Stress management and the toilet brush

Much of what ought to be common sense is plain to see if we look for patterns and meaning within everyday events. But because we often ignore what experience can teach us or decide that other choices are more convenient, common sense is not always common practice.

This fundamental contradiction creates stress.

When we're stressed we're more likely to become confused or anxious about responsibilities, challenges and conflict. We make unwise decisions that create problems, get involved in unproductive busy-ness, or push for results without balancing attention to the best methods for getting them. We use out-dated and ineffective approaches or improvise inefficiently, causing greater stress, the wrong results or the right results at great cost. We may focus on unimportant things, leaving vital matters until they become overwhelmingly urgent and important crises.

The best way to manage and reduce unhealthy stress is to rediscover what we already know, use that knowledge to get back on track, re-aligned with our own values and aspirations, then habituate better practices that methodically release more of our capacity for effectiveness. That's what EncourageMentors' mentoring support is for.


The toilet brush?

As an analogy it might be a long stretch, but that brush is a vital and economical tool designed for easy, everyday personal use. You don't use it to impress the neighbours, become more competitive or win status stakes. It's very effective for keeping parts of the plumbing functioning and healthy. Without it . . . well, let's not go there.

Here's the connection: mentoring support is similarly functional, effective and economical. Its focus is improved practices for better functioning and everyday wellbeing. The effects are immediate, perceptual, visceral, and emotional. You won't have a diploma to frame and hang on the wall but you will have learned how to:

• Stop forging ahead when you know or suspect that you're on the wrong track
• Prevent problems from continually recycling themselves in different guises
• Accept full responsibility for generating the causes of the effects you want to experience in your life.
• Bring out your strengths and the best in others
• Deal creatively and well with whatever currently stresses you out.

Make the discoveries that make the difference

Use mentoring online or in person, to make the discoveries and changes that really matter:

• Methodical approaches to self-management, people-management and leadership reduce painful and costly emergencies.
• Successful use of a map requires knowledge of two facts: where we are now and where we want to be. We must know the first before we can plan or change where we are going.
• Leadership is action, not an arrangement of power. There are distinct behaviours that constitute effective leadership action.
• A vital aspect of self-management involves investigation of the thinking patterns and belief systems that underlie unhealthy stress. Clarify and modify these and you deal with the root causes.
• Unlike conventional approaches to problems, systematic problem solving does not create or recycle problems: it resolves them.
• When we understand our own part in generating problems and self-defeating stress, it becomes easier to transform them into satisfying improvement strategies without blaming others or waiting for them to change.
• Conflict and differences with others begin to dissolve when we deal our own, inner conflicts.
• When we don't plan, don't plan well or don't monitor our plans, things don't go according to plan. The key to realising individual or collective intentions is knowing how to plan and manage a plan.
• Methodically reducing the gap between how we judge ourselves (by our intentions) and how others judge us (by our actions), is the shortest route to improving our relationship management and leadership practices.
• It isn't necessary to resign ourselves to irresolvable difficulties in relationships and give up on them prematurely, naively hoping we'll avoid such challenges elsewhere. Developing skills and finding the courage to confront these challenges can be life-transforming.

"Whenever we experience a stressful feeling -
anything from mild discomfort to intense sorrow, rage, or despair -
we can be certain there is a specific thought causing our reaction,
whether or not we are conscious of it.
The way to end our stress is to investigate the thinking that lies behind it.
[If the inquiry is rigorous] we discover that all the concepts and judgements
we believe or take for granted are distortions of things as they really are."
Stephen Mitchell

Select and contact a Mentor if you'd like to discuss these ideas or want support to make progress with your own issues.

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