Stress free living is having an open, honest dialogue with myself helps me to communicate with others.

When you  communicate effectively with others you’re able to be true to yourself.

Open honest dialogue allows you to have a deeper level of communication because you’re fully aware of your thoughts and feelings. You know what you want to say because you have thought it through and talked realistically and honestly with yourself first.

Respect and value your ability to communicate your inner thoughts effectively.  You can do this when you practice what you say before you say it.

Coming to a full understanding of yourself allows you to think through any frustrations and realize how your words may affect others.

Vent frustrations, share excitement, and be prepared for conversations by first reflecting on your own needs. Often you’ll find that what you really want to say is very different from the way you first felt about the situation.

Be open and honest with yourself first, and you’ll be able to convey your feelings with others with confidence. You’ll find your relationships are stronger because you first had a conversation with you.

When you’re feeling frustrated prepare for communication by first talking with yourself.  Choose to take the time to vent any frustrations and sift through unnecessary dialogue in your own conversation before you have it with others.

Self-Reflection Questions:

1. Have you thought through what you want to communicate?

2. Have you had the conversation with yourself first?

3. How did the conversation with yourself lead to a better communication experience?

Stress Free Living De-Stressology Lesson – Think Positive

Think Positive- Positive thoughts lead to positive results. Surround yourself with positive energy and this energetic vibe will be released into your lifestyle and daily habits.

Feel do and be the good vibe.

Stress Free Living – Get Rid Of The Need to Create Obstacles In Your Life

Obstacles create roadblocks. My time is precious to me. I have a full and active life with many things to do. I enjoy accomplishments, and feeling strong and empowered. I establish these characteristics because I choose not to create obstacles in my life. I am firm with my goals so I can accomplish all my  tasks without distraction.

Set yourself up for success, by staying ahead of the game.  Should something unexpected come up, be  prepared to rearrange your schedule at the drop of the hat.  Your more successful when you follow your plans and avoid the procrastination.

Creating roadblocks or obstacles for yourself through procrastination is self-defeating unhealthy behavior. Letting go of negative choices in life enables you to move forward positively and productively. Be strong because it keeps the road clear ahead of you.  You can move forward with confidence and self-assurance.

Just for today, stay focused on what is ahead of you and let go of any obstacles or chaos in your life. Accept your success and strengths, and enjoy moving forward with your head held high.

Stress Free Living – Boost Your Self-Esteem by Accepting Yourself

If you’re like most people you may not even recognize when those negative emotions happen especially when they happen all the time.  Maybe you’ve never been able to find positive way to deal with negative feelings. You might even deny it’s happening and use food, cigarettes, or alcohol to numb your feelings.  But can this lead to a positive outcome?  No.

The first thing to realize is that while you can’t  always control what happens to you, you can certainly control your response to what happens to you. Remaining to be calm and managing your feeling is a skill you can learn. The choice to learn is strictly yours.   Past events control your feeling, your feeling determine your action, lack of action, wrong or right actions.
Feeling self confident or feeling  low self esteem both trigger responses.  One positive the other negative.  Emotions are important because they help us deal with different situations in different ways.
Four core emotions that effects everyone anger, sadness, fear and joy. If you understand what your reactions are and work on moderating and managing, you will feel more in control of yourself and more confident of handling various situations.
More on these emotions another day.  Just remember it’s natural to accept you have these emotions sometime feeling more then one at a time.  But controlling them means first and foremost accepting yourself.

Stress Free Living – The Power of Motivation

Motivation is defined by Wikipedia as s the set of reasons that cause you  to engage in a particular behavior. Motivation may be rooted in the basic need to minimize physical pain and maximize pleasure.  Motivation is what keeps us going.  It causes some to  succeed and others to fail  The elements of motivation is dynamic and include simplicity, attitude, the people you hang around, the way you think, knowing yourself, helping other people and so much more.

Elements of motivations:
Keeping things simple.  It would be difficult to get or stay motivated in an environment that’s cluttered and uninviting.  Keeping your space clear helps to keep your mind clear and a opens the door for motivation.

Keep good company.  Much of what motivate you or fails to motivates you can be directly correlated with the company you keep.  Have you ever noticed that when you’re in the company of a highly motivated individual you become more motivated.  On the other side of that coin when you’re with someone who is down depressed and negative you begin to feel the same way.

Keep Learning.  Learning promotes a healthy brain. A healthy brain is a motivated brain.  Learn something new every day.  You’ll feel excited about what you’ve learned and the desire to put it into action is likely response.  Learning something new means learning something positive.  Learning something positive creates positive motivation and an all around good feeling.

Stress Free Living – Using Self Talk To Conquer Fear

Fear of failure, fear of change, even fear of success can hold you back from creating a   life by design.  Uncertainty and doubt can and will erode your  self confidence and lower your  self esteem.  The one thing in life you can be sure of,  is we all have fear.  Being afraid is a normal part of living but letting fear hold the key to your happiness will undoubtedly affect your joy for living.

The first step to eliminating fear is identifying the cause. Self talk is ineffective unless you understand the root of the problem. When fear overrules your life it effects both your   mind and body.

We talk to ourselves all day every day.  Except most of the time we say negative things to ourselves.
“Nobody likes me”
“I can’t get anything right”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me”
“I’m so dumb”
Does any of this sound familiar?
Self-talk is more then just positive thinking and positive talk.  Thinking about something and never taking action is just thinking.  Yes you’ll feel better but it will have a limited impact on your life unless you take that thinking and add a quotient of action.

So when you look at it that way, self-talk at least effective self-talk, is action talk.  You can say to yourself all day everyday for a year “I’m successful”  but if there’s no action behind the words it’s pretty meaningless.

Do not let fear control your life. Self-talk will help you to do anything you want when your use positive thinking. Some people are afraid to climb over a fence. To overcome this fear of going over the fence, tell yourself you can do it. Face it and force yourself to go over the fence to the other side. Overcoming a fear systematically and self-talk your way through each step will help you to accomplish this fear. Think positive you can and will do it to succeed.

The key is to talk small steps every day.  When a negative thought comes into your mind reverse it with something positive.  And most importantly take an action step to reinforce the positive self-talk.

You are in control of your own desitiny, by the actions you take each and every day.  Be self-aware, and  self-confident to improve your self-esteem.

Stress Free Living – Move It Or Lose It

If you’ve ever tried to lose weight you know the mantra eat less and exercise more.  This same prescriptions can help you decrease the effects of stress in your life.  Here are a few helpful tips:

1. Aim for 30 minutes of exercise at least three days a week.  This includes simple steps and changes in your lifestyle.  Take the steps in a building instead of the stairs. Park further away from your office or the store.  If you have steps in your home make the trip up and down the stairs twice instead of once.  You’d be surprise how much more activity you can get by simple changes in your lifestyle.
2. Stretch – stretching can keep your muscles feeling relaxed and helps to relieve stress.
3. Accept the aging process- many people have trouble coming to terms with their body’s changes as they age.  Remember aging is a natural process.  But that doesn’t mean you don’t do things that will make yourself feel good and be happy. Your hair may turn grey but that doesn’t mean your muscles have to turn to flab.
4. Don’t just drink water, enjoy water.  It’s important to drink 8 – 10 eight ounces of water each day.  It doesn’t have to be a chore.  Put a slice of lemon or a few strawberry’s in your water it will not only be fun to look at but add a little flavor. 
5. Hide or throw away the scaleif you tend to weight yourself too often.  A scale can be an ingredient for disaster when it comes to self improvement and loosing weight.  The scale doesn’t tell all.  You can gain muscle mass and loose body fat although the scale won’t move because muscle weights more then fat you will be doing exactly what needs to be done and more. 

If  you liked these tips or want additional information let me know in the comment section below.

Stress Free Living with 10 Daily Management Tips

Time management isn’t a seminar you attend or a book you read. Time management is a process that must be engaged every day to be effective. Some of the most frustrated, disorganized people in any office are the ones with the most time management books on their shelves.

It’s not that these books were ineffective. Rather in their frantic workday, these people “didn’t have time” to read the time management books! In the interest of keeping it simple, these tips could set you on the way to getting serious about time management as you see the value unfold:

1. Get a day planner and use it faithfully. No more sticky notes with reminders and appointments scattered around your desk, car and refrigerator at home. Keep all appointments and reminder in just one place, your day planner.
2. Create a daily “to do” list. If you do this on your computer, you can easily move around items as you prioritize the day. If on paper, you can code the items with numbers or letters for: Urgent, Need to Do Today, Can Do This Week.
3. Read your To-Do list first thing in the morning. Don’t touch newspaper, open email or answer the phone until you see the road map for your day.
4. Review your To-Do list at mid-day and end of day to see what was accomplished and what remains to be completed.
5. At the end of the day, transfer the items remaining to tomorrow’s or Monday’s list. If possible, remove any items that are not significant.
6. Delegate as much as possible to an assistant, colleague or associate. If you work independently, consider hiring a Virtual Assistant for a few hours per week. The price is right and there’s no obligation as with hiring an employee. This is particularly effective if you travel or spend much time outside the office.
7. Attend only the meetings that are absolutely necessary to do your job. Avoid any meetings that you can. Unless a meeting is run well with an agenda, there is usually wasted time chatting.
8. Close your door when you are focusing on a task or put up a sign on your cubicle asking people to stop by later when you are finished with this work.
9. Let voice mail answer your phone while you are focusing on an important task.
10. Say “no” as often as possible when you have reached your work limits. That means saying no to overtime or taking work home. When you are mentally or physically exhausted you don’t do your best work and you need to say so.

It’s easy to stay on track with time management once you commit to changing your daily habits. Just put the above tips into action and you should see more free time throughout your day.

Stress Free Living – Wellness Tip

There’s no better place to begin self-improvement than with your health. After all, health is one of the most important aspects of life. Taking care of your health is the first step on the road to self-improvement.

1. Eat breakfast- start the day off right with a quick morning breakfast. Fruit and yoghurt, granola and milk or whole-wheat toast and peanut butter will ensure you start on the right foot.
2. Relax in the morning- get up a couple minutes early and savour that extra time. Enjoy a loving cup of coffee while watching the sun rise; take a few extra minutes to yourself in the shower; or go for a fast brisk walk around the block to get your heart pumping. There’s nothing worse than starting your day in a rush. A few minutes in the morning can make a world of difference.
3. Exercise with a friend- Exercise releases endorphins, which can lift your sprit as well as help you maintain a healthy weight. However, sometimes it can be hard to get out of bed and actually hit the gym. Combining your friendly chatter with exercise can make exercise much more fun. Working out with a friend, whether this is a morning stroll, a spin class, an evening run or anything else, can keep you motivated and revved for the rest of the day.

Stress Free Living – 7 Signs You’re Experiencing Time Management Stress

Living stress free requires time management skills.  The most difficult part of time management is to resolve that you actually do want to manage your time. In life, you quickly learn that your days fill up incredibility fast. You find yourself hurried and rushing to do all that you have on your to-do list. Constantly putting out fires, dealing with last minute crisis, and taking care of the unending details leave you little spare time for anything else and quite frankly exhausted and unable to think clearly.

If you never seem to have enough time to get anything finished you might feel constant, chronic stress. Have you ever seem to notice an hour might fly by like it’s five minutes or crawl by like it’s three hours. Sometimes your workday is over in a flash, and sometimes it feels like 5:00 P.M. when it’s only 11:00 A.M.

Fortunately, managing your time more effectively is something you can learn. Maybe you don’t experience time-related stress. Let’s find out. Take a look at the following list and check off what seems to describe you.

1. I feel that I don’t have enough time for myself, my family or my friends
2. I feel I waste too much time
3. I find myself always rushing
4. I find I don’t have the time to do the things I really enjoy
5. I find I frequently miss deadlines or late for appointments
6. I find I procrastinate too frequently
7. I virtually never work with some type of priority or to-do list

Stress Free Living- 7 Signaling You’re Experiencing Time Stress

Checking off one or two items on this list indicates your time management skills require a tune up. If your time is organized and you are able to devote your full concentration to one task at a time, times seems to expand in quantity and quality. You get something finished. You feel a sense of satisfaction. The time won’t creep by, like it does when your enduring something painful.

Learning how to manage time efficiently takes some practice, but if you have a plan, time management is easy.

1. Begin Small
2. Identify your time management issues
3. Concentrate on your top three
4. Just say no
5. Let it go

You can begin living stress free today.

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