Look for the calm within yourself

Not always an easy thing to achieve when all you feel is stress!!

How can you access a "calm" sense when your boss is screaming at you, a deadline is looming or you are juggling family/work/friends?

Stresses me out just thinking of all of the above!! I've found a way in my own life to quieten the noise & slow myself now. And I think it is different for all of us. Just as stress triggers are different for all of us. A cluttered sink is enough to tip my husband over the edge on a bad day ! My Dad phoning my mum from his bedroom for the 20th time in a hour is enough to make her scream & want to run away!

I meet many business owners who feel the stress of the daily running a business just too much & they collapse in an exhausted heap by the time they come to see me.

We all have our stresses & finding the calm for you might be very different to what works for your partner or your colleagues.

The thing I noticed most when seeing clients is they all have the ability to switch off from stress, mediation works for some, chilling out in front of the T.V. for others, my husband loves to go off & clean his cars! {whatever works,right?!|}

The point is we all have something that can melt stress away.

"Now how on earth am I going to sit & watch T.V. in the middle of work?" Is what a client said to me recently, I laughed, well obviously I don't expect you to just flip out your phone in the middle of a meeting & start binge watching a Netflix series! But heres what he said.." I guess I could stop for 5 minutes at lunch & just watch something !" Stupidly simple but brilliantly right... The stress feeling he was carrying all day crept in on the journey to work, almost setting himself up for a day of stressful encounters... but by breaking the state in which he normally spent all day in he was able to switch his focus & he gave himself the answer in breaking up the stress.

He took 10 minutes of his journey to work to listen to a podcast, 10 minutes at lunch to just switch off & find something funny to watch, even when he didn't feel like it, 10 minutes in the journey on the way home to just listen to music, not run through the mental to do list of what was going to happen the next day. And heres what happened, on one journey home he had an idea for a business of his own, he'd wanted to create something for himself for many years but got swept away with the wish list everyone else had placed on him, these moments of time out gave way to reflection & then a whole new life was born from that journey home.

Had he spent the journey making calls, that idea may never have arisen & taken form but in an altered state he was able to listen more to himself & where he truly wanted to go.

Taking yourself away from the noise in whatever makes you feel calm & centred alleviates the stressful feeling. Noticing the triggers of what makes you flip out & the pattern that is can really jump you out of yourself as well.

I have a friend who's stress trigger is seeing her family, she gets herself in such an emotional tis , she just breaks down & cries moments before they are due to arrive.

I questioned her over it one day seeing for myself how upset she was getting, & we went back to when she was little & her Mum always wanted everything to be perfect when guests came over, she would shout at my friend to tidy up, screaming at her to straighten the cushions, spray air freshener everywhere & then act all loving the minute the guests walked through the door, my poor friend unable to comprehend the highs & lows of her mothers moods. Mid way through our conversation, she realised she was re-creating her mothers stresses in her own life all these years later, she couldn't believe she was putting herself through that same emotional roller coaster.

She flipped how she dealt with people coming over & told herself it wasn't her house they were coming to see, it was her & her children. Took a deep breath & resisted the urge to make everything look perfect.

By changing the state & breaking the pattern she was able to let go of the limits she put on herself. And her mother never noticed the difference in the house! Further realisation my friend had indeed created her own stress pattern!

We can't feel calm 100% of the time, it's in our nature to experience feelings ,but what we can do is take the small moments in building the calm feeling that will get us through the more stressful moments of our day, something we can anchor ourselves back to. And give ourselves a break.. we put so much pressure on ourselves to have perfection at all times... & we all know thats not real, we think our lives are so different to everyone else's but it's that fact that we all feel different means we are all the same!

Find the calm in your day so you can show up giving 100% of yourself at any given moment, the dynamic business leader that goes home frazzled isn't giving to their families or themselves the same 100% they do at work, or the nurturing carer/teacher that gives all out through the day but comes home with nothing left to give isn't able to give the same amount of love & patience at home .....find the balance in small moments to make the dynamic you, the caring you, the nurturing you ,be that more of the time so the stress really does melt away.

Just a few small moments each day over time will create such a shift & ultimately increase the calm & lessen the stress.