5 Stress Management Strategies to Bust Your Stress

Stress is one of the greatest threats we face. The need to change our relationship with change (3Q) and develop simple effective strategies to manage stress is critical. Nip stress in the bud and start to develop a new relationship with change.

Happy to host this guest post by Yazi Jepson on stress management for coaches and their clients. Excellent actionable advice!

There is a reason why medical experts have nicknamed stressthe killer disease.” It really is that serious.

Since there is no one on this planet (except perhaps a meditating monk in a cave somewhere) who can escape from feeling stressed, the key is to learn how to manage it. Here, there actually is such a thing as good stress.” But it is only good if you know how to recognize in stress itself your opportunity to learn new ways to deal with stress.

If you are a career or life coach working in the field, you can probably think of one or many clients you have right now who are oh-so-stressed. In fact, thinking about this probably makes you feel stressed out too.

In this post, you will learn strategies you can use to alleviate and manage your own stress that you can then teach to your clients in turn. Welcome to your less-stressed, more productive and peaceful world!

De-Stress Strategies That Really Work

These proven stress management strategies will help you and your clients learn how to deal with stress on the spot.

Strategy 1: First name your stress, then address it.

At its core, the experience of “feeling stress” comes from the activity in the most ancient part of our brain. This part is called the limbic system, and we share it with most other creatures on this planet.

In this way, stress is the way your survival instinct communicates with you to let you know there is a survival threat on the horizon.

What to do: Your first step in addressing stress is to name the threat. Here, you might find out your stress is linked to insufficient sleep the night before. Or it could be witnessing your boss go storming down the hall. Or it might be “good” stress – like the type you get when you propose to your love and they say ‘yes!’ Once you know what the threat is, or if it is even a threat, then you can deal with it appropriately.

Strategy 2: Identify your personal stress tolerance limits and your go-to coping strategies.

According to the American Psychological Association (APA), different age categories manage and process stress in different ways. Each age category, from Mature to Boomer to GenX to Millenials, also has their “go-to” stress management strategies.

In general, the younger you are, the more you are likely to feel challenged to manage your stress. You are also more likely to use less healthy coping strategies (drinking, smoking, over-eating), whereas your older peers are more likely to take a walk or head for a faith service.

The better able you are to identify when your personal stress tolerance limits are getting stretched, the more control you will have over your response to your stress and the coping strategies you choose.

What to do: It can really help here to create a list of stress triggers and go-to coping strategies you can turn to before you just hit your stress limit and automatically turn to something you swore you would not do again.

Strategy 3: Learn to turn stress to your advantage.

Interestingly, stress can be useful to us as more than just a fight-or-flight early alert system. Stress in its purest and most primal form is the energy of e-motion.

You can see this at work in the performance of elite military forces and professional athletes. Those who become most successful in their chosen careers are the ones who can sense and harness the emotional energy of stress to produce their desired outcomes.

What to do: Welcome the e-motional energy of stress as a tool you can use to achieve your goals. Unharnessed, stress energy shoots around like a water hose without a nozzle. Harnessed, you put a nozzle on that hose and direct the stream exactly where you want and need it to go!

By learning and practicing these three ways of dealing with stress, you can feel more centered and self-connected during your client sessions and then teach your clients how to duplicate your successful results.

About the Author: Yazi is an inspired writer who enjoys writing about personal growth, self-help tips, and women’s lifestyle. She sometimes writes for Streeterlaw,  a firm that helps their clients resolve disputes, preserve and protect their legal rights. In her parallel life, she loves reading and finding her own way to balance her time between writing, baking cakes, and personal training.

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