Stress got you down? Discover how the right shower can strengthen your resilience!

True strength is not in avoiding storms, but in learning how to sail through them.

When you’re facing big challenges, there are two ways to deal with them

3. change the root cause

4. change your response to them

This post is about number two.  There is nothing wrong with the first approach and it is often entirely appropriate e.g.  if you’re in an abusive situation, you need to remove yourself or stop the abuser.

In truth, both approaches work in tandem.

Sometimes, though, you cannot change the external stressor – but you can change yourself.

Looking firm, unbothered and determined.

The bad news is, you may continue to feel uncomfortable.

The good news is: feeling uncomfortable won’t matter as much. 

Now, there are a lot of people online, telling everyone else to be “comfortable with being uncomfortable”.

But they don’t tell you how.  And they don’t seem to do it themselves.

I have a simple solution.

Practice.  Practise being uncomfortable and then soothing yourself.

But choose situations where the outcome, if you fail will be ‘un-catastrophic’. [link to optimism blog – when to be optimistic and when not to].

Some people call this exposure therapy.

Find a situation in which you're uncomfortable and practise soothing yourself.  But, initially anyway, don’t use a situation from which you can’t recover.

Bitter to better situations.

The cold shower is the one I probably use most because:

a. it’s quick

b. it’s available

c. you can do it every day

d.  it’s really, really uncomfortable, but it doesn’t actually cause you any harm

I get into a cold shower (or a stream or the ocean if it’s available), full-bore, and try to control my breath and then do some cognitive tasks like adding up numbers or spelling a word.

While I highly recommend it. I have to warn you it’s also really s***.

It’s always uncomfortable.

But it has helped me keep calm in the face of stressors.

I’m not expecting you will start having cold showers - but consider how you can begin practising managing stressors better - and start with minor situations such as somebody taking your car parking spot, the checkout person putting the soft vegetables at the bottom of your shopping bag or an owner not picking up the dog’s poo.

What are you going to pick today that would normally trigger you (in a minor way) that you can practice managing your response?

Or get onto the waiting list to hear about early bird offers for “The Calmest Person Wins: How to have difficult conversations and handle challenging situations. Effectively”

#CalmestPersonWins #EmotionalIntelligence #Resilience #CrisPopp