Recently, I’ve been working on a project about ways to encourage health and wellbeing in the workplace. Perhaps not surprisingly, managing workplace stress figured highly in some feedback from employers, so today’s conversation is about stress.
When your life conditions do not match your blueprint
Stress often occurs when we feel we cannot change or control a situation. Or, as my mentor, Tony Robbins, says “when your life conditions do not match your blueprint”, and you feel powerless to do anything about it. The idea being that you are happy if your life conditions match your blueprint – that is your picture, beliefs, values of how you’d like your life to be. You are unhappy if your life conditions are not living up to it.
What’s your story when you’re stressed?
It’s fairly safe to assume that we’ve all experienced stress at some point in our lives.
Throughout my work, I’ve found that it is rarely the situation or circumstances that’s actually causing the stress, but rather the story we’re telling ourselves about it, and the meanings we’re giving that story.
There’s the facts and then there’s the story. The facts might be true, but is your story about it empowering you or keeping you stuck and stressed?
Change your story
We get to choose our stories. No one makes us choose one story or another. It’s up to us, and how we choose inevitably has an impact on our decisions and relationships.
We might not be able to control others or what’s happening around us (life conditions), but we do have control over the story we tell ourselves and how we react (our blueprint).
So, it naturally follows it can be easier to change our blueprint and tell ourselves better stories, than it can be to change our life conditions.
Here’s three questions to help you do that.
Q1 What’s your blueprint? Do you know?
We’re all regularly running patterns – be it consciously or unconsciously – which can give us a good clue about our current blueprint.
This can show up in the way we tend to react to certain situations in an angry, critical or fearful way. Or find ourselves automatically becoming triggered by certain people or events.
Take some time out to think about the times this occurs in your life. What tends to be happening? What causes you to feel that discomfort? Don’t censor yourself, just see whatever comes up and write down everything that comes to mind.
You’ll quickly get an idea of the things you don’t enjoy experiencing in your life, the opposite of which will give you a good idea of the blueprint you’d like to be living from.
Q2 How is your current blueprint working out for you?
Now take a look through what you’ve written, and ask yourself how is your current blueprint working out for you?
Make a note of all the thoughts that are coming up. What are you feeling, what’s the story you’re telling yourself as you’re reading what you wrote?
Q3 What will be the impact on your life continuing that blueprint?
Write down the first things that come to mind – how will it affect you, your important others, your health perhaps, your dreams of how you’d like life to be now and down the line?
The idea is to be conscious about the blueprint you’re running so it supports you in living the life you want. Keep the good bits that are working, and let go of the ones that are not.
And decide to tell yourself better stories – you get to choose so you might as well make them good ones. Navigating stressful times gets a whole lot easier when you do!