(By Loyd Ford) Radio is a stressful place to be these days. Sales are way down. Layoffs, furloughs and pay cuts are now the norm. In car listening dropped off the cliff. Here are ten tips to help you work through the stress.
- Monitor Your Stress, track it and rate your stress. Perhaps you can keep a journal of daily stresses to track and destabilize your stress over time by proving to yourself that what stresses you most falls short of hurting you.
- Consider first what you can control. When you make a list of your stress, focus most on the things you can control. This allows your focus to narrow and gives you more power to really positively impact your stress. Call it stress compression for 2020.
- Make a plan. You’ve heard this a hundred times. If you don’t have a plan for where you are going, you’ll end up somewhere else. You may end up living someone else’s stress if you don’t control your mind by actively planning actions that give you more of a feeling of control over situations and stresses of all kinds.
- Take action on what you can impact. You’ve heard that worrying doesn’t help a person, but acting often does. Once you make a plan, take action and be proactive on those things that can propel you forward to arrest your stresses.
- Help others with stress and encouraging others. It’s amazing what taking your attention off of your problems and reaching over to help another human (or team) can do for you. This is one of the most powerful tools for exciting your soul and lifting your spirits. If you feel joy from helping others, your mind isn’t stalled out on stressful thoughts.
- Consider the worst that could happen. Go ahead and free yourself to consider all the worst that could happen. Even if those things were to happen, you are likely to survive and could even thrive. So, live like you know that’s true. You can’t keep a good man (or woman) down. You will rise.
- Remember that most of your fears never come to pass. No kidding: The worst things we worry about almost never happen. This has been proven in study after study.
- Visualize calm. It’s amazing what putting your mind in a positive space can do for you, but this hack is really about visualizing the calm you want in your life. Visualize and you are psychologically a step closer to getting what you want.
- Breathe. This tactic is all about taking calm into your body. You can look up breathing technics, but essentially breathing deeply resets your mentality for some of the other things above that will set you on a path that gives you confidence, purpose and a feeling of power.
- Be kinder than you have to be. How can this be bad advice in any lane today? You simply don’t know what another person is carrying with them.
Stress is no one’s friend. The older you get, the more you may come to realize that we are never really in control, so focusing on doing our best is really powerful medicine. No one on Earth can be a better you than you. You have great value and perhaps the most important hack you can have on your side for stress relief is to make sure you are in the right place. If you’re not appreciated where you work, you could be in the wrong place. Past that, use this list and work to establish and respect the things in your life that make your quality of work and life better. That will minimize your stress and keep you productive even in today’s crazy world.
Loyd Ford consults radio stations, coaches personalities, and provides behavioral and strategic programming to radio with RPC. Reach him anytime. 864.448.4169 or [email protected].
