Life! By Design_ 6 Steps to an Extraordinary You - Laura Morton [46]
My wife and I took a trip to New York City several years ago. She grew up in Southern California, so her only image of Central Park was what she had heard on the news—not even recent news, but the old stories to stay out of the park at night, that it’s a dangerous place where people get raped, mugged, and murdered. My goal on that trip was to get Kathy over her fear of Central Park. One night after dinner, I suggested we walk back to our hotel by cutting across the park. She reluctantly agreed. As we strolled, I explained to her that if she fed her fear, she would never be able to enjoy the beautiful setting. Suddenly, I could feel Kathy’s body tense up as her hand tightly clenched mine. She noticed a large man quickly walking right toward us wearing an overcoat and a baseball hat pulled down over his eyes and face. I could feel her trepidation as he approached. As he got closer, I suddenly realized it was the actor Andy Garcia. My wife was freaking out thinking he was a mugger, when it turned out to be someone whose work we both admire. Imagine the difference in her experience that night if she had been free from her preconditioned worry and assumption of a worst-case scenario.
I read a story about Ted Turner in his book Citizen Turner that I’ve never forgotten. The book tells the story of Ted’s family. One morning, Ted’s father kissed his wife on the forehead, turned to Ted, gave him a kiss too, and told them both to have a nice day. Before he left the house that morning, he said he forgot something upstairs. He disappeared up the steps in their family home, took out a gun, and killed himself. The story goes on about how he had been unable to handle the emotional stress of the many mistakes he had made in the family business. Although Ted was a young man, this is when he began to handle the family business so his mother didn’t lose everything. He was dealing with the banks and other business interests to turn around the family fortune. He developed a survival strategy in life, which was basically to go for everything you want. There was no room for worry because the worst-case scenario was that he could always kill himself. He told bankers they could give him the necessary loans or he would just kill himself and they’d be left with a bunch of bad debts. Although his approach was extreme, it helped Ted build his empire from the ground up. Ted Turner was willing to accept the worst-case scenario, which not only kept him alive but helped him thrive.
I often talk to my clients about worst-case scenarios to help them understand that every challenge we go through in life is temporary. Circumstances do not define us. How we handle them does.
A client of mine was on the verge of losing his job. He was panicked at the thought of being unemployed. I took him through a series of questions so he could play out all of his worst-case scenarios prior to anything actually happening. When I asked why he was so upset about being fired, his first response was that he would lose his house. He was already on the brink of financial disaster and was a banana peel slip away from bankruptcy. If he lost his job, he’d never be able to make his mortgage payments.
“And if that happens, what else will happen?” I asked.
“The house will go into foreclosure. The bank will come and take everything.”
“And if that happens?” I asked.
“I’ll lose my wife. She’ll divorce me and take what little I have left in this world.”
I kept going because I didn’t think we’d hit the worst case yet. “What would happen if your wife divorced you?”
“I’d lose my kids too.”
“And if that happened?”
“I would die. I wouldn’t want to live.”
I looked at my client with a straight face and said, “So, let me get this right. If you lose your job, you will die? Like six feet under, die?”
My abrupt approach startled him at first. But then he realized how absurd he sounded. He wouldn’t kill himself over losing his job. I explained to him that his worry had blown his possible job loss way out