The Mentor Method: think of your favorite person. Someone you love, respect, trust, like a mentor or someone from the spiritual tradition. Simply thinking about them can help you change your focus from the pressure hooey to a more desirable response related to your favorite person. Also, you don’t have to wait to get stressed out to do this as considering your hero’s always makes you feel better.
How to start?
- Pictures of family and loved ones also help so be certain that you have these at work. Think about happy and/or silly times you have had with these people. Feel better already do not you?
- Create Worry zones and Stress times: select a particular location for your anxiety celebration and restrict yourself to this place for things worth worrying about. Get serious. Get wigged out.
- Get ready to worry! Do your rants/raves just in this place you’ve selected and for the time you’ve specified. That’s right, there’s a time limit to the moaning/groaning! When stuff happens that you routinely worry about then visit your own zone and take care of business.
- Minutes max. When it doesn’t seem like enough time then you have to get better at fretting in a shorter time period! Behave yourself anyplace else. Make sure that the zone isn’t a place where you spend the majority of your time or has other people in it.
- Keep the kitchen and family room as cheerful as you can. The bedroom is for sleeping and other enjoyable activities so no worrying is permitted there. Ditto for your workplace, the bathroom, the car, church meetings, movies, restaurants, etc.. Pick just 1 place for the stress zone.
- Use “hello to life” actions to break from your patterns that produce stress. One of my favourite people, Truman Madsen, introduced me to this one. Do something radically different that’s enjoyable. For example, rather than walking/worrying do some jumping instead. It’s OK to continue with the stressing but your primary focus should be on the jump. You skipped as a child. It’s time to do it again. Not only will you feel better but just think how absurd you will look to other’s who see you skipping on your work clothes, carrying a briefcase and talking on the telephone at exactly the exact same time! At the very least, it is going to make others feel better! They may not realize you’re angry or worried. They’ll simply think you’re nuts.
- Touch your noseyes, you heard me. First, get yourself in a terrific state like hilarity. Get yourself laughing and goofing around feeling terrific. In this peak state of pleasure, touch your nose. Get others in on this and make yourselves laugh more and more often touching your nose because you laugh, giggle, smile. This produces a neurological”anchor” in which your mind associates the great feelings of laughing and goofing around with touching your nose. Later on, you may simply touch your nose to produce the great feelings. If you do this a lot you might learn how to enjoy your stress. Warning: touching others on the nose when they’re pissed off doesn’t really help that much so touch your nose only.
- Howl and hallucinate: imagine the ones that you’re blaming for your own stress. What would they look like if you started yelling at them throughout the stress episode? Imagine the look on their face once you howled with glee. Imagine the look on your in-laws faces when you howl in their kitchen. Imagine the look on your boss’ face once you howl standing on your desk. Imagine the look on these people waiting in line at the supermarket once you howl like a maniac. Need to spice up your romantic life? Next time you’re in the middle of that romantic stuff just begin howling. Your wife will think you’re a stud muffin. Your husband will think that you are a hotty.
- Motivate yourself with great feelings for a change! Many folks motivate themselves with bad feelings! Even worse, they often motivate themselves to do what they do not want or enjoy! Use nice voice tones to speak inside your head. Use them to talk to others also. Consider the enjoyment associated with completion of a job rather than the numerous steps required. Focus on the advantages of what/why you’re doing the activity instead of on any unpleasantness connected with that. Also concentrate on how great it will feel to get accomplished with job and to other things you like even more.
- Eat real food that protects your body from stress. Junk food reduces your body’s ability to manage stress. Additionally, it weakens your immune system so you are poorer and more vulnerable to illness or injury. Ditto for alcohol and other self defeating habits. Exercise is near the magic bullet or fountain of youth. Make certain that you get enough to make a significant difference in your health/fitness levels. What’s the best exercise? Something that you like enough to do several times a week for a lifetime.
- Procrastinate till you feel better. You’ve been advised that procrastination is a bad thing. You’ve been told wrong! I’m here to tell you that procrastination is among the best skills a person can develop. Imagine your life quickly improving by procrastinating your regular responses like anger or discouragement. I know you need to get angry at your children and I’m sure they deserve it, but for now, let’s just procrastinate. We’ll get angry at them Saturday or next week.
- You’re special. Start acting like it. There’s nobody else like you. You’re truly unique. Never in the history of the world has there been another you. There’ll never be another one in the eons of eternity which compose the future. Never. You’re one of a kind. When God made you He was only showing off. Now, go do good things. You deserve them and are fully capable.
- Everybody else is special also. Start treating them like that. 9 above applies to everybody. Yes, even the boneheads. Your purpose in life may include teaching them. Remember: we didn’t come to this world to neglect. We came here in order to succeed on a gigantic scale doing the perfect thing in the ideal way for the ideal reason while using a spectacularly good time supporting others.
