Natural Anxiety Relief: Focus On The Good And Your Strengths
Natural anxiety relief comes in many forms. Some of the most effective are to change the way you are thinking and what you focus on. Too often those who are anxious focus on the negative rather than the positive.
A young man was competent at his work. He was four years through his five year apprenticeship and his boss was very happy with him. Then one day he made a big mistake. He had had a heavy weekend and had come to work rather hung over from the effects of alcohol and lack of sleep. He made a mistake that could have led to someone’s death if his boss’s routine check on his work hadn’t picked it up.
The young man was devastated. He felt his mistake had undermined everything he had done before. He was anxious about what his boss thought about him and about whether he could trust himself when he became fully qualified. His one mistake had colored his whole view of himself and his sense of the future.
His boss was actually quite pleased with the situation. His systems had picked up the mistake. The young man had needed to step out and grow up socially and at least he was doing it while he was still under supervision. However the boss was concerned about the young man’s emotional response to the mistake. He had to take him on one side and tell him firmly that he was being a slow learner – he should have made the mistake with the alcohol when he was in his first year of training, not his fourth! The boss laid out his understanding of what he expected of him. He had to grow up, become fully adult and learn how to manage alcohol and his social life!
However he also had to be able to show his boss what he had done right, what his strengths were in his job each day for the next month. The focus was on what he had done right. This became his natural anxiety relief as he had to identify his positive strengths to himself before telling his boss. His boss had recognized that he had a conscientious worker in the young man, the sort he would want to have working on his family’s property because he could be sure any job would be done well. The last thing he wanted was for the young man to seek anxiety cures in the bottom of a bottle.
Over the next year the young man’s anxiety settled down. He did learn how to manage his social life alongside his work life and he also had a good role model in his boss for when he too would take on an apprentice.
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