When I suggest to my clients that they go through the Worst Case Scenario process, many think I’ve lost it. I hear things like “What you focus on expands, Matthew.” “I know all about the Law of Attraction. If I think about the worst case, I will attract it.” “I manifest what I think about. There is no way I am going to focus on bad things.”
These responses are perfectly logical until you dig a little deeper. Here’s why: Resisting potentially negative futures is a thought-form. Resisting things ENSURES that they are present in your life because you are experiencing the thing you want to avoid – and it’s not actually happening.
When you accept the Worst Case Scenario, you release your resistance to it. You diffuse it. You remove the mind’s need to strategize how to avoid the thing you don’t want. Let me say that again: You remove the mind’s need to strategize how to avoid the thing you don’t want.
Most people don’t realize that resisting requires effort. Resistance has a powerful, creative nature about it. So, when we resist something that lives in the future (meaning it doesn’t exist yet) we begin to give it shape and form. We literally take a fantasy about something negative, that is not happening and we give it our focus.
So, in order to diffuse or release it, you must accept the very thing you are so afraid if. Not easy.
Let me give you an example. One of my clients is terrified of going broke. He’s a very successful guy who has worked really hard for the life he has. The idea of losing it keeps him up at night when things in the markets get volatile. To put his mind at ease, I suggested we do the Worst Case Scenario together. At first, he was resistant (yes, he was resisting working through his resistance). Finally, I convinced him of the value of talking through his nightmare scenario of losing it all.
As he visualized what “losing it all” looked like, he became more and more afraid. There were moments when trying to describe life without his current standard of living and being rejected socially was almost unbearable. Then we imagined losing the house, his family, his investments – all the things that gave him purpose and identity. We went all the way down to the total destruction of life as he knows it. Then we took a breath and I said: “Ok, now that you are here, can you make peace with losing everything? I know you won’t like it, but can you make peace with it and move forward?” “Yes,” he said. “OK. Now let’s make a plan about where we go from here.”
His energy exploded. His creativity kicked in and he started talking about all the ideas, plans and new ways he would rebuild with a newfound connection to his wife, his family, his work, and a new way to relate to material success. The freedom he felt was contagious. Ideas, inspirations, and ah-ha’s poured out of him.
It was nothing short of mind-blowing.
Accepting the Worst Case Scenario frees you. By fully accepting the future you are trying to avoid, you gain a new level of flexibility and power. You shift the energy from defensive to offensive.
You recognize that there is no future. So, you release the need to avoid a future that isn’t coming.
If this doesn’t make a lot of sense yet, imagine that potentially negative futures are like a hiking trail. The more times you walk down a path, the deeper the groove gets in the ground. The deeper the groove, the harder it is to get off the path. The same is true for obsessing over a potentially negative future. The more you obsess the harder it is to get off the subject. The more you focus on the subject, the more the universe makes it true.
Once you get present to the fact that your fearful negative future is just one possibility and you accept that if it happens you will survive, then you are free to imagine new futures.
So, what is the Worst Case Scenario you are avoiding? What is the future you are making sure doesn’t happen? What is the future, that if you accepted, right now, it would free you from obsessing over it?
If you are spending time avoiding a potentially negative future, then you are not seeing what’s really happening. Your head is in the proverbial sand! Instead, make peace with the Worst Case Scenario, and free yourself to deal with whatever comes your way in a rational, peaceful, and creative state.
Author
Matthew Ferry
7 Comments
Thank you! I hope all is well with the Ferry’s. All of you! God bless.
Thanks. I needed that.
I think sometimes you have to accept the possibility that you won’t survive, and learn to be ok with it.
That is the ultimate goal for a person on an enlightened journey. To accept that you are doing to die gives you the freedom to live.
I have been avoiding a situation, and thinking about it for 11 years! I feel at ease after reading this. Much Thanks!!
That is the goal. Once you are at ease with the situation, you can start to think about things more deliberately and clearly. It’s really difficult to be rational and resourceful when fear narrows your view.
The guy said “yes” he can accept the worse case. What if he said “no”? I could not accept living on the street as homeless vagabond, without access to decent food, particularly. I feel myself dependent on a system of earning money over which I have little control to buffer me from this unendurable condition.
What should one do if the worst case is too terrible to accept, if it makes one think only suicide remains?
The above essay is saying a very good thing: you will be able to counteract against the consequences of the worst case. You have more resources and ingenuity to repair your situation than you give yourself credit for. That is the message I hear here. But were the truly worst case to occur – you become *entrapped* in poverty – no, I do not see how to make that acceptable.
Just sayin’ my honest thoughts here….constructive logical responses please.