Caroline Cavanagh, author of Anxiety Alchemy, commits to a parachute jump before mid-August as the first step in her anxiety management process. She shares her personal experience with anxiety and invites viewers to follow her progress on anxietyalchemy.co.uk.
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Hi, my name's Caroline, and I am the author of a book called Anxiety Alchemy, which is a process that I've developed based on hundreds of hours of working with people who are struggling with anxiety. When I was writing the book earlier this year, one of my clients said to me, well, you know, Caroline, it's all well and good, but you don't come across as being anxious. You're so confident all the time. Kind of, what do you know? And at the time I thought, oh, that, that stings a bit. That hit, hit where it hurts. But should I take that on board? Maybe she has comments, you know, maybe she has a fair point. So I thought, well, yes, I am confident about quite a lot because I've struggled with anxiety in my past, missed out on a lot of things that I could have done but didn't, and I've learned from that. So I'm now in a position where I am relatively confident about a lot of things. Fantastic. But it doesn't stop there. What am I anxious about? And then, as often, these things, when you ask the question, the answer comes up. I have had on my bucket list since probably being a teenager to do a parachute jump. Opportunities have come up many times for me to jump out of an aeroplane, and I've always managed to find an excuse that, oh, what if I broke my ankle? I've got kids. That's really unreasonable. You know, what would— really irresponsible to jump out of a plane, break my ankle. What would the kids do with me on crutches? Other reasons, other excuses. And because what's the basic reason? I am scared like hell of jumping out of a plane with nothing but a piece of silk above my head. So that's what I'm going to do. And I made a commitment at the back of my book to say I am going to do a parachute jump by the end of September this year. We're now mid-June. What have I done since then? Absolutely nothing. I have had on my to-do list for at least 2 weeks now just to even book the flipping jump, not even get close to doing it, just book it. I've done a bit of research, excellent, but all it took was to press that buy now button. Didn't do it. I put up on Facebook to say, what does everyone else think, should I do the 10,000 or 15,000? And yeah, thanks all those people who said, Caroline, you've got to do the 15. Great, so I've now got to do a 15,000-foot jump out of a parachute, but I still haven't booked it. And this morning I got to that point, which maybe you're familiar with yourself, where you just go, okay, enough now, I've just got to change something. So I sat down and I started going through the Anxiety Alchemy process, and several pieces of the jigsaw fell in place. I'm not going to tell you about them now, I'm going to do that next week when I've made a little bit more progress. But what I am going to do now is make this big commitment, this huge goal. By the end of today, and today is Friday the— what is it? Day after referendum day. 24th, is that? Whatever. Of June. Before I go to bed today, I am going to book the jump. And I'm not going to wait until the end of September because what's the point? I am going to do it before we go on holiday, and we leave on the 13th of August. So by the 13th of August, I am going to have jumped out of an aeroplane, is the plan. First step of the plan is to book it. So I'd love you to join this journey with me, see how I get on, see what you can take from this that you may be able to apply to something that you're anxious about. maybe inspire you to, to really do the process yourself right the way through. Because I'm sure I'm gonna learn things. I already have, and I wrote the flippin' book. So it's all about understanding how your mind works and how to use that knowledge to actually achieve your own goals. So I'd love you to follow me through this journey. I'm gonna be putting regular blog posts up on the anxietyalchemy.co.uk website. And the next one will be whether I stepped up or shut up, and which case there'll be nothing on the blog. But my plan is to step up, go away, and book this jump now, and I will tell you all about it next time we speak. So thanks for watching, wish me luck, I think I'm gonna need it, and have a fantastic weekend, and I'll speak to you very, very soon. Bye! Bye!
