Free Yourself from Fears (13 page)

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Skill for freedom

Not judging by appearances

Use this skill when you feel afraid that you do not look good enough.

1 Listen to your internal dialogue. Are you saying that you are not going to be good enough?

By what standards are you judging yourself? Where did you get these standards:

J Your parents?

J The media?

Are these standards realistic?

Are these standards your standards?

Who exactly is judging you?

Are you sure they care as much as you think?

How will you know when you look good enough?

If you cannot answer this last question, then you can never be sure if you will be good enough.

Do the best you can now.

2 Remember, this is just one moment in your life. It does not mean that everybody will think you look bad, and this will be the case far into the future.

3 Listen to your internal dialogue. Are you telling yourself that you should look better? Listen for words like “should,” “have to,” and

“must.” These are pressure words.

What would happen if you did not conform?

What forces you? Is it really necessary?

Just suppose you didn’t have to—what would that be like?

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If there are good, objective reasons for putting on a good appearance to a certain well-defined standard, then do so. Otherwise think twice.

4. Check the mental picture you have of yourself. Is it good? Make it brighter and more colorful.You may be paying more attention to your internal picture than you are to the real you.

5 Remember that your appearance is not you: it is something you choose. How you appear does not define your identity. How would you like to define who you really are?

Fear of the future

The future is not what it used to be. It is more uncertain; we wonder what sort of life we are bequeathing to our grandchildren.

There are many more ways for things to go wrong than for them to go right, and many future scenarios are frightening. Pessimists will remind you that many countries are at war, and that these wars are more bitterly fought than ever. Terrorists kill civilians in the name of their cause. The “war against terror” that the US is fighting has the potential to start many more full-scale wars like those in Afghanistan and Iraq. Large companies are involved in corporate scandals. Many people no longer trust big business to act ethically or even sensibly. On the environmental front, there is some evidence of shifts in the global climate; chemical waste and pollution seep into the environment, with many chemicals taking thousands of years to degrade. Are we poisoning our world? In some countries, social services that we take for granted are at breaking point. In many Latin American cities, electricity and water are rationed to certain times of day. People with money are retreating to closed condominium com-plexes patrolled by security guards and surrounded by electric fences. Furthermore, advances in genetic manipulation have opened up questions about eugenics, designer babies, and a host of ethical problems that we have never confronted before. Have we lost 99

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control? Are we on a slippery slope and it is too late to put the brakes on even if we try?

With the focus on bad news, it can seem like the world is falling apart—nothing is safe. But generalizing in this pessimistic way only makes us feel worse. There is good medical evidence that pessimistic thinking damages your health. This statistical link is more robust than that between smoking and lung cancer.

Optimists counter by saying that many well-intentioned and intelligent people are working for peace, and that we can put technology to work to solve these problems. We will discover new ways to produce fresh water and to counter pollution. The age of mass space travel is only a generation away, and this will spawn new technologies that will help solve problems here on Earth. Genetic advances will let people live healthier, happier lives and genetic defects will be eradicated.

It has been said (attributed to James Cabell) that the optimist pro-claims we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears that this is true.

Both the optimistic and the pessimistic views are predictions, not reality. We make one or the other real by the decisions we take now.

We have to think globally and act locally. People acting in their best interests without looking at the bigger picture usually
cause
difficulties. We can all work for a better future for all by doing our best to give a better life to those we love. We cannot solve such large-scale problems on our own, but we are not powerless—we all have a circle of influence, however small. We can work with other people; one candle can light a thousand others. Those who caused the greatest revolutions in philosophy, science, technology, and ethics were not politicians; most had no secular power at all.

Remember the well-known metaphor from chaos theory: a butterfly flapping its wings in Rio de Janeiro can cause a tornado in Texas.

The weather system is so complex that a very small disturbance can be magnified by air currents to create a huge disturbance thousands of miles away. In the same way, a small act of kindness or an intelligent decision can have effects on many other people far beyond the 100

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immediate environment. Fear of the future can be a healthy motivation to make good decisions. The future is made now.

Information

The information you can obtain is not the information you want…

The information you want is not the information you need… The information you need is not the information you can obtain…

Good information is crucial to feeling safe. We used to have a problem getting information and it was precious. Now we have the opposite problem: information is so plentiful that sometimes it is worth nothing. For example, I wanted to research “fear of flying” on the internet, so I typed the words into the Google search engine. Back came 3,250,000 hits in 0.14 seconds. Information overload. Now what? How can I find exactly what I am looking for? The information I want is hidden somewhere in those hits, but where? I don’t have a lifetime to sift through them all. Three and a quarter million pieces of information is as good (or as bad) as none. Google ranks these results, but the way it ranks them may not correspond with my exact interest.

Scientific knowledge has increased exponentially in the last cen-tury, so the answer to your question is probably out there; the problem is to find it. It is harder to get good information, and there is always the sneaking feeling that you may be missing something important.

There is a game called Googlewhacking. Its object is to put two words into the Google search engine that will bring up only one web page as the answer. This is not easy. If the words are too unconnected and esoteric, no pages are returned. If the words are too general, there will be more than one. One of the first Googlewhacks was “ambidex-trous scallywags.” Now there are over 100 pages returned for that combination of words. Googlewhacking is a joke, but behind the humor it is clear that the only way to get through the information glut is to hone the art of asking good questions.

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We need information that is as precise and relevant as possible. The most important skill is to ask exactly the right question. The quality of the information you get depends on the quality of the question you ask—this is the GIGO principle (garbage in garbage out).

The internet also offers us ezines and newsgroups on every conceivable subject. Many are interesting, but we cannot read them all. It is an Aladdin’s cave of goodies seducing us further and further in; and the further in we go, the more there is available. The internet is open 24/7. It does not sleep, but we have to.

Too much email is also information overload. Email is an example of the “tragedy of the commons.” What started as useful, quick, and easy can be useless, slow, and difficult because so many people use it. Spam is one problem. You didn’t ask for it, you don’t want it, yet it keeps coming in floods—drugs, porn, personalized messages telling you have won the lottery, and solicitations from unknown Nigerian businesspeople to open up your bank account to them. The real, important email gets lost in the slush pile. No wonder looking at their inbox on Monday morning causes anxiety for many people.

So much to do, and so little guidance on what is important.

The best way to deal with information overload is to be absolutely clear about your goal. Then ask the precise question that gets you the information you need for your goal and no more.

It is important to limit the information you take in. Too much information just leads to confusion and a turbulent mind.

Skill for freedom

Dealing with information overload

1 Stop! Be aware of how you feel. Use a relaxation exercise (see page 212) for a few minutes.

2 Be aware of your thinking.What do you see? What do you hear?

What do you feel?

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3 If you have mental pictures that are moving fast in a blur, slow them down. Change how they look until you are more comfortable.

4 Listen to the sounds in your mind. If there are many voices, just let them die away. If the sounds are loud, turn down the volume. Make them slower if necessary. Change the sounds until you are comfortable with them.

5 Come back to the present moment.Think about exactly what your question is and what is important about that to you. Get the best answer you can right now and know that later you may get a better one.

Choice

NLP has a saying: “If you have only one choice you are stuck. If you have two choices, you have a dilemma. You need three choices for real choice.” Choice is good; this is beyond argument. We laugh at the old Soviet Union planned economy in the 1950s and 1960s where you could have any car you wanted, as long as it was a black Skoda.

We also assume that if we are deprived of choice, then someone else is hoarding all the goodies for themselves. If three choices are good, then are four better, and five better still?

Europe and the United States are like Disneyworld to someone who lives in a very poor country. Shops full of dazzling goods, things you have only dreamed about, and dozens of varieties of the things you want. Even for people who live there, the choice can be too much sometimes. Once upon a time if I wanted a cup of coffee, I went to a coffee shop and took one of the coffees on the small menu—a few varieties of espresso or cappuccino. Now every time I go, I have choice with a vengeance. First, choose the coffee blend. Do I want Colombian?

Brazilian? Kenyan? A mixture? Then, do I want it with ordinary milk, 3% fat milk, 1% fat milk? Cream? Half and half? Hot or cold? And what size: large, larger, or too large? To drink there? To go?

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Choice is good, except when there is too much of it. Research indicates that our short-term memory is restricted to between seven and nine pieces of information. Too many choices take us over this limit, so in practice we limit our own choices.

Marketers generally think that more choice is better, so sometimes they bombard us with choices that make it difficult to decide. They assume that the more choices they give customers, the better the customers will like it and the more customers they will get. Some choice is better than none, but more is not better. More and different things do not necessarily make us happier.

Choice and happiness

The gross domestic product of the USA more than doubled from 1974

to 2004, yet the proportion of people describing themselves as “very happy” declined by about 5% (that is, 14 million people). Happiness is subjective; it does not depend on a high standard of living.

Some interesting research asked a large group of people to rate their happiness on a scale of one to ten. A score of one meant they were very unhappy; a score of ten meant Nirvana. The average was 6.5. A lottery win would push the score up to 9 or 10, but a year later the reported rating of the lottery winners was back to an average of 6.5. We adapt to our circumstances. When life improves, we soon take the improvement for granted and expect it. It becomes normal. And then we resent going back to the place where we were content before. The more you have, the more you take for granted and the more you have to lose.

More choice, less value

It also seems that the more choices you have, the less you value what you get. There have been several studies where people were asked to guess the price of a magazine subscription. One group was given one magazine and asked to guess how much it was worth. Another group was given three or four different magazines. The first group, which had no choice, consistently gave the magazine a higher value than the other group with the choice.

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When you give people too many choices, you remind them that they cannot have everything. In choosing one thing, they must give up everything else. And as a result, they are less satisfied with the decision they make. They tend to see the opportunity cost, what they have lost rather than what they have gained.

Maximizers and satisfiers

People deal with choice in two very different ways.
Maximizers
are those who aim for the best possible choice in every situation. The more they try to get the best, the more likely they are to regret their decision afterward (when they see they have missed something better). Maximizers see the opportunity cost in their decisions. The more choices there are, the more overwhelmed they become, since they feel compelled to evaluate them all to pick the best.

Satisfiers
are people who aim for a “good enough” choice; it does not have to be the best. They don’t spend as much time and effort on trying to achieve their goals, or devote as much thought to their decisions. So maximizers are likely to make better choices than satisfiers, yet paradoxically be less happy about them. They get less pleasure from knowing they did well, and suffer more if they discover afterward that they could have done better.