How Anxiety Sabotages Your Mindset — and the ‘Tiger, Tiger’ Question That Can Set You Free

As I mentor young leaders, I’ve noticed – this year more than most – that anxious thoughts are frequently sabotaging their mindset.

The optimal mindset is relaxed, supple and optimistic. Anxiety undermines all three.

Your mind is continually inflating, conflating, deflating your reality – all types of ‘flating’ – but very rarely is your mind neutrally perceiving.

To question your perceptions and beliefs is therefore an amazing gift to give yourself, and you can have it all the days of your life.

“Tiger, Tiger, Is It True?” is a brilliant children’s book about a little tiger who thinks his whole world is falling apart. A wise turtle asks him four questions, and he soon realises that his problems are not so much caused by things, as they are by his thoughts about things. And when he questions his thoughts, life becomes wonderful again.

Negative thinking thrives in the general and the vague.

Next time you catch yourself catastrophising, ask yourself: Tiger, tiger, is it true?