My telephone weighs 470 kilograms if I do not pick it up and make a call out by 8:30 in the morning. I get nervous. I can’t pick it up. I make my living calling people and sometimes I just can’t do it.
So I use a rubber band to help pick it up. I put the rubber band around my wrist. Every time I start to think about being nervous I snap it hard against my wrist. If I pause before picking up the phone, I snap it and pick up the phone. If I feel nervous, I snap it and pick up the phone and dial somebody, anybody. The real trick is that I interrupt my thought patterns. I have a mechanism to deal with nervousness. The little snap of pain also trains me that nervousness is unpleasant. More important than the pain. is that I interrupt my negative thoughts. I start concentrating on the positive, and do something positive.
When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them. (Confucius)
I should have told my daughter how to use a rubber band to change her thought pattern when she and her friend were talking about their fear of needles. It might have helped her channel her thoughts so she wouldn’t cry before the needle touched her. Irrational fear or just nervousness can ruin an hour, a day, or a lifetime. Control the negative by finding something to interrupt the negative thoughts and think about the positive.
You really are what you think about. If you need to think about something else, figure out a way to do it. I use a rubber band to help pick up the phone. What do you use to get over nervousness?
Something to do today
Research ways to interrupt your thought patterns and channel them positively. There are a lot of great books on the subject. The classics are The New Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, or Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Read it. Absorb it.
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Later: Fledging falcons on the DEP building