Anticipating Anticipation

Negative anticipation is a powerful force. You'll sweat, lock up, get a headache, lose the ability to think clearly, doubt yourself, lose your temper... the list goes on and on. Bottom line, negative anticipation -- for an event, a subject in class, a particular aspect of a project, a meeting with an employee -- has a negative impact on your life and your performance.

There are two basic ways to deal with negative anticipation:

1. Try and remove it

2. Try and avoid it.

The first -- removal -- is almost impossible. Try to not think about that pink elephant. Can you succeed? If so, you did it by thinking of something else, not simply not thinking. You can't remove one thing without replacing it with another. That's a truism in almost all respects of life, and is certainly true with anticipation and learning.

In Head First, we occasionally do try and remove anticipation (although it's the minority approach, for sure). We place a really hard topic, one often negatively anticipated, near the end of a book or chapter. Then, we try and provide positive experiences leading up to that hard topic. We make sure preceding challenges are very achievable (not necessarily easier, but positioned and setup to increase your chances of success). We provide extra positive reinforcement (through a scenario or even the text). The idea is that as you close in on the tough topic, and negative anticipation rears its head, you're filled with confidence and positive feelings, enough so that you can replace negative anticipation with hope and even self-confidence.

It's not easy, because you often end up dumbing down challenges leading up to it, or creating self-congratulatory text. In both cases, a learner feels the fake nature of these confidence-producing exercises, and there's a negative backlash. Not good!

Translating this into your everyday life, it's really tough to truly replace negative anticipation. You can put yourself in positive situations, whether they're practice or samples or slightly easier challenges. Ideally, this would provide self-confidence. But in reality, you often sniff out the false nature of these buildups, and discard them. The very thing you meant for confidence creates self-doubt. And the end result is you feel the same negative anticipation. And sometimes, it's even worse... you know you've faked yourself out, and feel cheapened by the whole deal.

The best way to replace negative anticipation is to find some aspect of the anticipation that is positive. Put aside the negative feeling itself and try and think on the result of success. The passing grade, the getting-ungrounded, the pay raise, the new car, the adoration from flocks of loving fans throwing lacy undergarments at you... well, you get the idea. Don't worry at all about the HOW of getting to the result; just concentrate on the result. Your brain often KNOWS how to solve the problem if your anticipation and self-doubt would get out of the way.

It's not easy, but it's doable. And the results? Soon the positive anticipation of those results becomes a reality.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about trying to avoid negative anticipation. Tune in then for more!

Thanks
Brett