The speaker tested two anxiety techniques: deep breathing during a feared task and a confidence mantra in another situation. After consuming self-help books, audio recordings, and CDs, they identified which tools actually worked and compiled them into their first book, a toolkit for living with anxiety.
In situation one, I'm going to go and I'm going to apply strategy A. So that's. I'm going to do this thing that I'm scared of. I'm going to engage in deep breathing before I get there. Let's see how that goes. And then I'm going to a similar situation, but we'll call it situation two. And I'm going to apply strategy B. So maybe that is reciting a mantra to myself, something that sort of makes me feel a little bit more confident in the moment. And as I'm going on this journey and I'm reading different books and I'm listening to Books on Tape at the time, or cassettes or whatever it was, CDs, I'm picking up and synthesizing these different strategies and then trying to figure out, do these things work for me or do they not? And so if I fast forward all the way down to having written my first book, which is the subtitle, There is a Toolkit for Living with and Overcoming Anxiety, I was trying to basically not only tell my readers about my own experiences, but I was trying to say, hey, I gave all those tools that you might hear about. I gave them a shot, and then I figured out which ones worked for me and which ones didn't.
