In I'm Not Crazy, I'm Just Not You (by Pearman and Albritton), you are invited to explore individual psychological resouces that you can explore and use to adapt to your personal daily challenges. In the most popular chapter in the book, "The Teacher Within," you are invited to explore how stress affects your perceptions and judgments. Often as stress increases we fail to see the choices around us. One of the underlying themes in the book is that you have abundant choices in how to respond to life events....it is just that you need to learn how to identify and act on those choices.
The evidence is pretty clear that as stress goes up, your flexibility goes down. To reduce stress, you have a couple of strategies to employ: (a) physical activity, (b) intentional relaxation, (c) reframing and taking perspective, (d) and reaching out to connect with others. Hopefully this blog will invite several of these strategies. What are your most effective stress management strategies?
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Two things come to mind: Angeles Arrien said in an interview recently that she knows when she is too attached to something because she looses her sense of humor and she can't see options or possibilities. That certainly happens more under stress; we can't even 'see' options that might be there. So one challenge is how to detach and soften our eyes when we are under stress, I think. Second: I have experienced lately that sometimes groups who are stretched or stressed become hardened around their values. Specifically, a group sharing 'Appreciative Inquiry' values was absolutely resistant to even reading, let alone discussing, Randy White's new article about positive psychology links to the current economic crisis and strengths based coaching excesses contributing to our coachees vulnerability. That start up organization was experiencing tremendous growing pains and everyone was feeling overwhelmed and the attitude was 'we don't have time for that,' are you on the bus or not? Funny isn't it that the paradox is that we can become so rigid in our demands that every one be 'flexible' that we don't have the flexibility or choice to use a more structured and consistent response when appropriate. In other words, I'm rigidly flexible. That happens when I lose my detached center. Has anyone else experienced that lately?
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