Take Control Of Worrying
How often do you find yourself worrying? Does worrying use up your time and energy and stop you sleeping? Do you find that you cannot focus and are easily distracted by your worries? Some worry is normal and may be all part of doing something new or bigger than you have done before. However sometimes worry can stop you getting on with running your business or living your life to the full. You may be worrying about your business profitability, how to recruit new staff, how to market your business or worrying about having too much on. So how can you take control of worrying? Here are some things you may like to try:
Understand what you are worrying about. When you are worrying and getting in a state what are you worrying about? Get to the root cause of your worries. You may be worrying about something superficial on the surface but underneath there is a deeper worry.
Write a list of everything that you are worrying about. Every time you find yourself worrying, write down what you are worrying about. In this way you will be taking the first step to moving forward as you will be acknowledging your worries and you will have a list of what you are worrying about.
Think about each area of concern and understand more about it. Take some time to rationally think about each area of concern. This is not easy to do but by focusing on each area and getting to the bottom of it you will be in a better place to do something about it.
Decide what is the worst and best that could happen on each area. When you worry you tend to get things out of all proportion. Try thinking about the worst and best that could happen in each area. This will give your worries some perspective.
Consider what is within your control and what is outside of your control. It is easy to worry about things that are outside of your control, but you cannot do anything about them. It is much more productive to focus on those things that are within your control and you can do something about.
Prioritise those areas that are within your control in order of importance. Decide the order of importance of the areas that are within your control and work on each one in turn.
For each area decide what action to take. On the areas that are within your control decide what to do about them. Create a plan of action as to how you can move forward on each area.
Break the actions into manageable steps. You can get easily overwhelmed by something that seems a major step to take. To help with this break your actions down into smaller manageable steps and decide when you are going to take those steps.
Take action. It is surprising how you stop worrying when you are busy taking action and you will find that as you complete each action you will feel a lot better. Start taking action to move forward.
Review where you are on a regular basis. If you have a plan and regularly review where you are and update your plan you will feel more in control as you will know where you are with everything.
Talk to someone. By talking through your worries with someone else you may feel better and they may also help you in deciding what to do about them. This could be a friend, colleague or maybe even some outside help such as a counsellor or business mentor.
By using the above ideas hopefully you can take control of your worrying and feel more in control and on top of things.
Author: Liz Makin
Published: February 2012
Makin It Happen has a range of personal development online courses to purchase, created by Liz Makin, including anxiety management, communication, resilience, soft skills, stress management, time management and coaching. Liz Makin also provides personalised business coaching, business mentoring and stress management services to business owners, directors, managers and professionals.
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