How to Stamp Out Personal Fear and Anxiety in Ten-Minutes

Do you ever read articles or listen to experts who sound so slick you discount their knowledge as just old common-sense?

What we are too nice to say is their great solution to your problem is too good to be true. When the answer is too-easy, something a ten-year old could come up with, we say, No thanks, I will do it myself.

U of Chi

The University of Chicago is a great school, it was started by John D. Rockefeller in 1890 to make folks love him and do good works. It was a religious thing, pushed into reality by the American Baptist Educational Society with the Rockefeller oil dinero.

Marshall Field the department store czar, donated the land for the campus. The goal was to be different, more European than American schools. How? The departments crossed educational boundaries.

I am getting there - their first President was William R. Harper, who demanded professors take the less traveled road and produce scholars, not job seekers. The money behind them delighted in controversy - imagine that.

Today

Professor Sian L. Beilock of the University of Chicago just wrote a book on Choking (up) by folks facing adversity playing golf or making financial decisions.

She came up with simple, but effective solutions for not choking up in the middle of life's challenges. Stupid - but they work.

Simultaneously she wrote an article on how to avoid anxiety and stress in taking exams. Again, simple strategies that just plain work. Get this - her scientific solution enable students to improve their test performance one-full-grade. Example: B- to B+.

Solutions

1. Write out (keyboard is nice too) your worries and fears for ten-minutes before testing, making a presentation or doing a job interview.

Five-minutes does not work, and glittering generalities fail - you need to express your deepest emotional fears and anxiety in print. It shifts your brain from Left Hemisphere (brain) to Right-brain functioning.

Use words that produce mental imagery (movies) and really get into it. You move forward a winner. It never fails, works like a charm.

2. Instead of concentrating on your worries, anxiety and stress - Sing. That is exactly what Dr. Beilock discovered in her experiments. If you sing, you brain cannot worry about failing the exam or blowing the presentation or interview.

It causes your brain to shift hemispheric dominance. Your move your thinking from left-brain dominant to accessing your powerful right-brain. Righty specializes in pictures, emotions and holistic thinking. You are empowered and win all the ---

3. Instead of being a perfectionist, and attempting to control all the factors in your environment, literally Stop! - let go of control over all the circumstances.