Are You Living In A State Of Stress?

The Problem

Are you living in a constant state of stress and urgency, moving from one challenge to the next?  Do you find yourself struggling to get ahead.  What causes the state?  How do you avoid it?  For many, stress is just the cycle of your day to day life and is typically caused by self inflicting reactions to specific circumstances that we all face daily.  Thus, you are always living in the state of reaction to urgency rather than focusing on what is important but not urgent.  This cycle and state you operate in will not allow you to be empowered and often cause many to seek avenues to “remove” the stress by entering a state in which the urgency is temporarily removed.  For some, they revert to alcohol or drugs, others eating, watching TV, working out and the list goes on.  Now most of these avenues are not bad, rather many are healthy and empowering.  (minus the drugs, alcohol and over eating)

The problem is the amount of time spent in these areas to remove yourself from the stress.  Rather, your time should be focused on identifying how to manage your life in such a way that you are not living in reaction.  Living your life in reaction will cause your life to be run on the terms of other people and outside circumstances rather than on your terms.  Often we allow other peoples “urgent” matters to control our reaction as well.  Some are important and must be taken care of, on the contrary, many are typically non important and cause most of us, to fulfill the basic need to be “significant”  and we will enlarge the matter to feel more significant.

The Solution

The key is to spend your time, your #1 resource on the things that serve you and matter to you most.  The way to do this is to learn how to get in the “zone” where everything is flowing for you, things are happening in such a way that you are fulfilled and you are operating at a higher level.  Getting to this zone requires you to step back and break out of the cycle of living from urgent moment to urgent moment.  It takes a realization that you have choices, most stress comes from the belief that we are in a position without choices, we have a to do list of  things we “must do” and this causes stress.   You always have at least three options to any scenario.  The choices as you approach  matters of urgency are the following:  is this urgent and important, urgent and not important or neither urgent nor important.  This is about developing a change in your belief system as to how you view urgency.  Urgency, is not your friend, urgency is the source of stress and the source of living reactionary.

Where do you spend your time on a regular basis?

Evaluate your time and what you spend your time on.  What % do you spend on things that are urgent and important, what % on those things that are urgent but not important and what % on things that are neither urgent nor important.  Learn to shift your time and organize your time to focus on things that are important so that they do not become urgent.  Remove yourself from the belief that urgent = important, often the things that we are making urgent are not important.  When you learn to focus specific time on the things of importance you will not be living in a moment of reaction rather of choice.

As you develop a systematic approach to how you evaluate where your time is spent and you reduce the moments or urgent reaction, you will find more of your time in the zone.  The zone will allow you to be fulfilled, to accomplish more, to live with more free time and ultimately design your life around the areas of importance to you.

Keep On Charging

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