Caroline Cavanagh shows how to flip anxious "what if" thoughts into positive ones. Her daughter Nadia asked a nervous 16-year-old before an exam, "what if you did?" instead of dwelling on failure. The shift from worst-case thinking to possibility thinking changes everything.
Chapters
Most of us at some point have probably said, what if? You know, what if I get all my mucking words fuddled? Hmm. What if I, um, don't get the promotion? You know, what if I, you know, I don't know, all sorts of things. What if? And the brain is designed to then catastrophize. It's part of our survival technique. So what if I get all my mucking words fuddled? Well, then you're not going to get rebooked. then you're gonna not be able to pay your mortgage. And suddenly from one thought, I'm out on the street divorced and homeless while I'm still sitting in a chair. So just changing that thought process, if someone else says to me, but what if you don't? Your brain goes, oh well, if I don't and you speak really well, you'll get rebooked. And it's suddenly gone in a completely different direction. Yeah, yeah. And so again, this permissive culture, if someone says, oh, what if I don't do very well in that interview? A colleague just turned around and says, what if you do? That pattern interrupt, a well-known therapeutic technique, really, really works. And I've seen it happen. It was a beautiful moment at my kitchen table with my daughter. She'd got, I don't know, there's probably 7, 8, 16-year-old girls. And one of the girls said, oh, what if I didn't do very well in my exam today? And my daughter just spontaneously looked at her and said, what if you did? And this, this 16-year-old girl went, oh, well, do you know, I probably did do all right. And that was it, conversation over. And Nadia looked at me and I was like, yeah, good girl! And it was just that lovely moment where she spontaneously changed a thought process for someone that completely changed how she felt. And imagine that happening all day, every day around an organization, because we all say what if, but we can all just flip it.
