This week on the Love Letters, Life, and Other Conversations podcast we welcome our second guest to the podcast.  Jane speaks with one of her Chateau Life Residency guests, Dr. Ruth Anderson.  They use a quote by one of Jane's favorites, Yung Pueblo, as a springboard for their conversation about anxiety and its role in peak performance. 

Ruth is a sports psychologist specializing in peak performance for athletes.  She works with athletes working under pressure to manage their thought processes so that they can have an awareness of how to think when they are actually performing. The idea is to equip people proactively to be self aware of their psychological processes and how to perform when they need to in a high performance way.

Jane and Ruth talked about how the skills applied by high performance athletes are applicable to those in business and the average person who wants to function at their best level.  

Anxiety is a universal emotion.  The flight or fight reflex.  And when flight is your reaction of choice this is not because of weakness.  Think of it rather that anxiety can actual help you perform better because you are  aware and your reaction and decision making time is heightened. What you need to learn is how to not allow the anxiety to stay high, but how to manage it and perform in the moment.

The only thing that is within your control is what you think what you do and what you focus on. What do you need to do to get the best outcome possible for your situation.  

If you’re not 20-30% anxious about something, you are probably not challenging yourself. If you want to move forward you have to be willing yourself in that challenged position, but have the skills to put into place.

Jane share some of her current tools for managing anxiety: 

• Implementing ‘worry time’ which can help manage anxiety in an incremental way vs letting it become overwhelming. 
• The 5-4-3-2-1 process
• Habit Stacking 

Ruth shared  that there are some common though traps: 

• Common thought traps
• Self doubt
• Worry
• Predictions
• Ruminations

She also share that it is important to individualize what is right for you, but that there are two practical things we can do for our mind and our body to help manage our anxiety and improve our performance:

• Slow deep abdominal breathing 
• Work on our awareness -  paying attention to what you are thinking

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Connect with Ruth
Her website is: https://mindhq.com.au/ruth-anderson/
On

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