Friend or Saboteur ~ What is Your Relationship with Yourself? (Part 2)

Habit #2 is managing stress in your life.

A saboteur has an inability to manage stress in a healthy way.

Let's look at three questions you can ask yourself when dealing with stress in your life.

How do you know if you are experiencing stress in your life?

For me, I start feeling agitated or irritable.  I might get a headache, and I usually start feeling overwhelmed.  It's important to be able to recognize when stress hits us.  So think about what happens to you emotionally and physically when you feel stressed.  Take a minute or two to write down your responses.

What are your stressors?

What are those triggers in your life that cause you to feel stress?  Let's take Maria, for example.  Maria is a school secretary, and her job requires her to multi-task on a regular basis.  What makes her job stressful is that she is constantly dealing with interruptions from the phone, children, and the faculty members.  At the end of her day, she often feels stressed because she hasn't gotten anything done.

Maggie works part-time in internal communications for a large corporation.  Sometimes she works in the office, and other times she works from home.  She is also a mother of a small child.  Maggie has identified her stressors as rushing, trying to do too many things, and worries about other people.

Stop for a minute and write down your stressors in life.

What is the solution to minimizing your stress?

Let's go back to Maria.  After talking through some of the possible solutions to not getting things done at work, we learned that she needed to work on setting better boundaries at work.  Maria found herself always saying yes to every request that was made of her, even when she could have said no, or at least postponed the request.  One particular problem she had was with the custodian of the school.  The custodian liked to take a lot of breaks, and her favorite person to talk to was Maria.  So she would come into the office and sit down for some idle chit chat.  Well, Maria didn't have time to talk, but she didn't want to be rude.  So Maria and I did a little role playing and practiced getting rid of the custodian in a nice way.  Maria's solution to stress was learning to set firm boundaries with her time.

After working with Maggie, we discovered her schedule was filled with social engagements that were only mildly important to her.  Even though Maggie was an organized person, she had never thought of planning her week and scheduling her days so she could focus on what was important to her.  Most of the time, she reacted to whatever life threw her way.  Instead, we have worked on finding the right balance for Maggie and helping her to understand that planning and scheduling helps her to be proactive, rather than reactive.  We all have choices, and when we exercise our right to choose, we can control our stress.

When you are a friend to yourself, you manage stress in a healthy way.