First of all, I just want to say again a huge thank you from the bottom of my heart. This past weekend was the first event for my business, and I am so wonderfully overwhelmed by the amount of support we received through this whole process and during the event itself. It definitely made us excited for the future.

However, before the event itself, I was incredibly anxious about the whole thing. Fear of an unknown situation triggers my anxiety. I want to be a person that goes with the flow, but I am not always good about change. I remember being so stressed before my first class at my job right after college. But once it went fine, all my anxiety went away.

I was so stressed all last week. I didn’t know what was going to happen. However, this is not the first time I have dealt with this specific anxiety. As a result, I have created a journaling exercise that helps me a lot. I want to share it with all of you in the hopes that it can help someone else as well.

The idea of this exercise is that you are creating a range of expectations for an event or an outcome. You will need to include the best possible outcome, the worst possible outcome, realistic outcomes within that range, and emotions attached to all of them.

The first two steps are interchangeable. You can do the top parameter first and then the bottom parameter. Or you can do the worst case and then the best case. Personally, I like to start with the best scenario. I let my imagination run wild and plan out the best possible option, even if it is incredibly unrealistic. I am going to use my business event as my example for this blog post since it’s fresh in my mind. The best-case scenario? We run out of all of our inventory for the weekend. Every product gets sold, we make maximum money, and we go viral so we never have to work a regular job again.

Once I have my top parameter and have let my imagination run crazy, I then pull it back in. Now, it’s time to unleash the anxiety. I do not let my anxiety run as wild as my imagination. It stays on a leash so that I don’t spiral out of control. But I let my anxiety imagine the worst possible outcomes that I can still deal with. For example, my worst-case scenario was that we sell nothing and nobody likes our products.

Now that the parameters are established, it’s also important to assign emotions to them. How would you feel achieving the best-case scenario? What are you going to do if the worst version comes true? What would be the next course of action in either case? Ask yourself those questions or other similar ones. The emotional aspect is important in being able to prepare yourself for what is to come. I have surprised myself by being able to feel acceptance over the bad scenarios instead of feeling like a failure.

Understanding an idea of expectations helps so much in creating realistic scenarios. What actually happens will fall somewhere between the best outcome and the worst outcome. Going back to my business example, here are the three scenarios I came up with: 1. We make back our booth fee. Everything extra is profit. 2. People may be slightly inconvenienced that we don’t have a card reader, but that shouldn’t deter too many customers. 3. We might be awkward at selling, but that makes us human. We’ve also never done this before. We won’t be perfect the first time around.

Would you like to know what actually happened? We made our booth fee back in two hours. We made jokes about not having a card reader that made people laugh. We only had one sale be deterred from buying for us. And best of all, my business partner (who is normally pretty introverted) THRIVED as a business seller. It was so exciting to watch her do so well.

If you noticed, outside of my booth fee, none of my realistic scenarios had anything to do with money. That’s because I didn’t want to set up myself for failure or disappointment. I didn’t know if $100 in profit was reasonable or if $1000 in profit was excessive. I just wanted to let it ride. And I think that gave me a greater sense of excitement and accomplishment. It also gave me hope for continuing this venture in the future.

I could give other examples, but I’m going to trust that you get the idea. This can be applied to any scenario when you don’t know the outcome. I know that this technique has definitely helped me to manage my own anxiety. Setting up parameters gives me a much more realistic range of possible events rather than just facing a fear of the unknown.