Let go of your worries & live your life

Every day you wake up, your mind wakes up too, and with it, the sounds of worry, fear, and anxious thoughts, wake up too. It’s unstoppable and unavoidable to have them because that’s what the mind does.

What if my boss doesn’t like the project? What if it rains when I’m hiking? Would I like the play tonight? Would I have someone to talk to at the party? The list of worry thoughts is endless, limitless, and can vary from the most regular ones to the most bizarre ones.

And what do you do with all that noise in your head? Quite likely you get entangled with thinking, dwelling, and mulling over and over again.

Getting stuck in your head when you need it is one thing, but getting stuck in your head every time there is a “what if” thought popping up, that is a different story.

In this presentation, you will learn how to stop living full time in your head, create the relationships you want to create, and get back into your life and the stuff that matters to you most.

Participants will learn skills to:

• Stop getting hooked on those worry, anxious, and fearful thoughts.
• Detach from the noise that shows up in your head.
• Check how you want to show up to yourself when getting inundated with worries, fears, and anxieties.
• Make room to handle the internal discomfort that comes with “what if” thoughts.
• Practice caring behaviors when dealing with worry thoughts.
• Get back into your life and do the stuff that matters to you.

Harnessing the power of perfectionism

Do you constantly think about how to improve and make things better? Do you struggle when someone drops the ball? Do you get quite concerned about the possibility of making mistakes? Do you get disappointed when you or others make mistakes?

We live in a culture that pushes all of us to have high achievements, to excel on every task, to be the best, and basically, to succeed at all levels, at all times, 24/7. And with this context, we put pressure on ourselves to do things right and perfect, and to do the best we can in different tasks, roles, and even hobbies; sometimes, we capitalize these external and internal variables in our favor, but other times, we get stuck in a downward spiral of fear of making mistakes, analysis-paralysis and inaction.

Perfectionistic behaviors are the norm in every career or path of life you can imagine: the basketball player that throws the ball hundreds of times hoping for the perfect shot; the politician that reads his speech over and over to make sure he doesn’t have verbal mishaps when talking to the crowd; your neighbor that goes on a date and rehearses the steps to create a good impression or the graphic designer that spends hours and hours in front of the screen searching for the right look on the screen, just to name few examples.

Doing-things-right and perfect behaviors don’t have to be demonized; high standards don’t have to be dropped; and playing-it-safe behaviors don’t have to stop. Instead, it’s important to learn skills to differentiate when doing things right and perfect matter versus when they’re making us be stuck.

Participants will learn skills to:

• Harness the power of perfectionism and hold high standards when they are moves towards our personal values.
• Distinguish when “excellent, good enough, or just okay” are different ways of approaching different situations.
• Sit with the discomfort that comes with living in an imperfect world.
• Learn skills to handle the internal messiness that comes when things go wrong.
• Be compassionate with ourselves when inevitably something goes south.

Living with not-knowing & doing what matters

Imagine for a moment that all knowledge is represented in the shape of a pie that adds up to 100%; there is maybe 5% of things we know, another 15% of what know we don’t know, and 80% of things we don’t know we don’t know.

The reality is that as much as we want, wish, and hope for, we don’t know the answer to many things: Am I making the right decision? Am I going to be accepted? Is this the right way to spend my time? Is this a good partner for me? Would I like this job?

Though it is not comfortable, all those thoughts demand you to act and solve the unbearable “not-knowing” problem.

But, what if instead of rushing toward action, pushing away the discomfort that comes with “not knowing,” you learn to handle those urges, those certainty-seeking behaviors, those annoying emotions, and learn acceptance-based skills to move forward with the stuff that matters to you.

What if instead of running away from not knowing you learn to “see what’s really out there” and inside you?