Be grateful for Spring!
Stress for Success
April 2, 2013, Week 430
Here’s a stress truism: you find what you look for. If you’re an optimist you’ll look for and find evidence of how great the world is. If you’re a pessimist you’ll look for and find the opposite. If you believe most people are sexist or racist, you’ll find evidence of it, even where it doesn’t exist.
This has huge implications for your stress level since stress is in the mind of the beholder. If you believe that life treats you unfairly, you will find plenty of evidence --- even where none exists. Your life will be more stressful than others who have the exact same stress (if that’s even possible) but who focus much more on what they’re grateful for in their lives.
What are you grateful for? Here’s a few things on my list:
• Southwest Florida traffic will soon return to normal (largely) after a very, very busy tourist season. I’m also enormously grateful that the season was so successful for area businesses.
• Our fall/winter/early spring have been absolutely gorgeous. The weather could not have been better – for me at least.
• Spring’s renewal is visible everywhere. OK the allergens are also thick but the beauty of freshly re-leafed trees and plants is reassuring.
• The Great Recession seems to be receding more and more into our collective memory.
• Even though summer is not my favorite time of year, I’m looking forward to the awesome Florida rains to nourish my husband’s and my newly planted trees and hedge. You can almost see them growing daily.
When you’re grateful for a myriad of things, it puts your focus onto the positive. Don’t get me wrong, positive thinking alone is limited in reducing your stress. But true gratefulness does balance, therefore reduce, stress. Gratefulness helps you put things into perspective. Yeah, you may have a cranky co-worker to tolerate every day but it’s gorgeous outside!
In other words, your entire life doesn’t have to be brought down by stress. There is so much to be grateful for.
Plus, when you focus on what you appreciate, you bring more of that into your life. (Obviously this isn’t a 100% or we’d be living in spring-like weather year-round.) For example, if you appreciate your partner’s considerate nature you’re more likely to notice when he’s considerate and less likely to notice when he’s not.
To practice gratefulness:
• Daily, upon awakening or before falling asleep at night, review the little and big things for which you are genuinely grateful: from your good health to waking up to birds singing. It’s a wonderful way to start or end your day.
• Practice gratefulness before your family evening meal by saying what you appreciate today.
• When you complain about anything, consciously look for something about it for which you could be grateful. For example, if you catch a cold be grateful for not catching it while you had guests visiting. (If you jump to, “They gave me the cold,” you’re missing my point.)
• Thank someone who has done something you appreciated. Make it a genuine expression of how you feel.
To lighten your heart be grateful and count your blessings. The more grateful you are the more you’ll be aware of the good things you already have.
And stop and smell the roses on a daily basis. Appreciate the small things in life, the beautiful things around you, the people you love; all help to balance the stress in your life. Happy Spring!
Jacquelyn Ferguson, M. S. is an international speaker and a Stress and Wellness Coach. Order her book, Let Your Body Win: Stress Management Plain & Simple, at http://www.letyourbodywin.com/bookstore.html. Email her to request she speak to your organization at jferg8@aol.com.
