you are compared to existing via how other people see you?

How can we remove the psychological influence of what others think of us?

This project seeks those answers.

First, consider the source of anxiety:

Anxiety, pressure and low confidence come from 2 basic factors:

• First, is that you might not be able to get done that which you want to get done. I.e. you might fail.
• Second, is that other people are watching and you have regard for what they think. I.e. you might look bad.

Consider this 2—2 matrix: with the top being ‘positive expectation of success’ and the side being ‘regard for what other people think’.

So to interpret the matrix:

• With HIGH regard for what others think, but LOW positive expectation that we will succeed, our anxiety is high and our feeling of confidence low.
• With HIGH regard for what others think, but HIGH positive expectation for success, our anxiety might be considered ‘medium’ and our confidence considered ‘reasonable’.
• With LOW regard for what others think, and LOW expectation of success, we must be pretty miserable… a flat confidence and medium to high anxiety because we think we can’t achieve the thing that we want to do.
• With LOW regard for what others think, and HIGH positive expectation, we have low anxiety and high confidence.

Doesn’t that make so much sense?

• A low expectation for success comes from the perspective that you might not have the ability to succeed.
• High regard for what others think comes from our socialised collectivism in which we lack the freedom of individuality and independence.

So the goal for building confidence and reducing anxiety and pressure is two-fold:

1. Have high positive expectation that you will succeed – in the time-frame that feels right for you
2. Don’t care so much what others think of what you do and whether you succeed or fail

Let’s take them in turn…

1. How To Build High Positive Expectation

Having reason to believe that something will come to pass through the growing confidence that things can be achieved because I was becoming capable and seeing results in my life through my actions. That I can achieve my aspirations.. That I can. And that I will.

Thus Confidence of my ability, and of my future success, became a focus point.

Only by immersing in the actuality of the situation that you wish to build confidence in can you really do so. You can only know that you can do something, once you have done it, or something very similar.

To help understand the real solution, consider these quotes from an article on surviving extreme physical pressure during freak accidents:

“Anytime you take purposeful, directed action, you suppress panic.”
“The more you practice creating organized plans and executing them step-by-step, the better you’ll function in an emergency.”
“There are three important steps to take to suppress panic: breathe, organize, act.”

This relates to the 3 keys presented in my guidebook The Missing Principles of Mind Control, which are: Clarity, Preparation, Action.

Building these 3 mind-body ‘muscles’: clarity, preparation, and action are the keys to confidence: becoming independent in thought and able in body:

1. Clarity: Know who you are, what you want, and what you are currently capable of. The more you do, the less you will care about what other people think, and will develop the focus for the next 2 keys of confidence.
2. Preparation: Break down what you want into the steps for achievement. Become clear on the mechanism of success. The more you know about the situation, the higher will be your positive expectation of success. (There is also another important tool for preparation, but it’s not the visualisation or meditation that the self-help guru’s teach. It’s a visceral bodily experience that imbues your being with confidence within reality — explained below).
3. Act: Again, only through the reality of experience do you build genuine certainty of outcome.

Your visceral microcosm for building positive expectation

• Visceral? — Relating to deep inward feelings rather than to the intellect
• Microcosm? –A little world

One of the most potent little worlds of deep inward feelings is strenuous physical activity – such as sport.

High adrenaline sport provides the opportunity to focus, prepare and act, through a full-immersion mind-body experience.

With the confidence you learn in the microcosms of sport, you will carry your mind-body confidence muscles of clarity, preparation and action into the macrocosm situations of your life through THE 7 dimensions of life management (explained in full elsewhere):

1. 1st dimension of life management is FOCUS and CHOICE
2. 2nd dimension of life management is DIRECTION and PURPOSE
3. 3rd dimension of life management is STRUCTURE and ENVIRONMENT
4. 4th dimension of life management is ORDER and SEQUENCE
5. 5th dimension of life management is CONTROL and CREATION
6. 6th dimension of life management is SYNERGY and COLLABORATION
7. 7th dimension of life management is CONTRIBUTION and INFLUENCE

Confidence by nature comes from the clarity that one is able to prepare and act on a purpose and achieve its outcome.

2. How To Not Care What Others Think Of What You Do

To contorl our internal experience.

To remove all anxieties, restrictions and social inhibitions which are non-values or dis-values to happiness.

To remove all vestiges of second handership.

To stand before our fellow men completely naked of pretence but fully clothed in self respect and confident composure.

For this research I take great inspiration from hypnotherapy and NLP, as unless someone does something physically to us, any experience of that person’s influence or presence can be controlled via the power of our own mind.

Hence we relate to State Control. Frame Control.

• State Control - are you able to control your emotional state via your thoughts. If someone, a friend, is given the task of screaming obscenities at your face, how well are you able to control your emotional reaction? My friends and I call it ‘the reactivity series’.
• Frame Control – whose contextual perspective of the given situation is stronger and thus more overpowering? If the lady at the fruit cart is trying to charge you 20% more than you think she quoted you per item, how do you psychologically and emotionally deal with the situation to arrive at a resolution without any sense of anxiety at all?

An experiment: Embarrassing myself to build confidence – exercise 1

I walked down the road from the bus station and then stepped into my boxer shorts.

Yes. My boxer shorts. Yes, outside my jeans.

I then proceeded to walk into the center of town, around the shopping area, and went to have lunch in a restaurant – all while wearing my boxer shorts over my jeans.

At first no one seemed to notice. That in its self was frustrating, because the whole point of the exercise was for people to notice, and thus for me to experience the psychological effect of their experience and reaction.

Then I saw a few people did notice. And more than anything it made me chuckle, as I saw the surprise and confusion on their faces.

I didn’t feel all that embarrassed, and didn’t for the entire hour and a half.

I did though feel at some points as though my butt was almost naked, an uncomfortable feeling perhaps of inadequacy. Normally I am comfortable in my body (except when I feel tired, which is fairly often actually), but I think we can all relate to moments of embarassments where we are too self conscious of our body shape and how our body moves.

But other than the few moments of feeling like my butt was naked (best way I can think to describe it), I was not all that bothered about the whole experience.

Next time I may have to stick a banana to my forehead and try that. Or maybe both the banana and the boxers.

Until then.

The Habit of Anxiety

Whilst the 2 underlying factors of anxiety are positive expectation and what others think, we also develop the habit of anxiety that even when those 2 factors are greatly reduced, we may still experience high anxiety. This is a habit of the mind. Of your neurology. Here we must employ tools such as EFT and NLP to rid ourselves of these vestiges of anxiety.

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