It is Sunday, about seven in the evening, and the week has already started without you.
Nothing has happened yet. The meeting is thirty-eight hours away. You have run it four times, badly, and you will run it again before you sleep.
By the time it arrives you will have lived through it twenty times. Then it will happen once, take eleven minutes, and be largely fine.
You have tried distraction, and going to bed early, and telling yourself it will probably be fine. You cannot reassure yourself, because the part of you that needs convincing knows you have no evidence.
So stop arguing with it and start keeping a record.
Your dread is making a claim: something specific will go badly, in a particular way, on Tuesday. It has never once been asked to show its accuracy.
Inside you will discover: - The five-line forecast, and the two-line check that turns dread into data
- The marking test, so your forecasts can be scored right or wrong
- The difference between preparing and rehearsing, settled by one question
- Why Sunday evening specifically, and why ten minutes at six beats two hours at ten
- The worst realistic version, and the and-then-what chain that shrinks it
- What to do at four in the morning, when the body arrived before the thought
- Three kinds of dread, and why treating them the same is why nothing has worked
- What it means when your forecast turns out to be right
- A twelve-week sequence, and the four numbers you will be able to read at the end
No positive thinking. Nothing here asks you to pretend your worries are irrational, because some of them are not.
This is a short practical book, not therapy. The practice borrows a mechanic from cognitive behavioural work and does much less than the real thing. Chapter 14 says so plainly and tells you when to see somebody instead.
Book Four of The Control Line Series. Reads perfectly well on its own.
Buy your copy and write one forecast this Sunday.
