What's the Worst That Could Happen?
No seriously--what’s the worst thing that could happen in the situation you’re imagining? Whether you’re worrying about an event you’re planning or whether you’re making the right decision by accepting a new job--I want to challenge you to ask yourself what could possibly go wrong?
This isn’t meant to be a masterclass in worrying--most of us are already experts on that skill. Instead, I want to share with you how one simple exercise can transform your fears into useful information that will lead to your inevitable success.
In my past life working with college students, I used this activity every time I trained student leaders. I ran a one-week intensive community service program for incoming freshmen and hired a team of students to manage small groups of participants. My student leaders were always very nervous--it was the first leadership role for many of them and impostor syndrome was hitting them hard. They were worried they wouldn’t be taken seriously by the participants, afraid of getting lost in the city, and anxious about doing a good job facilitating the different workshops and activities we had planned. For the entire week of training, there was always a palpable feeling of anxiety and nervousness around one central fear--what if the whole thing is a disaster?
Well? What if it was a disaster? What would we do then? First off--what would a disaster look like? What would have to go wrong? It’s usually not a disaster until there’s nothing left to salvage. I asked each student to jot down their worries on little slips of paper--what if a participant has to go to the hospital? What if we get into a car accident? What if we run out of food? What if a community partner doesn’t show up for our service project? I challenged them to start getting specific about what, exactly, they were worried about.
If you care about having the outcome you want, worrying is completely normal. Unexamined, however, worrying can quickly become oppressive. By slowing down and actually naming what we’re worried about, we can start to work through these fears methodically. The result? A dramatic increase in confidence.
After the students (and I!) had named all of our worries, we put the slips of paper in a bowl and passed it around the group. We took turns drawing a worry out of the bowl and brainstorming how we would deal with it. Fears about a partner not showing up for a service project turned into a plan to call all of our contacts to reconfirm our visits and developing a back-up community exploration activity just in case something fell through. We worked through the bowl, one worry at a time, naming potential challenges and collectively generating solutions.
The results were extraordinary. Things went wrong, of course--a participant went to the ER, someone set a cardboard box on top of a glass-top stove and it started burning, and despite re-confirming, a community partner did need to cancel at the last minute. But because we had spent time naming our fears, anticipating these challenges, and coming up with solutions in advance, the students felt much more prepared in the moment. They didn’t feel like impostors, going through the motions--they had already visualized successfully dealing with these difficulties so when they came up in real life, it was as if they were doing it over again and not for the first time.
Naming your worries is such a powerful technique. You take these generalized concerns and fears out of your head and start to make them more concrete. You can lay them out and start to examine them for what they are--solvable problems. You can then channel your energy into developing a solution so that if that scenario does happen, you know what you would do about it. This is enormously powerful for quashing impostor syndrome, as you start to visualize yourself as a capable problem solver instead of a sitting duck waiting for the inevitable.
If you’ve got a big project or event coming up, try this activity yourself. I’ve created a special worksheet to help you do this solo. It will take you just 20 minutes to get all of those worries out on paper, name them, and think through what you would do in each situation. This can be a huge confidence booster and you will likely realize that many of your worries are easier to address than you realized.
Grab my free worksheet right now to try this out for yourself!