I was scrolling through LinkedIn earlier today, thinking maybe I’d find inspiration for this week’s “Chat.” It didn’t take long. I saw a post from motivational speaker, Sarah Cary and the lightbulb went off. Her post was about a book I read many years ago and was pretty sure I still owned. I ran upstairs and scanned my bookshelf. Sure enough, there it was: Dale Carnegie’s best seller, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. Could there be a better title for this Covid spring?
When we worry, our minds jump here and there…and we lost all power of decision. However, when we force ourselves to face the worst and accept it, we then eliminate all these vague imaginings and put ourselves in a position in which we are able to concentrate on our problem.
-Dale Carnegie
Back in January if anyone had told you that we’d be living through a worldwide pandemic, that school and many businesses would be suspended, that we’d all be hunkered down in our houses, rationing our toilet paper for crying out loud … well that would have sounded pretty close to “the worst” thing you could imagine, right? Yet every day you get up and get through the day. You maybe even accomplish a few things. Some of you are going to be graduating within a few short weeks, despite the current circumstances! You are getting through this!
But. If you’re obsessed with worrying, you become paralyzed. Instead of taking action toward your goals, you fret and fulminate. You scroll your phone for hours, losing track of time, or lose sleep at night, staring up at the ceiling, leading to an unproductive day. Basically, you’re stuck in a rut, bogged down by your concerns. And I know, despite my (sincere) happy talk in the paragraph above, that we all have valid concerns these days. I am by no means disputing that fact! However, worrying about the future isn’t going to change or even remotely improve it.
My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.
-Montaigne
As I leafed through my copy of How to Stop Worrying… and saw the many passages I’d underlined back in the day, it started to come back to me: my mood when I first read it. I was in graduate school, working on my M.Ed. Most of my friends were getting engaged or well into establishing their careers, or both. Meanwhile, I was 24 years old, racking up student debt, living in a dark basement apartment, sleeping on a futon, and trying to ignore the fact that the country was in the middle of a recession. In fact, I graduated into what was called a “jobless recovery” which was about as un-fun as it sounds.
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
-Thomas Carlyle
I needed this book at that time, and I need it again now. I can look back at 1991 with the benefit of hindsight and smile at the struggles I went through before I ended up working for two years at the Career Center at Vassar College. The information interviews I conducted, the cover letters I wrote, the resume I tweaked over and over and over; it all paid off (eventually). But I don’t think I was doing a whole lot of smiling when it was happening, I was obsessed: searching for job openings, tailoring my cover letters to each one, reaching out to friends and faculty in my program for support. And sometimes that’s just what you have to do. You follow all the old sayings: put one foot in front of the other, take it one day at a time, put your own oxygen mask on first etc. Those sayings may be clichéd, but they became clichés because they hold nuggets of truth that have been passed down for so long that they are considered obvious. But sometimes we need reminding of the obvious. Some days just getting up, getting dressed, and sending out a few emails is a victory. In the next few days, I think I’ll be visiting more in-depth with Mr. Carnegie, and trying to live out some of what I’ve written about here. And I’ll remember this whenever the worry starts to consume me:
Concern means realizing what the problems are and calmly taking steps to meet them. Worry means going around in maddening, futile circles.
-Dale Carnegie
– Mary Becelia, Career Coach
