Stress Relief When You’ve Got Too Much On Your Plate
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008Remember the empty plate club? Nowadays, what we really need is the too much on my plate club…
I wrote a book about how to stay sane under stress, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t also find myself in way over my head situations. Too much on my plate club indeed.
What to do? Step one: calm down. And yes, you can find out how in my ebook, “Instant Stress Relief Strategies,” and also on this blog if you browse around some… Or if you go look up my ezinearticles.com articles, which you can find by clicking on that cute little ezinearticles.com Expert Author button on the right.
Or you can go to http://www.elisabethsarticles.com.
And then, there’s step two: take stuff off that plate!
Yes indeed. Just because it’s on your plate doesn’t mean you have to eat everything on it, empty plate club rules notwithstanding! You can take some and pass it on to others (delegate) and you can also renegotiate deadlines.
If worse comes to worst and you really just can’t get everything done, you can still practice damage control. Which of these things will cause you the least trouble if you skip or postpone it?
One VERY handy tool here is Abraham’s Placemat Process (see the Abraham-Hicks section in the Categories list).
That will help you pick out the ones that absolutely MUST be done now, and increase your chances that you actually get those done and will feel good about it. Then repeat the process with the next batch the following day, and so on and on.
And soon enough, you’ll find that things may get done without you. You’ll find out that some of the stuff has become moot. Or someone else already did it. Or it didn’t need to be done after all. I remember a letter I was supposed to write and it just got lost in the shuffle. I felt guilty about it for quite a while, until I got an email from that person that said that the other letter hadn’t actually been necessary, but now would I please write one. So I did. Funny how some of these things work out.
And in a worst case scenario? What will happen if you really can’t do it? What would happen if you fell over with a heart attack? They’d cope, right? Well… you DON’T have to get a heart attack first.
So learn to practice portion control when you allow stuff onto your plate (yeah, I know, I find it a challenge too). And if there’s too much on it already, take some of it off the plate
And yes, sure, if you like, there is this handy dandy ebook I wrote on how to calm yourself down instantly (or very quickly anyway) when you’re so stressed that you can hardly catch your breath anymore.
You can find it at Instant Stress Relief Strategies. Those strategies work. I’m using them myself and they’ve helped me (and my friends, and some of my students) through some very rough times.
I hope you have a very relaxing day!
Elisabeth
















