I’m nervous and scared. I’d been carrying a bag load of fear around on my chest for a few weeks now. It’s many things - transiting to a new season of life, audacious goals, ambitious new habits to make, learning completely new skills like coding, major changes coming up for family.

But it’s good that things like that surface on weekends, during downtime. That’s what downtime is for, isn’t it? To catch up on things which I might have missed, in my head-long dive into deep work during the weekdays. And fear and anxiety came up today, just as I was relaxing and daydreaming while on a quiet bus ride cruising under golden sunset light and pleasant temperatures. You relax, loosen up, and whatever that the body had been bracing for and tensing up against, now gets released. The fight-flight-freeze response gets to be somatically discharged. It’s a good thing. It’s tells us stuff we need to know and track. It’s telling me stuff I should acknowledge.

That it’s normal to feel performance anxiety in such transitionary times. That I have a lot on my plate. That there’s high expectations for myself to step up by leaps. The toughest and most obvious aspect is learning programming. It’s deep foreign territory for sure. And trying to create a working product and launch within a month, with one paying customer at least? If my fear can speak, it’s saying “YOU’RE CRAZY!”.

But the fearful child self needs leadership in these moments. I try to bring in my calm, patient and compassionate adult self. “I hear you. Your fear is true and necessary. You got us dreaming big again, so that’s a good thing! I’ll take care of you. You got this. WE got this.” I do self-talk all the time, and on that bus ride, I saw my adult self come up again.

The other thing to acknowledge is to recognise that the challenge is worthy. If it’s easy and familiar, I won’t feel fear. If it’s not exciting, I won’t feel anxiety. I recalled this diagram I saw before, in the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He talked about the “flow channel”, which is a balance between challenge and skill. Anxiety arises when something is too hard based on your skill level. Boredom comes if things are too easy for your skill level. When the challenge is first matched by your skills, you experience flow and you enjoy it. But soon over time, you get bored, because it’s hard to enjoy doing the same thing at the same level over prolonged periods. We grow either bored or frustrated. A desire to enjoy ourselves again pushes us to stretch ourselves and seek out harder challenges. Personal growth and discovery ensues. And growth is what I want. 

It helped to recognise this anxiety as a necessary stage that I’m passing through. There’s no sabretooth tiger chasing me right now. There’s no real danger of being eaten alive, or terminal ruin and loss. It’s subjective, not objective fear. But the fear itself is useful - it keeps me alert, helps me not get complacent, makes me seek out opportunities, drives me to work harder.

So all in all, good fear. 

I’m writing this to self-talk, basically.