Strange but true: 

There are moments in my day job when I’m so thoroughly baffled by the phrases being bandied around by my esteemed banking colleagues that I sometimes think I’ve slipped into a parallel universe where normal, understandable conversation no longer exists and gibberish, gobbledegook and mumbo-jumbo has taken its place.

I talk, of course, of office slang…

Of acronyms…

And of the grand-daddy of the acronym world, the three letter acronym.

Three letter acronyms are so overused in financial services that three letter acronyms THEMSELVES have got their very own acronym.

That’s right.

The three letter acronym is the infamous “TLA”.

These TLAs have gone so overboard that it’s not unusual for me to get a DM at work littered with TLAs. Inevitably, I have no idea what the DM actually means. And so I have to hop over to an acronym dictionary to cross-reference the TLAs in order to crack the unintentional secret code.

Which IMO completely defeats the point of acronyms in the first place.

i.e. instead of speeding things up (which I guess is what the acronyms are meant for), they actually slow things down.

Life is full of own goals like this.

Another approach which has the opposite outcome to the intended outcome?

I’d suggest worry falls slap bang in the middle of that description.

Conventional wisdom will tell you that a sprinkling of worry will help you find the solution to whatever you’re worrying about.

But the conventional wisdom is wrong. 

All worry does is block the clear-mindedness, perspective and clarity which lead to reliable ideas, solutions and actions.

Take the Subtraction Method presentation I gave a couple of weeks ago to Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s Ness Labs community.

In the past, an hour long presentation with all eyes on me would’ve been a huge source of worry. It would’ve kept me awake for a few nights before.

But instead of a knot in my stomach and the usual pre-presentation jitters, I was actually looking forward to the presentation. And when the Zoom call kicked off, I could relax into it and enjoy the ride.

This isn’t me saying “you shouldn’t worry about things”. I’m not trying to turn this into a royal decree.

All I’m saying is this:

If you want a calmer, freer experience of life where solutions to problems arise effortlessly and where old problems don’t even look like problems any more, subtracting your worries can be a really helpful way to do that.

All it takes is peering under the hood of what worry is all about and seeing that, just like the infamous TLAs, worry leads to the opposite of what we're really after.

Simple in theory but harder in practice.

But that’s where my coaching comes in.

If you’d like to subtract the mental clutter that keeps you worried, stressed and second-guessing yourself so you can find more clarity, calm and peace of mind, RSVP ASAP:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com

To fulfilment,

Tom