Stress is often talked about as an epidemic in this country. In fact, in a 2017 survey
of 6,700 Americans conducted by Everyday Health, 57% said they were paralyzed by stress and just over a third said their job is a regular source of stress. Do you count yourself among them? If so, your energy might be the source of the problem. But, there are ways you can use your energy to change how you feel stress.
When your alarm goes off in the morning, do you pull the covers up over your head, dreading the coming workday, or do you jump out of bed with excitement about the possibilities of the day to come? How we approach our lives is predicated on the lenses through which we view it. These lenses form our perspective and determine how we respond to the various stimuli of our day.
To explain what I mean, let's use this example: Linda is the person who dreads her workday, while Helen, her co-worker, is excited for it. They each head to work as usual and on their morning commute they hit a traffic jam on the Freeway. Linda goes crazy. She bangs the steering wheel, gets angry at the people around her and curses her wasted time in traffic. She can’t get past it; she gets stuck in thoughts of late meetings and missed deadlines and how this will throw off her whole day. Linda thinks to herself, why does this stuff always happen to me?
Helen, stuck in the same traffic a few lanes over, is also annoyed. But, seeing that she is likely going to be stuck for a while, she checks her calendar to see which calls she might be able to take from the car. Helen uses the stuck time to reorganize her day and start in on the calls she can take outside of the office. She thinks to herself that this provides the perfect excuse to call some people she hasn’t had the time to reach out to.
So, why do Linda and Helen see their situations so differently? Because they view their worlds through different energetic lenses. These lenses, developed over time, affect how we interpret and respond to situations. They create our reality. To put it another way, quoting Anais Nin, “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”
As we change and evolve, the filters can also change. If we can learn to recognize what our filters look like, and the effects that the energy we bring to situations has, we can change our the outcomes.
Let’s go back to Linda and Helen. Linda came into the traffic jam situation with low energy, already dreading the day ahead of her. The traffic jam served to confirm her expectations so she was unable to see it any other way. Helen, on the other hand, reacted with a brief moment of stress but rather than wallow in bad circumstances, her high energy allowed her to move quickly past the inconvenience to find opportunities in the situation.
How would you react in Linda and Helen’s situation? Would you be the Angry Victim or the Opportunist? Think about how your energy, your filter, is affecting your view. How do you show up at work? At home? What triggers your stress and how you do you handle it? What might a shift to more positive energy look like for you? Your day is just a string of stimuli that have no meaning other than how you perceive them and that view will either create stress, or not.
If you are interested learning more about energy and specifically what you filter looks like, reach out to me about the ELI Assessment. If you are interested in learning more about the science of Core Energy Coaching, check out this Research.