Strategic Focus:
The invisible barrier to overcoming anxiety forever
This is why traditional therapy did not heal you fully
Jul 12th 2024, by Iveta Finn
Strategic Focus might be the missing puzzle piece
to fully heal your anxiety issues
Let’s make this clear straight away – by strategic focus, I do NOT mean “not getting distracted” as in working on a task and staying focused on the work. That is what I call operational focus, which of course is important too, but I am talking about a way more powerful concept of strategic focus here.
Strategic focus can literally be the missing puzzle piece to fully heal anxiety and panic attacks. Especially, if you have been working on yourself, if you’ve enhanced your self care, you see the way you’ve changed… yet setbacks seem to appear again and again, you might be wondering
“What else does it take to heal completely? What other steps shall I take? I feel like I’ve tried everything already…”
I’d bet it’s strategic focus that’s been misdirected and is preventing you from achieving full mental health!
How to change your strategic focus
The first step is to realize that you have a strategic focus already. One, that has been misdirecting you, preventing you from healing fully. This awareness is crucial and most people never realize it. You know it now – that is progress. So what’s next?
Do this little experiment:
1. If I asked you to: “Get as anxious as you can right now!”, how easy or difficult would it be, to get anxiety to 10 out of 10 intensity?2. What if I asked you to: “Get as peaceful as you can be right now.”? How easy / difficult would it be to achieve 10 out of 10 peacefulness?
Why is it easier to feel anxiety than peace? Is it natural? NO!
The only reason you can intensify anxiety so easily and peacefulness feels difficult is: you’ve been practicing anxiety a lot, for a long time. And you have not been practicing peacefulness much at all (is that a fair guess?).
It is as simple as that. Emotions are habitual. They get memorized and are parts of your overall patterns:
“When you practice piano every day, it’s hard to play the guitar.”
This may sound silly and straight forward, but it’s precisely what happens with anxiety! Let’s continue with the piano metaphor, where piano is your anxiety:
You’ve been practicing piano a lot. So much, that it’s started to affect your life in a very negative way. So you decide, you must stop. But instead of removing the piano from your house and getting a guitar, you watch YouTube “How to remove piano from your house”, you get lots of self help books on “how to stop playing piano”, you hire a therapist, who teaches you very helpful techniques, but every session, you talk about playing the piano and how you used to feel back then. In other words – the piano remains in your strategic focus.
This is why traditional therapy so often fails to heal you completely, because in every session you re-live, re-experience the issues and strengthen the old emotional habit. This is why you still experience set backs! You need to remove anxiety from your strategic focus.
What will be your new strategic focus? I call it your desired state.
What is your desired state?
Don’t worry if you have a blank, if you don’t know right now. You’ve been wired to focus on anxiety, on threats, what to avoid… and it might feel unfamiliar to shift your strategic focus to something you actually DO want.
In Outgrow Anxiety (a program to heal your anxiety fully), we focus on defining the desired state right in the first workbook. We use the strategic focus to smooth the healing journey rather than waiting for the next setback! This shortens the time it takes to heal significantly as well. Would you like support with defining your desired state and strategic focus? You can claim your gift below!