Do you need to modulate your anxiety up or modulate it down?

Issue #42

“My anxiety doesn’t come from thinking about the future but from wanting to control it.”— Hugh Prather

⚖️ A mentor coach told me that a core job of a coach is to modulate a person’s anxiety. Sometimes they need less, in order to feel better and think more broadly. Sometimes they need more, in order to prompt action and urgency.

🤣 Here’s a short interview with the championship basketball coach, Steve Kerr. Steve is talking about how he builds joy into his coaching and practices. It’s intentional and strategic.

🧊 Here’s the thing about ambitious people, and that probably includes most of the readers of this newsletter: you often have too much urgency and it’s creating anxiety. I find it’s pretty rare as a coach that I see a need to modulate someone’s anxiety up.

🌊 I don’t see the word modulate very many places. I started using it after a deep dive into Flow states. You reach flow when the challenge of the task and your skill level are in balance. So if you want to manufacture a flow state you need to modulate the challenge of the task.

If a task looks boring, turn it into a game. That’s a form of modulating. I often open a stopwatch and turn a boring task into a game of speed.

If a task looks too hard, I choose a simplified version. For example, writers write multiple drafts. The crummy first draft is an example of modulating the challenge…