Stress or confidence?
For those of you who have school aged children, how do you feel now that your children have gone back to school? Sad, pleased, mixed feelings about it? Well, my children have finally gone back to school and I can start to get down to business again. I love having them around, but after 9 weeks holiday we are all ready to go back. Business issues stack up and I work from home so working in the holidays is not easy (nor do I want to frankly!)
With a slight whiff of irony about it, I got straight into things yesterday morning; I ran an INSET day for 70 teachers on stress resilience! They all looked like they loved teaching and didn’t need any help on stress at all; they might feel differently by mid- November of course!
I, on the other hand, have got a million things to do like all of us who juggle family and business and no time to do it in, and time management is really not my thing. So what is stress and what causes it? We feel stressed when we are out of control or perceive that we are out of control of events in our life and confident when we are in control. There are lots of things in life that we can’t control and lots that we can. The trick is to know the difference and to realise that you have more choice than you think you do.
What part do we play in creating our own stress? There are practical solutions of course that seem obvious to an outsider. The mother who told us that she feels very stressed every morning because she can’t get her children out of the house on time for school could probably alleviate a lot of it by getting up earlier; the person who can’t say “no” is likely to feel stressed and needs to say “no” more often.
More often though it is *how* we think about situations that cause us stress or anxiety. Perhaps your child has started a new school or has new people in their class and either you or they are anxious about it. The fact is that we cause ourselves stress by thinking about ways in which something can go wrong. Our minds and bodies don’t differentiate between real and imagined events so we create the same physical reactions to our thoughts as we do in reality.
When you have anxious thoughts try doing this:
1 Ask yourself, “Do I KNOW that is going to happen?” (probably not)
2 Take a deep breath
3 Think about what you would like to happen and create mental images of it going well
4 Notice how that changes your feelings about the event.
The more confident you are about something, the more likely it will go well anyway. Teach your children how to set themselves up to feel confident by encouraging them to make images in their minds about everything going well.
« Where do babies come from? | Home | “Parenting is about a relationship not a set of instructions” »
Pre-Order Brilliant Parent!
Leave a Comment