Most Stressful Thoughts Are About The Past
That’s why most of the time, I’m doing The Work on situations that happened to me in the past.
In fact, you could even argue that stressful situations in the future are merely projections of past experiences.
By working my past experiences, the future seems to care of itself. The future gets brighter and more hopeful as I keep doing The Work on my past situations.
This is what Byron Katie means when she says that The Work is preventive maintenance.
But There’s Also Value in Doing The Work on Upcoming Issues
A client reminded me of this the other day. He said that he uses The Work sometimes before making a stressful phone call.
He simply writes a few of his stressful thoughts about the upcoming call and questions them. He says that the actual call usually ends up gong very smoothly after that.
I like that approach. And I’ve used it too, though it’s been a while.
There Are Several Ways To Do It
1) Picture the upcoming call, or date, or interview, or test, or speech, or any other stressful experience coming up, and then write your thoughts free form.
For example, if I have a speech to give, I might write down stressful thoughts like this, “I didn’t prepare enough. They’re going to find fault in my logic. They will judge me. I have to do it perfectly. I need them to like it.” And then question each of these with the four questions and the turnarounds.
2) Write a Judge-Your-Neighbor Worksheet on the future situation.
I did this years ago when I was planning to tell my dad that I was in a gay relationship. I wrote a Judge-Your-Neighbor Worksheet on what was going to be an upcoming situation on the phone with him. I put myself right there in that future situation and wrote Line 1 of a worksheet, something like “I’m hurt by Dad because he is disappointed in me.” And then I wrote a whole worksheet out of that imagined future situation.
You could do the same thing with an upcoming speech. Pick someone in the audience and write a Judge-Your-Neighbor Worksheet on them: “I am hurt by my teacher because she is critical of my speech.”
3) Write a Judge-Your-Neighbor Worksheet on a past situation similar to the upcoming future situation.
For example, I could pick a time in the past when I was nervous about giving a speech, and when someone actually did critique me unfairly, and write a Judge-Your-Neighbor Worksheet from there. By clearing up the past, the future may get clearer too.
The advantage of this approach is that past situations are more concrete and are often easier to hold than future situations.
Give It A Try
I encourage you to experiment, and see what works for you.
And I’d love to hear your experiences working with future situations.
Have a great weekend,
Todd
“I often use the word story to talk about thoughts, or sequences of thoughts, that we convince ourselves are real. A story may be about the past, the present, or the future; it may be about what things should be, what they could be, or why they are.” Byron Katie, Loving What Is
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