Page 45 - Advance Copy: Todd Kaufman, Author

HOW TO MANAGE ANXIETY & END PANIC ATTACKS
He was sent to the school psychologist who taught him breathing exercises and began a CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) program with him. She told him he needed to start meditating. They gave him a quiet space to try and recover. It was all well-intentioned but no one told Lars what you now know: To stop a panic attack, you can never fight a panic attack!
So the attacks continued, getting worse and more frequent, until his mom finally found my office and brought a willing- but-exhausted Lars in to talk.
And Lars loved to talk about football! I honestly knew very little about his beloved game and he was more than ready to teach me! So I taught Lars about anxiety and panic attacks, and he taught me about football. We talked about his game and his coach, and how he made the most out of his practices.
As it turned out, Lars was a “left-footed kicker.” Apparently, in football we have a tendency to use and perfect our kick with one or the other of our two feet, just like we have a dominant hand with which we prefer to write and do other things. Lars was one of the rare left-footed kickers. He could drive a football with his left foot from one end of the field to the other with deadly accuracy and at a velocity that could knock you clear off the field if you happened to be in the line of fire!
I said to him, “Lars, answer me this: If I hosted a reality TV show and the deal was I would give you thirty days to show up on set and with a single try kick a football from half-way down the field through the goal posts, with your right foot, could you? And here’s the kicker: If you make it on the first shot, you win a million bucks!”
Lars smiled and quickly checked in to see whether my proposal was hypothetical or not. “Sadly,” I said, “it is hypothetical. But it is a very real and important question. So could you?”
Lars instantly responded: “Yeah, I could nail that in thirty days!”
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