“Stress is caused by the unknown, seek out a solution and your stress will disappear”
Problems with money, relationships, work and any of other key component of your life will cause you stress, there is no doubting that.
BUT ask yourself this, what if you could process a solution straight away? What if you didn’t need to burden yourself with the problem for the rest of the day, week or year?
The key to reducing stress all starts from a healthy mindset. It is a very vague thing to say but it’s the truth, only you can initiate your thoughts and mindset to overcome problems in your life.
Think about it, when you finally do work through the stressful situation/problem and then understand a solution or outcome your general stress levels will diminish right? Yes you will then have a certain amount of stress to deal with especially if the problem needs an action to but the initial on set of “how am I going to deal with this” has now changed to completing certain actions to complete the task.
Coming to this solution straight away Is something that can be learnt and as we know that 95% of the time you’re governed by your unconscious mind the key to a successful behavioural change is to start with the conscious and keep progressing through the stages until the conscious because the unconscious.
My favorite stress management tool.
The ‘Awfulisation’ Tool
Imagine a scale in your mind of the worst possible scenario on one end and the other end the scale a comment of “It’s not so bad I can handle this”
Lets use an example to make this more clear.
Last week due to an roadworks being carried out on the road on route to the City I was running slightly late to my next appointment.
Option 1:
Panic, get angry and begin to toot my horn and complain to myself on why they have decided to do road works on one of the busiest through routes. I will race as fast as I can to get there run through the door and for the first 10 minutes talk about how terrible the situation was and how silly road works were taking place!
Option 2:
Im annoyed (Awfulisation Kicks in) but I stay calm. There is nothing at all livingly possible that I can do to change the events going on. Am I ever late? No never. Does my client understand my values and understand my punctuality is one of the biggest parts of my personal DNA? Yes I hope so. So I call ahead explain the situation and explain that I will keep them informed as much as I can and ofcourse will make time after the session or later on in the week on the clients request to come back and go over anything that may not have been covered. Ofcourse my client understands, he will not as I have mentioned above get stressed as I have given him all the information needed to now go straight to step 2 and step 3.
The key to using this tool is to truly understand the situation that you are in at that specific time. In life there will be very stressful things that will come to head but for you to improve your self-awareness is only going to help increase your health and well being.
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