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What
This Section Gives You
In the last section, we introduced the
idea of ‘flow’.
Flow is a state of mind in which you are
completely focused on what you are doing,
and in which all of your skills and mental
resources are working together without distraction.
This helps you to deliver the very best
performance possible.
Flow is a deeply rewarding and enjoyable
state of mind. It is the one in which you
do your best work. It is also one that is
highly vulnerable to stress because when
anxiety, problems and distractions are flooding
your mind, they disrupt your concentration
and degrade your ability to think clearly
and perform well.
Understand where you are now...
This section helps you understand the stresses
in your life and plan to manage them, so
that you can you can concentrate fully on
the job in hand, and truly enjoy the work
you do.
The first part of managing stress is to
understand the short term stresses you experience
so that you can anticipate stressful situations
and learn to use the stress management techniques
that are most appropriate for each situation.
Recognize longer-term stresses
as well as short-term stress
What you may not have thought about are
the deeper, longer-term stresses in your
life. For example, the transition from college
to a new job involves radical changes in
lifestyle, location and personal status
that can be deeply stressful.
As another example, anyone changing jobs
or roles will experience a formidable array
of new challenges and difficulties –
all of these can be intensely stressful.
Similarly, the joys and upsets of relationships
and families also have their stresses. Remember,
all of these will have an impact on your
ability to cope.
The first technique we will look at is
the “Schedule
of Recent Experience”. This helps
you to understand the longer-term stresses
in your life. It sets the broad context
of your approach to stress management, and
helps you to understand how to bring the
long term stress in your life within manageable
bounds.
Next, we look at keeping and analyzing
a Stress
Diary. Stress Diaries help you to understand
the day-to-day stresses in your life so
that you work out how to manage them.
And Make Best Use of the Resources
Available
We will then use a variant of SWOT
Analysis to look at your use of stress
management techniques.
In its normal usage, SWOT Analysis is used
to look at your Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities
and Threats in a situation. This variant
will help you to understand where you are
good at managing stress, and where you need
to improve your skills. It also helps to
ensure that you are using all of the resources
you have available to you.
Just from your normal life experience,
you will have developed useful ways of coping
with many of these stresses. Others you
will not be as good at. The Stress SWOT
Tool also helps you understand where you
need to learn new skills.
Based on your analysis up to this point,
the next stage is to use the Self-Help
Tool Finder article to find useful techniques
for managing the sources of stress you have
identified.
Finally we introduce you to a simple planning
process that helps you plan how to deal
with stress.
The next
article helps you understand long term
stress in your life...
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