Walt Decherd Stress Busting Strategies By Garrett Coan

This subject could fill an entire book. In the limited space of this newsletter, let’s look at the key components of this stress-reducing strategy.

1. Identify the sources of stress in your relationships. Write about them in a journal. Make a list of people who cause you stress and explore what the issues are.

2. Resolve the underlying issues. For each of the situations identified in step 1, assess what needs to happen to resolve it. Make a list and design a plan to improve the situation.

3. Learn skills to improve relationships. Relationship skills are learned. We are not born knowing how to get along well with others, and most of us learned only limited skills from our parents. Identify the skills you need to develop, and make a plan for yourself. You can learn these skills by reading books, taking classes, or working with a therapist.

4. Avoid toxic people and situations. Some people have a toxic effect on you. If you can, limit the amount of time you spend with them. Look for opportunities to decline their invitations. When these people are family members, remind yourself that you don’t have to feel guilty about avoiding anyone who makes you feel bad about yourself. In work situations, look for ways to rearrange your schedule or your workspace to avoid interacting with such people.

5. Seek out positive people and situations. This step is the reverse of the previous step. Look for opportunities to spend more time with people and in situations that make you feel good. Think about people who make you feel good about yourself and look for ways to increase time with them.

6. Watch what you eat. Some substances amplify the stress response. These include:

• Caffeine stimulates the release of stress hormones. This increases heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen to the heart. Ongoing exposure to caffeine can harm the tissue of the heart.

• Refined sugar and processed flour are depleted of needed vitamins. In times of stress, certain vitamins help the body maintain the nervous and endocrine systems.

• Too much salt can lead to excessive fluid retention. This can lead to nervous tension and higher blood pressure. Stress often adds to the problem by causing increased blood pressure.

• Smoking not only causes disease and shortens life, it leads to increased heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration.

• Alcohol robs the body of nutrition that it might otherwise use for cell growth and repair. It also harms the liver and adds empty calories to the body.

During times of high stress, eat more complex carbohydrates (fruits, vegetables, whole breads, cereals, and beans).

7. Get moving. The human body was designed to be physically active. However, in most jobs today, people are sitting down most of the time. They hardly move at all except when it is time for coffee break or lunch. When faced with stressors, we respond with our minds, not our bodies. It is no wonder that many of us have a difficult time responding to stressful events. Exercise is one of the simplest and most effective ways to respond to stress. Activity provides a natural release for the body during its fight-or-flight state of arousal. After exercising, the body returns to its normal state of equilibrium, and one feels relaxed and refreshed.

8. Look for ways to let go of tension and anxiety. Meditation and progressive relaxation are two valuable ways to regenerate and refresh yourself. You can purchase meditation and relaxation audiotapes or record your own. This is especially important because your health and long life depend on minimizing stress and achieving a sense of balance and well-being.

Walt Decherd Control Stress With Walt Decherd By Dale Collie

When Army leaders fail to control battlefield stress, they lose as many soldiers to combat stress as they do to enemy bullets. Even when they are well trained, these soldiers are more likely to collapse in the face of great stress.

Units with high morale and esprit de corps, however, lose only 10% as many troops to stress. The training and preparation are important, but the high sense of teamwork makes all the difference.

This same sense of teamwork and belonging is important in the corporate environment. Where teamwork, morale, and esprit are good, the companies find improved productivity and increased profits. Employees are willing to sacrifice personal gain for the sake of the team.

Some of the bonding is so great that employees brand themselves the same way as the elite soldiers, wearing, wearing visible ID tags, logos, and apparel wherever they go.

Where morale and esprit are weak, employees refuse to wear these identifying symbols — and productivity suffers as unmotivated employees pay more attention to personal gain than to the team effort.

If absenteeism, early departures, accidents and other problems make you think employees need a morale booster shot, you can try some of the following successful techniques.

1. Develop logo mugs, caps, shirts, or sweaters for everyone. You can do this annually to keep the items fresh, but you’ll defeat your purpose if you buy cheap stuff.

2. Recognize team accomplishments with graduation certificates, plaques, mugs, and other items to brand teams and compliment individuals.

3. Povide logo items to special task force or problem solving team members upon completion of the project.

4. Sponsor special team nights out, in recognition of achievement or as an annual affair to encourage team bonding and relationships. People don’t really have time for this type bonding on the job. Be sure to give corporate gifts at these events.

5. Establish athletic teams to compete with other departments. You pay the space expenses and equipment costs. Many corporate problems can be solved by getting team members to compete together.

6. Present special training for team members to enhance job performance and team relationships.

7. Send key team members for high-adventure training where physical excitement encourages bonding. Make sure everyone gets to participate in some way, even if they are in support of those taking part in the more adventurous outing.

8. Sponsor annual company picnics where teams compete in athletic events or participate in unique ways to provide food, entertainment for others in the organization.

9. Generate internal competition so departments compete for best overall improvement or fewest quality complaints. Be careful not to have internal teams competing for cash awards, e.g. annual bonuses, or you’ll create a lot of negative stress and distrust that is hard to repair.

10. Leadership participation is important in each of these morale building team efforts. Leaders need to be a part of the competition and the adventure. They also need to personally award the logo items and compliment those teams that achieve.

Walt Decherd Life Balancing Tips By Matt A. Peters

We are all exposed to stress at various stages of our lives these days. It’s become a fact of life. We talk about the reasons for our stress and we discuss various ways to alleviate it quite often, but how often do you talk about how it can upset the work life balance?

The pressure of deadlines to be met and decisions to be made, a lack of cooperation and problems with fellow colleagues, the children who have to be picked up from school, a tense relationship at home, plus a high consumption unhealthy food choices picked up in a rush on the way home from a busy day, all contribute to the reasons we can suffer from stress and stress related illnesses.

What is stress?

Stress is a mixture of psychological and physiological reactions of the human body. In many cases, stress is the emotional side effect of not feeling able to find enough time to do those things you know need to be done.

A good example of a stressful situation is spending more time than you should solving problems at work, while you spend less time with family and friends or less time finding ways to unwind from the pressures of your job.

When your work/life balance is unequal you risk putting excessive strain on yourself physically and emotionally.

How Can You Manage Stress?

Stress management is about developing new perspectives in our lives and learning time management techniques. When demands on your time from work absorb your entire focus to the exclusion of your family obligations, you’re creating stress.

To help manage some of the stress generated from an unbalanced work life, you may need to consider delegating some of your extra work activities. You might also think about addressing your work load with your employer and explaining the need for more assistance with some tasks.

Creating a Balance between Work and Home

When you willingly pour yourself into your work and exclude those people who love you, it’s a bit like admitting that their needs come a poor second-best to what your employer needs from you first. Most people instantly react to this statement by saying that they work so hard in order to provide for their families.

Unfortunately, children don’t see the distinction between you choosing to spend time away from them and needing to provide income. The sad fact is that many marriages also begin to suffer when your work-focus seems more important than the family you’re supposed to be going to work to provide for.

Make a promise to sit down to dinner with your family each night. Not only does this force you to break your work-focus, but it also means sitting down to a relaxed meal with the family who love and need you.

Balancing Christian Values

Returning to our Christian values can also have a profound effect on eliminating stress. It seems that over the years we have let our Christian values slide into the background in favor of the “work at all costs” syndrome. Getting back to our basic values can aid us in managing and eliminating stress.

Recognize Stress With Walt Decherd By Dr. Tony Fiore

After a stressful day as a computer programmer, Jim pulled into his driveway. The children’s toys were scattered on the walkway to the house.

He immediately began noticing slight tension in his muscles and apprehension in his stomach. Entering his house, his wife ignored him while she talked with her sister on the telephone. His heart started beating a little faster.

Looking around, he noticed disarray; nothing was picked up, the house was a mess. Irritation and frustration started to settle in. Finally, as his feelings grew, he exploded and began yelling at his wife and children.

Stress may trigger anger:

Stress is often the trigger that takes us from feeling peaceful to experiencing uncomfortable angry feelings in many common situations such as the one described above.

Stress is most easily defined as a series of bodily responses to demands made upon us called stressors.

These “demands” or stressors can be negative (such as coping with a driver who cuts in front of you on the freeway) or positive (such as keeping on a tour schedule while on vacation).

Stressors may be external to you (like work pressure) or internal (like expectations you have of yourself or feeling guilty about something you did or want to do).

Whether the stressor is external or internal, scientists have discovered that the major systems of the body work together to provide one of the human organism’s most powerful and sophisticated defenses; the stress response which you may know better as “fight-or-flight.”

This response helps you to cope with stressors in your life. To do so, it activates and coordinates the brain, glands, hormones, immune system, heart, blood and lungs.

Avoid Jim’s destructive behavior toward his loved ones. Before your stress response turns into anger or aggression, use these strategies to get it under control:

Read your personal warning lights: Becoming aware of your stress response is the first step to managing it. This means listening to your body, being aware of your negative emotions, and observing your own behavior when under stress.

For instance, notice muscle tension, pounding heart, raising voice, irritation, dry mouth, or erratic movements.

What you see is what you get: For a potential stressor to affect us -stress us out – we have to first perceive it or experience it as a stressor.

Gaining a new perspective on the stressing situation can often drastically change the effect it has on us. Our stress response can indeed be a response (something we can control) instead of a knee-jerk reaction (which is automatic).