Grace Over Grind: Slaying Inner Demons to Relieve Stress & Improve Work-Life Balance

Are your thoughts helping you live to your highest potential or holding you back? The last time you were in a stressful situation, did your thoughts help you navigate through so you could get back to a state of calm and confidence? Or did your thoughts condemn you, pointing out how you're insufficient and unvalued, unloved?

[00:00:21] Were your thoughts magnifying the stress that you felt in the situation? Sometimes these thoughts and beliefs, you've had them from childhood, and you don't even notice them anymore. They're just such a part of the background noise that's in your head. You can shed these, though, and transform these into more self affirming thoughts.

[00:00:39] And it's not just through repetition of affirmations. Today I'm going to address some practical tips on how you can work with God on transforming these thoughts and beliefs to renew your mind. Let's slay some of these inner demons that are like roaring lions trying to devour you. Let's open up in prayer and then we'll get into the meat of today.

[00:01:02] Lord, thank you for bringing my dear friends to listen today. Please help them find the motivation, guidance, strategies, and tactics to reduce stress and improve work life harmony. We all have these inner naysayers, demons, and roaring lions that hold us back and keep us trapped from and prevent us from fulfilling the potential that you have for us.

[00:01:25] Just like Eve grabbed that apple and ended up having such a different life, these thoughts, these beliefs are holding us back. Help equip us with spiritual armor and weapons so that we can slay these. Help us recognize what's holding us back and where we are too focused on ourselves in this world. Open our eyes to see how through you we can find the calm, peace, balance, and harmony we desire.

[00:01:49] I pray all is well with every listener, healthy in body, renewed in mind, and strong in spirit. As they reduce stress and improve work life balance, may they know thy will and your love. In Jesus name, Amen.

In case if we haven't crossed paths before, I'm Sharon McCall with Whispering Fields Wellness. Today in Grace Over Grind, I'll discuss how to develop a plan to address internal stress triggers so you can relieve stress and improve work life balance.

[00:02:17] It's time to capture. challenge, and change what's going on inside your mind that's holding you back from having the life that you want. Stress recovery is about change, emotional and spiritual growth, and changing lifestyles so you can reduce your stress and improve work life harmony. Yet when it comes to change, the biggest obstacle most people face is themselves, and this is really in two different aspects.

[00:02:44] The first, Our ego and presumptions keep us from peace and health. As children, we bought into so many limiting beliefs and adopted automatic negative thoughts. Just as we were growing up, we didn't end up understanding really truly what was going on around us and didn't have the maturity to take a fully objective perspective.

[00:03:05] We created these safety measures when we faced what we thought of as children were adverse experiences. And so they've become. part of our natural blind spot. As we've grown up, we continue to observe this pattern and it reinforces these underlying beliefs and our thoughts and our experiences. And so they just become part of the way that life is.

[00:03:29] They're part of your belief system and your behaviors, because they've been going on as long as you can remember. So to overcome these obstacles, you first have to focus on growing in self awareness of what's preventing you from thriving and flourishing as God intends. Bringing these blind spots into clear view allows you to be able to identify where your defenses are, your demons.

[00:03:56] They are holding you back and preventing you from seeing yourself truly as you are and seeing yourself as God sees you, as who you truly are and the potential that you have, you're able to change. Now, moving into the second aspect of how people hold themselves back, our body, mind, and spirit are all currently conditioned to our current way of life.

[00:04:23] At the biochemical and cellular level, your physical systems are impacted by how you believe, think, feel, behave. And God designed us to be so efficient. There's so many things that run automatically or along conditioned pathways or habits. So any of those recurring patterns, any of those things that we've done with high frequency, it takes a lot to break that inertia.

[00:04:49] It's really, truly routed in our neural network. So, change requires breaking that inertia. It requires finding new pathways. So, even if you decide, and you've mentally, you're committed, your heart's in it, and you decide to regularly start training to do something new, it takes time still for the physical part to adapt to the new changes.

[00:05:16] Let's think about weight loss. So it requires so much more than just a decision, a desire, and a motivation to lose the weight. As you go through life, you have, with whatever you've been eating, and whatever your level of exercise is, you've trained yourselves to that level. So now as you start eating healthier, you start exercising more, thinking about how much your muscles complain when you start a new exercise routine.

[00:05:43] That is that physical inertia that you need to end up overcome, because your muscles change as you exercise more. Let's think about breaking an addiction. The body literally can crave what's bad for it just because it's gotten so used to the flood of these chemicals in the system and the way that the body responds to it.

[00:06:03] The brain starts creating distractions and excuses to try and slide back to what it considers the status quo. This is the examples of that internal inertia that exists inside of us as we're trying to make major changes. These fleshly desires and temptations will continue until enough of the cells heal or just get turned over through natural regeneration.

[00:06:26] Our cells are constantly replacing themselves. And so that's the same with when you're Reducing stress. In chronic stress, your body has adapted to this certain biochemical mixture that's going on throughout your body. And it needs to go through, in essence, a withdrawal period from these stress hormones and go through a renewal, get used to all of the good feeling hormones compared to the stress hormones.

[00:06:55] When you're chronically stressed, it takes a little bit of time to being able to get your cells and your biochemistry to adjust that new state, a new state of calm, confidence, happiness, and being relaxed. And also, the other piece of it is too, is when you're in chronic stress, the body defers natural repairs and maintenance because it's so focused just on survival.

[00:07:22] Whatever it needs to do for survival, that's what your body is focused on when you're stressed out. And so all of this deferred maintenance that hasn't been going on in your body. it's gonna take it a little bit of time to get it to optimal condition. And so that's why change can end up being hard. It's all of this neural and cellular conditioning that's happened with the way that we've been living before.

[00:07:48] Once you commit, And start following through with training and practice. It's all about long term consistency. It's not short term intensity. We'll go back to the example of going to the gym. Going to the gym once and working your tail off and to the point where like you're ready to collapse. You don't walk out of the gym suddenly with like huge muscles.

[00:08:09] It takes regularly going to the gym and being able to put the time and the effort to being able to to make the changes. This is not I can overnight thing. And if you think about it, what's happening physically is also needed then, spiritually, emotionally, so that we can being able to build ourselves, to reframe and renew ourselves, and to build a stronger relationship with God.

[00:08:42] Physical, mental, spiritual renewal, it all requires an extended period of time of commitment. God may grant you with that miracle and that magic wand that suddenly everything is so much easier for you, but the human side of it, our physical parts are still going to end up needing that time. additional work to keep us moving forward into and sustaining that life that we're working towards, that we know that we can end up having as we stand in God's grace.

[00:09:13] Once you commit and follow through with training and practice, change can occur. Perseverance isn't just about purpose, self control, motivation, momentum. It's about holding hands with Jesus and listening to Holy Spirit as you walk this journey together. It's having the loving support of others around you to help you stay.

[00:09:34] Stay focused on what it is that you want to achieve. Also, it's about surrender. God's will for you is always something beyond your imagination. We know his victory is assured. You may as well align your plans with what he has, with what he has in mind for you. That way you can thrive and flourish. Every time you give in to one of those inner voices, inner demons that's holding you back from that full potential, it's making you believe that lie that you are less than precious, that you are unloved, unvalued.

[00:10:10] It's holding you back from who you truly are and the life that you can live. And as you encounter times when in this world, those temptations, those fleshly desires, just the difficulties of things that are around you. When you're exhausted, hungry, feeling alone, or angry, and you can't move forward and you're weak, God is there, and he can make you strong and help you through.

[00:10:41] He will transform you and give you the strength if you let him. If you keep saying, I can do this on my own, I can do this, I can figure this out all by myself, you're going to keep banging your head against the same wall that you have been, leading to chronic stress, And this is why I love Tiny Habits, because it sets you up for that marathon and not the sprint.

[00:11:06] And with the changes, your whole being moves towards greater wellness. It's that pace of change that matches what's going on inside your body, inside you physically. That going for 1 percent better each day, it's not overwhelming. It doesn't get you stuck. You're able to Recognize and build that relationship with God, Christ, Holy Spirit, and with the support of others, being able to keep moving yourself forward into the life that you want.

[00:11:40] Less stress, more work life harmony. So let's dive in more on automatic thoughts and limiting beliefs that we talked about last time. After you uncover one of these, change doesn't occur just by making a decision or telling yourself. Don't do that no more. That's not going to end up making the changes that you want.

[00:12:03] All you're going to do is increase your frustration if you try that type of tactic, or if you just use affirmations to cover it all up. It doesn't address everything that's going on subconsciously. There is a process. for you to train and to practice on. And it begins with self awareness, prayer, and self evaluation.

[00:12:23] We talked a little bit about this last time. Really, it all comes down to asking Jesus, what do you see in me that I can't? Ask for his help, Holy Spirit, to guide you to rise above your opinion of yourself, and to see where these demons in these inner voices are holding you back. So with self awareness, you can begin to capture, challenge, and change what is holding you back.

[00:12:50] Also, you can begin to identify the stressors where your perception of a situation is not reflective of reality. Remember, we talked about fortune telling and mind reading last time. As you look at the patterns in your stress journal, you may have noticed that so much of work related stress, it's all about focusing on the outcomes that you don't want, all the reasons why you can't succeed, it's the things that you do or to prevent people from having a poor opinion of you, or that you're trying to control everything.

[00:13:28] But you can't. Does that pretty much summarize some of the patterns that you're seeing in that journal of what's causing you stress at work? So reducing the impact of any of these patterns of internal stressors, it's about accepting reality. non judgmentally and with compassion and recognizing where you have control.

[00:13:51] Let me share a situation from my career in manufacturing. One thing you should know, safety and quality are always number one. First rule, gotta follow. So we put a lot of processes and systems in place to ensure that we could keep thing, everyone safe and our consumers safe as well by having high quality product.

[00:14:13] Yet there are times when we ended up having major failures. And here's an example of one of these situations. I was early in my career as a leader, and we had a quality problem in the plant I was responsible for that was significantly impacting several business KPIs. I was leading a team of experts to figure out what the root cause was, and we had resources also assigned.

[00:14:36] To figure out how to mitigate the issue and make sure that we could get safe and good product out to the customers. I was totally stressed out mentally. I was working through all the catastrophic risks that end up could end up happening and everything that could go wrong and is part of our risk plan.

[00:14:56] I'd had resources and the team stretched out as much as possible to prevent these worst case scenarios from a personal standpoint. I kept telling myself that. Nothing I did was good enough, and that I couldn't manage, I was in this trap of imposter syndrome. I didn't believe that I could get the group to solve it, even though we had some of the company's best experts working on this.

[00:15:21] And it was driving me to work even harder and to get even more involved. And I was so worried that Despite my best efforts and the best efforts of the experts that we put on this team That I get fired because I couldn't lead the group to solve it. So I was totally freaked out and had this immense Catastrophe of what was happening going to happen in my personal life in my professional life to the consumers of the products the people on the team and it just I was so bound up in Terms of what was going on and I was You Because of all of this, I also wanted to make sure then that the leadership team, the people that we were reporting our results to, they only saw the team's efforts and my efforts in the best light.

[00:16:07] Sometimes I wasn't as timely as I needed to with a request because I was scared of what they would think of us. And that's it. Honestly, this issue was too big to micromanage, which would have been my natural inclination with this how stressed I was. So just ended up having a lot of tight controls and governance to maximize the amount of control I could have over the the team and the work that was being done.

[00:16:32] I listed through in that example a whole bunch of different factors of what was driving me to be stressed out, my internal belief systems. It was a challenging enough problem from a reality standpoint, but I was making it all worse in my head with all of these things that were going on for me personally and for the team.

[00:16:50] And so changing even one of these factors, it could have reduced my stress and started to change my perspective. At the time, I wasn't a believer in Christ and really wasn't reaching out to God all that much as it came to my work life. So if I was, I probably would have been constantly praying, but I wasn't there yet, so I didn't have any of that assistance.

[00:17:13] With taking all of this on, I got myself really close to the proverbial edge of crashing. But fortunately, I had some wonderful people around me. I had, I received some very well timed advice from a mentor, and he helped me to realize that, you know, truly, as an organization, we were all in this together.

[00:17:36] We were all doing everything we could to solve this problem and focusing on the things that are in our control. We didn't need to go work on all of these things that could go wrong that were outside of our control. And this just wasn't about me and my performance, and it was much bigger than the team and their performance.

[00:17:52] This was a big problem for the organization, and everybody was coming together on this. It was Actually when you step, when I look back, it was just amazing the amount of support that we got in this crisis and how well we all came together to work through it all. So the situation, don't get me wrong, it was still wildly difficult and challenging and high pressure, but getting that shift in perspective from my mentor really helped me reduce a lot of stress, almost like overnight, and it at least allowed me to start sleeping better, thinking clearer, getting out of that panic place.

[00:18:31] We were able to be so much more effective and I was able to end up feeling so much better. going through this. So it was a win win from that standpoint. So let's get into an exercise so that whatever situation that you have that's kind of like that, any of these big stress situations you're having at work, let's figure out how we can help you gain that perspective to help you reduce your stress enough so you can relieve a little bit of that pain that you're in right now.

[00:19:02] We've talked about stress journaling a couple of times, so hopefully you've had a chance to get that started. From your stress journal, What's a pattern of internal stressors that you find? Maybe it's a thought that you've been working on that with that four question Capture challenge change exercise from a couple of weeks ago.

[00:19:23] What do you think it is? Take a moment and just jot that down.

[00:19:32] Now for this exercise though I'm going to use an example from someone that I worked with. This person His stress came from when people that he delegated to, they didn't follow through, and it reinforced his tendency to micromanage others and to prevent another failure. Because he's like, too many people have not delivered, so no matter who you are, whether you've delivered on time or not, I'm going to make sure that you deliver.

[00:19:58] He was constantly micromanaging. And anytime somebody did not meet his expectations, he felt angry, and this caused resentment to build up in his interaction with anybody that failed to meet his expectations. He took their miss, their misses very personally, and it is a sign that they didn't respect him, and that their performance, and he really truly viewed that their performance reflected on him, and that his boss would then negatively impact on his review.

[00:20:27] Just a quick pause before I get into the exercise. There was a lot in this situation. If you were this person, what would you work on? And I think some of you are going to have some different answers than what he chose to. What underlying belief or beliefs do you think are hidden in this example?

[00:20:49] What we determined as we were working through this is that he felt that he wasn't valued, that people can't be trusted and are selfish and all that. only looking out for themselves. So in the case of one of the specific situations where his downline did not deliver on time, we started with the thought that he felt of, Julie does not respect me.

[00:21:14] He took it through the four questions and recognized that this was an example of mind reading. Remember those cognitive distortions that we went over last time? And when we looked at his tendency to micromanage, whenever he delegated to someone on his team, he noticed that he didn't do this with his peers whenever there was something that he'd asked one of them to do, or individuals higher in the organization.

[00:21:38] He was just trying to really exert this control over his downline. And in, honestly, he recognized that he was trying to control things that he really couldn't. He needed to let them do their work. It was their responsibility. It was what they were hired for. And as he was working through with this and on this for a little while, the Holy Spirit gave him this epiphany that his micromanagement actually stemmed from a lack of trust and respect for his downline.

[00:22:07] That mind reading when he thought that Julie doesn't respect me was actually he didn't respect her. And so he expected the same in return. Hmm. What are some of the things you're thinking about other people that are actually what you feel and think about them, but you're not quite ready to admit to yourself?

[00:22:33] Here is another type of journal exercise that you can use to come up with an effective action plan. It builds upon some of the exercises that you've seen in the prior weeks. So the first step is to being able to stop distorting reality. We're going to focus on those automatic negative thoughts. We want to capture, challenge, and change those.

[00:22:54] Last week we went through a couple of the common negative thought patterns. So, As we take a look at the example that we just had, the thought that we're going to end up working with is that Julie does not respect me. So as you take a look at this sample journal exercise, this is set up so that you can capture the and, that negative thought, and you want to categorize it based upon what we've learned about common cognitive distortions this last time.

[00:23:21] The captured thought was Julie does not respect me, and it is an example of mind reading. Then the next column, this is where you're going to challenge it. So last week I introduced four questions that can be used and to being able to make it pretty easy for you to go through. Here's a list of more comprehensive questions, um, to being able to determine if this thought is true, helpful, or good.

[00:23:45] The part that's new is how does this thought impact Or how would I act differently toward others if I didn't have that thought? So that's where you challenge it. So now moving into the right column, this is where you're going to change it. So you're going to end up turning this into a Holy Spirit truth.

[00:24:06] The easiest way is you just take the opposite of whatever you were thinking and then provide evidence of this. So the opposite of this statement is Julie respects me. And what evidence do you have of this statement? She has professional interactions with me. She's not rude. So maybe the truth is you don't know.

[00:24:29] She may or may not respect you based upon her behaviors. So the other things you want to look into are biblical references, sitting on it with prayer and meditation to see what the Holy Spirit gives you. And then once you've kind of put these different things together, you want to being able to rephrase that thought in a way that is aligned with Holy Spirit. You want to make sure that you are seeing through that deception, that initial negative thought, to getting clarity on what that truth is. And then from there, we can turn it into an action plan. So we're going to go back to one of the tools that we talked about a couple weeks ago, that action plan for improvement.

[00:25:10] Once you've identified that new thought that you want to have, you need to put it into action. Nothing will happen if you just write it down and put together a pretty little sentence about, Julie respects me. It's not going to change anything. You need to translate it into an action plan and being able to reinforce it through training and practice.

[00:25:29] There's a handful of different ways that that can work. We were able to come up with for him to put together an action plan. So he had, it just recently happened. So he decided to go and talk to Julie and find out why she was late on the assignment and figure out what needs to be done to make sure that this happens differently in the future.

[00:25:49] He'd also had decided that to make sure that the next time that he delegates to Julie that he would be a little bit more proactive about it and kind of build up some communication and then in general, cause he, as he was realizing and it was dawning on him that, you know, honestly, he didn't really truly respect his team, um, that he needed to use more gratitude to being able to find that respect for them.

[00:26:11] He included an end of date gratitude practice. So kind of as you go through this progressively. You want to identify what is that next action so that you can end up taking advantage of renewing your mind through the benefit of neuroplasticity. The more that you practice your new behavior, your new thought, the more you reinforce it.

[00:26:35] That's what it becomes. And whenever it becomes tough, you just reach back out to Jesus, God, Holy Spirit, and ask for that assistance being able to push, to get you through to the next side. So the other type of action plan that you can end up doing goes back to what we had talked about previously, I guess about a month ago in regards to action plans, where we'd had the four different questions to ask.

[00:26:57] Just to refresh your memory, that's what do you need to do in your routines to build resilience? What can you do to avoid the trigger? How can you minimize stress when a trigger occurs? And how can you reduce stress after you're triggered? So in this situation, delegation to his downline was the trigger.

[00:27:16] That was the pattern that he'd identified. And he realized that it triggered some of his protective behaviors. So he still needs to delegate. He can't get away from it. So he can't, really avoid it. He just needs to end up having a better strategy to being, to handle delegation. So what can he do before and after a task is delegated?

[00:27:37] And so he came up with a couple of different things to include in his action plan so that he can become more effective at delegating and reduce that tendency to micromanage. So in summary, this is how you go from capturing a negative thought, challenging it, changing it, and turning it into an action plan.

[00:28:01] This all starts though with that self awareness, being able to be clear on what your pattern of stressors are, and building up that self awareness, where are those blind spots, where are those things that are holding me up, making me feel so stressed about things at work, so that you can being able to turn that into action.

[00:28:21] This was a really quick high level run on these exercises. If you have any questions, do reach out to Sharon@whisperingfieldswellness.com. I welcome any discussion on these. I'm also available in the Facebook group as well, if you'd like to end up bringing the discussion there. So then what was the outcome for this individual after they had done all of this work?

[00:28:47] In time, as he practiced these things and reinforced the techniques, He was able to reduce his stress, become a much more effective delegator. Since he wasn't micromanaging all the time, it meant that he had time that he could free up for other interests and to do more with his life than just to be stressed out about work.

[00:29:08] Most of his micromanaging had happened after hours, sending emails after dinner to chase on the things he hadn't had time to do during the day. So this really did have a big impact on his life at home. So he could end up having a better quality of time with his family in the evening instead of being focused on what everybody else was doing.

[00:29:28] And truly, they were doing their job. And that's what he learned over time, is that they were more effective, more productive, his team got better results. As he backed off on the micromanagement and people were more comfortable asking for help and clarification and coming to him So they wouldn't wait until the 11th hour to come to him if there was an issue So, a great outcome for him, just from a couple of simple techniques.

[00:29:58] It did take a lot of mining, a lot of prayer, but he was able to effectively make the changes he desired. Will you commit to trying this out this week? Even a small part of this exercise can make a significant difference in your mindset. I know it will end up having an improved effect on you. on your stress.

[00:30:19] In next week's episode, we go back to our wellness toolbox, mainly focusing on physical well being. Sometimes that's a little bit easier to tackle than all of this mental well being that we've been covering over the last few weeks. To close us out, so going back to what I covered earlier, when we want to change, sometimes our biggest obstacle is ourselves, our ego and presumptions and our conditioning.

[00:30:44] It takes slow and steady training and practice to make effective changes. By identifying what's holding you back, that inner naysayer, that demon, that devouring lion, that's the first step. That's identifying what's holding you back. Uncovering the deception so you can slay it. You want to capture, challenge, change, and take action.

[00:31:09] Accepting reality non judgmentally and with compassion and recognizing where you have control. This is how you reduce stress and improve work life harmony. Whenever you can't move forward or you get stuck on your goals, God can help you and he will if you let him and you reach out to him. Just let him in your life.

[00:31:31] Doing the work of stress recovery, it brings you relief from stress. and improved work life harmony. You'll be able to thrive and flourish as God intends for you. I know this was a very high level run through. Click the link to download my journal worksheets to help you cultivate greater self awareness.

[00:31:50] There's more than just the tools shared today included in this download. Or, if you want to work with me so you can put these stress recovery tools together better and go deeper. Click the services link below. As a stress recovery coach, I'm here to help you explore more of what underlies your stress and imbalance and ensure that you have the motivation and accountability to make the changes you desire in your life. I can come alongside to support and encourage you and share a few strategies and tools to help you with mindset, lifestyle, and diet changes. I know you can reduce stress and improve your work life harmony.

I'll see you next episode. Have a blessed day!