What is the worst thing that can happen?
So I’m asking this person who came to me and said, “I’m very busy at work, okay?” “Why are you so stressed?” “You don’t understand my boss has given me so many tasks and I can’t ever make them on time.” “So what’s going to happen if you’re not going to make any more time?” “He will be disappointed in me. He will be mad at me.” “Okay and what’s going to happen.” And then you can see this shallow face of someone who has never thought about it. “Well, nothing’s going to happen.” So I’m asking him, “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” And he was like, “Well, he really appreciates my work, basically. So he’s not even going to fire me or anything. He’s simply going to be mad at me.” “Okay, Is he mad at you right now?” “Yeah.” “So what is the worst thing that can happen?” Logically speaking, the answer is nothing.
When we’re faced with our friends or children or family members and they’re asking us something and we’re stressed about the request. We’re stressed, we don’t know what to do. We don’t want to do it on one hand, it’s hard for us or it doesn’t fit our schedule and on the other hand, it feels bad to say “no.” “What can possibly happen if you’ll say no?” “So what?” “You said no, so what?” “They’ll be mad, they’ll be disappointed.” “Okay. And then what?” I think 90% of the stress in most people’s everyday life, the logical answer of the “so whats” is, nothing is going to happen. A friend will be mad for five minutes and the next day, everything will be back to normal.
Become socially confident
Emotionally however, and this is where NLP comes very handy. I asked him, “Okay.” We understand that logically nothing is going to happen. But let’s intuitively like to answer those questions, not logically but as your inner self, as your cowardly self, as your inner like conversation, inner dialogue. Let’s try to give it some volume. Let’s try to put it out. “So your boss is going to be mad at you, what’s going to happen?” And he was like, “ao it means I’m not good enough.” “Okay and if you’re not good enough, so what?” “So no one wants to be with me, no one will want to….,” it goes back to the idea of being rejected from society, “I am not being accepted, I am not being valued.” So this fear within us comes into illogical places but it feels very real and this is what we’re very stressed about and it comes through in many areas of our lives.
So if we want to be less stressed in our lives, we “simply” and it’s quote, unquote, “simply” because it’s not so simple, can become more socially confident. The more socially confident the person is, the less he will be prone to stress. I’ve had the privilege of working with several highly functioning [inaudible 04:30] people. Highly functioning meaning they have a normal life almost like every one of us. But they still have some of the amazing [inaudible 04:46] qualities and those people tend to become extremely stressed but for very short periods of time. Most of the time, they experience close to no stress from what I observed. They become extremely stressed but very focused for periods of time and this is because on a day to day basis, on an ongoing basis they are not aware or as aware of their social needs.
The people I had the privilege of working with, did not always feel the need to be accepted because they were so much into their own heads and only with themselves and they weren’t focused on whether someone will like them or not. When they’re focused when that way then of course, they feel stressed just like anyone else. But this is a very special example of people who are biologically, socially confident in a weird way. But they are confident because they don’t feel the fear of being socially rejected all the time. They feel it sometimes but most of the time, it seems to be out of their scope, out of their focus.
Older you get, the less stressed you become
This is one of the things that people tend to say that the older you get, the less stressed you become. It’s not necessarily true by the way, some people get more stressed as they grow older. But the basic idea behind this phrase is that very young people are very dependent evolutionarily and socially on their peers and the older you get, you get less dependent on your peers and more in touch with your very close circles and your very close circles tend to have a place where you have more confident in your place in those relationships.
It’s obviously not the case everywhere. It’s obviously not for everyone. But this is the truth behind this thing, that when I’m trying to impress 30 people or 300 people in my high school and I wanted to look how can I fit in this place or if I’m 25, or 32 in the new workplace where I have to impress the boss and my boss’s boss and my boss’s boss and all the peers around me in order to get the promotion, in order to be socially valuable, in order to be someone.
Some people when they’re 65, they don’t have all of that stuff. And they simply have like, “I need to be loved by my wife and my three children. And I already have a 40 year relationship with those people where I know in a more reliant way that I have this place in their lives.” Obviously, it’s not always the case. But it’s something that we have to understand and this is obviously something that we can create at an earlier age. But this is something that for some people happens naturally as they grow up, as they become older but of course, we can develop social confidence whenever we decide to do it.
Hey, it’s Gal Tzhayek. Thank you for watching this video. If you liked it, please press the thumbs up button. And you can also subscribe to the channel. Make sure you get notified each and every time a new video is uploaded. I’d like to hear your questions and review in the comment section below. And I’ll see you in one of those new videos.
