A short excerpt from a YouTube talk (April 22, 2024) about reframing anxiety and fear as informative signals. The speaker advises noticing small "gremlin" moments as indicators that something matters, treating anxiety as an opportunity to learn and prepare, and using micro-moment techniques to offer better support to others.
Those gremlins are just an indication that something really does matter to you. So, you know, you kind of flip anxiety, like, whoa. To wonder, you know, like, oh, okay, that's clearly significant. I'm registering that something does matter. What if I allow myself to see it as an exciting opportunity? Like, clearly, I want to serve this to the best of my ability. What do I think I need to do more in order to be the most useful support system for these operators? So it's those sorts of little moments where, as geeky as it sounds, that technique actually really helps. It's like, hold on, little gremlin, what are you actually trying to echo here? Right? And then this is again, when you become accustomed to these little things. It's tiny micro moments in time. But you can't just go, I'm just gonna soldier on and I'll bulldoze it through this fear thing. No, it serves a good purpose. Look at it tango dance with it. Let it teach you the thing that it's meaning to teach you and then move forward better prepared than you were a second priority.
