MANAGING STRESS – FIRST STEPS

How Stressed are you?

Do you suffer from one or more of the following symptoms?

  • Nervousness
  • Withdrawal
  • Constant tiredness
  • Frequent headaches
  • Increased use of alcohol, smoking or other habits
  • An unexpected loss or increase in your diet and/or body weight
  • Restless sleep
  • Irrational emotions or behaviour
These may be an indication that you are suffering from high stress.
Most people are living with high levels of anxiety.  Psychologists are telling us that many people are living with levels of anxiety high enough to have led to their hospitalisation had they been measured 20 years ago.  Research has also showed that unmanaged stress can reduce our life expectancy by up to 32 years!  Clearly we need to deal with this.  But what is stress and how do we deal with it?

Is your Life an Exhilarating Adventure?

We have the capacity to take on life’s challenges in a positive way.  Of course this would be easier if we understood where the anxiety came from.  And we would be more excited about challenges if we had a strategy for managing every day worries as well as the long term build-up of stress in our lives.  We hear so much about the “balanced life” but what is a balanced life and how do we achieve it?  And what on earth is “Healthy Stress”?
If it were that Easy, Why are we all so Stressed?
Managing stress requires that we have a clear plan.  Our plan should be based on our understanding of what is causing anxiety; how this is affecting us and the key activities we should engage in.  All too often we focus on one area to the detriment of another without a holistic view of stress and how it affects us.  After a while we lose interest in the activity we have chosen and fall back into our old habits.  And sometimes we feel so swamped by life that we find it impossible to see anything more than the terror of what we have to face each day.

Coaching Outcomes

Develop your own personalised stress management plan.  Successfully managing stress requires an understanding of a broad range of issues.  The core intention of this course is to offer delegates an understanding of the “vocabulary” of stress.  This includes terms for describing their current situation, as well as the tools for managing stress.  Delegates will have an opportunity to reach the following outcomes:
  • An understanding of what is stressing out in the 21st Century
  • Acknowledgement of what effect this is having in our lives
  • Knowing how to use stress indicators to gauge their own levels of stress
  • An understanding of a strategy for managing and learning from a crisis
  • An understanding of some useful stress management tools and techniques
  • An initial, personalised stress management plan
Usually coaching delegates find that defining a plan helps to reduce their anxiety.  Often, having a plan itself takes away a whole lot of stress.  And as participants have found how much fun it can be to implement their own stress management plans I have seen how they begin to reconnect with the joy of living.  And as they record and appreciate the small successes in implementing their plan, I have found people beginning to take on more risks and achieving more successes in their lives.

Is this coaching for you?

If you acknowledged that one or more of the symptoms in the first paragraph of this note applied to you, and you are not already actively managing the stress in your life, perhaps you should consider taking on some of this coaching.