Ellen Hendrikson

But sometimes that threat sensor of ours is just a little too sensitive and we can really blow the outcomes or the consequences out of proportion.

So I had a client who was worried that if he lost his job, his family would abandon him.

There was another who was worried that he would immediately end up financially dependent on his chaotic and alcoholic family.

And so what is generally happening here is that we're conflating possibility.

You know, it's possible that the feared outcome could happen.

with probability, like it's not probable, it's probably not going to happen.

And there are often many, many interim steps that would have to happen to get to that catastrophe.

Yeah, for sure.

So I'll use an example of another client who was worried that if he was to lose his job, he would end up homeless.

So he would, for example, have to miss the signs of impending job loss.

He would have to be unable to...

fix the situation.

He would have to not get severance or unemployment.

He would have to run through his emergency fund.

He would have to not be able to find a cheaper living situation.

He'd have to not be able to find another job, you know, on and on and on.

So what we can do is treat it like a math problem and literally list out all the steps that would have to happen to get to our feared outcome, assign each one a percent likelihood and multiply it out.

And the answer is not going to be zero.

But it's often like 0.00001.

Interesting.