Dealing with the Future Unknown, continued

As we are all painfully aware, we are in the midst of some very uncomfortable future unknowns looming in front of us.
We have been walking for months on a dimly lit path and as we look forward, we realize we cannot see what lies ahead for:
...the election outcome, the anomaly of this election process - no clear answers are going to come on election night, potential legal battles to follow, COVID rates and death rates rising, vaccines, etc.
-Just writing this has made my anxiety bubble up to the surface!
Given the state of these significant Unknowns, I figured it was time to go deeper into the process of How to Deal with Future Unknowns.

There are theoretically 2 components to dealing with a Future Unknown and feeling some sort of control in regards to the situation. For the record, there is only one thing we can control: ourselves; our thoughts, our emotions and our actions.

Part 1: “I did my part.”
The first is the one that we figured out how to do a long time ago:
Worried about a test? Study for it. We still may not be able to fall asleep the night before the test because we are worried we will not do well. But if we can authentically tell ourselves, “I studied hard,” then we can likely quiet our brain and fall asleep by knowing, "I did what I could do. I did my part.”

Doing my part can be very helpful to quiet the anxiety wanting to be fed within us. But, there is a limit to “Doing my part” to feel in control of a situation.

With the election, I can do my part:
I voted, I signed and put my ballot in a ballot drop box, I followed up to make sure they counted my vote. Or, I did my part by contributing to a candidate, or contributed to organizations that are fighting against voter suppression.

This is not helping me feel any better about the election this year… I did my part does not solve the true problem: I know I am not in control of the outcome of this election!

We can apply the same principal to getting COVID and giving it to someone on accident. We can do many things to do our part to prevent spreading COVID, but it is no guarantee we will not asymptomatically pass it to someone else. Wondering when a vaccine will come out, and how effective it will be shows how obvious the situation is out of our control.


Part 2: Knowing / Trusting/ Turning it Over
I began to address Part 2 in February 2020 in “Dealing with the Future Unknown.” Please check out the previous writing as well. The Timeline is a very helpful strategy.

Part 2 is the solution for when we are on the dimly lit path and as we look ahead, we realize we cannot see what lies out there. What do we do?! Bad things could be out in the dark!

This is why we created the ineffective strategy of preparing for the worst: we were scared and we did not know what else we could do. The truth is that there is no longer anything we can do to help control the outcome of this unknown situation. We are not in control. We know it, and we are terrified. So, we do what we have been trained to do our entire lives: feed our fear.

We can review everything the teacher told us to study, but we still do not know whether the test will have questions on the material we know well or the material we are not as confident about.
We can eat healthy, exercise consistently and go to the doctor regularly. But while we are anxiously awaiting our test results, we know that we cannot undo our genetics or that we may end up getting bad news.

As I said last time and say to many clients frequently,
“Fear always wants to be fed. It is insatiable. And the more we feed it, the hungrier it gets.”

The solution is simple in theory; though very difficult (at times) in application.

A. Focus on the Desired Emotion: "What do I want? Not, what do I not want?"

Anxiety looks to the details or Quantitative Level to be fed. It wants to play out every single possible scenario that could happen for a Future Unknown. This is not going to take us anywhere helpful. All we can do is train our brain to stop doing this by focusing on the Qualitative Level.

Think about it:
Why would we worry about how well we do in a job interview tomorrow if we knew we were getting the job? This would be illogical. We would not waste our time and energy worrying. We would just explain to ourselves, “You have every right to be nervous about your interview, but I promise you, it will be ok.”
                                                                      "I could choose peace instead of this."
Let's get to something more realistic:
I have no job, and I am applying to many jobs. I don't even know which job I really want, and I don't know if I have to settle for something I don't really want because it is so hard to find a job during a global pandemic. The infinite questions would be exhausting: Do I apply to this job, even though it sounds boring and I am overqualified? I think I want that job, but what if I get it and realize I don't like it?

Skip the infinite possible scenarios! Focus on the things you do know: How you would feel when you got THE job; that is the job you wanted even before you knew you wanted it! Think about it. How can we imagine working for a company we have never heard of? We cannot. But the feeling of relief and joy and happiness of knowing we got the job and now don't have to worry anymore is the same feeling we will feel whether or not we had heard of the company before.

Timeline for Future Unknown: Did I apply for, get and take the Right Job?
_______I__________________________________________I__________________________________
       Time A = present                                    Time G = I know whether or not it worked out
                                                                                                                                                   
*I do not get to control how long it takes until I know whether or not it worked out (If I applied for the right job, let alone if I will get it). The only thing I can Control is how miserable I feel between now (A) and when I actually have the answer to whether or not it worked out (G)?

Feeding Fear:
_______I__________________________________________________I_______________________
        A = present                                                                *G1 = “I applied for the wrong job!”
                                                                   
Trusting that it will work out/ I can have what I want:          
________I________________________________________________I_______________________
               A = present                                                         *G2 = “I got the job I wanted!"

The Past is over = no longer real
The Future has not occurred yet = Not Real

*G1 and G2 are equally unreal at time A = because they have not occurred yet!
So why feed Fear when it is as equally as unreal as my best case scenario??

B. Gather the Past Evidence that It Worked Out even when we didn't think it would:
                                        "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger."
Think about difficult times we have had in our lives when we were terrified/ hopeless/ defeated. We made it through these moments to be here now. It was certainly rough when we were in the thick of it, but we made it through; we survived it. We are here, and we learned and grew because of these events. Sure, maybe if we could go back and never have had to live through it, we would skip it. But, something positive must have come from this difficult experience. *If you are not there yet with a past event in your life, a) this is totally a reasonable place to be, b) look to a future self who is further away from it.
I have been through some tough heart breaks. Historically, I have not been good at letting exes go and moving on. I have been in the thick of it; in denial and or grieving the loss for an amount of time I am embarrassed to say. But with enough time away, I have always been able to see how the emotional pain was in my favor. I hurt for a lot longer than I wanted to, but I learned from it and it made me a stronger, healthier person.
I have reflected a lot on the tough moments in my life. As painful as they were, I would not undo them because they made me into the person I am today. I may have wished I learned the lessons faster or easier, but I learned from them. I would not give up that learning.

C. Turn it over to your Future Self:*
Einstein believed Time and Space are Relative. We have the ability to theoretically connect to our smarter and wiser Future Self who knows the outcome of this current Unknown, and this Future Self has words of calm and knowing to share with us.

“I know this is a really tough time for you. I know you are scared. You have every right to be scared, but I promise you it will be ok.”

Look at something that has happened in the past that we now know worked out. We in the present (reading this) are the Future Self to our Past Self still struggling to feel in control. Think about that past Unknown that worked out in our favor. Did we benefit from worrying about how it turned out? Did feeding the fear of innumerable possibilities somehow make the positive outcome happen? If we could, we would go back and tell our earlier selves to worry less or more? If we look to our past Unknown, we can connect to the same desired emotions we want now, from a time when we were hopeless or could not predict how it all actually worked out.

Connect to the Qualitative:
The key strategy to not feeding the near infinite possible outcomes to a Future Unknown (aka. Feeding the fear) is to focus on our desired emotion as the outcome we want and not get caught up in the details.

Gather the Past Emotional Evidence that accompanied it working out, lean into this Calm Knowing and project it onto your current Unknown by connecting to your Future Self who has the calm that we seek.

D. Turn it over to a Higher Power
Through my own spiritual practice, I have found a lot of peace in asking for help when I have struggled with things beyond my control over the last four years. This is not something I had thought a lot about, or felt very comfortable doing in the past.

I have believed for a long time that there is something that connects us all. This could be defined on a physical level as energy being our universal connector. We are all made up of energy. Energy exists in empty space and in living and non-living things. It is stored (potential) and moving (kinetic).
Others refer to the idea of a Collective Consciousness connecting us together on a mental level. I know that my mind is very limited as a human being. Certainly my expectations on how long something should take to be resolved / my ability to remain patient while anxiously awaiting an outcome is a huge limitation of mine. I also know that the more experiences I have and learn from, the slightly less limited my mind becomes. My Present Self knows more than my Past Self, and my Future Self knows more than my Present Self. I believe the Collective Consciousness and/or the Collective energy of everything in the Universe has far more information than I do. I do not think that the Universe is here working for me, but I do believe it has greater knowledge than I ever could alone. And I believe moments of intuition are our ability to tap into this greater knowing.

"Please help me with _______."
"It takes the Universe time to connect me to my ideal job."
“I put my future about ______ in the hands of the Universe/ God/ my higher self/ my future self.”
“Everything works out in the end. If it is has not worked out, it is not the end.”
“Everything is going to be ok.”
“I am going to be ok.”

For those who do not believe in a higher power/ collective consciousness/ Grand Organizing Designer (aka. Me until I was about 19 years-old), not to worry!