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Semi-annual values-based review

Semi-annual values-based review

by | Accepting negative stories about myself and questioning my abilities, Criticizing, judging, & attacking yourself, Disengaging and using safety crutches, Doing things right, perfect & precisely: perfectionism, Overanalyzing, doubting, & indecisiveness, Procrastinating, postponing and delaying, Searching for certainty, predictability, & re-assurance, Taking my thoughts too seriously, Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures

Reading Time: 4 minutes

 

 

 

Most people use the end of the year as a time for reflection, planning, and assessing how things have been for them. I personally like to set mini-quarterly reviews on my schedule along with reset time and spend more time in a mid-year review. I very much welcome a moment to pause, reflect on what has happened, what’s next, and how I want to live my life.

So, instead of looking strictly at goals or accomplishments, I like to reflect on the:

  1. The actions I took – whether they took me closer to or further away from my values
  2. Internal struggles I had with some ways of thinking and feeling
  3. Learnings I had in different areas of my life. 
  4. Check any themes that have emerged

That’s why I called this process “values-based year review,” and you can do it any time that works for you. More than having a specific time to complete this review, it is more important to reflect on how you have been living your life, what makes it challenging, what happens under your skin when pursuing what matters, and what you need to do next to be the person you want to be.

If you want to do your own values-based mid-year review, here is a 21-page template you can use; it includes a description of 9 areas, a values thesaurus, a values dashboard and reflective prompts for each area in your life.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD YOUR VALUES-BASED REVIEW TEMPLATE

As I reflected in the last couple of moments, below are the theme, highlights, and key learnings that emerged for me.

Chaos and connection

2020 and the beginning of 2021 were very challenging times. The pandemic unfolded, Black Lives Movement, a presidential election in the United States, unexpectedly losing close friends, and my health being affected made it one of the hardest years and also, one of the most compassionate ones.

You see, as a full-time psychologist, specialized in fear-based struggles – I’m sure many of my colleagues relate to this – we breathe and live situations related to all types of fears every single day. But, when you have an insurmountable amount of stressors around you, those experiences augment exponentially.

Yet, for over 12 months we all did our best to show up to the people we work with and care about while acknowledging our vulnerabilities, limitations, and common humanity. If you’re a provider in mental health reading this newsletter, my sincere appreciation for all that you did the last couple of months!

In the midst of all the political, environmental, social, cultural, and economic chaos we went through, in one way or another, my connections with others were also reinforced, for the most part, revitalized in some cases, and renewed in others. It was in those catching-up moments that I realized, once again, that life is all about connecting with others and creating memories with the ones we love.  It was in those moments that I experienced “chaos and connection” co-existing next to each other.

Key learnings

  • Savouring every moment that comes my way allows me to find new rhythms
  • Life is much more manageable when I’m around people that get me
  • Showing up to my friends as the best I could is essential to growing my friendships.
  • Being flexible when unexpected things happen is fundamental to keep doing what matters.
  • I undeniably have a low tolerance for bureaucracy and institutional fakeness.
  • Being self-employed is one of the best things I have ever done in my life.
  • Being real with people is fundamental to building long-lasting relationships

Highlights

My thirst for creating resources and owning my content has grown tremendously. Here are the highlights from the last 6 months and some from 2020 – 2021:

  • I discovered Ness Labs and for the first time, got exposed to a group of kind, bright, and incredible collaborative people from all over the world, interested in science-based ideas and related fields.  It was absolutely mind-blowing and still is,  that this group is non-hierarchical and non-clicky by nature; it’s 100% collaborative.It doesn’t matter which school you went through, who you’re associated with, who you collaborated with, what’s your expertise, or who is in charge.Ness Labs is a culture of collaboration.You know something that could be helpful to another person, you offer it; you have an idea that could be helpful to another person you offer it. You don’t know something, you ask for it. You don’t need to be the expert but a co-creator of knowledge. And trust me when I say that this was mind-blowing to me, I mean it. While I’m not an academician, I have been part of academic and professional environments that, as nice as they are, all are structures around hierarchy, seniority, and under-spoken clickiness.
  • My book Living beyond OCD got published and with it, a comprehensive resource to tackle Obsessive Compulsive Disorder using Acceptance and Commitment Skills.
  • Co-authored a book on process-based therapy that will be released in 2022.
  • Finished a manuscript for people prone to high achieving and perfectionistic actions.
  • Collaborated in two research projects looking at the effectiveness of the interventions described in two of my books (papers have been submitted already, yay).
  • Got a bike – a lifesaver and mood buster.
  • Hosted many zoom calls with friends all over. 

Playing-it-Safe: A project from the heart:

The question of “how can we get unstuck from ineffective playing-it-safe moves so we can live a meaningful, fulfilling, and purposeful life?” is fundamental in my work, and my thirst for answering it has grown significantly.

Playing-it-safe has been one of the highlights of what has been a weird year.

In 2020, I launched the Playing-it-Safe newsletter and the Playing-it-Safe podcast without knowing how these projects were going to be received. For the last few months, I’ve sent out this newsletter every Wednesday in an effort to share research-based skills derived from behavioral science, Acceptance and Commitment ‘Therapy, reflections, and resources related to fear-based struggles.

You have witnessed the evolution of my style in the podcast as it’s a new way of creating resources for me and have heard me trying different formats. Little by little, right?

The response from all of you to these resources has been bigger and much better than I could have expected. Thank you for keeping in mind these resources!

It’s my goal that Playing-it-safe continues to grow and get better in the next months. I have some exciting plans in the works for it. Stay tuned!!! 

Thank you for spending some time with me each week. 

I think learning to relate skillfully to fear-based emotions is a very important topic and I’m excited to continue creating more resources about it in the coming months. What am I missing? Is there something that you’d like to see me write about in the future? If so, please send me an email at doctorz@thisisidoctorz.com.

As always, if you think a friend of yours would be interested in fear-based reactions, please share this newsletter with them!

8 Principles to make solid values-based decisions

8 Principles to make solid values-based decisions

by | Overanalyzing, doubting, & indecisiveness, Doing things right, perfect & precisely: perfectionism, Procrastinating, postponing and delaying

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Choice 1: searching through more than one hundred dating profiles

Choice 2: looking at the menu at an Italian restaurant

Choice 3: scanning through countless types of nails to hang a painting at home

Choice 4: researching hundreds of types of mattresses

Choice 5: exploring the destination for your next vacation

Choice 6: deciding who to invite to your birthday party

Choice 7: choosing a name for your baby

Choice 100: . . .

Choice nnnnnnnnn

How often do you have to make choices, decisions, and solve problems in your day? 

Quite likely, it’s very often because that’s the time we’re living in. How do you handle those deciding moments?

  • Do you spend hours playing out in your mind the best choices, smartest decisions, and most efficient ways to complete a task?
  • Do you play out in your head all kinds of what-if scenarios about things that could go wrong to help you make the best decision?
  • Do you check all the best resources before making a choice?
  • Are you afraid that a better option might come your way after you’ve made a decision?
  • Do you second – (or third-) guess yourself when having to make a choice? 

If you answered yes to three or more of these questions, you may be dealing with decision-phobia—also referred to as decidophobia, decision paralysis, or indecision paralysis.

Decision-paralysis is a very common struggle for high-achievers, go-getters, anxious procrastinators, or people struggling with perfectionism, procrastination, or chronic worry.

The bottom line is that it’s hard for you to make choices, from the simple ones, like what type of tea to buy, to the complex ones, like whom you should marry.

Why is it hard for you to make decisions?

What are the things your mind tells you that cause you to dwell on decisions?

Our human minds do human things. And our minds are vulnerable to the coherence trap that says, If I don’t carefully think this through, then bad things will happen, and I’ll regret it later. So your mind will often come up with reasons to think and think and think again, all the way through. And yet, where does it lead you?

Think about the times you’ve gone to a store and, after hours of investigating and examining a particular product, you left without buying anything. 

You need to get to the root of your difficulty with making decisions. Here are some reasons why decision-making might be hard for you: 

(1) You’re afraid of screwing things up.

(2) You’re afraid of missing a better choice later on.

(3) You’re afraid of the feelings of regret, sorrow, and remorse that may come with a given choice. 

(4) You’re holding on to thoughts about a decision representing who you are or what you’re worth.

Which one of these reasons applies to you?

It’s possible that over time, you have developed a particular decision-making style that makes decisions easier or harder for you. Let’s dive into it.

What is your decision-making style?

Barry Schwartz (2004), an organizational psychologist, has described two types of decision-makers: maximizers and satisficers.

  • Maximizers strive to make the best decision possible, so they collect and optimize all the information needed with that purpose in mind.
  • Satisficers consider their gains and losses in a given situation, evaluate their options, and make a decision.

Which one describes you? Do you like to gather as much information as possible about your options so you can make the optimal decision? Or do you make a decision when you find a suitable “good-enough” option and move on? 

Keep in mind that despite what most people might think about maximizers making better decisions, Schwartz’s research demonstrated that creating many choices impedes our ability to make decisions, triggers excessive searching, and, in fact, leads us to make worse choices (Schwartz, 2004; Yang and Chiou, 2010).

 

What if you deeply care about a decision?

In general, it’s annoying to make a bad decision—but it is much more bothersome when you are genuinely invested in that choice and what it means to you.

In fact, when people care deeply about things, they get very fearful of making wrong, poor, and thoughtless choices, so, as a result, they spend countless hours analyzing, mulling over, and scrutinizing every potential path they could take.

Do you know what I mean? 

Think about it: When something is important to you, don’t you want to make the best decision possible? Don’t you want to exhaust all the possibilities and make sure you have all the information needed to make an optimal decision? And then, do you go on and on, searching, researching, and acquiring as much information as possible to the point that it’s overwhelming?

There is also another important variable to consider in decision-making: your emotions.

How do your emotions influence your decisions?

A study conducted by Lerner, J. S., & Keltner, D. (2000) found that “fearful people made pessimistic judgments of future events whereas angry people made optimistic judgments.”

These researchers explain how every emotion we experience comes along with a perception of what’s in front of us in ways (appraisals) and influences our choices. Whenever we are making a decision, our emotions tell us how to judge the situation and what to do about it.

How to make values-based decisions

Because we have to make decisions every day in every area of our lives, it’s important to approach them in a way that expands and nourishes our lives.

You certainly need to be aware of your decision-style, your fears, and the emotional state you’re in when considering a choice. You also need a framework to approach all the choices you have to make.

I want to invite you to consider the following principles to approach when facing a decision:

  • Ask yourself: What’s my mind guarding me from if I don’t make the best choice?
  • Watch out for your decision style: maximizer or satisficer.
  • Check your values: ask yourself, what really matters to me in this situation?
  • Ask yourself, what’s the feeling that is going to be hard for me to make room for?
  • Set a time limit for searching for information.
  • Set a deadline for any decision you have to make. 
  • Set which variables or factors will help determine your choice (instead of dealing with countless criteria).  
  • Approach each decision as a process (not as a life-and-death situation).

The many shades of avoidance, dirty words, & powerful moves

The many shades of avoidance, dirty words, & powerful moves

by | Procrastinating, postponing and delaying, Disengaging and using safety crutches, Overanalyzing, doubting, & indecisiveness, Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures

When was the last time you felt anxious, worried, or scared? How did it feel?

Feeling anxious is not your fault; anxiety just happens and although it feels super-uncomfortable, it’s a natural, adaptive, and healthy reaction we experience to a potential threat.

You may be wondering if it’s natural, why it feels awful and why for some people it’s like living in hell.

The answer is in how you respond to your anxious feelings when they show up! What do you do when feeling anxious? How do you handle that anxious state?

There are two variables that differentiate an effective response from an ineffective response when dealing with fear-based reactions:

(a) The way you think of fear-based reactions.

(b) The way you respond to fear-based reactions.

Let’s dive into these two variables:

(a) The way you think of fear-based reactions

When feeling scared, anxious, afraid, or in panic, you may have learned to look at those experiences in ways with a negative lens and take all those thoughts as the absolute truth with capital T.

Popular thoughts about fear-based reactions are:

– Thinking of fear-based reactions as “bad.”
E.g. I shouldn’t be feeling afraid.

– Thinking of fear-based reactions as “a sign that you’re in danger.”
​E.g. When noticing that your heart is beating fast, you may have thoughts that it is a sign that you may have a heart attack.

– Underestimating your ability to handle those feelings
​E.g. I won’t be able to manage my anxiety.

– Overestimating a catastrophic ending
​E.g. it will be really bad, terribly bad.

Quick clarifications:

– I’m not saying that fear-based reactions are fun, easy to have, and enjoyable; I know they suck and yet, we’re wired to have them.

– There are times in which we’re definitely surrounded by threat – e.g. someone pointing a gun at us, someone stealing our purse, etc. – but most of the time, the degree of threat our mind perceives – perceived threat – is related to how we interpret a feeling, thought, sensation, or a situation.

The tricky part with how you’re thinking of fear is that Instead of acknowledging that your mind is trying to protect you, as it usually does, you get consumed with those thoughts and act accordingly: you avoid whatever is starting a fear-based reaction.

(b) The way you respond to fear-based reactions

Humans, we don’t like to be in discomfort, struggle, or basically being in pain. So, naturally, we run away, minimize, and do everything we can to get out of an uncomfortable situation. A common response to anxiety is experiential avoidance.

Experiential avoidance refers to all the things we do to avoid unpleasant feelings resulting in short-term relief but making things worse in the long term. There are five basic types of avoidant behaviors:

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Situational Avoidance

With this form of avoidance, you stay away from anything that triggers fear-based reactions like:

– People
E.g. you avoid your new manager, mother-in-law, or police officers

– Places
​E.g. elevators, trains, and planes

– Animals
E.g. spiders, rats.

– Objects
E.g knives, plastic bags, needles..

– Activities
E.g. eye contact, public speaking, asking a question in a group, large parties.

Cognitive Avoidance

Cognitive avoidance refers to all the thinking strategies you do privately in your mind to avoid any form of anxiety. There are different forms of cognitive avoidance:

– Suppression
Actually saying to yourself, “don’t think about that. Just don’t go there.”

– Worrying
Thinking about all potential what-if scenarios in the future.

– Rumination
Thinking about past scenarios and running them over and over in your mind.

– Replacing thoughts
​Sometimes, people attempt to replace one distressing thought, image, or memory with positive content.

– Mental rituals
​You may pray in a specific way as a way to protect yourself from something bad happening, but if for whatever reason you don’t do so, you cannot move on with your day.

Somatic Avoidance

When dealing with somatic avoidance, you do your best to not experience internal physical sensations associated with fear. For example, you may be hypervigilant if you experience shortness of breath, feeling hot, feeling fatigued, and so on.

Emotional Avoidance

With this particular form of avoidance, you intentionally try to minimize, suppress, & get rid of uncomfortable emotions. An example is Harold, who struggled with not knowing if he made a bad decision at work so, when feeling uncertain, he began drinking in an effort to avoid this feeling.

Preventive avoidance

S. Hoffman & A. Hay (2018) in a review of different types of avoidant behaviors, identified what is called “preventive avoidance.” Preventive avoidance are all those actions that you do to prevent your experiencing fear-based responses either before or after a triggering situation. For example, if you’re intensely afraid of making a mistake, you may check the task you’re working on multiple times; or after sending an email, you may call the person who received it to make sure you didn’t say anything offensive.

As you can see, avoidance has so many shades; sometimes you may be engaging in one specific form of it or a combination of them. The reality is that these types of avoidances co-exist with each other and don’t show up in isolation. I only broke down the concept of experiential avoidance to help you to consider how you’re responding to a triggering situation and how – without knowing – you may be feeding into the cycle of anxiety.

Just to clarify, while avoidance makes things worse when dealing with worries, fears, anxieties, and obsessions, it’s not a dirty word. Sometimes, avoidance can be adaptive; for instance, when dealing with a problem at work, you may have this urge to talk to others about it because you feel very anxious and receiving emotional support makes those feelings go away and doesn’t interrupt your day-to-day life; pretty adaptive, right?

The challenge is when using experiential avoidance as your go-to response to anxiety-provoking situations; in the short-term, avoidant behaviors help you to avoid an unpleasant moment, but tomorrow you must face the likelihood of the same uncomfortable situation welling up again and again. It’s like the depth and height of what you do is limited by your day-after-day attempts to avoid bad experiences that are, ultimately, unavoidable.

Now that you’re familiar with particular ways of thinking about fear-based reactions and different types of avoidances, I hope you can see how both variables can lead you from experiencing anxiety as a natural emotional state – that we all experience – to a problem that needs to be solved.

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At the end of this long newsletter, I want to leave you with three questions for you to ponder about any avoidant behaviors you’re doing right now.
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– What am I avoiding that I want to approach?

– What do I want to do that I’m afraid of?

– What’s the fear holding me back from?

– How is this affecting my day-to-day life?
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Learning to make room for any fear-based reactions, without letting them take over our life is possible. And it all starts with dissecting our fears.

Awareness is one of the most powerful moves you can start practicing.

Do you want to get unstuck from wrestling with worries, fears, anxieties, obsessions, and ineffective playing-it-safe actions?

Learn research-based skills and actionable steps to make better decisions, adjust to uncertain situations, make bold moves, and do more of what matters to you.

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2 questions to distinguish productive and unproductive worry

2 questions to distinguish productive and unproductive worry

by | Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures, Overanalyzing, doubting, & indecisiveness

A couple of weeks ago I was going over old pictures and saw a picture of when I was in my twenties wearing one of my favorite pairs of jeans at that time. I remember the hassle of buying them, and in particular, I remember all the questions and worry thoughts I had when talking to the salesperson:

  • Would you rather them slim fit, easy fit, loose fit, or relaxed fit?
  • Do you like button fly or zipper fly more?
  • Do you want a boot cut, tapered cut, straight cut, or slim cut?
  • Do you like them in natural, black, or white color?

I was so overwhelmed with all those choices that I couldn’t make a decision right away and was too lazy to try the 101 options of jeans this person was putting in front of me. My mom was patiently smiling; I was just overwhelmed!

My mind was overwhelmed too: what if that cut doesn’t look good on me? Would I fit in those jeans? What if I don’t find any jeans that work for me? It’s hard to find jeans that fit me because of my height, what if they don’t have the color I like? Would my classmates make fun of me with this pair of slim jeans? What if I look weird in these jeans?

Two hours later, I left the store with empty hands. As I reflect on this memory about buying jeans, I think that it’s not different from how our minds work, like a salesperson, when coming up with 101 worries.

We all worry about all types of things. Shell Silverstein, an American poet and illustrator, catches the essence of our worries in his poem Whatif:​

Last night, while I lay thinking here,
Some Whatifs crawled inside my ear
And pranced and partied all night long
And sang their same old Whatif song:
Whatif I’m dumb in school?
Whatif they’ve closed the swimming pol?
Whatif I get beat up?
Whatif there’s poison in my cup?
Whatif I start to cry?
Whatif I get sick and die?
Whatif I flunk that test?
Whatif green hair grows on my chest?
Whatif nobody likes me?
Whatif a bolt of lightning strikes me?

​Who doesn’t worry about all types of stuff? We all do.

Worry is defined as “a chain of thoughts and images, negatively affect-laden and relatively uncontrollable. Worrying is an attempt of our minds to solve an issue whose outcome is uncertain but it contains the possibility of one or more negative outcomes. That’s how worry relates closely to the fear processes and fear-based responses.” (Borkovec, Robinson, Pruzinsky, & DePree, 1983).

In our day-to-day life, worry shows up as what-if thoughts, a collection of them, with a strong pull to dwell on them, we feel exhausted, tired, and fatigued, and instead of taking action, we stay in our heads.

Going back to the memory of buying jeans, when having all those what-if thoughts, it may have looked as if I was solving a problem: deciding what type of jeans I should buy based on the many options I had in front of me. However, while my mind was coming up with all those thoughts about the future, I felt saturated and ended up not buying any of them.

It makes sense that our mind comes up with all those worry thoughts – focused on potential future unknown scenarios – because that’s how our brain helped our ancestors to survive.

When anticipating a risky situation, our ancestors handled their anxiety by running various what-if scenarios over and over in their minds in the hope that constant vigilance would somehow prevent anything bad from happening. They needed to be on the lookout to survive!

If you’re dealing with a laundry list of what-if thoughts, here is a key distinction to make:

Productive worry vs. unproductive productive worry

Let’s say that I start to worry about you -my reader – not liking this article useful. What if it’s not actionable? What if it’s missing academic references? What if readers don’t find it  

  • First scenario: I set an internal deadline for myself, re-read it, made sure that I included specific actionable skills, shared it with a colleague/friend of mine to get their feedback, and then published it.
  • Second scenario: I call my friend to share my worries, wonder about written mistakes I have made in the past, wonder about this article being shared with other people and my professional reputation being compromised, and remember all those times when I found typos on an article on my website. 4 hours have passed by and I didn’t finish writing the article and didn’t publish it. 

The first scenario is usually described as “productive worry,” and the second one reflects “unproductive worry.” (Leahy, 2006)

  • Productive worry prompts you into action.
  • Unproductive worry asks the same “what-if” questions and creates new problems for you or new unknown scenarios that need to be solved; it focuses on long-distance problems that you have little control over or ability to influence; makes it hard for you to accept any solution because none of them guarantee you 100% success or anxiety free.

Some psychologists would clarify that “there is nothing productive about worry and that worry by nature is an unproductive emotional state.” While this is true, given that most people struggle to break the cycles of worry, the differentiation between productive and unproductive worry is helpful to see how you can move from worry into productive or effective problem-solving.

I’ve found that once you understand the difference between productive and unproductive worry is key to managing anxiety effectively and building a joyful life.

Here are two questions for you:

  • Are you staying in your head for hours?
  • Are you defining the problem, setting an internal deadline, identifying actionable steps to take, and taking them?
Worry simulators, worries, and our old friend

Worry simulators, worries, and our old friend

by | Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures, Overanalyzing, doubting, & indecisiveness

Dan Gilbert, a Harvard Psychologist, gave a TED talk on “synthesized happiness.”​

​In this talk, Dan reminds us of a powerful quality of our brain:

“Pilots practice in flight simulators so that they don’t make real mistakes in planes. Human beings have this marvelous adaptation that they can actually have experiences in their heads before they try them out in real life. This is a trick that our ancestors could do, and that no other animal can do quite like we can. It’s a marvelous adaptation.” (TED talk, February, 2004)

The idea of thinking of our mind as an experience simulator resonates so strongly with me, all the way. It’s reminder that our mind is a content-generating machine that is creating all types content on and on. It’s a reminder that our mind is pattern-making machine that is constantly coming up with thinking-patterns, action-patterns, meaning-patterns, relating-patterns and many more. It’s a reminder that our mind also has this incredible capacity to create experiences as if they’re happening right now, right here, based on past ones.

Think about these two scenarios:

  • Scenario 1: Let’s say that on a sunny day, you’re walking in the streets of your neighborhood and you see a mom & pop book store. You decide to take a peek at it; so you walk, smile at the person at the front desk, start wandering through the bookshelves and see the classic sections – cooking, gardening, personal growth, business… And then you see a tiny section on traveling. You walk fast towards that aisle – because it reminds you of your upcoming vacation. You grab a book that looks interesting because of all the colors on its cover; turns out, it’s a book about Bolivia. You flip through the pages, read about Salar de Uyuni, the Bolivian flat salts, and see the many shades of blue, pink, red, and white in every picture. You read about the high temperature during the summer, the different types of birds you will see, the hotels made of salt that are around, the types of vans that are driven in that area, the best restaurants in which to have local food.
  • Scenario 2: I bump into you, we haven’t seen each other in a while, so we’re catching up about our families, work, projects, and much more; and as the conversation unfolds, I share with you that I’m trying a new recipe for dinner blending dry cat food and chicken!

Any reactions? Did you get an impression of how it may feel to be in the Salar de Uyuni? Did you make a face when thinking about putting together dry cat food and chicken?

There is no right or wrong way to react to these images; each one of us will have a unique experience of them.

However, regardless of the intensity and type of reaction you had when reading about those scenarios, your mind was doing something that it naturally does: simulating an experience based on previous information – how it feels to be under the sun, how different colors look like, old news about South America, the texture of cat dry food, the flavor of chicken, and so on.

Even though you weren’t in the Salar de Uyuni or have never tried dry cat food and chicken, your brain foresee, anticipate, and predict how those experiences would be. Isn’t it fascinating how our brain works?​

Our brain not only is a content-generating, pattern-making machine, but it’s also an experience-creating machine.

​This is exactly what happens when worry kicks in; our brain – like a worry simulator – comes up with a laundry list of gloom-and-doom scenarios. Naturally, we play-it-safe by anticipating, predicting, and imagining all negative possibilities and next thing we know, we organize our behavior accordingly.

For instance, Gemma was applying for a summer internship; she worked very hard on her application essays, asked her mentors to read them, prepared supplemental questions, and researched carefully the agencies she was applying to. Gemma couldn’t stop thinking, “I probably won’t get any position, people won’t read my essays, I won’t get a decent job, and I’ll never be independent; The more that she thought about these possibilities, the more she asked others to review her application.

Gemma’s playing-it-safe move was over-preparing for a potential failure, bad outcomes, and other awful things, that despite all her efforts, it was keeping her stuck in her head.

You may tell yourself that by paying attention to potential negative outcomes you’re protecting yourself from painful surprises, but you might actually miss seeing the entirety of a situation with all its layers, colors, and shapes

So, at the end of this post, I want to invite you to try a couple of things:​

  • Remember to see your thoughts as thoughts, not as inevitable truths of what’s happening next.​
  • Do your best to stay in the present as it is and as it’s happening, not as your mind is telling you it is.​
  • Remember that your mind is an old device and acts more like a content-generating, pattern-making, and experience-creating machine, not as a source of 100% truth.
Sweet connections, rough conversations, & fearful moments

Sweet connections, rough conversations, & fearful moments

by | Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures, Accepting negative stories about myself and questioning my abilities, Disengaging and using safety crutches, Doing things right, perfect & precisely: perfectionism, Overanalyzing, doubting, & indecisiveness, Procrastinating, postponing and delaying, Searching for certainty, predictability, & re-assurance

A couple of months ago, I didn’t have a choice other than having a complicated conversation with a friend. Four nights before having the conversation, I couldn’t sleep, was worried about the impact it would have on our friendship, future collaborations, and felt sad about having to sit and discuss something that could potentially make things hard for us to continue our friendship. I was scared!

Relationships are a messy business, period!

A life well lived has strong connections with the people we love. The reality is that we have survived as a species not only because of biological adaptation, but also because of our connections with others. Our ancestors learned very early on that in order to survive they required the group, and to be part of the group they needed to learn to foster different types of relationships.

I honestly think that building connections with others is one of the most precious things we can do in life; without these connections, we are vulnerable to suffering, loneliness, and isolation.

But relationships are not just like flowers and butterflies; they are difficult to look after, maintain, and be in. I think that most of us go through life using a trial-and-error approach to creating healthy, caring, and fulfilling connections with others. But do we really know what we are doing all of the time? Probably not.

Creating a relationship from scratch is not an easy project; it’s actually a complex undertaking because, as fun as relationships are, we also get hurt, disappointed, frustrated, and discouraged at times. And every time there is a rupture, there we are again: covered in visible or invisible tears, trying to pull ourselves together in the midst of the emotional turmoil and simply surviving from moment to moment.

In my case, I was scared about losing the connection with a person I love, care about, and cherish in life.

My fears, worries, and anxieties about this upcoming conversation came with images of us fighting, arguing, and crying; thoughts of “it won’t go well; What if everything ends here? How would it look when we are at the same party and still disconnected? Would this person speak badly about me? How awkward would that be? What if other friends have to choose who they continue in a friendship with? Would they choose me? Would this affect my work?”

My mind was quite busy anticipating what would happen, what would happen if this or that, and generating all types of hypotheses about a potential outcome, as it was supposed to do. My mind was working fast, quickly, at the speed of light, and doing the best it could to protect me from any hurt related to this friendship and soon-to-have conversation, all driven by fear.

But my fear – and all the thoughts that came along with it – was taking me away from asking myself key questions to handle this clashing moment:​

What’s my value in this relationship?

How do I want to show up to this moment of fear that is consistent with who I want to be?

How do I want to respond to the distress that a person I care about is going through?

Our fears take us into all types of future scenarios, negative outcomes, and gloom-doom outlines; but the good news is that, instead of going along with all those thoughts, by bringing ourselves back to the present and checking what sort of relationships we want to build, we can learn to approach conflict as a source of growth, connection, and even as an act of love!

Sweet connections, rough conversations, & fearful moments can happen all at once, and all together can be opportunities to live our interpersonal values.

Living our interpersonal values is about discovering how we want to be within each relationship we have – especially when having a contentious moment – and while making room for our fears, worries, and anxieties as they come.



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