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stress and relationships
Managing Stress, Stress

Stress and Relationships

Hi everyone and welcome to the world of stress. I was tooling around on Facebook and I saw something that really cracked me up. Those of you who remember the movie, ‘Back to the Future,’ if you don’t, go see it again. The whole trilogy is pretty brilliant. Thank you Steven Spielberg, but there’s a scene where the wild-haired doctor goes to the future, comes back, meets Marty McFly, and wild-eyed he says, ‘Marty, don’t go to 2020.’ So, there you have it.

We have predictions, but we’ll get through this, and we will be the better for it. We will learn from it. We will create new ways of being. We’re already doing that.

So, what I’d like to talk about today is, I’ve asked people and I’ve gotten a lot of questions. I’m going to read some of them about what is it you really want to understand, learn and know about right now, and people are saying, a job searching for the age of over 50, beginning a new job and relationship building online, remotely which is great. How to cope and maintain positive interpersonal skills in an environment at work that just doesn’t seem very pleasant. That’s many places right now. Losing the guilt when terminating an employee because they’re not doing a good job, but I know about them personally, and it really hurts me to have to let them go.

Another is, I’ll figure out why my director is always so short with me, but nice to other people, and it goes on like that. I must have gotten 40 or 50 of these, and one of the things that’s really important is, as I looked for the common denominator, it was all about relationships and interestingly, that’s the work that we at Creative Energy Options have been doing. It seems like forever. It’s all about relationships. So, it’s about relationships at home, relationships that were relationships in our community and relationships with ourselves.

So, I’m going to just talk very briefly today about the core of how I got here, and it really started as I was growing up, and my father was in a family business with his two brothers. That was very, as I say, fiscally successful but emotionally bankrupt. They would fight all the time. So, as a kid growing up, I would have hear him come home from work, and say to my mother, he was always complaining about something, and finally I must have been. I don’t know, five, six, seven in that range, I said to him one day, ‘Daddy, if work isn’t fun, why do you go there? Why do you do it?’ And he looked at me and patted me on the head, and said, ‘Honey, that’s just the way it is, and you just do what you need to do.’ Well that’s the way it was. It’s not the way it has to be.

So, I’d like to give you this little tidbit to take with you about relationships, and think about this for a minute. We are born from a relationship. Do people get together and y’all know what happens. Now, we have other ways of doing it with in vitro etc., but nonetheless, it takes an egg and a sperm to make a kid, right? So, we’re born from ovary, relationship through a relationship, and every woman who’s listening, who has children knows that one. There is some kind of, hopefully cooperation between this infant baby, who is going to be born, and the mother as this very complicated process of being birth comes out. So, we’re born from a relationship through a relationship into a relationship. Somebody’s there to catch the baby, and then the baby is taken and given to nurses, to the mother on her breast. The father may or may not be there. I don’t know. I don’t want to judge any of this. I’m just saying from a relationship through a relationship into a relationship, and relationships never go away.

So, we have to learn, understand and do a deeper dive into the power of relationships. That’s what our work is all about. That’s what ‘Don’t Bring It to Work’ is about. The book I wrote, which is about breaking the family patterns that limit success. What we learned as little kids as we were growing up, I learned that work was the enemy as I watched my father, and I had to come back round and see. No, there’s a different way of doing it. You don’t have to fight all the time. So, there is a place in the work that we do, where each of us has to understand relationships better.

So, remember what I just said from a relationship through a relationship into a relationship, and then of course there’s that relationship we have with ourselves, that inner world, that we live in, and we need to understand what pushes our buttons, what makes us so upset if somebody says something. I love what somebody wrote here, where they said, ‘Where is it? Let me see… cut um, it’s the one about I want to figure out why my director is short with me, but not with others.

Well, that’s going to take some work. So, it really is about a couple of cups of coffee or tea or something to sit and talk with that person, and figure out what’s going on. It’s all about relationships now. Next week, I’m going, I’ve asked my coaches to begin to add their expertise in this, and the first one next week will be, Brenda Thompson, who is one of the first Creative Energy Option breakthrough coaches. She’s incredible. So, she’s a pattern breakthrough coach. She’s also an HR expert. She has a master’s degree in applied behavioral science from John Hopkins. So, she comes highly, highly respected and very well studied. Now, what she’s going to talk about, which is going to be her topic and I’m quoting now is, furloughs, layoffs, downsizing. Oh my, how to bounce back when you unexpectedly lose your job or you’re put on furlough.

So, stay tuned next week for Brenda, and she’s a wealth of information. If you have other questions, please put them under here or comments. We love to hear from you. We’re here to make this world a better place, and we’re here to get through this time. So, 2020 even though it’s complicated and difficult, can end with a flourish, and we can all have grown and move on during this pandemic.

Thank you so much. Have a beautiful rest of the day. Thank you.

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stress
Managing Stress, Stress

How to Handle Stress in Difficult Times

Hi everyone!

Well, here we are at home and I’ve been doing a survey, and the survey has been asking how people are coping and looking at coping mechanisms, and it’s been very interesting because they fall into kind of specific categories.

Some are into the eating and binge eating, and for me, it’s chocolate and even ice cream, and I remember as a kid, when I would be in a bad mood, my mother would say, “Oh, sit down and have some chocolate, ice cream and you’ll feel better.” So, even now, when I’m in whatever state, I’m in my mind says, “Chocolate, ice cream will make you feel better, and a hot fudge sundae will make you feel even better,” and they saw other side of that, is I don’t think so.

A little too much of anything going to the extreme is toxic. The latest I heard is, people bringing on Tiger King, the Netflix series and wondering what’s next after that, and so people are doing what they need to do, and it’s about finding comfort and safety.

I’m really feeling pretty good about yourself in that way, except it’s short term. It’s not long lasting. So, coping often leads to indulging and indulging is not a good thing.

So, the question is, how do we counteract indulging? Well, I’d like to tell a little story that comes from the Cherokee to Cherokee legend, and it’s the story as when kids were little, they would sit with the grandfather or the tribal elder, and they would ask, how do we know? What’s good and what’s not good? And the response would be, there are two wolves and they’re always fighting, and one wolf is the wolf of darkness, and despair. The other wolf is the one of light and hope.So, the kids would say, “Which one wins?” And the grandfather, the elder would say, “The one you feed.”

So, I’d like you to think about that as we go through the next days and weeks and perhaps months, that we are all sharing together right now.

Here’s the thing, what do we feed physically? What do we feed emotionally? What do we feed mentally? And I said, I would today have two emotional exercises to give you some emotional strength. You know, we always feel better when we’re doing something, and we learn it, and we can feel it easily in us. So, that we can do better. So, here are the two exercises: One, is the 77077 exercise. Now, everybody can remember the numbers up to seven, and it’s a breathing exercise and it helps you get more oxygen in your system, and will calm you down.

So, before you say something you might regret, you can do this anywhere. Just go into a quiet place. Go into the the bathroom, and if you need to lock the door, seven, seven, seven, seven, and here’s how it goes:

You breathe in to the count of seven through your nose. Breathe in, hold to the count of seven. Breathe out through your mouth to the count of seven, and then, what we say is, hold empty to the count of seven, seven times and use your fingers to remember it. So, one full section is breathe in, hold, breathe out, hold, and after you’ve done that seven times, I promise you, when you open your eyes and look around, things will begin to look brighter because you’ve put more oxygen in your body. You’ve also taken a pause, which is really important.

So, do that whenever you’re in a place of saying, “I’m going to say something that I might regret. Remember the two wolves. One is about, let me get the exact words I had written down about this, because I’m writing about this
– where is it? One wolf is about anger, and resentment, and intimidation, and upset, and fear, and the other wolf is about empathy, and caring, and creativity, and planning. So, think about it. Which wolf do you want to feed?

So, exercise number one, will give you the space to make the decision. Now, the next exercise is ten seconds, and you do it every hour. Ten seconds, can you take ten seconds out of an hour? It’s out of sixty minutes. Ten seconds and here’s what you do in ten seconds. I would set something on your computer, or your phone, or if you’re still wearing a watch these days, on your watch, ten seconds. Whatever you’re doing, stop and look at something. Look at something. Look at here. I have a some interesting scissors that I keep here. If I have to cut through a piece of paper but you just sit, and you look at it. Look at it. Pay attention to it. Look at the creativity that went into making it.Whatever it is that you have, just look at it. That’s all you have to do. Take something different each hour. Look at a pen, if you still have pens. Everybody still has a pen. Look at, you know, I have it here because I’m going to ask for a walk after this. A pair of sunglasses and look it’s Paris. Unless it has one of my peace of mind, arrow on it. Oh well, look at it. Just look at it. Look at the creativity. Look at the design. Think of the people who put these things together. That’s all you have to do.

Those are two important exercises. They will begin to feed. Next week, I’m going to talk about the survival brain and the creative brain, and it’s information that I think is really valuable. You can use it at work. You can use it at home, but first you have to start and use it for yourself. Now, I know we’re going through tough times or maybe it’s complex times, and we’re going into an area that seems unknown. So, taking those breaths and stopping to just put your mind on something very specific. If you’d like to meditate, do that. That’s great, but if that’s too much for you, where you get to get drowsy from it, do the ten-second. I call it a 10-second meditation, and do it as many hours as you possibly can.

So, ’til next time and anybody, if you want to call or email me or text me, let me know how you’re doing and we will get through this together. Thank you so much.

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