As mock exam time approaches at school, my requests to coach for anxiety always increase!
Over the years that I have been coaching I have noticed that clients initially talk to me about their anxiety to see how they can remove it from their lives. Working with these people to understand what anxiety is, how it affects them as an individual and building their awareness around it can enable them to make progress.
Many of my clients think that I will be able to make anxiety go away which is not the case. Sometimes just understanding that it is OK to feel anxious can lift a weight off my client’s shoulders. Anxiety is the body’s natural response to a situation that we are fearful of. I coach my clients to understand about their anxiety triggers and symptoms, build their awareness of what happens to their physiology and then put specific individual strategies into place that will move them forward.
If planning, preparation, practice, determination and perseverance are combined with their specific anxiety toolbox techniques then progress starts to happen. It takes a lot of repetition (40-70 times) to change the conscious mind into doing something different and you need to treble those repetitions in order to change the unconscious mind and do it on autopilot.
Most people struggle to maintain new habits because they only ever change the conscious part of their mind. Changing the unconscious mind requires much more work. Lots of practice and repetition will lead to a change in mindset and approach which subsequently allows us to maintain new habits long term. Many clients say to me that they have tried that strategy and it does not work, my question to them is ‘How many times have you practised?’ In most cases they have not practised enough.
If you know of someone who is anxious and would benefit from being coached then please contact me.
Remember – it is OK to feel anxious. It is what you do and the action you take that matters and will keep anxiety levels to a minimum
