Have you ever heard the advice to just drop it or let it go?

I’ve talked about Dr Claire Weekes before. She was an important pioneering doctor in the field of anxiety recovery.

She said anyone could recover from disordered anxiety, excessive nervousness or panic attacks with four simple (but not always easy steps): Face, accept, float and let time pass.

It’s clear to me that these are the for anti-stress responses to flight fight freeze and fawn.

She described it in many ways such as mastering inactivity (doing nothing about the anxiety): not analyzing, not trying to avoid or remove it, but instead going with it by floating along above it.

Others define the concept of floating as letting go, surrendering, tolerance, melting.

What I want you to understand is not only what floating is, but also why it helps, what happens when you get it right and how holding on is working against you.

To start out I’m going to give you an analogy: Imagine a person is hanging from a cliff. They are grasping tightly for dear life. Their arms are shaking, their hands are going numb. The only thing they can think of is bracing or falling.

Now imagine the cliff this person is hanging onto is in their imagination only, or they’ve misperceived a phony threat for a real one. The cliff isn’t real. It feels real though.

It seems like they need to grasp tightly or they’ll fall to their doom, but when the cliff isn’t real, only in their imagination, they don’t need to continue holding on for dear life. IN fact bracing in frozen fear is what’s keeping their fear alive and keeping them stuck in it.

What happens if they let go of the imagined cliff? We know they won’t fall because there is nowhere to fall. So what happens if they release their grip, surrender, let go?

They FLOAT!

Think about it! With all that pressure released and all that bracing relaxed, they feel lighter than air.

All they have to do is let go symbolically or metaphorically, and they will see there was nowhere to fall and it was their own fears pulling down on them the entire time.

The more you want a thing, a certain outcome, a certain friendship, a certain person to stop bullying you, the more importance you’ll put on it. You’ll build up that thing to the point that it’s way up high on the edge of a cliff, and getting it requires you to dangle from that imagined cliff that.

You’ll be frozen, bracing, holding on for dear life, living by conditions you cannot control and by other people’s standards.

And here’s what’s worse: All the built up stress will cause you to fumble or even fail.

As soon as you let go of the importance you built up, as soon as you stop caring what the bully does, says, thinks, or feels, you’ll float above the stress and rise above the problem. You’ll be able to see the solution, and you’ll care more about yourself and your standards than a particular outcome. That’s when others will start to invest in you.

They way you’ll know they are investing in you is, ding ding ding! You guessed it: They will live up to YOU and YOUR expectations. They will follow your rules.

You will have influence to not only stop the bully food that you dish out, but the bully food others supply will dry up too.

Say to yourself, “My standards are more important than any outcome. My reality, my rules.” Then allow yourself to say something you truly think that’s different from others’ opinions, and watch how many of them insist they actually agree with you, changing their minds right there on the spot.

Remember Kelly telling you, “Let go of the importance, and the threat will be revealed as phony.” You’ll feel free to act like the bully doesn’t matter, and then you’ll see them fumble and fail.

I hope you have a wonderful week!