The Best Way to Manage your Stress

Forget about therapy. The best way to manage your stress is to just breath. And its free.

Take a deep breath. Breathe deeply and bring yourself only into the here and now. Stand with your head held high and your shoulders pulled back, breathe deeply and smile. Do you feel stressed doing the exercise?

Breathing is essential. In order to listen to our bodies and solve the problem that is creating the stress in the first place, we must breathe; reconnect with our own resources and allow the options to come. You have a choice when you become stressed.

Now think of a typical stressful situation in your life. Welcome that feeling, get in touch with it and now let it go. Could you let it go? Would you let it go? You always have the choice to let it go.

Breathe, take a step back from the problem. The more often you do that, the more often the answers will come.

G.G.

Check Your Happiness Quotient

One way to maintain and even heighten your awareness to your level of happiness is to regulary take stock of what activities and people gave you joy over the past day, week or month. By keeping a journal and noting when you felt happy can actually help you determine what makes you happy. As well as help you make choices which will lead to even more happiness.

What Makes You Happy?

Life is too short. The older you get, the more apparent it becomes that time goes by quickly. So why waste time doing something you hate?

Study after study shows that the majority of working people in the richer countries of the world are unhappy with their job. And as one spends the majority of their day at work, we can only assume that there are many unhappy people out there. As each person is different, we all want different things but one of the common factors amongst us is that most of us want some happiness. How do we attain that desire?

To start, we should ask ourselves these questions:

When was the last time I was truly happy?
Where was I?
What was I doing?
Who was I with?
In general, what makes me happy?
What activities give me the most pleasure?

Next, list the five situations that give you the most happiness. They should be activities. So for example, for me, I get pleasure from traveling with a purpose and participating in group sports. List your five things. Then examine the list and actively plan how you will incorporate more of the things that make you happy in your daily schedule. Thats right, not monthly but a daily/regular schedule.

The more you intergrate things that make you happy in your life, the more happiness you fill your day or week with. While this exercise is not the answer to all of your problems, its a start. Its a beginning to allow other great things and opportunities to enter your life.

GG

Adopt an Abundance Mentality

An "Abundance Mentality" is based on the belief that there is an infinite amount of resources for everyone and that possible opportunities are endless. People with an abundance mentality beleive that there are plenty of resources for accomplishing their goals and that one person's success does not mean another person's failure. This type of person can be genuinely happy when friends or associates are successful.

To make the idea clearer, let's compare it to the opposite of abundance, which is scarcity. If you have a scarcity mentality, you believe there is only so much success to go around. You see success as a limited resource. If someone else succeeds then that means it will be that much more difficult for you to succeed. This type of person typically has difficulty sharing, money, power or recognition. This mentality breeds greed, fear, spite, jealousy and all those nasty things that end up making us miserable.

With an abundance mentality, you are above such petty things. You can breathe easier because you know, for certain, that whatever life brings your way that there are solutions and opportunities waiting to be discovered. You don't have to live in fear of losing what you have because there is plenty for everyone.

Increasing your abundance thinking is easier said than done. To get started on the path to abundance, stop dwelling on what you don't have and begin appreciating what you do have. Each day, write down 3 things you are grateful for....I think I got this from Oprah:) but it works. Soon, each day, you'll actually start paying attention to what you are thankful for and become more appreciative of what you've been given in life.

Next, try helping others. More specifically, teaching people something you already know. Watching people grow thanks to what you have taught them is the biggest step along the road to abundance. G.G.

Adapting to a New Culture

I often get asked questions about dealing with the cultural differences when living abroad. And usually the answers are not obvious. If you are completely new to a given country, expect that you will make cultural "faux-pas" here and there; its part of the package. What's important is, what you learn from those mistakes. With every ungraceful attempt in getting one's agenda across is a lesson. Not only is it critical to learn from one's mistakes but equaling important is to always probe further on the question of cultural acceptability in your host country.

Lastly, once there is more clarity on the particular cultural issue, it's then time to modify one's behavior. It's the gradual modification of behavior over time that allows one to fully intergrate into the society of a given country. One person cannot change a culture. Know that ultimately, if you want to stay in a particular country for an extended period of time happily, its essential to bend to the culture.

Your Comfort Zone

Even though you may be setting goals, what kind of goals are you setting? If they are goals that you are certain or mostly certain you can accomplish, they probably arent the most ideal goals. Those are probabaly goals that are found within your comfort zone. That is to say, they are things that you can accomplish without much effort so you may or may not accomplish them because you know you can do it.

The zone that you want your goals to fall into would be your stretch zone. Your stretch zone is outside of your comfort zone and its a reachable goal but at the same time, it requires you to work harder to acheive it. Along these lines, your goals should be exciting. A goal should be something that, just by thinking about it, gets you exicited or inspired. Otherwise you won't really get around to doing it.

Often I speak to people who want to move abroad but they hesitate because the actual act of moving abroad is, by nature, outside of what they deem as comfortable. But that reality must not deter you from living the life you've always wanted. If you stay in your comfort zone, you won't progress and you will stay where you are. Make the necessary steps towards the stretch zone and reap the benefits of a more fufilling life.

To get what you really want out of life, you must experience some discomfort. After all, anything worth having is work.

What's Most Important to You?

Once you've isolated the goals you want to acheive, its time to plan the steps necessary to reach those goals. However, if your goals are not aligned with your values or rather what you value most, you'll never acheive them. Few people really reflect on what exactly they value most.

Attaining true happiness does not just happen by chance. It requires regular reflection. Take time to think seriously about what you want, what you value and write it down. Examples of values you may have are honesty, integrity, independence, love and family.

Every now and again look at those values and your goals. Do they align with each other? If not, its time to reconsider your goals.

G.G.