When it comes to stress, illness and wellness, it is important to remember that what goes on in your mind is reflected in your body. People who continually worry and get stressed about their problems tend to develop tense muscles, become tired easily or get headaches. When their mind is stressed, their body becomes stressed too. Dwelling on your mistakes and over-analyzing what could have gone wrong or what you could have done differently only drains your energy and distracts you from what you have to do. Worrying only uses up energy and doesn’t really help your situation. Like acid, worry will just eat you away if you let it into your life each day. There are endless things you can worry about…service, safety, health, future, etc. But let’s face it:- Worry doesn’t change the situation
- Worry won’t help time move any quicker
- Worry won’t help you with your service
- Worry just doesn’t help in any way…
So don’t do it! Instead…Exchange worry for action Worry, like a hot stove, only hurts you if you touch it. Worry will paralyze you.Instead of worrying, do something to solve the problem. Action leads to results.
What kind of friends do you have? What kind of employees? What kind of colleagues? So many times in life we get from others EXACTLY WHAT WE EXPECT! In short the way we see people affects the way we treat them and the way we treat them affects the way they perform. This is called Pygmalion Effect (sometimes called the “echo effect” or the “mirror effect”). Expectations can influence behavior: therefore, a manager may get better staff performance if he expects better performance. What we see reflected in many objects, situations, or persons are what we put there with our own expectations. We create images of how things should be, and if these images are believed, they become self fulfilling prophecies. The feelings and tones which surround us can be changed if we work to change them by sending out the kind of signal we want reflected or echoed. We all have an audience of individuals and colleagues whose day, including their moods, feelings, and dispositions, will be influenced by the way we start it. The Pygmalion Effect has met the test of scientific analysis. • A study showed that experiments could raise the IQ scores of children, especially on verbal and information sub-tests, merely by expecting them to do well. • A study showed that worker performance increased markedly when the supervisor of these workers was told that his group showed a special potential for their particular job.
Most of Our Failures in Human Relations are due to “misunderstandings”.We expect other people to react and respond and come to the same conclusions as we do from a given set of “facts” or “circumstances.”No one responds or reacts to “things as they are,” but to his own mental images. Most of the time, a person “understands” and interprets the situation differently from us. He is merely responding appropriately to what – to him – seems to be the truth about the situation.Ask yourself:“How does this appear to him?”“How does he interpret this situation?”“How does he feel about it?”Try to understand why he might “act the way he does”In dealing with other people try to see the situation from their point of view as well as your own.
Hammer it home to yourself, that the key to the matter of whether you are disturbed or tranquil, fearful or composed is not the external stimulus, whatever it may be, but your response and reaction. Your own response is what “makes” you feel fearful, anxious & insecure.Do not emotionally respond to the scare “bells” in the environment. You are an “actor” not a “reactor”. We should not be like a ship that goes whichever way the wind happens to blow. We must keep our ship afloat and stable. Our ship must not be tossed and rocked and perhaps sunk by every passing wave, or even a serious storm.Many times apart from the actual minor stimuli in the environment we respond to our own negative mental pictures. We impose our own negatives: This or that may happen; what if such & such happen. Stop scaring yourself to death with your own mental pictures.We respond to these negative pictures as if they were present in reality. Your nervous system can not tell the difference between a real experience and one that is vividly imagined. The proper response to worry pictures is to totally ignore them. Our physical body has a built in thermostat, which maintains the inner temperature at a steady 98.6 degrees, regardless of the temperature in the environment. The weather around you may be freezing cold, or 110 degrees. Yet your body maintains its own climate – a steady 98.6. It is able to function properly in the environment because it does not take on the climate of the environment. Cold or hot – it maintains its own.Likewise you don’t have to take on the outward climate. Use spiritual thermostat to maintain an emotional climate and atmosphere in spite of the bad emotional weather around you.
Most people would agree that one of the greatest sources of stress in our lives is our problems. To a certain degree this is true. A more accurate assessment, however, is that the amount of stress we feel has more to do with how we relate to our problems than it does with the problems themselves. In other words, how much of a problem do we make our problems? Problems come in many shapes, sizes, and degrees of seriousness, but all have one thing in common: They present us with something that we wish were different. The more we struggle with our problems and the more we want them to go away, the worse they seem and the more stress they cause us. Ironically, and luckily, the opposite is also true. When we accept our problems as an inevitable part of life, when we look at them as potential teachers, it's as if a weight has been lifted off our shoulders. Think of a problem that you have struggled with for quite some time. How have you dealt with this problem up until now? If you're like most, you've probably struggled with it, mentally rehearsed it, analyzed it again and again, but have come up short. Where has this entire struggle led you? Probably it has led to even more confusion and stress. Now think of the same problem in a new way. Rather than trying to push away the problem and resist it, try to embrace it. Ask yourself what valuable lesson(s) this problem might be able to teach you. Problems can teach us to depend on Krishna more & more!
Very often we are immobilized by the slightest criticism. We treat it like an emergency, and defend ourselves as if we were in a battle.When we react to criticism with a knee-jerk, defensive response, it hurts. We feel attacked, and we have a need to defend or to offer a counter criticism. We fill our minds with angry or hurtful thoughts directed at ourselves or at the person who is being critical. All this reaction takes an enormous amount of mental energy.An incredibly useful exercise is to agree with criticism directed toward you. I'm not talking about turning into a doormat or ruining your self-esteem by believing all negativity that comes in your direction. There are many times when simply agreeing with criticism defuses the situation, satisfies a person's need to express a point of view, offers you a chance to learn something about yourself by seeing a grain of truth in another position, and, perhaps most important, provides you an opportunity to remain calm.One of the first times I consciously agreed with criticism directed toward me was many years ago when a friend said to me, "Sometimes you talk too much." I remember feeling momentarily hurt before deciding to agree. I responded by saying, "You're right, I do talk too much sometimes." In agreeing with him, I was able to see that he had a good point. I often do talk too much! What's more, my non-defensive reaction helped him to relax.Reacting to criticism never makes the criticism go away. In fact, negative reactions to criticism often convince the person doing the criticizing that they are accurate in their assessment of you.
The people you meet are all here to teach you something. Perhaps the disrespectful employee or an angry colleague is here to teach you about patience.Your job is to try to determine what the people in your life are trying to teach you. You'll find that if you do this, you'll be far less annoyed, bothered, and frustrated by the actions and imperfections of other people. You can actually get yourself in the habit of approaching life in this manner and, if you do, you'll be glad you did. Often, once you discover what someone is trying to teach you, it's easy to let go of your frustration. For example, suppose you're in the post office and the postal clerk appears to be intentionally moving slowly. Rather than feeling frustrated, ask yourself the question, "What is he trying to teach me?" Maybe you need to learn about compassion—how hard it would be to have a job that you don't like. Or perhaps you could learn a little more about being patient. Standing in line is an excellent opportunity to break your habit of feeling impatient.All you're really doing is changing your perception from "Why are they doing this?" to "What are they trying to teach me?"
