Help Customers With Worries Without Ignoring Your Own

I begin my post today with a quote:

“Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.” – Winston Churchill

If you know me, you know that I worry. I often take small molehills and turn them into giant mountains.

But, this isn’t the best approach.

Over the past year or so, on my journey to being more awesome, I found that I need to not nix the worrying completely but rather, make the worries work for me.

We all worry for different reasons and we all have different levels of how we react to these worries. Some of us will have just one small worry and make up a novel of stories about the predicted outcome in their minds. Some of us will ignore the worries, store them like bricks on our shoulders, until they weigh us down heavily. And, some of us will completely shrug them off and release any personal connection to them.

So, how can we worry effectively?

Think about it from an angle of how you would typically handle negative customer feedback: treat these worries like the gifts they are. It all goes right back to LAMB:

• Listen to the feedback
• Acknowledge
• Make Better
• Boost Improvement

Worrying is like internal negative feedback for the soul. Here’s how we can apply LAMB to our internal worries to avoid anxiety and effectively plan for the future:

Listen to the Worry

What are you worrying about? Listen to yourself about this worry and try to understand where it is coming from and what you are most worried about happening. Write it out in an email to yourself, as you would to a customer when you were responding to their feedback.

Acknowledge and Accept the Worry

You matter and so do the worries you have. They are there for a reason. Don’t ignore them or stuff them down; that will only make for worse problems in the long run. Accept how you feel, own it and call it yours. This is YOUR worry–give it a chance to breathe.

Master the Worry

So, you now are at a point where you’ve listened to the worry and have all the notes about it. You have taken ownership to your worry and accepted it, as crazy as it sounds, as a part of you. You have the ability to truly master the worry through deeper understanding and personal reflection. Your worry is asking you to take action to make changes that will impact the situation. This results in the success of your worry. Ask yourself:

• Where does this worry stem from? Is it an issue from my childhood, for example?
• What exactly am I afraid of happening with this worry?
• How can I understand this worry in more detail? Can I use resources to obtain factual evidence about the situation?
• What action and planning steps do I need to take to make this worry a success and solve the impending problem?

Boost Improvement

Thank yourself for having the opportunity to have a worry, first of all. What did you learn from this worry that you can use for the future? Take the knowledge of what happened with this particular situation and use it to your advantage–document what you need, make changes as you need and learn to tune into yourself even better than before. This will only help you improve and make more successful worries in the future.

So, if you were to take this feedback and write a follow up to yourself, as opposed to the customers you usually reach out to, it may look something along the lines of this:

Dear Jenny,

Thanks for sharing your worry with yourself. You are here to listen to you.

The worries you have do matter and they are calling to you for a reason. You have great insight into a problem that may occur in the future and the worry is the signal to stop and look around at the situation in more detail. 

You understand that this worry stems from a situation that, if happened, may cause much frustration for many people. Together, we shall take actions to ensure that this does not happen by reaching out to our resources, obtaining facts and fixing the problem before it happens.

We have learned, from this worry, to avoid situations that lead us down paths of uncertainty in the future. We know that the next time we are given this predicament, we will react differently to avoid the worry in the first place. Thank you again for giving yourself this opportunity to learn and grow.

So, I know it’s a bit cheesy to write a negative feedback response to yourself, but if you worry as much as I do, taking the time to give those worries more focus will allow you to see the worries for what they really are–and how some of them are totally ridiculously false and some are really demanding and serious–but, they all must be listened to. Just like negative feedback from your customers. We do so well helping our customers with their worries, don’t ignore your own. Appreciate the opportunity for awesome. It will only make things better in the long run.

P.S.I want to thank Marie Forleo (@MarieForleo) for inspiring this post today with her video, The Fear Of Losing Success: What If It All Goes Away?

[custom_author=jenny]