The Worrywart's Companion
Twenty-One Ways to Soothe Yourself and Worry Smart
Worrywarts are characterized by chronic anxiety, enslavement to out-of-control thoughts, and haranguing themselves to a degree that triggers FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Smart worriers take control of their worry by creating a time and place to do the work of worry, objectively studying their behavior to better understand how to worry effectively, and practicing flexible thinking rather than rut thinking. Smart worriers look for solutions, including partial solutions, and accept what can’t be changed, challenge their worries, practice making under-reactive statements that defuse anxiety rather than fuel it. The Worrywart’s Companion offers a smorgasbord of tools to help readers become smart worriers, including deep breathing and muscles relaxing exercises, practicing deliberate belly laughing, saying a prayer, doing a good deed, taking a walk, rocking oneself, counting details to keep one’s mind off of the worry, and more. When smart worriers finish the work of worry, they purposefully soothe themselves so that they can move on to other activities. The Worrywart’s Companion helps disquieted readers integrate soothing activities into their daily lives to keep worry-provoking anxiety in check.
Beverly A. Potter, PhD, (Docpotter) received her doctorate in counseling psychology from Stanford University and her masters in vocational rehabilitation counseling from San Francisco State University. She was awarded the prestigious Ford Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies.
Docpotter’s work blends philosophies of humanistic psychology, social learning theory and Eastern philosophies to create an inspiring and original approach to handling difficulties encountered in today’s world. Docpotter has developed a number of original self-help approaches, such as her breakthrough model of job burnout and how to overcome it based upon research in “learned helplessness”, her smart worry model inspired by Daniel Goleman’s “emotional intelligence”, her use of the Japanese ronin—the unindentured samurai—as a metaphor for her new paradigm, non-linear, career strategy for the cyber-age in which work is an adventure. She is noted for challenging rules and thinking of issues from an out-of-the-box perspective.
Docpotter was a faculty member of the University of California at Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy’s prestigious Executive Seminar program for City Managers. She was a member of Stanford University’s Human Resources Staff Development Program for 20 years. Her managerial training programs have been offered through University of California at Berkeley Extension, San Francisco State Extension, De Anza College Short Courses, as well as in-house training at Sun Microsystems, Genentech, TRW-CI, Hewlett-Packard, GTE, IRS Revenue Officers, Tap Plastics, Becton-Dickinson, Department of Energy, California State Bar Association, International Association for Personnel Women, Design Management Institute, Asian Management Institute, Cisco Systems and others.
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