Why I Speak | Caroline Cavanagh: Anxiety Specialist | @caroline-cavanagh

19 Mar 2025 · 2 min

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2:10

In this monologue, anxiety specialist Caroline Cavanagh explains her motivation for combining one‑to‑one therapeutic work with public speaking. She describes the privilege of helping individuals move from a stressed, agitated state to a calmer one within a short session, but acknowledges the fundamental limitation of time that restricts how many clients she can see. To amplify her impact, she turned to speaking, which allows her to reach many people simultaneously. She argues that while deep work with a single client is valuable, delivering a single practical tool to a large audience can create a cumulative "tsunami" of change. When audience members recognize unhelpful thought patterns—such as worrying about imagined scenarios—they gain the choice to stop the anxiety cycle, producing ripple effects throughout organizations, schools, and broader communities. The speaker expresses enthusiasm for witnessing these light‑bulb moments and the collective benefit that arises from shared awareness.

Chapters

So yeah, why do I do what I do? So working with people one-to-one as an anxiety specialist is a real privilege, and I sometimes smile at what my neighbours might think because someone turns up at the door quite stressed and agitated and they leave 90 minutes later in a much better state. And you think, but there you go. But it is a privilege to be able to turn something or someone who is, you know, in quite a bad place, whether it's anxiety, whether it's depression, and to work with them therapeutically to give them the tools to then feel a lot better. And the one restriction I believe we all have is time. You can go and get more money, you can get more energy, but you can't get more time. So how we use that time is really important. And so working therapeutically, there's only so many people I can reach because there's only so much time in a day. So by going out and becoming a speaker, it means that I can reach a lot more people. And it very quickly was obvious to me that whilst there's huge value in working really deep with one person, there's also great value in working superficially with a lot of people. Because when each of those people takes even just one thing away and collectively use it, it's like a tsunami. A drip here and a drip there suddenly sends out ripples that builds and builds and builds. And in an organisation, in a school, if someone sees a colleague that's looking stressed and says, you look worried, is what you're worrying about a reality or is it just your imagination? It's like, oh yeah, I'm worried at the thought, it hasn't actually happened. And in most cases, won't happen. And that collectively used in an organisation has a phenomenal effect. And that's what I love seeing. And even those light bulbs going on when you're talking to an audience and someone goes, I do that! And as soon as you know you're doing it, you've then got a choice to not to do it, and that's powerful. Yeah.