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!

My nudge today was going to be about putting things off, and then I remembered I’d written something on this before so went back through some old nudges. Coincidentally, I wrote the following in June 2012, and three years on, I think it’s more important than ever to have this conversation with ourselves.

A nudge about putting things off

So, we’re nearly half way through another year…how’s that make you feel? Good, you’ve done so much you wanted to? Or a sinking feeling because the year has run away again, and you’ve not done an eighth of what you set out to at the start?

Well do you want the good news or the good news …? There’s no point worrying about the time that’s passed, you’d only be wasting more time, and you’ve got the next 6 months to achieve more of what you want.

Start with not working so hard …

I think this one applies to all of us more and more in this age of 24 hour, non-stop, real time communication, and the resulting expectation that we should somehow respond immediately to others’ agendas. This was brought home to me big time when I read an article written by a palliative care nurse listing the 5 things that people tend to say they regret the most at the end of their lives*.

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

The two that resonated with me were:

1 The wish by many people – and in the case of the article, men in particular – who had said “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard”, but had rather spent more time with their children growing up and in their relationship with their other half. To clarify, women also felt this, but many of the men were from an older generation so tended to be the main breadwinners.

Much of my nudging is about helping people to manage the overlaps better between their work and personal lives, and I think this nurse’s findings reflect well what is so often the case now, despite whether both parties are working or not.

2 And the second, which is so powerful was “I wish that I had let myself be happier”. Many had not realised that happiness is a choice, and had stayed stuck in old patterns and beliefs, fearing change, often pretending they were content when in fact they longed for more laughter in their lives.

So my nudge for today is …

1 Take some time this coming weekend to think about some ways you can commit to making one or two small changes so you can spend more time with your partner, children, good friends or other important people in your life.

It might be deciding to block out some non-negotiable time, much as you would an important work meeting; planning to stop work an hour earlier, or doing something you’ve been wanting to, but have been putting off in favour of work.

And remember, there’s no mention on the list of people regretting that they hadn’t spent longer hours working!!

2 Think about something you are far from content with, and imagine the exact opposite is now happening, and you are feeling happier than you have in a long time. What is that one thing? And what can you choose to do now to help bring it about – and possibly create more laughter for yourself into the bargain?

*You can read the full article here:

In the past couple of days, I’d been thinking it’s time for another nudge, but had been mulling over what conversation to have.

While various ideas were going round in my mind, I remembered a quote from one of my favourite coaches Michael Neill: “You’re only ever one thought away from a happier one”. Since we can all get stuck in our own thinking, this immediately gave me the idea to have a different conversation about thoughts.

The map is not the territory

This is an expression, which I learnt years ago in my coach training, which revolutionised the way I think and approach all communications.

The idea is that we all have our own unique, internal maps for interpreting our world – that there is no one map or reality. So, it isn’t a case of there being a particular, or right way, to see, do or approach things, but rather our own way, based on, amongst other things, our individual experiences, beliefs, values, rules, etc that we choose to live by.

The concept might sound like common sense, and yet it can prove hard to make it common practice! Just think for a minute about all the times we try and persuade someone of our opinion about something, or disagree with another’s viewpoint, argue about having to be right, or feel stressed or hurt over someone’s behaviour. In these instances, there is little point in wasting energy in persuading people to see things our way. Rather, I remind myself that they’re seeing and believing things through their own unique filter, as I am mine, it’s not possible for them to do otherwise, which makes life a whole lot easier!

We create our own reality

So, if there isn’t one map or reality, my next favourite idea about thoughts is that we create our own reality, regardless of what’s going on around us. This can take a little more explaining, but the best way I know how is capturing it in a phrase: “A thought is only ever an idea crossing your mind. It only becomes real if you choose to attach meaning or importance to it”.

The concept comes from something called The Three Principles – Mind, Thought and Consciousness. Sometimes referred to as Inside Out Thinking – the idea being it’s not anything that goes on around us externally that causes us to think or feel as we do; it’s only ever what’s happening internally i.e. the way we choose to process/think about something, and all the meanings, beliefs we attach to that thought. And this is where we can get stuck in our own thinking. It’s that old age pattern of never questioning our thoughts – or worse, believing our thinking is the truth, which of course it isn’t.

The nature of thought

By way of an example, I came across a video recently from a psychiatrist called Dr Bill Pettit who specialises in the Three Principles. He does a lot of work around trauma and PTSD, and told the story of a girl who’d had multiple suicide attempts following an horrendous kidnapping and torture situation, and had been in and out of mental hospitals numerous times.

As he was standing in one such hospital reception one day, he overheard the girl ask why she couldn’t be allowed to die. He quietly said to her whatever it was she wanted to die over was over now, it didn’t exist anymore, except as a thought. He then invited her to come to a workshop, and if she didn’t like it no worries, but just come this once. She did and her life changed from that moment on when she saw her distress lay in reliving her recurring thoughts. In understanding The Three Principles, she was able to see that there was nothing wrong with her, nothing to be fixed, but rather to quieten her mind, let the thoughts come and go, and eventually she would return to an easier state of consciousness. Also known as innate health, as getting back to a natural state of wellbeing – or inner wisdom – that was available to her at any time.

Which brings me back to that quote, which I feel, captures this concept so well: “You’re only ever one thought away from a happier one”. Now, that’s a much nicer thought to have isn’t it?

Happy first Sunday of Spring!

How good are you at saying “no”? This was a recurring conversation that came up in the nudgeme Small Groups, that people can find hard, which only exacerbates the “busyness” syndrome. From saying “no” to others’ demands on them in their work or business to invitations from friends to go to social events they’d rather not attend, to requests from acquaintances, or even strangers, who they find themselves nodding a “yes” to, when they’re inwardly screaming “no”!

Here’s 3 ways to help make it easier to say “no”.

Setting healthy boundaries

In my experience, a key reason we have difficulties with saying no often relates to the value of putting others’ needs before our own, and that’s a good thing, as long as we also take care of our own needs too, which is invariably the bit that we miss! And I don’t mean trading ‘you do something for me and then I’ll do something for you’. I’m talking about being really clear about what your needs are in the first place, your important priorities and the things you value the most in your life because then it gets much easier to set healthy boundaries around that to guide your dealings with others.

Being true to yourself isn’t selfish

I often hear but isn’t it selfish to put your own needs first?

Well, let’s look at that. How is it really possible to be responsible for another’s needs? We can only take personal responsibility for meeting our own needs, and how we think and feel about meeting those will be different depending on our own beliefs and values. Just as we can’t possibly think and feel exactly the same as someone else does, how can we expect another person to know exactly what we’re thinking or feeling either – put simply they are not us.

By the very nature of the different beliefs and values that we each choose to live by it follows that saying “no” is not selfish, but an inevitable part of respecting our differences and being true to ourselves. This is possibly a good reason why we can feel uncomfortable when we don’t!

It can really help to bear this in mind when you think you’ve upset someone by saying “no”. Or alternatively, someone appears to be being selfish from your perspective. Reframing their behaviour as being true to themselves puts a very different spin on it!

Giving and receiving

Interestingly, saying no seems less of a problem when it comes to giving and receiving. Here’s when many of us can find it easier to give than to receive. In those moments, we don’t hesitate to say no – “no I couldn’t possibly let you do that” when someone is offering to do something for us. The irony is that it’s in those moments when we should be saying “yes” more often as in doing so we give the other person the pleasure of giving to us, and we all know how good that feels.

I’ll sum up the conversation by suggesting you give it a go this week. Try saying “no” more to others’ demands and “yes” more to their offers for help – in doing so, you’ll not only be giving both of you the chance to be true to yourselves, but helping to alleviate the busyness in the process!

“To be doubtful is uncomfortable to be certain is absurd.”

Voltaire to Frederick 2^nd of Prussia 4:6:1761

A good few years back when I was having a particularly difficult time about being certain about some things my father gave me a small card with this quotation on, which I still keep in my purse.

It was one of his favourites, and helped me to see how our wish for things to be certain in life is, as the quote says, pretty absurd. And of course the reason why we would like it to be so lies in the first part of the sentence – it can just feel so uncomfortable to sit with doubt.

What I find fascinating is that the quote was from 1761 – and here we are in 2015 often finding doubt and uncertainty just as uncomfortable! You’d think we’d have got better at it somehow!

Fast forward and one of my favourite quotes now is from Tony Robbins who pioneered my training in Strategic Intervention:

“The quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty that you can comfortably live with.”

So, if that’s still the thinking all these years on, I thought it would be useful to share some thoughts on how we might get better at achieving this.

Make friends with uncertainty

Knowing that nothing is certain (except death and taxes as the old expression goes) can immediately take the charge out of most situations. So, rather than fight it, just get good at noticing when the need for certainty arises and let it come and go. Often uncertainty is just the egos way of keeping you safe so just acknowledge what’s happening, and then focus your thoughts onto something else.

This too will pass

Changes of any sort can quickly throw up all sorts of uncomfortable feelings and a rush to control them to feel certain. Just repeating the words “this too will pass”, or any form of words, that act as a trigger to feeling calmer again can quickly put you in a more resourceful state.

Get good at meeting your own needs for certainty

A good way to cope in times of uncertainty is to have things you can think of, or physically do, that immediately make you feel more secure, and give you your own sense of certainty, regardless of what’s going on around you.

And, even more importantly, is for those things to be within your control rather than relying on a sense of certainty from other people over whom we have little or no control (given they are individual human beings with their own unique needs at any given time), or from external sources such as our work, which can change at any time.

A good place to start is to think of the times when you’re feeling happy and nothing particular is bothering you – you just feel relaxed and okay with the world. What do you tend to be doing at such times? What’s happening around you? Where are you? Who are you with? Then write down what comes to mind. Often the things we enjoy about our lives are the things that help us feel better in times of uncertainty. This could be anything from:

• taking a walk
• getting out into nature
• listening to some music
• reading a book or a newspaper
• relaxing in a bath
• watching sport
• playing a game
• laughing at something funny
• learning something new or inspiring

whatever it is that makes you feel good.

Expend your energy wisely

So, if you think of all the energy we can put into worrying about things we’re uncertain about that never actually happen 99 per cent of the time, then how much better to get wise to that and, instead, expend that energy on the people and things that matter most to us.

I’ll end on one of my (and also was one of my father’s) favourite times shown in the photo above when I feel especially happy and certain, and that’s when I’m on my annual holiday in Cornwall walking along this cliff path. It always conjures up the same happy feelings, and, as the saying goes, serves as a ‘symbol of stability in an ever-changing world’!

Five things to STOP…!

1 Talking to yourself in negative ways

Everything’s hopeless; wish I was slimmer, brighter, richer; it was definitely something I must have done that made them react like that.

2 Slipping into victim mode

Beating yourself up when things don’t go exactly to plan; nothing ever goes right for me; that’s just my luck.

3 Living in the past

Rehashing unhelpful conversations or events over and over again.

4 Berating yourself

Whatever you do, it’s so important to finish absolutely everything on your (never ending) to do list before you can even think of relaxing now.

5 Overloading your mind

Keeping as busy as possible, doing lots of things at once and always having one eye or ear out to something else even when someone’s talking to you.

Five things to START …!

1 Mastering your thoughts

i watching your language – replacing ‘shoulds’, ‘musts’ ‘got tos’, with ‘want tos’, ‘good tos’, ‘love tos’; replacing ‘never’ and ‘always’ with ‘not for now’ or ‘not yet’.

ii checking in on your physiology – shoulders back, head up, deeper breathing, smiling more, regular movement, hourly mini breaks.

iii choosing what you focus on – you get what you focus on so focus on what you want, not what you don’t, get good at catching yourself out and stop!

2 Taking things less personally

Registering it’s not all about you. So, as the saying goes “what people think of you is none of your business”.

3 Believing that people are doing the best that they can and have good intentions

It might not be your best or your way, but not attaching negative meanings to what others do or say, and rather seeing people in the best light, works wonders – especially in personal relationships -;)

4 Carving out guilt free time for yourself

Getting really good at  ‘me time’ is not only not selfish and good for you, it’s the best thing you can do for the people you care about (think about it …)

5 Giving your undivided attention

If it’s talking with your partner, a friend, child or work colleague give them your undivided attention and actively listen.

And one bonus nudge! Practice running through all the things you are grateful for at the end of each day – often good to have the conversation with yourself before you go to sleep at night. No matter how large or small, psychologists say it’s impossible to feel grateful and unhappy at the same time!