Defeat Stress at the Source

Feeling stressed this holiday season? What I do know with absolute certainty is that the stress you are feeling is not coming at you but coming from you.   I completely understand that you may absolutely disagree with this statement and it might even anger you.   I am willing to possibly offend you to help you.  It has taken me 30 years of “unlearning” to be able to teach the truth of this awareness, and it is the key to creating a more peace-full and productive workplace.  Until we believe in our own strength it is impossible for others to believe in theirs.   A dozen years ago a good friend gave me a beautifully framed quote from Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inaugural address.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.  Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.  It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.  We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?  Actually, who are you not to be?  You are a child of God.  Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.  There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.  We were born to manifest the glory of God within us.  It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.  And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.  As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.*

 *(I think the original author is actually Marianne Williamson)

For years I appreciated the gesture but never understood the message.  What would we be like if we were “powerful beyond measure”?  Not with arrogance that belies insecurity, but with a calm understanding that you were put here for a reason with all the skills, time and energy to do whatever you are called upon to do.  Stress is a belief in scarcity, a certainty that we have a shortage of time, resources or control.  Once we believe anything to be true we set in motion the process to make it so.  We have all heard the phrase that “seeing is believing”.  What would be more accurate is that what we believe determines what we see.  We don’t see (or experience) reality.  We see and experience what we expect to see.

Whatever you look for you will find.
Whatever you find will continue.

This holds true with our jobs, our relationships, our children and most of all ourselves.  The reason we need both our peers and time to experience this truth is that most organizations would rather have you be afraid than engaged.  Frightened people are easily manipulated, whereas fearless people although far more productive are often more difficult to manage.

My wife recently shared with me that in her very first year as a student at St. Edward the Confessor Catholic School she flunked “Conduct”.  Patty was fearless about expressing her opinions which were not always appreciated in the strict confines of the classroom.  Over the years she, like most of us, was conditioned to “go along to get along” and life was good.

Now being both self employed, we realize that fear in any form is the most destructive force in nature, and that good is the mortal enemy of great.  We are born fearless but taught to be otherwise.

 “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” 
George Bernard Shaw

 *(I think the original author is actually Marianne Williamson)