Anxiety & Result-Oriented Mindset

The date is September 4th, 2022. You're meeting a gril today, and your friends are putting lots of pressure on you to "perform". "This chick likes you, man. She's really nice - this is a golden opportunity. It's gonna be great!" After expressing a little bit of discomfort around the situation, you get a "It's fine, just go with the flow."

At this point things aren't too bad - you find ways to avoid overthinking and keep your head clear. When the party starts though, one of your friends says something like, "Dude, this is all you!"

This is when things get weird. You suddenly start feeling really anxious about the whole thing. Why though? Is it a fear of messing up? Performance anxiety? Low self-esteem and putting the other person on a pedestal?

You take a walk with your friend, and realize a few things:

• You're not scared of "losing" her - you don't even know this person!
• You're not in a state of low self-esteem - things have been going well the past few weeks.
• You try dropping this person off their pedestal. Nothing changes.

Ok. What is going on then?

• You feel like this person has high expectations of you, that you're afraid you won't live up to.
• Actually, everyone has high expectations for this moment. Including your friends and yourself.
• Expectations for what though? Expectations to nail this moment, to succeed.
• The RESULT is what matters here.
• More precisely, what the result would say about YOU.

Ok. So what can you do about that? You're clearly super nervous about this result, and what it says about you. Your friend tries to reassure you through a metaphore of a piece of art depicting a moose. You can either see it as a bunch of random brush strokes of color. Or you can see it as a whole, the moose.

You have no idea what that's supposed to mean in this context.

You tell your friend you want to run, to move. You need to shake this feeling off. He goes back and leaves you alone. You start to run, sprint.

At first it does nothing. Your stomach has beer in it and doesn't enjoy being thrown around. You start to think a bit.

If you fuck this up, that would define you as an anti-gigachad. A loser, unable to attract women. It would mean you suck, and your friends would be disappointed. YOU would feel disappointed. SHE would feel disappointed.

But you remember: this is the positivity arc of your life. You're making conscious efforts to be more positive and nice to yourself. You're actually a cool dude, you have interesting thoughts and insights about the world. You're fun to be with - to some extent even on your bad days. You're super chill and don't judge others - people feel safe around you. You're still young and have much to learn, but you've been kicking ass recently: at work, with your friends and with your own self-improvement.

You feel the anxiety slowly fade. Why is that? Is it because you boosted your self-esteem? You don't think so - you were already in a decently high self-esteem state when this all started. You do notice that you don't seem to care about the result as much.

In fact, you realize that you DON'T care about the result. You don't need to result to define who you are. You just defined YOURSELF and who you are. You know your value, and you just want to chill and have a good time tonight. Because that's who you are.

Knowing yourself and defining yourself means you don't need external validation anymore. The results no longer define you. And now you can chill.