Transform Stress Into Strength

Help! My Life's Out of Control: It's a common lament - an increasing frustration. You're frazzled by the frantic pace. Your "e;to do list"e; is about to do you in. You can't catch your breath before more musts and shoulds apear. You're "e;all stressed up"e; and spinning into a vicious, downward spiral. Many of us face this common dilemna. We rarely take the time or have the know-how to examine our lives deeply; most of us are just not introspective enough to do so or lack the tools to do it effectively. In addition, we may lack the clarity of well-grounded values, a mission, a vision and clear goals. Then too, we impose on ourselves unrelenting time pressures and inappropriate and destructive emotional responses to half-understood stimuli. These factors all reinforce each other in negative ways, resulting in increasing levels of stress and frustration within. How can it be different? The intervention process I've defined presents a four stage approach that involves analyzing your life, creating your life plan, redefining your response to everyday events, and reallocating your time, you can reverse the negative, "e;vicious circle"e; and replace it with a "e;virtuous growth cycle"e;, one that continuously builds personal strength. The ultimate, achievable goal is a life of harmony, fulfillment, contentment, and inner joy. And, it's about a life of balance - the alignment of your actions and use of your time with your true personal values and life purpose. Whatever the reason, as we proceed down life's path one truth begins to emerge very clearly: If you don't control your destiny someone else will; your parents, spouse, boss, friends or just circumstances. This book began as a seminar I taught at companies around the world. At every workshop people would ask me, "e;where's your book? "e; Well, this is it! And I wrote it to be identical to my seminar format, so you can work on it in logical stages as you go along. It starts with a series of personal assessments to get an "e;inside view of you"e;. You will delve deeply into what causes your discontent and begin to see how to change it. I encourage you to starve your stress and feed your joy, and make a commitment to change; afterall you're worth it! In the second section, the book helps you to zero in on your personal values, begins the process of developing a personal mission statment and helps you envision an ideal future state. And then it helps you to set milestones and measurements to ensure commitment to your goals. In essence, you will learn how to build an actionable personal life plan based on your values and what's uniquely important to you. But just having a life plan isn't enough. Many times in life, we know exactly what we should do, but a variety of obstacles derail us and keep us from accomplishing our plan. Our mindset sabotages our well-intentioned life strategy. The third section helps you get control of your mind. We all have irrational beliefs or thinking errors developed over a lifetime that tend to ignore the positive, exaggerate the negative or overgeneralize. Key to this is understanding that it's not what happens to you that matters, but how you react to what happens to you. And many of us have mental traps of worry and unforgiveness that keep us from feeling fulfilled and happy. Through this book, you will learn a process to get control of your mind and help you reach the destination defined in your life plan. You can halt the madness and set yourself on a well-charted course to transform stress into strength and reclaim your personal power. In the final section, you will learn to refocus your time from the "e;tyranny of the urgent"e; to the truly important. It presents some of the best and current techniques for aligning your time with your personal and most valuable priorities and ways to eliminate the key time wasters. In summary, this book presents a blend of well-proven and highly effective tools that can help you diagnose your personal causes of distress,