As someone who has experienced a lifetime of Anxiety, occasionally acute but always constant, and these days (mostly) manageable, I do still have times when the management has to step up a gear. It’s those times when I’m well and truly out of my comfort zone. As a Myers Briggs INFJ I’m mostly out of my comfort zone when I have to be more extrovert, and in a world mostly geared up for extroverts, this is quite often. One of those times is when I deliver training. When I train I step out of my introvert world and very much into an extrovert one. As a trainer who delivers around 3 full days of training per working week and over 40 weeks per year, this then becomes quite often. Some would ask why I on earth I have chosen this line of work. Why? The reasons are simple, I will not (ever) let my anxiety and fears control me, and secondly my passion for the subject areas in which I deliver – mental health, resilience, and suicide prevention – which I believe are of human priority and through delivering high quality training and training products, I can potentially reach a lot of people to make a positive difference to these. For a long time I really struggled with any type of public speaking, let alone training, and there were plenty of hurdles to overcome before it became possible. Managing the symptoms of chronic IBS was one of them, and to this day medication is still required to do this. Two other areas of weakness have also needed to be overcome in order to deliver on my passion. Based on the Derek Mowbray ‘Resilience Development Framework’ I score lowest on ‘Problem Solving’ and ‘Confidence’, but score high on all the other facets of resilience e.g. Organisation, Vision, etc. (most likely compensating for the areas for development). If my anxiety is peaked my weak areas surface and reveal themselves. After reading Sully Ali’s Confidence e-book today, I honed in on tip number 11 – Distract your inner fears by directing your focus on helping others. Tip 11 resonated because this is one of my most powerful tools when having to step the anxiety management up a gear. If I allow the negative thoughts to take hold when I am training, they could so easily overwhelm me to the extent that I would crumble. I no longer let this happen and one of the ways I do this is to focus on the overall outcome – helping others. My main aims in life are to make a positive difference to my family and friends, and to make a positive difference to humanity. The latter I aim to achieve through my work and passion for mental health and suicide prevention. When I keep that purpose in mind it helps me to direct my inner fears, or in actual fact to keep them at bay in order that I can deliver effective training that makes a difference. I can then see past the anxiety, dissolving any catastrophising thoughts before they can take hold and overwhelm me. They float away into nothingness, they lose their power. Key to this is spotting the thoughts starting, and preventing them manifesting, a skill that was lacking in the early days. How I do this nowadays – I acknowledge but don’t entertain them, the latter being key. When we talk about coping mechanisms in training, we discuss that there are so many that most of them appear to be happening without acknowledgement, but it’s important to remember that even the more hidden or subtle ones can play such an important role in thriving and surviving.