Resolving stress is not as difficult as everyone seems to think. You just have to make a decision about the issue.

If you look back on any stressful time, you’ll find that it stopped being stressful at the point where you decided one way or another.

Maybe something happened that made your decision for you. Or maybe you got so fed up that you jumped off the fence.

But you’ll find that the failure to make a decision is what keeps stress stuck in the treadmill of your mind.

In the last step, we talked about how to gain clarity and perspective on the issue by examining it from every angle, with no questions off limits.

That’s important, because once you can see the issue in greater clarity with all the facts and subtle nuances laid out before you, the decisions are so much easier.

If you’ve ever made business decisions in an organisation where the management information is clearly given to you, you’ll recognise that mostly the facts make the decision for you.

Here’s another example. Everyone who’s dealt with money knows that if you spend more than you have, you’re going to run into trouble.

Yet, many, many people struggle with debt. Here in the U.K, last year debt levels reached £1.35 trillion or about $2.7 trillion. That is more than the Gross Domestic Product. which is the value of everything made and sold in that year.

Sometimes you will see tv shows about people who have gotten into dire trouble and then they meet with an Advisor. The first thing the Expert does is sit down and analyse the figures. In almost all cases, there’s nothing the Individual couldn’t do themselves, but they kept running and hiding from the issue.

It’s exactly the same with resolving other areas that cause stress. You just need the clarity to have all the different strands that make up the issue in front of you. That was covered in step 2.

The first part of deciding is to set your criteria. So you take all the questions you asked in step 2 and answer them individually.

Now you have the issue broken down into many small chunks, you decide where you stand on each chunk. These become your criteria.

Usually people struggle to make decisions because they are trying to make a huge decision without considering all the aspects and elements that make up the surface issue.

A small, start up business might ask the question, ’shall we advertise?’ But that’s thinking at too broad a level to gain any worthwhile answer.

A successful company will ask, ‘how shall we allocate our advertising budget to tv, radio, print and internet?’

A really successful company will know the return they’ll get for every place they advertise. So the decision is made for them to advertise and where. There only question is ‘how much can we invest before it stops being profitable?’

You aren’t having to make one huge decision, just lots of little ones. This is how you refine what exactly it is that you want.

Let me give you a simple example. I have a webcam hooked up to the computer to make these videos. Now my two Daughters have been having great fun videoing themselves singing, dancing and generally shouting and doing stupid things and then rewatching the clips.

Now they’re having a great time with it, but it’s very loud. So my wife and I are trying to talk, but we can’t hear ourselves. If it were just a one-off it would be fine, but it happens quite frequently and so it becomes an issue that causes stress.

The basis of the stress is that we are torn. On the one hand we want to be good parents, we want them to be free and be able to have fun. Yet we also want to be able to sit and have a cup of tea and talk over our day.

So the stress comes from wanting two seemingly contradictory things and not seeing the underlying conflict. Once we parcelled the chunks out and defined the real issue, our creativity could be unleashed and the problem resolved.

The webcam can easily be moved to my Daughter’s desk and laptop upstairs, where they can play about and downstairs doesn’t sound like a rock concert.

So for example, yes, I do want them to be able to have fun. No, I don’t want to live with constant shouting, screaming and fighting.

The best solution, therefore has to be one that matches up both needs, or as many as possible. Before you can identify the best solution though, you need to have identified your criteria. Answering the detailed questions gives you, your criteria. This is the first part of stage 3.

There’s no video yet, due to technical problems.

Tags: Stress Management Techniques //