Every working day puts me in direct contact with anxious patients and their families. That’s understandable because I am going to give someone an anesthetic. I am a Nurse Anesthetist. In my career, I have administered over 40 thousand anesthetics, and my patients have taught me a lot about anxiety. More importantly, they have given me opportunities to learn how to lessen theirs.
In trying to figure out how to help them, I also became really interested in how some people can be calm, cool, collected, almost never upset or angry, have great relationships, raise good children, and make choices that evolve their lives rather than complicate them.
To make a long story short, it is because they think differently. Their thinking skills create better results. That seems reasonable since better skills do create better results in all other aspects of our lives.
My first book, Mental Mechanics: A Repair Manual, was just that, a repair manual for the thinking skills in the areas of our lives that cause us most of our distress, relationships, negative emotions, and making choices.
Shortly after it was published, I realized something profoundly important that turned my passion into an obsession. We already know how to do all of those things very well.
Maybe we have problems using the skills in specific aspects of our lives, but the same processes for doing them well are already being used in others.
The evidence for that is all of our Successful Habits. Our brain knows how to do those skills well and does them thousands of times every day.
My second book, Already Wise: Our Brains Ability to Make the Best Choices, focused on the thinking skills we can use to make our best choices.
But looking at the nearly exponential increase of anxiety, distress, depression, and suicide, what people really need to know is not how to make the best choices, they need to know how to quit making the wrong ones.
Nearly all our life skills are learned before we start school and have become automatic subconscious habits that basically dictate our decisions for the rest of our lives.
Our subconscious had to learn all the skills we currently are using, and how it learned them is no longer a secret.
Re-training our subconscious is the quickest route from where we are, back to better relationships, fewer negative emotions, and better choices.
Since our subconscious already knows how to do all these things, it does not take a great amount of tweaking to get our conscious mind to use upgraded versions of the same skills, and by using them deliberately, we can automatically retrain our subconscious.
These are the same techniques every coach uses to help someone improve their skills. Better understanding, better execution, and deliberate practice.
Life Is All About Skills contains the concepts, procedures, and the science that backs up the first organized method for to retraining your subconscious with better skills. It will show you how to work with your brain instead of fighting against it.
(c) 2017 Douglas McKee