Too much stress and stress management techniques aren’t working?
Maybe you’re focusing on the wrong thing.
Throughout the years of working with people in my corporate life and as a business and career coach, I’ve seen way too many people experience stress at work. What they may not realize is that simply shifting their focus (even slightly) is an extremely useful stress management technique.
Not focused on stress and stress management
A Couple Loses Their Jobs at the Same Time
Last year my friend and her husband lost their jobs within a few months of each other. And neither one of them seemed anxious or stressed.
My friends looked at their situation as an opportunity to find something they liked better. They continued on with their lives. They went to workshops to increase their skills in public speaking, networking, and interviewing. They enjoyed weekends going to their son’s basketball games. They rode their motorcycles. If you met them, you would never know they were both laid off.
Are these people freaks of nature or independently wealthy? I assure you, they are not. They are normal – and yet they are definitely not average!
Changing Your Focus Bypasses Traditional stress and stress management Techniques
What are these 2 people doing that others aren’t? I love studying people and why they do the things they do, especially when they get successful results. So, I asked my friend how they were able to deal with the emotional stress of a seemingly financially and emotionally devastating situation.
So my friend said, “We just focus on what we want. It takes the same amount of energy to focus on what you want than what you don’t want except you’ll get better results focusing on what you want.”
She also said, “Instead of focusing on saving money, I choose to focus on how I can make money. This doesn’t mean we don’t save because we do. We live beneath our means, always. The point is that we don’t spend our energy thinking about cutting costs, stiffing the waiter out of a good tip, or stealing hotel towels. We use our creative energy to think about how we could make more money.”
My friend said she had no doubt they would be able to find work, and this time they know better. They won’t just take any job that pays the bills. They are looking for something they really want to do and that leverages their gifts. So I asked her if this was positive thinking. She laughed and said, “No, it’s just the truth. We’ve gotten jobs before and we’ll get them again. We have a lot to offer a company, and people will want to hire us.”
You may describe my friend’s behaviors and actions as Law of Attraction, putting out to the Universe what you want, asking God for the desires of your heart, or rewiring your brain synapses. Whatever is your belief system is fine by me. What I’m more interested in are the conscious choices my friend and her husband made to bypass many of the stress and stress management techniques we’ve all read about.
Two Different Approaches to Stress and Stress Management
I’m not saying stress management techniques don’t work. I am a strong advocate for meditation, prayer, exercise, eating healthy, and getting support from people who can help you. What I am suggesting is choosing to focus your energy on what’s going well, what you’re grateful for, what you know is true about your gifts, and what you want to offer the world. This is an abundance approach to stress and stress management.
What I’ve found is when you focus on what you don’t want, you’re creating some type of resistance, or you’re holding on too tightly to something that is not serving you well. This is a scarcity approach to stress and stress management.
What you’re essentially saying is, “There is not enough for everyone. If I let go, someone is going to take this thing from me that I need to be safe. Even though I’m not happy at least it’s better than the unknown.” That happened to me one time, and I spent 6 months battling TMJ. Clenching my jaws is a sure sign of fear. When I finally let go, the TMJ went away.
Abundance Thinking
I think about my friends’ approach to losing their jobs, and what I’ve landed on is that they are not positive thinkers, they are abundance thinkers. They don’t look at their work as a j-o-b where they slog away and pick up their paycheck for doing their work. Ho-hum. Their approach to work is they give the very best they have to offer and at the same time ensure they have plenty of work life balance. They focus on what they want and then put together a plan create it for themselves.
And it works – my friend accepted a job with a great company, negotiated a higher salary, and got it. “In this economy,” you ask? Darn straight!
When you feel stress and stress management techniques don’t seem to be working, consider using an abundance approach. What will you choose to focus on that tells the truth about what you really want and what you have to offer? What keeps you from offering your gifts to the world? Don’t you know that an organization, business, or people need someone just like you – to show inspire them to be better versions of themselves!
Try Our Fun Experiment
Take out sheet of paper & draw a line down the middle of it. At the top of the left column, write the words “abundant thoughts.” At the top of the right column, write the words, “scarcity thoughts.” Throughout the next 24-48 hours, write down all the thoughts that come into your head putting them into the appropriate column.
If your thoughts are mostly abundant thoughts, kudos to you! You can expect less stress and stress management won’t be necessary because you’re simply in the flow of life. If most of your thoughts are scarcity thoughts, see how you could move 1 or 2 over into the abundant column – and just take it one step at a time. It’s not a race. Just keep moving forward.
Even moving one or two thoughts from scarcity to abundance will make a huge difference in your life.
And now, tell us below what you discovered about your approaches. What could you teach us about the choices you make/are making?