It’s been an exciting summer…
You’ve seen lots of good things made available here for anxiety and panic attacks, and there’s more to come. But in my personal life, which is increasingly fleeting lately it seems, I had an incredibly memorable time over the past few month helping my four year old daughter learn to swim. The process even gave me a great example to illustrate a major part of overcoming anxiety…
Now I know how to swim, pretty good in fact, but just because I know how to, doesn’t mean I know how to TEACH someone else how to…so my wife and I decided to enlist the help of our friendly neighborhood children’s swim instructor.
When we first started out, my daughter was TERRIFIED when her feet couldn’t touch the bottom, even though I was holding her and she was perfectly safe. I mean, it’s natural to be afraid of drowning, right? Not as many of us would be walking around if your ancestors didn’t have a healthy dose of respect for the possibility of sinking. So whenever she would try and put her feet down and nothing was there to support her, she would hold on to me real tight and on more than one occasion, use my ears and hair for a nice and firm grip.
Ouch.
Now like I said, I can swim, but I had no idea how to handle this or where to even begin to teach her to have some confidence in the water.
Enter Bill, the swim instructor.
We showed up for our lesson, and Bill got pretty much the same response as I did initially. But what he did next really took me by surprise. He didn’t start by teaching her to swim like I was trying to do…
He taught her to float.
Yep, the very first thing he did was teach her that whenever she got scared, instead of struggling and fighting and kicking and flailing her arms, she could simply roll onto her back and float. That trying so hard to NOT SINK was actually the problem. She needed to stop resisting and relax and just become part of the water.
See, she’s a natural…
Kind of sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Maybe a little bit like I’ve been telling YOU about your anxiety…and how your struggle against it perpetuates it, and how a big part of overcoming it is to realize that if you just TRULY stop resisting it, it starts to go away. That once you know that whenever you want you can, “roll onto your back”, there’s nothing to fear and the anxiety demon stops stalking you…
You can learn all about my techniques to help you lean to “float” and end your anxiety in my programs over there on the right side of the page.
So here’s some questions to ponder…I’d love to hear read the answers in the comments section of this post:
So how can you better “roll onto your back and float” the next time you get anxious?
How have you been fighting your anxiety so far? Has it helped or do you keep sinking and scaring yourself?
How many lessons do you need before you try something different?
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Great story, Rich – it really makes it clear how so often our own struggle and resistance are the source of our distress, not our circumstances. I like to think that not only will your daughter become a great swimmer, but that she is learning a lesson about facing her fears in the future.
A wonderful example for my case.You are genious!
Sometimes I automatically try and resist anxiety which then gets me more anxious, so you have to tell yourself to let go…….just relax for once!