WHAT I'M READING WEDNESDAY : Beyond Anxiety by Martha Beck

"What if their plane crashes?" I thought to myself last weekend as my husband was returning from the north of France with our two kids.

Pretty awful, right?

Yet, when these thoughts come to me, I don't get sucked into an anxiety spiral. Instead, I get motivated into a creativity spiral.

I spend a few moments thinking of all the ways that I would respond if this reality came to pass.

When I feel confident that it won't break me, the thought flows away from me, and I move on with my day.

It doesn't happen very often, but it does happen.

I can't say the same for many people, though. According to the research quoted in Beck's book, anxiety is on the rise -- significantly. She herself has faced sometimes crippling anxiety, and has had to learn how to move beyond it throughout her entire life.

Recently, several companies have asked me about hosting book circles or book-labs on how to deal with uncertainty.

Do you know the emotion that often accompanies uncertainty? Anxiety.

I have been a big fan of Martha Beck's writing since I first was introduced to her in 2012, through her book The Joy Diet . I think I've read every book since.

I often incorporated her exercises into my work with coaching clients, and even still do so now as a facilitator.

What I so appreciate in this book, is the heavy emphasis on getting out of our left-brain, logical thinking mind where anxiety is born, and into our right-hemisphere, where creativity thrives.

Unfortunately, most of us take our left hemisphere to the proverbial gym, way more often than our right-side, so we're a bit (or a lot) lopsided.

Beck invites us to use both mindfulness practices to tame our anxiety creature, and then step into creative acts, in a variety of ways.

They don't have to be traditional creative acts like painting, drawing, or sculpting, either. There are so many ways that we can be creative.

I am so inspired by this idea of using creativity to support ourselves emotionally, that I am meeting with my friend and artist Marie Louise Williams, to talk about putting together a series of workshops of all of you.

Stay tuned...

Originally posted on LinkedIn with comments.

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