I have a lot of people come to me with anxiety.

Now we all get anxious from time to time. That’s normal. But when anxiety starts robbing you of the pleasures of life, of the freedom to go places, to do things, that’s a problem.

So what is anxiety? Well, for some people anxiety is like an attack. They might even say “I had an anxiety attack” or “I had a panic attack”. Well the truth is anxiety doesn’t attack. Panic doesn’t attack.

Now I’m not discounting the feeling that you might have, but anxiety is often a defense against some other experience that we’re having. So I like to think of anxiety as the absence of trust.

Think about this for a moment. You have to go for an interview, and you’re anxious about it. What are you really anxious about? I’d hazard a guess that what’s really going on is that you don’t trust yourself to show up in the way that you really want to show up in the interview, fearful then that you won’t get the job, won’t move ahead in your life.

The anxiety builds because you’re telling yourself something that in the moment feels real, and it gains momentum. It gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and for some people that anxiety is so big that it stops them from living their life.

So I want you to think about anxiety as the absence of trust. Where in your life don’t you trust yourself? All you need to look at is where are the areas of your life that you get anxious, and from there you can start looking at now how do I build trust in these areas of my life, creating more freedom, more possibility?

It’s not as easy as it sounds, I’ll give you that. But I’m telling you that medicating anxiety is not the best form of creating a solution for it. Talking it through and gaining perspective on how you can trust yourself more, and under what circumstances, so that you can feel your own energy and power in a situation, now THAT’S freedom.

So I want you to think about trusting yourself, and where you’d like to trust yourself more.