Grace Over Grind: How You Define Success Can Make it Harder to Relieve Stress & Improve Work-Life Harmony

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Studies routinely find that the greatest source of stress that people experience is related to occupational and financial well-being. So what's your satisfaction with these areas of your life? Are you in search of enough or content? So many people are looking for enough.

The career in financial security to have enough money for the future, for the retirement, enough praise and recognition for being responsible and hard-working, enough success at work to be picked over the competition for the next promotion or high visibility project, enough social success to be respected in the community to keep up with the Joneses, enough financial blessing to have a large house and yard and fancy vacations or name brand clothing.

Any of those could be what you define as the next milestone that you're chasing after. It may end up coming up to you as my family and I will be happy when this next milestone occurs and then the next and the next and you're constantly chasing happiness and being stressed out that you've not yet achieved whatever is that shiny object that you're going after. So I just ask you, how much is the quest for enough leading to keeping overly busy at work, seeing everything is work-related, proving yourself by working harder and longer hours, worrying about work all the time, being controlling to ensure your success, neglecting your health, relationships and spirituality so you can get ahead at work and financially? So is this quest for enough at the root of the imbalance that you feel between work and the rest of your life? Has this hectic busy pace left you wondering, is this all that there is and how my life needs to be? Let's start with prayer.

Lord, thank you for bringing my dear friends to listen today. Modern society wants us to define success based on career and financial outcomes. But that's not the only way. That's not your way. Help us overcome the fears of scarcity holding us back from embracing your view of a successful life. Let us praise the abundance and blessings you've shown us already and see how we can reduce stress by stopping the chase for enough and relaxing into your grace with surrender and trust.

I pray that you can help every listener achieve their goals to be healthy in body, renewed in mind, and strong in spirit. As they reduce stress and improve work-life balance, may they know your will and your love. In Jesus's name, amen.

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Hi, I'm Sharon McCall with Whispering Fields Wellness. When I was in my corporate career, I've been where you are. A lot of stress, yet very high job and career satisfaction.

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And usually I really like the company I worked for. The few times I changed companies, it took an enormous amount of consideration and personal reasons for change. Through all of these different assignments, work was often consistently and constantly in my thoughts.

The only friendships I had were through work. So even friendly get-togethers, they often sounded more like work-sponsored happy hour than just friends coming together to enjoy a little bit of time. Even though my work was high pressure and stressful, I was deeply committed to my career goals and always trying to ensure that I had enough for my loved ones so I could avoid the soup kitchen lines when we're in our 70s and 80s.

Even though I was always worried about the what if, my only financial issues were what I jokingly called my champagne problems. What is the best long-term investment? Diversifying IRAs, 401ks, flipping, renting, selling investment properties. Not serious concerns.

These were all, like I said, I recognized that they were champagne problems, but they were still causing me no end of stress as I tried to avoid this worst case scenario of a soup kitchen when I was older. Work was my life for such a long time, I just didn't even notice how imbalanced I was. Once I figured this out and realized that I needed to improve my work-life balance and to reduce my stress, it was a little hard.

I didn't know how to approach it without sacrificing the career success that I had. I really truly thought that the hours that I worked was tied directly to my career success. Once I realized that they weren't and I could still be successful, be less stressed, and have more work-life balance, more time at home, it just completely changed everything for me.

This is why I'm so passionate about stress recovery coaching. It makes things so much better for you, your family, your loved ones, your downline, the people that you work with. I want to make sure that you have an easier path to reduce stress and improve work-life balance than I did.

Today I'm going to talk about the wellness toolbox topics of financial and occupational well-being. These wellness toolbox episodes help you define for yourself what work-life balance really is and identify some elements for you in your stress management plan. Today's really geared around journaling and introspection on your relationship with work.

I believe you won't be able to improve work-life balance without truly understanding why work has become such a major stronghold for you. It can be hard to shift as life changes and work now has to become a second priority or maybe an equal priority to something else that is an increasing priority in your life. So let's say your child's getting older.

They're asking for more of your time. You want to be there to help them with their homework. So some of these types of events really bring about significant changes in the way that you view work and the relationship with work that you have.

So on this slide you'll find the distinction between burnout and stress. There are two clear definitions from this and I think it's important as we talk about occupational well-being to be clear on which side of the spectrum that you find yourself upon. So read through these and I'm going to ask a couple of questions to help you identify where you are.

Both of these occur when there's a lot of pressure and tension at work. I often find that the primary distinction between stress and burnout is engagement and satisfaction. Motivation drops with burnout but with stress you can still feel fulfilled by your career choices.

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You're still highly engaged, feeling enriched, and driven even though you are exhausted. Whereas in burnout you're asking yourself what's the point and why bother? Your motivation is so low and so your exhaustion is driven by two different factors depending on whether you're stressed or you're burned out. So to help you go deeper into this idea I have a handful of questions for you.

Please bring out a sheet of paper and pen and jot down some of your notes and feel free to pause with each question to give yourself a moment to write things down. So the first one, what do you feel Sunday night or Monday morning as you contemplate going back to work? There was one of my key role changes. I just felt ill Sunday night as I was contemplating going to work the next day.

That was the key to me to finally changing roles. I think that was the only time I did that because I realized the role was not suiting me and I needed to find something else. So going into the next question, so what makes you motivated to go into work? Is your career a means of a paycheck, a standard of living, or does it have greater meaning? When you look at your career does it align with your life goals or your greater life purpose? How do you serve others in your current career or role? As a Christian this idea of service may be very important to you and something that you hold dear.

So hopefully those questions give you a better idea on where on the spectrum between burnout and stress that you fall. When you're so busy reaching for the future to have enough or the under the self-imposed pressure of not being enough, it's really key to understand where you are because the resolutions are different on these. Burnout, so often the resolution is a different role or organization or some other shift in lifestyle that restores motivation, something that infuses meaning and hope.

Maybe it's you stay in the same role and you can find your motivation because you're reframing it. I've done this before when I thought that the organization and the role wasn't right for me and then I sat back and I reframed it so that I found greater motivation. So maybe that's an activity that you can do to help reduce the stress that you feel because so much of that stress is just really coming that you're no longer motivated to to do the work.

Whereas when you're looking at chronic stress the resolution is lies more in changing the view of the work situations and your personal relationship with work. Both burnout and stress they benefit by resilience building and basic stress relief, calming exercises to soothe and calm. So with today's discussion of occupational well-being I find that this distinction between stress and burnout is really important.

Many of you are stressed yet with have high career satisfaction so need to look further than motivation and purpose. Whereas if you're burned out you just need to deep dive more into motivation and purpose and that should get you to resolution on what you're facing. And stress becomes really dangerous long term when it interferes with your ability to live a normal life for an extended period of time.

This is why everybody's so concerned about how stress fuels inflammation and disease. Burnout's not the same thing. You may just be unmotivated but stress it can have real ramifications on your life long term.

So that's the first thing that we're going to talk about today in regards to financial and occupational well-being. Moving into the next topic, success. So what measurements do you use to assess success in your life? Let's say that three times fast. Assess your success, assess your success, assess your success. What does success success mean to you? Is it the bigger house, the large bank accounts, fancy vacations, brand label clothing, shoes? I touched on a number of these different types of things earlier in the discussion identifying what enough means. Some people that I've met felt that success is really based on if the career sufficiently supports having a fulfilling life outside of work.

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At different stages in my life success had different meanings and it may be the same for you. I've also realized that your definition of success it gets really strongly into your view of scarcity and abundance. So we're going to run through a couple of questions just like we did in the last one.

So grab that pen and paper and let's do some journaling again. So how aligned is your career to with who you are as a spiritual being as a Christian? How does it fit with your values? How are you acting upon God's purpose and plan for you? Does your work offer personal satisfaction and stimulation and allow you to contribute your talents, gifts, and knowledge? How can you reclaim more of your personal power? How do you serve and solve problems that impact other people? So instead of just thinking about the company's bottom line, how are you serving other people inside the organization, your customers, your clients, anybody that you're interacting with? How do you have fun at work? Hopefully these give you a few more ideas of digging into where your strengths are and where you're connecting with work because these are ways to help alleviate some of that stress as you're looking to define success based upon satisfaction and stimulation and enjoyment, impact to others, having fun versus having a definition of success that's based upon material things or bank accounts. As I was researching this topic over the years, I found a biblical view of success that I'd like to share.

It's about following your personal truth each day, not a delivery of outcomes. To stay with this, I do recognize that sometimes I have challenges with this myself. I get so hung up in the outcomes of what I want to have happen versus staying centered in that personal truth of each day.

I think this is one of those things that you can do as you're growing as a Christian, to being able to sit in that space of personal truth in that relationship with God. So using this approach for reframing, is there a way to remove the fear of failure or feelings of powerlessness or any self-doubt you have in your abilities that might be contributing to your stress? So if you're in that personal truth, how does that empower you and reduce the perception that things are hard, that things are difficult, that you can't, because that's really what stress is. It's all of those beliefs that are holding you back from being able to sit in God's power.

All of these different things, the fear of failure, powerlessness, self-doubt, these are ways that we cope with the pain of having lost our sense of being and not feeling good enough in who we are, that we need to go and chase our worth outside in outcomes. And so overscheduling our lives with activities, with this pursuit of other things, it's how we run from ourselves. We keep busy to blot out our feelings and to feel and that our worth is reflected in all of these outcomes, all of these things that we bring in.

Our relationships are defined less by that connection and more by what do we do and give to others. This is what I find is at the root of so much chronic stress. It's that tension in your being and that recognition of that self-worth.

As we move into the third topic today, how does this view of success influence how you define work-life balance? How does your job inform your identity? What is a more empowering story to tell about your career? So as you sit in your personal truth, as you stay connected with God and you take a look at all the gifts that you've been given in your life, all the blessings and the ways that you're able to serve others, how can that help you tell a more empowering story, a different view of the work that you do? Let me share a story because this for me, as I recast this story and I reframe my mindset, it helped me to reduce the stress that I was feeling in the specific roles. So on this particular role, I was so frustrated because my boss said my contributions filled in the cracks. It felt like a throwaway comment and I was so mad.

He truly meant it as a compliment and it took me a long time to get there because he repeated it a couple times. But personally, I felt devalued. It caused so much tension in my relationship with my boss and I started to take on even more projects to prove that I had greater value than just filling in the cracks.

And this increased the stress and the pressure that I put on myself because I couldn't take the way that he was describing the value I added to the organization. So spending a lot of time down at the beach and a lot of journaling and rethinking, do I need to change my job? Do I need to go apply for a different position in the company? What do I need to do? I realized that I just needed to reframe and reclaim filling the cracks. And so I took the viewpoint that as a process engineer, that I was kind of like public safety and fixing the sidewalks and roadways, fixing those trip hazards of when the sidewalk had split apart or that it was the root was breaking it or filling in potholes or things were really starting to fall apart.

Because honestly, that was really, truly what I did as a process engineer. When things were broken, I'd get called and I needed to go and fix them and to make sure that things didn't get worse. And as I was able to adopt that public safety view, I recognized that there was actually a freedom that came from being from this.

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I was able to identify the hazards on my own. Nobody was telling me where the cracks were. Nobody was telling me where the potholes were that needed to get done.

It was up to me to find them. So having the freedom to go out and identify what organizational pain points, inefficient processes, productivity issues were going on, listening to the people on the floor and being an advocate for them to get long-standing problems addressed. I was able to put this all together into a business justification in regards to how to solve these problems, which would then benefit other people, benefit the people that were also purchasing our products because we were able to make them more efficiently.

And so it helped me take that attitude of service, that whole public safety viewpoint, where I could focus just on the benefits of those issues. So I was really proud then to be the fill-in-the-cracks girl because I was able to identify the freedom that came with that and own and re-empower that for myself. So what's an empowering story that you can tell yourself about your career to help you feel greater purpose, to put things in perspective so there's a lot less self-imposed pressure, so that you're not chasing impossible standards for perfectionism, so that you're not chasing whatever is that next thing that's just over the hill that's preventing you from being content and feeling like you don't have enough.

So getting into the exercise for today, we're going to pull all of these different questions and the answers that you wrote down together so that you've got something that makes sense and can help you with any changes that you want to make in your life so you can reduce stress and improve work-life balance. So we're going to go through another identity exercise. This is recognize God's plans for you.

So when you start with your identity in Christ, what does it mean for you to flourish and thrive, to be successful? Who do you want to be related to the goals that you have, to have and be enough? God's word gives us so many inspiring ways to frame our lives as God calls us closer to him. So what you want to do in this part is to find a Bible verse that really resonates with you and the changes that you want in your life as it comes to work-life harmony and success. With this biblical grounding, it gives you that focus that's so much stronger and more powerful than just focusing on the outcomes.

Having this completely God-powered instead of will-powered driven, it gives you that clear focus and direction for the changes. So a couple of examples of things that I've pulled out or had other people work with. Precious and beloved child of God.

That's my particular favorite. A godly parent and pride of your children. Do everything with love.

Be a loving partner with a marriage held in honor above all. A family that loves each other deeply. Bless and honor your parents.

Find satisfaction and toil and happiness in life. That's a very work-life balance-y one that someone's used very successfully. So just flip through the Bible or using an internet tool.

Figure out what is that right and inspiring verse that really holds for you and ties to your Christian identity and all the goals that you have. What is that plan that God has for you that only you can do in your life as part of his bigger plan? So once you've got that statement, that gives you that true north, that navigating point for anything that you need to do. So whenever you're stuck in priorities, come back to this statement and then identify does working late, missing my child's game, skipping being so tired that I can't do date night.

It helps you to prioritize these. You get an entire different perspective every time you come back to this identity and ask, what is the right behavior that I need to do? And you pray with God and ask him for his guidance and his strength to help you do the right thing in this moment as you're seeking to improve, to take the right action whenever you're under so much stress. So the second part of this then, once you've got that identity statement, we want to build out this vision of thriving and flourishing.

What does work-life balance, work-life harmony mean to you? What does a life with less stress mean to you? Because it's going to mean something different to every single one of you that's watching this. So what does that vision look like? So we've gone through all of the different wellness toolbox topics over the last 13 weeks and pulled out a couple of different ideas for your stress management plan. So how do you put all of these together into a singular vision so that you've got that clarity in mind? So just like at work and you're always putting together, starting with the vision and then working out your strategy and the tactics that you need to, it's the same type of thing you want to do in your personal life.

And as you put this vision together, it'll help you also get greater clarity on where you need to divert some time and energy away from work toward activities and relationships that really enhance your self-sense of well-being. So we're going to map out what this means to you. We're going to come back to this Venn diagram type model that we've talked about before, where there's a section for body, for mind, for spirit, and it's all anchored on Holy Spirit in the center.

And you're going to go through and you're going to fill in on your sheet of paper just what does this future state look like for you to take a look at? And then what does that mean for you at work? So as you're looking at your occupational and your financial well-being, how does that need to change for you going into the future? These are very touchy-feely activities this week. I hope you've enjoyed them. They really are designed for that introspection to get into what it is that you really want with your career and how are some of these things in your relationship with work that's preventing you from living that fulfilling life that you want? How are some of the things in your relationship with work that's creating that stress and that tension that's bleeding out into other areas of your life? So I hope this gave you a few insights on where to get started with making changes.

Any questions on today's exercise, please email Sharon@whisperingfieldswellness.com. I'd love to hear if you've had any epiphanies or anything came up as you work through these exercises and questions as well. I know today was very high level and we went through a lot of ground. Most of this is just something for you to sit down with your journal and God and a little bit of prayer and figure out what does this mean for me? Hopefully this can help you get unstuck with some of the changes that you're trying to make to improve work-life balance and to reduce stress.

Next week I'll discuss how to reinforce work-life boundaries through your work habits to allow you to have more content and calm and be able to have more time and energy to spend with loved ones, yourself, and on interests that you hold dear. Today I reviewed financial and occupational well-being and how your view of success influences work-life balance. With today's exercise on updating your definition of success to be more biblically based, I pray that this helps you tap into God power instead of willpower to make the changes that you desire in your relationship with work.

I hope this gives you plenty of ideas for your stress management plan as you are DIYing your stress recovery journey. I pray that you are creating the changes that you want in your life to be less stressed and have more work-life balance. Everything I covered today can be implemented in your life through faith-driven tiny habits.

If you're looking for more, check the link below. Start today and when you can't, just remember God can if you let him. Want to take this idea further and implement changes in your life? Download the free worksheets that I have.

Start implementing simple and practical habits to reduce stress, improve energy and focus, and reclaim your time. You can be started in five minutes or less. It's that simple and easy.

If you've already experimented with these DIY tools and are interested in working with me, I can help you to go deeper and farther in your stress recovery journey with personalized coaching and support. Click below to see the links and get started. See you next episode.

Have a blessed day!