Leadership is STRESS!
Gooooooooood Morning to all;
Today is the 14th day of the 9th month in the 9th year of the new millenium. Isn’t that just incredible. How far we have come as a society and yet we still try to handle other people’s problems and burdens without taking the time to help ourselves.
Today I would like to discuss a worldwide epidemic of astronomical proportions. I have seen the the effects of stress and have experienced the devastating incompassatation that it can cause. Stress is a major factor in the thousands of heart attacks that happen everyday on this little blue planet we call home.
Let’s start at the beginning and ask the question, So, just what is STRESS?
STRESS is not an event, it’s our perception of the event. Whether it is your family life, work environment, social life or personal life, no one ever reaches a point where they are no longer confronted with challenges and these challenges will cause stress.
If you suddenly found yourself with no challenges, that in and of itself would be a major challenge because you would need to find something meaningful, some direction for your life.
Not only is stress inevitable with life’s challenges, but it is essential for fulfillment. A challenge can be a positive form of stress or a negative form of stress depending on how you perceive it and deal with it.
Allow yourself to be the musical instrument in the orchestra of life and by that I mean you have stress in your daily life, there is no getting away from that. But take the guitar for instance. Without tension on the strings, the guitar cannot make music and too much tension can break the strings. Allow just enough tension to make beautiful music in the symphony of life.
Here are a few things a person can do to help relieve the tension that daily life’s stress puts on a person and I will talk on some of these topics in another post.
1). Know your stress signals
2). Know the cause of your stress
3). Control the controllable
4). Cope with stress you can’t control
5). Exercise
6). Laugh Loud, Laugh Long, Laugh often
7). Meditate/Pray
8). Network with support groups. (You are not alone)
The Ohio Mental Health Association says to use “GUTS” or “Get Underway, Try Something”.
C.S. Lewis wrote a passage in “Letter to an American Lady” and this is great advice for avoiding undue stress.
“We must try to take life moment by moment. The actual present is usually pretty tolerable, I think, if only we refrain from adding to its burden that of the past and the future. How right our Lord is about sufficient to the day!”
Keep checking in for more on STRESS!
The Massage Professor
