EP 103: How to Conquer Your Worries and Anxieties

Get another FREE tool for conquering your worries here: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/worry-opt-in-for-socials

Join Audrey as she discusses the worries and anxieties we all experience. She demonstrates unhealthy ways we try to cope with our worries that actually make us more anxious! She goes into the short and long term negative consequences to our lives and our health when we allow ourselves to engage in chronic worry. Then she outlines 3 PRINCIPLES you can apply right now in order to arrest your worries in the moment and engage in good solution-focused thinking instead of worrying. With inspiring stories she shares about herself and Catherine Marshall, you'll see these principles in action and know how to better utilize them in your own life. She even ends with another FREE tool you can grab by following the link above! 

"Save us from the sin of worrying, lest stomach ulcers be the badge of our lack of faith." Peter Marshall

"I've been through some terrible things, a few of which actually happened." Mark Twain

Transcript:

 Welcome to the Mission-Driven Mom podcast. This podcast is for moms just like you, who want to learn how to glorify God through finding and embracing true principles, discovering and developing your greatest gifts, and using them to serve your family and community. Welcome back to the podcast. I am Audrey Reba, the author of The Mission-Driven Life, and the founder of the Mission-Driven Mom, and I'm super excited to join you today on this podcast where we get to talk about three steps you can take right now to stop worrying and being anxious, how you can move forward in your life with greater confidence and forward momentum.

And not let those worries and all that mom guilt stop you. Like they have stopped me in my tracks so many times. If this podcast is helpful to you, if it's giving you good information that you feel blesses your life we would love it if you would pass it along and if you would give us a review. That helps others who come across our podcast to know that it's a value and that they ought to engage and see what they might be able to learn here.

It. Now we know that we all worry, and I do have a gift I'm gonna give you at the end with another tool for how to stop worrying. There's a lot of them that you can learn and get acquainted with in the academy, but today we get to learn three important ones from Dale Carnegie's book, how To Stop Worrying and Start Living, which I love and I've had in my home library for 20 plus years.

These three steps are going to help you know what you can do right now today to turn those worries around. But I wanna start with giving you some context in a bigger picture about what worry is and what worry is doing to you. Mark Twain said something, I read it years ago and I've never forgotten it. I think it's funny, but also so true.

He said. I've been through a lot of terrible things, a few of which actually happened. So that's kind of how life is for us. We worry, and one of the things that we know about, the more that we worry, the more it turns into anxiety and the more we focus on it, the worse it becomes. One of the aspects of worry that I found online was it is a.

A lack of knowledge of and acceptance of reality, which we will talk about a little bit more later, and I think it's really fascinating to understand that. When you focus on the past, what you don't like about the past, that instigates depression, and when you focus on what you might not like about the future, that instigates worry.

So this is where all of this is coming from, is when we are outside of the realm of the actual facts and we're not focusing on all the information. Instead, we're focusing on things that we don't like. When we do that, when these feelings of worry or anxiety start, sometimes we're not even like consciously aware that this is happening.

You know, our child says something that sparks a, oh, they're gonna do this now because they said that, or we have something slightly wrong with our body, and we start to think, oh, no. This is gonna turn into such and such. I know someone whose life is, they're persistently struggling and crippled with health concerns that never come to fruition.

I know other people that worry. I worry about my kids. I. Like crazy and things that are gonna happen that don't usually happen. It's usually not as bad as I think it's gonna be. Every once in a while it has been. I have had circumstances where I followed these three steps that Dale Carnegie taught me, and it's actually bowed me, well, I'll tell you about one of those in just a minute, but I wanna start with Amy Morin.

She's got a book that I love that we use in the academy and in it she talks about. How we try to keep everything under control. She says, trying to control everything usually starts out as a way to manage anxiety. If you know you have everything under control, what's there to worry about? And rather than focusing on managing your anxiety, you try controlling your environment.

And this goes back to a Stephen Covey quote, and I'll mention this a couple times in this podcast. He said. When we need change in our lives and when we don't like how things are going, we can focus on the one thing over which we have complete control, and that is ourselves. What we do when we experience anxiety so often is we try to control conditions.

We try to control the environment, and we try to control other people. We do this through. Having conversations or putting consequences in place, or getting angry or pouty or going into self pity. We do this a lot of ways, but they're all about control, and we think that if we have more control, then it will abate or somehow lessen the anxiety and worry that we feel, but it actually makes it a lot worse.

Because it's not the truth. We don't actually have control over the things that we're trying to control, and therefore, by trying to control them more, we increase the anxiety more. She has a list of things in here that I wanna go over with you quickly, because sometimes I think we don't realize all the ways in which we're trying to control and all, but two or three of these, I put a check mark next to, for myself.

A little self-evaluation because I do these too. I understand how difficult it is, and frankly, if I didn't have the tools that I teach in the academy, I would be toast. Because it has been, especially the last few years, have been incredibly rough. I'm just telling you, we need these tools and when I tell you these three steps or principles that Carnegie teaches, they might seem counterintuitive to you, but they really do work.

Okay? Here's some of the things you can think about whether or not you're trying to have control. You spend a lot of time and energy trying to prevent anything bad from happening. You invest energy into wishing other people would change. That's. So me, when faced with a tough situation, you can, you think you can single-handedly fix everything you believe.

The outcome of any situation is entirely based on how much effort you choose to exert. You assume that good luck has nothing to do with success. Instead, it's completely up to you to determine your future. Other people sometimes accuse you of being a control freak. You struggle to delegate tasks to other people because you don't think they'll do the job right.

Even when you recognize you aren't able to completely control a situation, you struggle to let it go. You fail. If you fail at something, you believe you're solely responsible. You don't feel comfortable asking for help. You think people who don't reach their goals are completely responsible for their situation.

You struggle with teamwork because you doubt the abilities of other people on the team, and you have difficulty establishing meaningful relationships because you don't trust people. If one or more of those sounds familiar, you probably struggle with control and that struggle with control may be tied to a need to decrease.

Negative emotions and negative thoughts about yourself and others that are producing anxiety and worry and guilt. She says we can't possibly make all of our circumstances and all the people in our lives fit into the way we think things should be. When you learn to let go of the details you can't control, the amount of time and energy you'll be able to devote to the things you can control, will give you the ability to accomplish incredible feats.

So we know what we don't wanna do. We don't want to do that list of things that Amy's given us to try to manage emotions we don't like. What I wanna do for just a minute too is make you aware of how urgent it is that you change things for yourself. There are so many things I can mention here. Damaged and harmed relationships, missed opportunities, chances for growth that we don't see.

There's so many negative consequences. In our lives when we let our thoughts and emotions be hijacked by worry because it is a choice, but there's also very physical ramifications. You are literally doing damage, sometimes permanent damage to your body through allowing yourself to engage in worry that turns into anxiety.

Your nervous system goes into a fight or flight mode. It releases adrenaline and cortisol, which leads to a racing heart and extra. Extra work on your heart and complications. You have muscle tension, which turns into pain in your shoulders and your back, which can also lead to longer term chiropractic issues, and you develop headaches and migraines.

You're more irritable, short tempered. You have a hard time relaxing and in your cognitive abilities. You. It impairs your concentration, your memory, and your decision making. I don't know if you've realized this or ever made the connection, but what's really happening to you when you're worrying is that you're not thinking, I.

One of the things that Dale Carnegie relates is that one of the worst features about worrying is that it destroys our ability to concentrate, like I was just talking about with the cognitive handicaps that we create for ourselves. And he said in one story that he related. That he hadn't been thinking he'd only been worrying.

And I'll talk in just a minute about how those are two very different things. Worrying is not thinking and thinking is not worrying. When we worry and we get negative and we go down a rabbit trail about future. Outcomes we can't control. We are being very problem centered. We are taking facts and information and distorting them outside of the realm of reality and turning them into a story that doesn't necessarily equate with them.

There are many ways to interpret the past, and there are many ways to tell stories about the future that are in line with facts and outcomes that we like, but especially that are in our control. Cardiovascular. It increases our heart rate and our blood pressure and leads to heart palpitations, which put extra strain on your heart and cause it to have complications later in life.

Your digestive system, stress and worry and anxiety cause nausea, diarrhea, stomach pain, loss of appetite, ulcers, and long-term stomach issues. Respiratory is again leading to increased rapid heart rate, which is bad for the heart, but also rapid breathing, which ushers in anxiety attacks. The likelihood of those and the likelihood of problems with asthma, the tendency to worry and anxiety also.

Causes us to have poor sleep habits, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, depression, less enjoyment of life and addiction. There are so many consequences in all areas of our lives for not arresting this habit. And it is just a habit. It's just a cognitive neuro pathway that you have entrenched in your brain and taught yourself to go down a certain track.

There's a train, it's on the track. That's the way that it goes. And it can be the case that you do this so often that you think that it's part of who you are. You think that it can't be changed, or it feels normal and natural, or it feels comfortable, and those are all the things that we don't want.

We don't want negativity, chronic negativity, misinterpretation of facts and poor thinking habits to ruin your health, to damage your relationships, to lower your confidence, and have all of these negative outcomes. This is within your control. That doesn't mean you're not gonna have bad days, it doesn't mean that things aren't gonna come up, but you can use tools.

The tools I'll teach you today, a tool I'm gonna give you at the end. And if. If you're when and if you're ready, tools in the academy that you can put in that toolbox and pull out whenever these things come up for you, which I do constantly, thank goodness for all of those tools I have in my toolbox. Now, the difference between good and bad thinking or proper thinking and worrying thinking is that good thinking deals with causes and effects, and it leads to logical, constructive planning.

There are hard, cold facts out there, some of which we don't like, and good thinking puts them in the proper perspective. It admits them. It lets them in the room. It admits them into the conversation, and then it focuses on using those facts to find solutions within the realm of our locus of control.

Bad thinking throws those out. It takes the facts and it turns them into a negative story, and it leads to tension and nervous breakdown. Worrying is not thinking. What's happening to you in your brain is that you have some sense of that things are out of your control and that feels uncomfortable, and that things might not work out in the way that you hope that they will be, and that's very uncomfortable, and often it's because.

We are worried about a decrease in status. And I know that sounds selfish, but it's really true. We all do have an ego and we have a status that we believe that we're at, and certain conditions and certain choices and certain events could lead to a lowering in our status, and we don't want that. We'll do anything for that not to happen.

And so in order to deal with these possible outcomes. We worry and try to take control or we worry and fall into self pity. The opposite of the taking control of everybody is to detach from the things that you can control. So when we go to one or the other extreme, and these three steps from Carnegie are gonna teach us how to stay centered in the middle.

But the one extreme is I'm gonna try to control everyone and everything, including myself. Like I'm gonna get up earlier and I'm gonna brush my teeth better and I'm gonna. Wear better outfits, and I'm gonna have better apps on my phone for planning my day. I'm gonna do all these things. I'm gonna control everything, or I'm gonna control everybody, or I'm gonna control the circumstances, or I'm gonna let go of everything.

I'm gonna wallow in self pity. I'm gonna make myself into a victim and disempower myself because I don't think I can control everybody, so I'm not gonna control anybody. And even though it might seem like going crazy with all of this, I'm gonna control, control, control myself. That isn't actually the way that we take ownership, and we'll talk about that in just a minute.

So what we wanna do is neither of those, we don't wanna give up all of the things that we could do. We wanna do the things that we could do that might make a difference while letting go of outcomes we can't control, and people and things, the economy and the president, and all of those things that are completely out of our control.

So here's these three steps. I'm gonna go over with you and I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna tell you the three steps, and then I'm gonna tell you a story about Catherine Marshall and a story about myself that will demonstrate these three steps in action, or we can call them principles because they work for us all the time, if we'll do them, if we'll do them properly.

The first one is to sit down and journal about the worst case scenario. Now this isn't gonna be izing. That's not what we're gonna do. And the reason that we wanna actually journal is because when we journal, especially when we hand write things down, we take thoughts. Our thoughts run way faster than our hand can move.

So when we are worrying and anxious, what's often happen happening is that all kinds of ideas and possible outcomes and negative things are just bouncing around in our brain, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing. And we think so quickly that we're just moving from one to the other, from one to the other so fast.

And when we stop and think. Yeah, we have to slow that down. And when we take the time to go to a quiet place in journal, we remove all distractions and we slow our thinking down and we force ourselves to put all these random, disconnected ideas and worries and, anxieties and whatever. We have to put them into sentences and into paragraphs.

We have to turn them into. Flesh and bones, we have to work them through. And sometimes just the process of journaling about what is the worst case scenario. We start to realize this has happened to me before. I'm really kind of being ridiculous here. I really am turning this, I'm blowing this way outta proportion.

There's, this isn't nearly as bad as I have been making it out to be. 'cause I just didn't sit down and walk myself through it. The other thing that happens. Is that we don't want to, what I mean by izing it is we don't wanna put down the worst case scenario as something so statistically unrealistic that it just really would never, ever happen in a million years.

Now, maybe you need to look up some statistics and you need to talk to someone else. If you are really absolutely 100% convinced that someone is going to sneak into your house tonight and kill you in your bed. That's not going to happen. That's statistically impossible to have happen, so we're not gonna turn it into things that are just.

Never going to happen. Your child losing their faith or your health declining as you age or you not getting in the commission, you're so hoping will come in. Those are real things that really might happen. Those are worst case scenarios that you might have to deal with. So you're gonna sit down and you're gonna journal, so you're gonna slow down and you're gonna just make the decision to think and not worry.

And you're gonna write down the very worst thing that you could possibly, realistically think that could happen. And then the next thing you're gonna do is you're gonna reconcile yourself to this worst thing that could happen. This is you taking the time to sit in your reality and to recognize that this worst thing might happen because it's clearly out of your control.

If it were genuinely 100%. In your control. Like let's say it was something like, I'm worried that I'm not gonna go for a walk. Well, that's 100% in your control, and there's a whole bunch of ways that you could make that happen. You could just walk out the door and do it, and then you would be on a walk and then it would've happened.

But often we're worried because there are some elements of whatever this thing is that we're longing and aching for, that we do know are probably out of our control. And we have to reconcile ourselves to reality, the reality that we're sitting in right now as we write down the facts and the reality of what could possibly happen.

And then basically after that, everything that is less than that worst case scenario is just good news. And we don't do this from a negative. I'll give you some examples that will help you. See what I mean by this. We don't do this from the standpoint of life is awful, bad things are gonna always happen to me.

Certainly this is gonna happen, but we reconcile ourselves to it, and you would think that that would bring a lot of depression and despair. That's the reason we don't do this. We don't do this because somewhere deep inside of us as all of these. Fears and anxieties roll around in our brains. We are trying to avoid them.

We're like not willing to approach them and actually look at them closely because we're afraid that that would just break us, but it won't break you. It actually will bring you peace. And it sounds strange, but it's actually true. And then the third step that you're gonna take is that you're gonna calmly devote yourself to trying to improve upon that worst case scenario.

So you can prepare yourself for it in a myriad of ways. How do I wanna show up if this worst case scenario happens? What's the person I wanna be? What are the things that I wanna do and stay? What are the actions I wanna take that I can be proud of after the fact? What could I do to lessen the possibility of that happen happening?

Because sometimes, in trying to take control, not only do we increase our anxiety, but sometimes we make the situation worse. So we're going to try to make it better than it might have been. Okay. So I'm gonna tell you two stories. One is by Catherine Marshall, who wrote the book, Christie, which I absolutely adores one of my all time favorite books.

We do it, read it in the Academy. She also wrote a book, I think it's her first book. It's a man called, it's called a Man called Peter was her husband, who was the clergy for the Supreme Court. No, for. The Senate, and he died suddenly of a heart attack when he was pretty young in his forties, and she wrote a book about him.

But in this book, she tells a story of her own struggle. So she was under a lot of stress and pressure. Things were really tough for her, and she developed tuberculosis. It could be a death sentence, but often it was. People recovered from it. And so the doctor said, your case isn't too terrible. We think you'll recover, but you've got to go to bed and not do anything at all until you're better.

And she said how long is that gonna be? And he says, well, probably three or four months, maybe a little bit longer. Shouldn't be too bad. So she cries and she's afraid, and she doesn't want to have tuberculosis. This is a big. Obstacle that she has to face, but she follows doctor's orders. She cries about it and it's hard, but she follows the doctor's orders.

And in March of 1943, she goes to bed with tuberculosis. And in September of 19 44, 18 months later, they do another x-ray of her lungs, and there's been no change. So here she is. She's the mother of a small boy. She has a million responsibilities. She's active, she's young. She was vibrant and healthy before this.

She's been in bed for 18 months with no end in sight. So she says This was a time of great soul searching. And she comes to the conclusion, having thought it through, that the spiritual world was governed by laws. Laws just as immutable as the law of gravity. And if that was true, which of course at the mission driven mom, we absolutely believe that's true.

Then God knows those laws and he could heal her through those laws. And when she read through the gospels, she noticed that Jesus never refused a single person. He didn't say, no, I won't heal you. He healed everybody he came in contact with. And so that being the case, she then asked herself, why then could I not ask this same Jesus to cure me?

I felt however unworthy to ask such a thing. So painfully in an agony of mind and spirit, I began thinking back over my life, recalling all too vividly, all my transgressions and omissions. Through many days. I put down on paper all of the things of which I was ashamed. So she wrote letters to people asking for their forgiveness for things that she had done to them that they might not even have noticed.

And she really just basically cleaned her life up spiritually. Now, this is not something I'm telling you you need to do. Just because you're worrying doesn't mean you need to try and fix all of the pro, all of the things you've ever done wrong. But this is what she felt she needed to do, and it led to something really awesome.

So once she felt spiritually clean, she claimed God's promise of forgiveness and cleansing. And she felt sure that she had done everything that she could and that now God was going to heal her. But then in September she had a new x-ray. So now she's been in bed another year. No, no, no. It wasn't September.

It was a few months later. Sorry. September was when she had the x-ray. Now a few months have gone by. She has another x-ray. No change. So she's pretty discouraged. She said. I was puzzled and hurt. The barometer of my faith fell sharply. It appeared that God had failed me. I was desperate at my ropes end. So it appeared to her that her prayers hadn't been answered.

And a little bit later she was pondering all of this and struggling and wondering what in the world to do. And she picked up a pamphlet. And this pamphlet told the story of a former missionary who was bedridden for eight years with her ailment. And during all those long years, she kept asking God, why?

Why do you have me in bed permanently sick when I could be out there doing mission work for you? But then this woman said. Catherine said about this woman when she really evaluated herself. There was rebellion in her heart and the drums of Mutiny rolled every now and then. The burden of her prayers was that God should make her well in order, that she might return to the mission field, but nothing happened.

Finally worn out with failure of these prayers and a desperate sort of resignation within her. She prayed. All right. Lord, I give in. If I am to be sick for the rest of my life, I bow to thy will. I want thee even more than I want health for. It is. It is for thee to decide. Thus, leaving herself entirely in God's hands.

She began to feel a peace. She had known at no time during her illness. In two weeks, she was out of bed completely. So what Catherine realizes. She says is this, I had never, for one moment stopped rebelling against tuberculosis or against the invalidism. It had induced, I had claimed health as my right, and I had not faced reality.

The right way then must be the only way left that of submission and surrender to the situation as it was. So going back to these steps or principles of facing our worries, when we write down the worst case scenario for both of these women, the worst case scenario was they were going to be in bed for the rest of their lives.

I mean, that is an unbelievable thing to worry and have anxiety about what? None of us wants that. Nobody wants that. And yet in both cases, they couldn't face the reality that that might happen. And so when they finally sat down with themselves and stopped worrying and fighting and rebelling against the circumstances they found themselves in.

And they got serious about facing the reality that there were certain things that were out of their control and that they might be faced with a life of being an invalid. They gave it to God and said, I can't control it. I'm gonna leave it up to you. Catherine did the same thing that this woman had done.

She said, Lord, I've done everything I've known how to do and it hasn't been good enough. I'm desperately weary of the struggle to persuade you to give me what I want. I'm beaten, whipped, and through if you want me to be an invalid for the rest of my life. All right. Here I am. Do anything you like with me and my life.

And if you'll remember in the Mission-Driven Life book, we talk about the three principles of loving God and one of them is to be willing, willing to go along with what his plans are, willing to let him be the plan maker and willing to hand over our hardest. Struggles and trials to him and willing to obey those things.

He says that we must obey. In this instance, it's accepting the reality of the circumstances that we're in and letting go of everything that we can't control and leaving it up to him. And for Catherine, just as it had happened for this other woman, she says, there was no trace of graciousness about the gift of my life and will nothing victorious, nothing expectant.

I had no faith left as I understood faith nevertheless. A strange deep peace settled into my heart. Now, in both of the instances with these women, their complete surrender, their complete acceptance of the worst case scenario led to deep abiding peace, which in turn increased their faith, which created increased hope.

Isn't that fascinating? And then in both instances, they came to the point where they started to feel inspired to do something, to take some kind of action because we know that faith is a principle of action and power. And so we must take action in order to exercise that faith. When we do things, that's faith, that's why God commands us.

He can command us to have faith because faith is action. He can't always, he can't always command us to, feel a certain way, but he can command us to do certain things. So we have faith by doing. And so she figures out what she can do and she slowly heals and mends. It's not instantaneous like this other woman, but it is over a period of several months, she, I think it took about a year for her to be back in health.

I wanna tell you about my own experience in writing down the worst case scenario, accepting reality and engaging in thinking instead of worrying. I'm writing my next book, how Truth Makes You Free. And in writing this book, I told this story in relationship to accepting those things to what it means to be made free.

In terms of accepting the things that we can't control. And so that's how I'm talking about it in, in this book. I'm gonna read to you what I wrote, 'cause I think I said it the very best I can. Although I, like you went through many difficult experiences in my life that were out of my control, like moving every two years when I was growing up.

Like my father's sudden death when I was 16, like falling in the hospital after giving birth and permanently damaging my hip. It. I learned the lesson in this instance, like we're talking about in this podcast of accepting those things. I can't control accepting the worst case scenario. I learned the lesson most poignantly when I was struggling with my husband's addiction.

As I've mentioned before on this podcast and in this book, I knew about his problems almost from the beginning of our relationship, and we both naively thought marriage would fix it. Actually, it became much worse the first several years we were married, year after year. I either ignored it or told myself that he was going to overcome it, yet he didn't, and the pain persisted.

After over a decade of this, I was again blindsided with another betrayal. I yelled and wept and basically went through the course of emotions I always felt when he acted out. But then when I had gained better control over myself, I began to really think This time I didn't rush to find solutions or make amends with Blaine.

This time I sat with myself for several days and pondered the situation I was in. I finally realized that I should stop lying to myself about my reality. I saw that this problem had been around for most of Blaine's life, and I was kidding myself if I continued to believe that things were going to suddenly get better.

In fact, I finally, for the first time, faced the truth that he might remain an addict his whole life. We might never find a solution. Amazingly, I did not say these things to myself out of discouragement or despair. I hadn't given up. I wouldn't stop trying to find answers. What I was finally doing was looking at my life more honestly and looking at my options clearly.

I knew I could divorce my husband, but I also knew that divorce wouldn't change the fact that he was the father of my children, that we would still need to interact constantly, that they would still have an addict for a dad, and that many of the problems I would I was facing would not change because of divorce.

I also knew that Blaine loved me. That he was trying and that I had made a marriage commitment to him for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. I also knew that despite his struggles, he had many admirable qualities that I could respect and focus on. After all the pondering and introspection, I finally came to a moment where I fully accepted my reality and the things I couldn't change.

I chose to keep loving my husband. I chose to stay with him, and I chose to be married to an addict for the rest of my life. Then something happened that I didn't expect. I thought this acceptance might bring discouragement, but just the opposite happened when I completely accepted my circumstances for the first time, I felt completely free for the first time.

Of course, there was still that hope inside of me that we could find the solution to his addiction and he could gain sobriety, but my staying with him did not hinge on his behavior. I was no longer a victim of my marriage. My new found freedom empowered me to stop complaining and start looking for what this solution could teach me.

I focused on the one thing over which I have control me, and when I was honest, I knew that I had a lot of work to do in cleaning up my own character and learning to be a better mother and wife. I knew in order to manage the situation properly, I would have to get a lot better at a lot of things like boundaries and forgiveness and communication.

Happily, I could finally see that the possibilities for my own growth in this trial were endless. And now, years later, I have become more than I would've been without this challenge in my life. So I too on, not this occasion, but especially on this occasion, experienced the power of these three principles of managing the worries and anxieties in our lives.

We can sit down, we can slow down, we can talk our way through it. We can journal through the problem. We can look honestly at the very worst thing that we can see happening. We can come to terms with it, and then we can get busy working on the thing we can control. And that is us trying to devoting ourselves and trying to make the best of a situation that we might not like.

That we might not be able to control or even change. Peter Marshall, Catherine Marshall's husband that she wrote this book about, said a really famous prayer, and in this prayer he said, save us from the sin of worrying lest stomach ulcers be the badge of our lack of faith. So this is really such a powerful three step process.

For doing something about those things that are keeping us up at night, that are causing our stomach ulcers, that are bringing us unhappiness and that are ultimately things we can't control or change because they revolve around the choices of a lot of other people. So I encourage you to use these three principles.

Right now today to start thinking about something that you keep chronically worrying about that is making you unhappy and causing you to be irritable and have stomach pain and all of those things that none of us want. And to get serious about using these three tools or principles or steps that can help you to overcome your worry.

And I wanna give you one more gift. There's another tool that we learn in the academy. That can really help you with your worries and anxieties. I've got a link in the description of this podcast. You can also go to mission driven mom.com, and at the top of the page you'll see if you're ready to conquer the worry and the mom guilt, then opt in for that simple tool.

I'll teach it to you. You can learn it really quickly. It's something you can master in 10 minutes, and you can use it day after day after day, and I promise if you'll utilize it, it really will empower you to take these worries and turn them on their head, see them in a brand new way, and turn your worries into forward momentum that really is a possibility for you because this thing that you're worrying about.

You worry about it because you care about it so deeply, otherwise you wouldn't worry and you care about it because you're a woman of principle and character who has noble values that you hold dear and things aren't going according to plan. And so you are worried. I get it. That's me too. I'm right in that camp with you.

But use these tools and when you're ready, come to the academy and fill up your toolbox with many more tools that we don't have time in this podcast to go over. That will help you with anything that you're worrying anxious about. And I hope again that this podcast has been beneficial for you and that if so, you will pass it along and give us a review to help us grow and reach more like-minded moms who want to be on the mission path with us.

Thank you so much for listening through for joining me today. I hope that you'll come back and share with me all the ways that this tool set is helping you to overcome your worries. I'd love to hear your success stories. I hope you have a wonderful day, and I will see you next time.