Think about an important upcoming event and consider where you spend your energy before, during, and after it. Perhaps it is a meeting with your board, a crucial presentation to your executive team, or speaking at a conference. How do you manage your Worry Trifecta?

The three stages can either leave you feeling like you are sinking in quicksand or give you the solid, steady ground you need.

• Pre Worry: While preparation is wise, a complete virtual run-through of a conversation or important meeting is expending unnecessary energy. Only focus on considering the possible outcomes, visualize questions, and consider how you may improve your probability of success.

• Parallel Worry: Just like a comic book thought bubble that appears next to the character’s head, from time to time we all have distracting thought bubbles pop up at the wrong time. Can you press your own virtual mute button and bring yourself back into the reality of the moment? Afterwards you can ask yourself why you’re having that conversation in your head rather than the one you need to be having.

• Post Worry: Are you prone to replaying whole events in your mind? What you forgot to mention, or what you wish you had said differently? It is too easy to play regret-roulette over things you cannot control and let your mind spin you dizzy, when instead you need to quickly reflect, learn, and act. Sometimes the best action can be to forget about it!

Take a look at my Worry Trifecta Transformer so you can turn your pre-worry into purposeful planning, your parallel worry to being able to listen and be in the moment, and your post-worry into thoughtfully reviewing success and taking action. My book, Thoughtfully Ruthless: The Key to Exponential Growth, Wiley, April 2016 shares more practical ways to boost and maintain your energy to accelerate your growth.
 
Enough about you. What about your team? Where are they wasting their energy on their Worry Trifecta?

Dedicated to growing your business,

Val