Finding the quickest route from where you are to where you want to be.

Everyone in life has a goal.  Most of us have lots.  Maybe it’s finding your soulmate or building your dream home, maybe it’s eradicating world hunger or achieving a career landmark.  Whatever your goal is, what matters most is whether you moving towards it or away from it?

Life is in a constant state of change, which is either closer to your goal or further from it.  There’s a simple way to know in every moment which direction you are heading in, and that is to recognise how you feel about that goal.

Negative emotions such as despair, anger, boredom and anxiety are all dangerous to your goal.  Let me explain why and how stress is the critical warning sign before decay sets in.

Image Credits: Sadness Lovers Journey

When we have a goal to achieve more income, to have a new or renewed relationship, to be slimmer or fitter, we want something that we haven’t yet achieved.  In other words we have to improve something.  We have to be – or demonstrate that we are – more valuable, we need to improve our relationship skills, we need better eating and exercising habits.  So the journey to this goal is one of growth, becoming better able to meet the challenge.

Now the road to growth is littered with challenges.  If we meet these challenges we become a stronger version of ourselves.  If we fail to meet these challenges we are thwarted in our goals.  In which case, we have to either come back and successfully negotiate that challenge or we have to give up on that goal.

When we give up, or we feel blocked from our goals, we can despair of hope, feel bored, anxious or seethe at who or what we believed stopped us from achieving our goal.  Many, many workplaces are filled with destructive people because they feel they have been blocked or held back from their goals by circumstances, the company or by Managers or Co-Workers.

That point where we face the challenge is an inherently stressful process.  Depending on our response and emotional readiness, it will either stretch us or break us.  Therefore stress is the gateway to either the paradise of your dreams or the hell of your nightmares.

The reason why stress is becoming such a huge problem in our society on a personal, organisational and social level is because we are on such a rapid path of progression.  Governments are trying to manage responsibilities for such broad and complex areas of life that are changing so rapidly that it’s mind boggling.  Businesses are under ever more competitive circumstances.  And Individual’s  are under greater time pressure and have more choices and dilemmas thrown at them than at any other time.

The only way that we can deal with this challenge is by upgrading our ability to deal with stress.  Because whether we live our dreams or our nightmares is determined by whether we have the bandwidth to grow and so meet the challenges successfully.  Let me use an example.

When it became clear that the Internet was going to be such a big deal and digital television was exploding, many countries had to upgrade their telecomunication infrastructure to Fiber Optic cables.  Because the old system just couldn’t cope with the amount of information flowing through the pipeline.

As Individuals, as Organisations and as Societies, we now have to upgrade our bandwidth in order to cope with the challenges we face.  For those who succeed in the ever more competitive marketplace for jobs, Lovers, for Customers and so on will be those who have the greater bandwidth that enables them the capacity to grow and meet the challenges ahead.

Those who do not have the capacity to deal with stress will suffer the separation from their dreams and destructive emotions until they do eventually upgrade their ability to recognise and use stress as a springboard for growth.

Stress Is Too Costly And Destructive To Ignore

It costs Organisations £100 billion a year (just in the UK) according to the Charity MIND.  Yet what they have accounted for is just the tip of the iceberg. Stress cripples productivity and impairs our judgement long before there are any recognisable signs that anyone is yet measuring.

It is stress, or emotional dis-ease, in it’s various disguises, that is at the root for us falling short of our potential, as Individual’s, as Family’s, as Organisations and as a Society.

As Individual’s, stress poisons our emotional lives.  It ruins our relationships, wrecks our health and sabotages our happiness and success. It clouds our judgement and holds us back from performing as well as we could in all areas of our life.

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A Family’s harmony and stability depends upon the stability and inner harmony of the Individuals in it.  One disruptive Parent or Child can be enough to upset and disrupt the entire equilibrium of the others.

Organisations depend upon the co-ordinated efforts of groups of Individual’s.  And so are only as strong as the weakest link.  When stressed Individuals disrupt the flow of work, when they distract others from their tasks the Organisation becomes weakened.

A Society is only as peaceful as it’s most disruptive Members.  You could live in a street with 99 peaceful homes and yet just one nightmare neighbour who often hosts loud, drunken parties, who leaves their litter spreading our from their property and the neighbourhood has gone downhill.

At the core of all disruption, all disharmony and all unproductive activities is emotional disease.    Because life is a constant movement.  Yet rather than take you towards where you want to go, these emotions move you towards what you don’t want.

These destructive emotions are all negative responses to stress.  But they began as a response to stress

Why Stress Is A Good Sign

People often feel as if they have failed or that there is something wrong with them if stress becomes overwhelming.  In some organisations, there is a macho culture where stress is seen as weakness.  Let me tackle these myths quickly.

If you don’t feel stressed, you either don’t care about what you are doing or you aren’t coming close to achieving your potential.

The only people who never get stressed are Psychopaths.  It’s part of their make up because they don’t care.

Look around your workplace or in your family, aren’t the people who care most about their work and it’s outcome the ones most stressed.  The people who are giving most of themselves, in and out of work, are those who are most likely to feel stressed.  It’s just that they have pushed themselves as far as they can go with their current emotional blueprint.  As they increase their emotional ability to handle stuff without stress becoming destructive, they are able to do more and give more.

The Difference Between Strategic And Tactical Stress Management

The reason why stress causes so many problems is that people don’t really understand what stress is and why it happens.  I get so frustrated when I see the crap that people commonly tout as being stress management.  Stuff like taking a walk, visualising your happy place, affirmations and all the other happy, clappy techniques.

Stress is a side effect of the way you live.  It’s treatment should not be escapism from it’s effects.  It should confront the situation and lead to an upgrade in performance and emotional well-being.  What most stress management training leads to is minimising the feelings from stress, which is no more than taking a pain killer.  The real goal has to be increasing the Individual’s bandwidth or you’re just going to get hooked on pain killers.

But in order for this to be able to happen, you have to tackle stress strategically, not tactically.  Let me explain the difference.

If you go and look at what is normally offered in Stress Management Training Programs, you’ll find all but a rare few can only ever lead to stress relief.  In other words they talk about exercising, meditating and other techniques to minimise the effects of stress.  That’s like giving someone who’s got the flu medication to relieve their symptoms.  That is tactical stress management.  There’s a big problem with tactics.

They work until the world changes enough to make them irrelevant.  In other words, today they work.  They feel less stress today.  But tomorrow they’ll build up the same stress and will have to go through using these techniques to dissipate the stress again.  Next year when competitive forces mean they have to work harder to stay in the same place, they will find that they need these techniques have less and less impact – assuming they have the discipline to keep practising them.

None of this is to suggest that tactics don’t have their place, just that having a massage won’t have any impact on your ability to cope next week.

Dealing with stress strategically is far more powerful.  The flu vaccine is a strategic treatment to the flu.  It strengthens the body so that even when exposed to the virus, it can deal with it.  Some courses do take a step in this direction when they talk about time management and so on to reduce stress happening.  That’s a good start.

Truly strategic (and the most effective) approaches do not change behaviour, they change the way you think of the situation.  And then the behaviour flows naturally rather than being something that requires constant attention, discipline and willpower and thus are likely to fail over time.

Once you go beyond the myths and misunderstandings, stress is no longer anything to be feared. Instead it becomes a warning signal that can spur you on to greater performance and enjoyment of life.

There’s no reason to suffer from the effects of stress.  If you look around you can see that every human problem has been solved, somewhere by someone.  You just need to find out what’s really going on and how you can resolve your issues.  If your electric circuit blows, an Electrician knows why and how to get it fixed.  If you have trouble relating to your kids, someone knows why and how to relate better.  If your business needs more sales, someone knows how to sell better.  It just happens that I have spent 16 years of immersed in an intense study of how and why we get stressed and how to overcome it.

I have come to understand that the true art of stress is not in managing it, reducing it or relieving it.  It is in the magical alchemy of transforming stress into adventure and achievement.  And it is my mission in life to share with anyone interested the fruits of my study.

I’d Love To Help You Reduce Stress Personally Or In Your Organisation

I’d like to help you learn to free yourself, or your Organisation, from the ogre of stress.  I hate waste.  And there is nothing more wasteful of our emotional, physical and psychological resources than stress.  And it is so unnecessary, if you only understand what stress is and how to minimise and avoid it’s harmful effects.

All any of us really want to do is to use our strengths, knowledge and interests to help others.  Just as, I’m sure there’s some topic in your life that you love and obsess over, mine is how can we live most effectively and happily.  It’s the point where my strengths, skills, aptitudes and passion intersect.

And because stress is the primary obstacle to achieving that ideal state of living, I have studied it to depths almost no-one else has.  But it’s no fun discovering all this stuff if you have no-one to share it with.  So that’s what this site is for, to share my thoughts and insights and learn from yours.  By working together we all get to be more skilled in dealing with stress.

My mission in life is to help people to get to where they want to quicker and less painfully.  After 16 years study and practice as a;

• Fitness Instructor,
• Nutritionist,
• Therapist,
• Samaritan Volunteer
• Psychologist,
• Author,
• Coach,
• Blogger
• and Stress Management Trainer,

I’ve looked at stress and wellbeing from almost every angle.  I’ve observed literally thousands of people that I have interacted with on the subject and observed what’s worked and what hasn’t.  My philosophy today, based on all my study and experience, is that the key factor that makes the most difference is emotional health. Not in the limp sense of an academic term, but in the sense of boundless passion and enthusiasm for what you are doing.

Yes, of course, the other tactics that people commonly offer such as meditation, visualisation and so on can work.  But if you are looking for maximum and long term impact, then you have to achieve strategic emotional wellbeing.  Then the actions and behaviours naturally follow and you avoid conflict, frustration, self-sabotage and getting overwhelmed.  Hence the name of the site, Your Emotional GPS, which refers to the process of finding the quickest route to where you want to get, from wherever you are now.

Just Enter Your Email For Your Free Stress Management Report?

I have prepared a free report An Introduction To Stress Management to get you up to speed on the basics of stress management.  It’s a concise overview, which will give you the same information that most of the £200 – £500 Stress Management Seminars contain.  Once you’ve read that I’ll share some of the more advanced concepts so you can start to really develop your skills at coping with stress.  And I’ll let you know about courses and other trainings that can fast track your development.  There’s no charge or any obligation, to receive these emails, all you need to do is sign up below.