Anxiety, stress, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, divorce, and suicides have increased in every generation for the last eighty years because our life skills have slowly and steadily deteriorated. So we have been struggling more and more as time goes by.
Then the Pandemic arrived and changed life as we know it. We were confronted by a life-threatening virus and in a few short months, it showed us four things.
- Our jobs, relationships, and lives were not nearly as stable as we believed.
- In the face of such danger, we had no idea what kinds of choices we should, or could, make.
- We had almost no control over our anxious thinking or negative emotions.
- The established systems we count on were as helpless as we were.
Because of those four things, our negative emotions are overwhelming our ability to make the kinds of choices we need to make to maintain our relationships, both professional and personal.
LIFE IS ALL ABOUT SKILLS is an accelerated life skills course that can restore and upgrade your abilities to create and maintain close and nurturing relationships, make the kinds of choices that move your live forward, and manage the negative emotions that happen when life throws you a curve.
LIFE IS ALL ABOUT SKILLS uses a skills-based approach to help you learn how to get your negative emotions under control so you can use reason instead of emotions and solve the majority of the problems you are facing
The course begins by showing that anxiety is actually the primary negative emotion, but far from being an uncontrollable incurable mental illness, anxiety is one of the most important conscious processes we ever developed. Originally, it allowed us to imagine things that were actually dangerous and develop skills and strategies to avoid being harmed.
Apart from the Pandemic, almost all the “dangers” we face today are virtual, not actual. They won’t cause us physical harm, but they might cause us emotional harm.
At least 95% of that harm comes from worrying about not being able to do three skills we have to do well to feel good about our life, relationships, make choices, and manage the negative emotions we feel when things do not turn out well.
Do our skills create desirable, tolerable, and sustainable results, or do they end up producing results we do not want? Anxiety is really about the unwanted results we believe we will create with the skills we have.
Need proof? Look at your own experiences. Do you remember how anxious you were when you were learning to drive, cook, interview for a job, take tests, date, learn a sport, or any skill that either has real or imagined serious consequences if not done correctly or carefully?
The following graph shows you everything you need to know about the anxiety process.
To avoid causing the unwanted outcomes and consequences, you had to learn how to do those skills a specific way. These are conduct-critical skills. How we do them will determine the outcome, and the better we do them, the less anxiety we will have.
Learning to drive is an excellent example because we clearly understand the consequences of not driving correctly or carefully can be fatal. In the beginning, we are all very anxious, but as we gain competence, we learn to trust ourselves to drive safely, and our anxiety about creating unwanted results, as in crashes, decreases accordingly.
Almost all our negative emotions share a common origin. What we know about the world, our place in it, our limitations in it, our expectations of it, our coping skills for it, our attitudes, biases, and prejudices, were all learned before we were five years of age.
We need to embrace the facts, not the fantasy, of our identity. Who we think we are is the expression of skills we learned as tiny children. We can re-learn, upgrade, practice, and master better versions of those skills as adults.
Our lives will be significantly better, but our children will be the ultimate beneficiaries of our personal transformations. Their skills will be better from the beginning so they will be able to realize more and more of the amazing potential they are born with.
Thankfully, the ability to change our mind instantly is built in, and the way our modern brain works makes updating our skills a lot easier than we ever believed possible.
Upgrading your skills will allow you to create and maintain closer, more nurturing relationships, make consistently usable choices, and significantly decrease the negative emotions that happen when things don’t turn out the way you wanted them to.
Your skills with relationships, emotions, and making choices, developed before you were five so they frequently don’t work in the complex situations you encounter as a teen or an adult. To upgrade your skills, and your life.
As a First Responder, you are already saving the planet one life at a time, but you need the skills to save your brain from the profoundly harmful effects caused by danger and the negative emotions you face every day.