Are you tired of feeling stretched as thin as ink on paper and wound tight as a piano string? Ready to be done with the aching shoulders, headaches, clenched jaw, and chronic acid reflux? Want to stop flying off the handle when those close to you get on that last nerve? Would you like to return to sharp, clear-headed thinking and decision-making and away from that mental fuzziness that seems to be growing?

If your answer is “yes,” you have found a resource for dealing with the discomfort.  If “no,” and you’re honest, you’ve been there before and will likely be there again and could use some support.

I know I’ve had my share of stress, and maybe that’s why I am so interested in the topic. I have studied it extensively, put stress to work in my life, and recommended the management practices to my coaching clients.  Responsible, skilled stress management can make stress work for you instead of on you.   For the coming year (or so), I plan to give bite-size reviews of principles from my book Put Stress to Work: Turning Headaches into Advantages in this ezine format.  As usual, they will be brief, practical, and challenging.  Feel free to share them with friends and family.

Uninvited stressors are a fact of life. And, if you are honest, you know that you create stress for yourself by overcommitting, organizing too little, and paying too little attention. You create stress for yourself by staying in difficult situations and relationships for too long. And you create stress for yourself by holding on to false beliefs, assumptions, and unrealistic expectations of people.

Most people react to any stress as victims, increasing their stress levels as a result. They stress over being stressed and sometimes embrace a belief that things can’t get better than their chronically stressed existence. I want you to be responsible, take charge, and become an assertive manager of stress, using it to prompt changes that are long past due and help you grow toward achieving your life purpose.

If you want to be a responsible manager and put stress to work, you must adjust your internal perspectives and habits.

• Embrace stress as a real, ever-present part of life. It’s a part of life’s fabric, so you can’t have life without colorful threads of stress.  You can’t eliminate it, so you must manage it.
• Adjust your beliefs and assumptions related to stress to avoid self-sabotage.
• Acknowledge that you have options. Stress is or can be troublesome for you, or it can be a helpful influence.
• Understand the nature of stress, its causes and symptoms, and act to manage stress to your advantage.
• Manage your thoughts, actions, and emotions as you relate to stress.
• Actively manage your stress so it supports the achievement of your highest purpose in life.

When you do these things, you’ll see more possibilities and options in your life and learn to use stress as a springboard to higher achievement.  Those around you will benefit from your newly managed behavior and learn from your example.  You’ll engage stress as a formative influence versus an undesirable irritant.  To gain these benefits, you must acknowledge that you need some improvement in your stress management and then get to work.

I’ll help you with the details of all of this. We’ll explore the basic nature of stress, how it works, and how it feels. I’ll offer tips for in-the-moment management and wellness practices for long-term stress management. I’ll also share stories from my coaching practice to illustrate how these tools work.

I’ll help you handle stress just like managing an employee. Get to know stress, understand how it works, and how it can work for you or hinder your progress.  The only caveat here is that you can’t “fire” stress.  You must work with it, so you’ll need to improve your relationship with it.

If you want more details or to jump ahead, get my book Put Stress to Work: Turning Headaches to Advantages.  Be sure to read the monthly ezine or listen to the recording to get summaries of the content and tips.

I hope you find the determination and courage to put stress to work for you so you can be more, see more, and achieve more in your life, relationships, and career.  I’m here to support you.