Are you planning your success? Read this first before your D-Day

Your boss tells you that a week from now, there will be an annual meeting with all big bosses and he asks you to give a talk about how your team changed the organization in front of a 250+ persons. And this is when you enter in panic mode. What if you lose your focus suddenly? What if what you say is not so intelligent after all? What if people make fun of you? What if they ask you something you cannot answer? What if...? But...? are symptomatic questions of fear one asks himself over and over, and ends up... failing miserably or worst: doing nothing.

Anytime you feel afraid you lose focus, but most importantly: you lose your natural self. If you were told to give the talk right away, right now, out of complete surprise, you would stand up and make the perfect speach because you would just say what you think in the moment. But you were given a future date, with enough time to let doubts invade your thoughts. Fear detaches you from your feelings, your inner "soul", to put you in "alert mode". When you fear something to come, you are not natural anymore, instead you anticipate, you think. When you think, you are being rational and you have the tendency to overthink to the point of anticipating the unnecessary and making plans.

Your anxiety is the sum of your thoughts/plans to "win back".

To liberate yourself from fear, you gotta learn to die first. Accept faith. Accept to be flawed as a human being. Accept that you can lose. This is those kind of counter-intuitive measures you can undertake to be better in life: accept to lose in order to win. When you don't accept losing, you start projecting tactics to win whatever happens. And this is exactly what will make you lose. When you are given the task of talking in front of a lot of people, the fear of losing makes you learn your speach by heart, write the perfect transitions, buy a new outfit... these are exactly the elements that will make you feel unnatural. This "robot" feeling is what will then make your audience bored and yourself uncomfortable and more stressed, then you will lose focus... and you know the rest of this never ending spiral.

Accept your little loss before it becomes too big

Instead, you should accept that it's ok to lose sometimes. That maybe you will forget something. Maybe you will lose focus at some point. Or certainly some people will lose interest. As soon as you accept that, you will be able to go unplanned and just act instinctively. And this is when you are the most beautiful, when you are natural, with your flaws. This beauty is what will bring success to you no matter the details. You might bomb your talk, but if you feel relaxed and laugh about it, people will like you more than your perfect robotic speach. Being yourself is the key, and fear disconnects you from your true self.

Accept to be flawed and let things happen

Planning is the ultimate way to fail and this is where people get confused. Planning is not training. You want to shine? Don't plan it: train for it. Planning is the action of laying down a list of things to remember during your performance. Which top athlete remembers to do something while performing? Do you think Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, LeBron James, Tiger Woods and all champions remember how to throw a ball? They just don't, believe me. Here is what they do: they feel it. They train so hard that throwing the ball becomes a natural feeling. Observe them champions closely and you will see they always have the same rituals before entering the pitch or hitting a ball... Why? Because those little rituals, although they might look dumb to one, they allow their body to reconnect with the feeling they got during training. When C. Ronaldo hits a penalty, he places the ball in some special fashion, he takes exactly the same steps back from the ball, he rolls up his short... to help him reconnect with the feeling of the 10 thousand times he hit the ball during training.

Train your feelings, then go unplanned.

Defeat is temporary

At the scale of life, dying is like losing: losing life. You've got to accept to die first, before you can live a great life. Please, this is not an encouragement to commit suicide in any ways, it is quite the opposite: if you feel like there's no point of return and you are lost, accept your defeat from this battle. Whatever you lost, be it a job, be it someone or be it yourself, your anxiety is the sum of your thoughts to win it back. As soon as you accept you lost it for good and that you need to lose it in order to win something better, I guarantee you will feel much better. So only when you'll be able to go passed beyond that fear you will discover a new life, unchained from blocking thoughts.

You may not need to win back what you lost. Maybe you didn't lost, instead you may have just experienced a new lesson you have to learn. This girl you lost may not be the one, but just another type you discovered is not for you. This job you lost may just help you finally get more clever for your next job search and get this dream job. Maybe you failed this exam to prepare better for the next or just switch carreer. You may have bombed your talk, but it will open your eyes that maybe you're better at writing speaches than giving them in public. And the list goes on...

I don't know if there is life after death yet. But I do know that we win bigger after any loss. There are no defeats, only lessons. But once again, you need to accept these temporary defeats before you can win. The more you fail, the more you learn. The faster you fail, the faster you learn.

You should not be afraid to lose, you should be afraid to not lose enough and earlier

Don't be afraid my friend, just let it go...