Your Life's Work
Avoid stress cycle and find peace in new year
Atlanta Business Chronicle - by Don Hutcheson & Bob D. Mcdonald
One of the greatest dangers you face, in terms of what is most likely to shorten your life and compromise the quality of your day-to-day existence, is the stress cycle.
What is the stress cycle? It's really nothing more than a habit of solutions to all of the hundreds of problems we all face every day, at work and at home.
Sinister stress cycle
The stress cycle comes upon us gradually, but it soon comes to invade almost every aspect of our lives. One of the most sinister aspects of the stress cycle is that often we are in it for some time before we realize that it is dominating us.
So how does it start? Generally, the stress cycle starts when other people's ideas about what we should do and how we should lead our lives come to take precedence over our own ideas and feelings about what we should do.
Involve yourself in life decisions
What we discovered in more than two years of research about how people make career decisions is that most people make major decisions about their lives and careers with almost no reference to the most important person involved: themselves.
Where we go to college, where we take our first job, whether we take a promotion, and what position and role we take when we work -- all of these are major career decisions and impact not only ourselves, but everyone in our families for years. And yet we typically make these kinds of decisions without having spent any time learning about ourselves and without having created a personal vision.
You can escape the stress cycle. But you have to do it on purpose. While you can slip into the stress cycle without even being aware of it, you can't get out of it (or even stay out of it) without being proactive.
By creating a personal vision you can take the first proactive step to yank yourself out of the stress cycle.
• Take some time. The one thing you can do, that anyone can do, is to stop.
• Create a picture of where you want to be. Visualize yourself one year from now. What do you want to be doing? How do you want to feel about what you are doing? Who do you want to be interacting with? What role or roles do you want at work? What natural talents do you want to be using every day? What about your most important values -- how is your time spent against them? What new skills do you have? How are you using them? What are you doing outside of work that is personally rewarding for you?
• Write it down. Write down your personal vision in as much detail as you can.
• Tell it to someone important to you. When you tell someone, your chances of following through are greatly increased.
The best place to start is to create your personal vision.
Hutcheson and McDonald are the founders of The Highlands Program, a national training and development company. They are authors of "The Lemming Conspiracy: How to Redirect Your Life From Stress to Balance."
E-mail them c/o Atlanta Business Chronicle (cclelandpero@amcity.com)
Their column appears twice monthly.
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