A thoughts exercise for taming anxiety

You are a founder of a technology startup and have a brilliant product. You are going to present your pitch in a startup hackathon coming Friday. From the moment you decided worry flurries have begun doing their job. “Is my product really of value? Is it unique enough? I do have some traction but do I have the edge I think I have? Maybe my revenue model isn’t convincing enough. In fact I barely have a revenue model. Tim was saying that Engineers are not good at selling. I am also not a presenter.  I am not making through this!”

When you find yourself in such a place, how about doing this-

Take 5 mins out of your time and jot down your thoughts about this on a post-it. Write down what you feel, how you feel about how your pitch will go. Write in enough detail (but don’t write a book.. .yet! :)). Also rate out of 10 how fearful you feel about it in this moment. And then just go back to doing whatever you were doing. ps: Don’t lose the post-it! Also, don’t forget the next most important thing- Practice your pitch!

Let time fly and welcome the D-day. Go to your event. Do your best. And then when you come back home and then without looking at your previous post-it, write down again- how your pitch actually went? What you felt when you gave your pitch? And then rate out of 10 how fearful you “actually” felt while giving your pitch?

Now it is time to have some fun! Take out your old post-it and put it next to this one. See what you wrote before. Compare your thoughts on how you thought the pitch would go vs how it actually went. See if there is any difference between the fear ratings on both postit’s. Is anything different? Whatever it is, that is the difference between imagination and reality.

Do this again when you come across a situation where your fears cloud your mind about a future reality. Repeat until you can see some patterns. After months of practice you will be able to see whether the gap between what you imagine fearfully vs what the realities are, is huge or not. Do you just feel too much fear about the future but in reality do ok? Then the problem is in your thinking or beliefs aka you believe too much in your thoughts and feelings. Reality is always less fearful than imagination. This is an important lesson and next time you have something come up, simply don’t believe in the thoughts too much!