What is stress then? Stress is defined as our body (physical) and our mind (psychological) responses to things that we don't handle well. Like if you forget where you drop your handphone, that is definitely a very stressful experience. The symptoms of stress are worries, tense, bad temper, short breadth, faster heartbeat, and in many cases, lower body immunity to illness.
In short, stress is how our we humans react to changes in lives that we don't feel comfortable with. Note that if you do not react to stress, you do not have stress. If you respond to stress positively, you will have success. That's what this article is about.
What causes stress? There are 3 major causes of stress:
- Time
- Money
- People
1. Time
When you are short of time, this feeling of inadequacy makes you start to imagine the bad things that could happen. Being late for appointments, filing for income tax and rushing a deadline are the 3 most common time stress today.
However, having too much time is also stress. The everyday situation when we feel that we have too much time is when we are waiting (a few nano-seconds) for our computer or smartphone to upload or download something and they seem to take forever to do a simple and routine thing.
If you feel that you are short of time, understand that time is just a concept of human beings. We are not short of time, we are just short of ideas on how to do unlimited things in limited time.
The solution to time stress are threefold: plan (so that you will have more than enough time and are more ready), get help and change your plan. That is, you limit the things you do with your limited time and your stress will go away fast.
2. Money
Everyone has not enough money, and even the richest people find that money is not enough for their ever rising needs.
However, the rich people understand that there is no such thing as a lack of money. This is simply because money is just a concept and has no intrinsic value. It is what you do with your money that has value. Thus the rich have no shortage of money, because they can find value in whatever little money they have, and they can always increase the value of money with whatever money they have.
For example, the rich know the value of investing and compounding interest, and they use that to increase their money.
Another important concept of money is exponential growth or decline. The rich knows that everything adds on to everything in much bigger ways that the original thing is. For example, all computer memories is on exponential growth basis: 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB, 64 GB, 128 GB, 256 GB etc.
Thus to really get more money you need to apply exponential growth to everything that you do. For example, keep working on something until it creates a wave and exponential growth will take place. Like the number of friends I have on my Facebook, I now run out of my limit of 5,000 friends and have to open another account. That is exponential growth because I will not be able to know 5,000 friends outside of Facebook, but because of Facebook's 'Friends of Friends' capability, I can grow my friends exponentially.
3. People
As we know, people do gives us lots of stress, especially the people that we don't know or we don't like.
Note that we have no problem in dealing with or working with people that we like, and that has nothing to do with what the person is giving us.
To handle stress from people well, you need to separate people from the problem. Note that people are not the problem, it is their problem that is the problem. For example, if the person is rude to me, I need to understand that this person is not the problem, it is his rudeness that is the problem. Thus if I can handle his rudeness well, this person is not a problem to you any more.
The ultimate goal is to turn people that we don't like to people that we like. But before that, we can turn such people to like us first. How to make people like us? The simplest and fastest way is to follow what they do. This is because the human's mind has a tendency to like what we know and are familiar with. So if we do what people do, like we speak like them, walk like them and even think like them, they will like us.
In short, stress is caused by 3 things: Time, Money and People. We can all turn stress into success when we handle these 3 things well. Happy stressing!
By Andy Ng, Chief Trainer Coach at Asia Trainers. Andy specializes in short but deep impact courses on finance, leadership, sales and effective employee skills. Since 1996, he has trained over 81,131 people in 14 countries, with the latest being Cambodia. Visit him at www.asiatrainers.com and see his action at www.youtube.com/AndyNgCoach/videos today!
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