How To Stop Believing The Worst
3 simple steps that really help.
Back when I made beer for a living and Kylie Minogue was in song for the first time, I was a fully-fledged member of the brewery taste panel. As a brewer, which I was, (honest), part of my role along with ten or so others was to decide which beers were good to go and which needed some help to make the grade. It was all a matter of finding the right balance and not simply discarding the ones wouldn’t make the grade all on their own.
We’d work our way through whichever brews were at a critical stage, giving some the green light and working out what to do with those that weren’t up to scratch.
Mostly, everything was fine. There’d be some brews a little too dark, others too light. Some too hoppy, others not quite hoppy enough. By blending them together in the right way, we’d achieve a high level of consistency.
Every now and then, there’d be something that’d gone properly wrong. A bitter that was, well, stunningly tart. Or perhaps a lager as dark as a mild. Something so out of kilter that normal blending just wouldn’t cut it. Without a solution, the whole brew would have to be ditched. And given that excise duty was already paid, that’s not an option.
The solution?
We’d search out an equally way-out but opposite brew. The really bitter bitter would get matched with a brew that had no bitterness at all. The dark lager would be matched up with an ale that was too pale.
Sometimes, the only solution was to deliberately create a one-off brew. To deliberately design and build a beer that was the exact opposite of the problem.
The result? We’d end up with a beer that was bang on. It worked.
It was a technique born of trial and error and long practice. It saved time, money and a lot of heartache. Moreover, and to my mid-twenties brain, it spared a lot of actually quite good beer going to waste, simply because it hadn’t turned out the way we’d expected.
Just because it didn’t match some pre-designated criteria, didn’t mean it should be simply poured away.
It played on my chemical engineering training, (which was my route into brewing in the first place), reinforcing the mindset I’d developed of there’s never just one right answer.
Even when all looks lost and disaster seems like the only option, there just might be a way out of it. If you look in the right place with the right eyes.
Little did I know that my taste panel expertise of yesteryear would lend a hand to my therapist self of today.
In this stressed-out, burnout creating world we live in, it turns out that the deliberate balancing of opposites to create a more pleasing outcome is a useful skill to learn.
Let me show you what I mean.
Here’s how to stop yourself believing the worst
Believing the worst is always about a very-unlikely-but-still-possible negative outcome. The belief makes it feel more real and our minds confuse ‘more real’ with ‘more likely’ and we believe even more. We need to find something to counteract the spiral.
The antidote to believing the worst is to deliberately conjure up its exact opposite. To create, if you like, the positively-best-case scenario. Now, whilst we can’t actually blend these imaginings together, they do bring balance. Just follow these 3 steps.
Step 1:
Acknowledge the worst-case outcome could happen. It feels like a real possibility, (which it is).
In acknowledging this, it’s important to remind yourself that whilst it might turn up, it’s incredibly unlikely.
Step 2:
At the opposite end, there’s a just as unlikely but crazily positive possible outcome.
Spend a few moments imagining what the hyper-good outcome possibility might look like. (I know, it feels odd, doesn’t it? Almost as if it’s so unlikely, what’s the point of thinking it?… Exactly!)
Step 3:
The real outcome must lie somewhere between the worst-case & best-case scenarios, mustn’t it?
There are infinitely more potential outcomes that are neither awful nor fantastic. It’s highly likely that one of these more mundane outcomes will be the reality.
But now you’re prepared for extremes too (both the bad and the good).
The takeaway
So there you go, without knowing it at the time, my mid-eighties alcohol-producing self was laying the foundations for my future therapy career. Or perhaps I’m just building analogies with the benefit of hindsight.
As a wise man once said, ‘It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be plausible’. Which it is.
So I’ll see you then, if not before, eh?
Take care and blend away those disasters before they arrive. (And if they do arrive, well, now you’ll be ready, won’t you?)