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!

Our minds are powerful. They are intellectually capable of imaginative possibilities and creating solutions never dreamed of before. They are emotionally capable of the tenderest of actions toward a loved one.

Yet, they can also keep us trapped and stressed, limiting who we are and what we can do. Stay until the end for a faith-driven tiny habit you can use to identify and break free from chronic stress. Let's go ahead and open in prayer.

Lord, I 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 can get so lost in our heads solving problems, making to-do lists, and figuring out what's next that we can get disconnected from you.

Also, the deceiver may have tricked us into repeatedly saying negative and unkind things to ourselves and believing that we are not precious, loved, or capable. These can be louder than the whispers of the Holy Spirit guiding us closer to Christ. Acting based on our will instead of yours leads to stress, imbalance, and overwhelm.

Help us to recognize what's holding us back and where we are too focused on ourselves and this world. Open our eyes to see how through you we can find the calm, peace, balance, and harmony we desire. 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 your will and your love. In Jesus's name, amen.

Hello. In case if we haven't met before, I'm Sharon McCall with Whispering Fields Wellness.

I am a survivor of chronic stress and a recovering workaholic. After decades of navigating complex politics and pressure cooker situations in a 24-7 operations work environment, I now help drained and exhausted professionals like you reduce stress and improve work-life balance. Let me tell you, it is possible.

No matter what your situation is, we can find a way through this. Today in Grace Over Grind, I'll discuss the importance of cultivating self-awareness of stress triggers. If you've got blind spots or you don't know what your patterns are, you can't change them and things will just continue to happen the same way that they always have been.

For this episode, we're going to focus on internal stress triggers that you might encounter. Your body honestly doesn't care if the tiger threatening you is real, on a movie screen, or just in your thoughts and feelings. Today I'm going to cover what is the perception of stress? How is stress triggered in that microsecond that it takes? We're going to go through a few examples of internal stress triggers and then get into a short practical journal exercise that you can fit into routines through faith-driven tiny habits that will help you identify toxic thought patterns and beliefs so you can set effective stress management strategies.

Through this, you'll also uncover any of those lies that the deceiver has managed to get you to keep repeating to yourself in your own voice that you believe is just the way that the world works. So let's get into the meat of today's topic. God wired us to use stress as part of our survival tool.

What we call stress is simply the response to a threat. This can be a real threat to our survival, like that fierce predatory tiger, or an oncoming car. These examples are external stress.

I talked about external stressors a few episodes ago if you want to go and review that. Or it could be a perceived threat. Think about all the times you get so engrossed in a movie or a book and you're feeling what the character is. Or if you're in playing a video game and you're so immersed in the world, you jump literally when the predator or the bad guy suddenly sneaks up and you can feel that intensity of the fight or flight just as you're getting immersed in that world. And so when it comes to perceived threats, it doesn't necessarily have to be because you're immersed in some media, and it doesn't have to be just life and death. They simply have to be situations that you don't have the resources to handle, or that you perceive that there's an injustice gap.

So a quick example of the first one. Anytime that you tell yourself that you can't, you're not enough, or something will go wrong, or bad will happen, you're telling yourself that you don't have the resources to handle a situation. So this makes it a threat.

If you believe and have experiences that prove that you can't get more resources, or that there is no hope or optimism of getting through, you will get stressed. The greater that deficit, the less you feel that you can be able to get through this situation, the greater your stress. It's an oversimplification, but I think you can get it.

Now let's get to the other one, because a lot of people don't talk about the injustice gap. But there's a lot of research, and this is, I think you'll recognize this in a lot of your interactions as well, and what causes stress. So an injustice gap occurs within relationships, and this could be between you and God, between you and yourself, you and others, or institutions.

It's about the perception of fairness. The bigger the gap between what you view as fair, and what actually occurs, the more stressful the interaction will be, and particularly into the future. So if you have a difficult interaction with your boss, and you view that it is unfair, then the next time that you have an interaction with your boss, you're going to view that he's going to be unfair again.

You're already coming in with that pre-assumption. So when this occurs, it is harder to forgive, and there is that more resentment, frustration, irritation that needs to be overcome for that situation. So I'll give you another one, and just kind of show how this kind of cascades out.

So you work your tail off for an assignment, going above and beyond, yet the slacker that's on the team, you know, you've been in this situation before, gets more recognition because they got a bigger part in the presentation, but they literally didn't do the work when nobody was watching. You view this as unfair. The more times that you see this occur, the greater the injustice gap.

The more you generate proof to yourself that your boss isn't fair, that the slacker is unfairly recognized, that you believe that you need to work harder, than anyone else being able to get the same recognition, that God has made life unfair, or he's punishing you for your fault. This is all creates this bubble of injustice. And then the more that you end up seeing this, this lack of fairness, it adds to your stress.

So don't think of stressors just as a threat, but also think about it is when you see that there's a great deal of unfairness, and that you're going to end up having being disadvantaged in that situation. So as you look at what this means, you see situations in your life where your perception of stress, sorry, your perception of fairness impacts your stress level. So the perception of stress is unique for you, and variable based upon how you are feeling at the moment.

So when you're drained, when you're hungry, when you're in pain, you're tired, you're more likely to view a situation as stressful than when you're feeling alert and energized and like you can conquer the world. So depending on what that inner resilience is, and that's physically, emotionally, spiritually is how that perception of stress is going to end up impacting you. So once you're in this situation, and you're feeling all of this stimulus that is coming on, so let's use the example of an external one.

So when the stressor is external, the nervous system collects the inputs of a situation, the sight, the sound, the smell, the touch, the taste, your intuition, and your history of learned association to react instantaneously to keep you safe. This is all in like an instant, faster than anything that you can imagine. So the body is processing this and being able to then trigger that stress response.

So now when the stressor is internal, when it's your thoughts, your feelings, a sensation, your beliefs, other parts of your brain are communicating back to that survival center, the amygdala. And it's a little bit more of a complex assessment, but it's just as instantaneous. The brain processes the sensory input, it recalls the memories, it evaluates the emotions, it appraises the thoughts, and accounts for your physiological state.

Are you hungry, tired, etc. All in a split second. Personally, I find it absolutely amazing about God's design of our body. It's incredible in terms of what he does to help allow us to stay alive and to being able to thrive. So, going back into this, being able to influence any of these factors that goes into the perception of stress can end up impacting what your perception of that situation is. If you're not hungry, you're gonna feel that the situation is less stressful.

If you are in a more positive mood, or you have more positive associations, the same situation isn't going to end up making you stressed. So, the more you can create experiences, build new memories, the more you physically change your brain and that automatic response that occurs. You can also go through and be able, like we talked about last week, you can capture, challenge, and change your thoughts and your beliefs through focusing on your identity in Christ.

Let's take a quick inventory of internal stressors. These are sensations, things that are going on inside your body, thoughts, emotions, and beliefs.

So, sensations - like we mentioned, your memories can end up getting triggered by sensory input. So, the taste of an Oreo cookie takes you back to those memories in childhood, that's where you were breaking it apart and having fun with your siblings or your friends and enjoying that treat. The same thing happens with traumatic moments.

So, if there's somebody that made you uncomfortable, or it was an adverse event, or traumatic, there are sensory inputs that are tied to that. So, like I had one situation, there was somebody I was interacting with that was really one of those close talkers, and like they're kind of close to you when he was talking, and he used head and shoulders shampoo, and it triggered memories of like just, and the sensation that I wanted to just run away. It took me a little bit of digging, but I finally figured out that the memory this was triggering, and the needing to run away and get away from the person, was from when I was in middle school, that there was someone that just would routinely trap me in the corner of the bus seat, and just kind of push me against the wall so that he could sit and talk to me.

I just didn't care for it, and then once I broke the memory, I dissociated the memory, so that I could just deal with my co-worker in the present with who he is, and not overlay the filter of, and that distorted view of that childhood memory, I was able to get a better working relationship with them. So, these are these sensory inputs that are just triggering reactions based upon what's happened in the past. Then there's the physiological state of the body.

So, like I mentioned earlier, it's the hungry and pain, tired if you're emotionally drained, and just don't have that resilience. It also has to do with like what's going on in the body. So, if you're sick, you're not going to end up being as easily able to handle what's getting thrown at you.

So, if you think about immune issues, internal inflammation, so some of these things you may not even really be aware of. You're just, your body's not working optimally, but it's not come up to a disease state or an illness that you're necessarily aware of, but it just drains out your resources and your resiliency and ability to handle what's thrown at you. Then also your emotional state.

Emotions have that physical sensation. You may not necessarily recognize it fully yourself, but a lot of folks that I find that are really stressed and overworking, they kind of live in their heads and they're disconnected from their emotions because we've learned how to just shove it all down. So, you don't even like feel it from an emotional standpoint, but you feel it from a physical standpoint.

So, you'll get the neck and the jaw tension. For me, this meant resentment and I wasn't saying what I really wanted to say. Heat, like when I'm feeling exposed or vulnerable, I get like a flush and I can just feel the warmth that comes on.

Sometimes these physical sensations may cue you in when there's intense emotions and you're not really processing or acknowledging the emotion. Sensations are not necessarily something a lot of people pay attention to because, like I said, if you're one of these people that kind of lives in your head, your body just becomes a taxi for you going from A to B and you're really not paying attention to the signals. If you're one of those folks that you stop taking breaks because you know you can hold it and you're not going to take that bio break no matter how bad you got to go and how exhausted you are, you're just overridden with your mind, anything that's going on in your body.

So, that's one source of internal stress. Then the next one is thoughts. So, thoughts, you're clear on them.

I'm sure you've got a very active mind. I'm very confident of that and that you've got things running around in your mind all the time of what's going on. And so, as you're just tracking these thoughts and as they whirl through, you can end up uncovering beliefs.

You can find patterns. Some of these really get to your core perception of yourself. So, you may not have been all of that focused on self-development, but if you sit down and you can start tracking some of this, you're going to see where some of your areas of opportunity are.

So, when you're overthinking and you're living in your head, there's also no quiet for the Holy Spirit's being able to get through to you. So, you may see some messages communicated in some different ways too. So, kind of going back to the sensations, pain is one of those that's kind of can end up being a megaphone where the spirit or your body is trying to get your attention to make sure that you can correct something before it goes too far.

So, getting back into thoughts. Sorry for that. I just forgotten to cover that when I was on sensations.

You want to watch for those negative thought patterns. I always find these and think of these as the internal representation of the devil walking around like a roaring lion trying to devour you that's in one Peter. I think it's just particularly when you think about stress and we talk about it as a survival instinct, this really ties into that.

These are the lion, the roaring lion that's trying to eat you of what's going on internally in you. So, it's the self-condemnation, it's the rumination, the judgment, blaming, excusing, complaining, denial, distraction, criticism, guilt. I'm sure you can layer it all on.

It's any of the things that are not what Christ is encouraging us to do and to think about and to feel about others or ourselves from that standpoint. There's also some of these automatic thought patterns. These can be hard to recognize because you just get used to wearing these thought patterns, the distortions of reality.

You pick it up typically in childhood and this is just what you view as real and it takes some pattern finding and tracking down to identify these. So, these common distortions are mind reading. That's where you're taking and going, okay, I know this person thinks that, I know that they're reacting in this way, but did you ask them? Nah, you made that all up in your head.

That's mind reading. Then there's fortune telling and this can be catastrophic or grandiose. It's those times when your thoughts run away with you and you think about, oh, if I do XYZ, I'm going to end up getting all these praise and these accolades.

That's the grandiose or oh my goodness, everything that can go wrong is going to go wrong. That's catastrophic. So, those are both examples of fortune telling where you don't know what's going to happen, but you're projecting yourself into the future and seeing all of these things that could end up happening.

The next category that's pretty common is guilt beating and you can recognize these with the shoulda, coulda, woulda, ought to, must do this. These are the things that are in your head saying, you're not living up to your standards, the other alternatives that you should have done and you're constantly second guessing yourself or trying to figure out what's right. The next category then is negative bias, which means that you just discount the positives.

You're always seeing the negatives. You just think of this as being pessimistic where you're always finding the ways to say that this is a half empty cup instead of half full. In any of these thought patterns that I have just mentioned, you are setting yourself up to perceive the situation or to be processing the situation after you're in the stress response from a position of weakness.

This is why I talk about being this roaring lion that's devouring you. It's taking away your resources and your ability to live to the potential, to act to the potential that God has for you. You really want to take these and turn the inner tormentor into your mentor.

Next up is emotion. The first thing about emotion to watch out for is emotional reasoning. When you are justifying what you do and making decisions based upon your emotions opposed to rational cognitive thinking, these can end up leading you down to all sorts of rabbit trails.

When you look back, you're like, why did I do that? That doesn't make any sense. Those are emotionally driven types of decisions. When you're in that space, when you're stressed, you may end up choosing coping mechanisms that you wouldn't normally choose to deal with.

That's one thing to be aware of and how that can create stress and how it can perpetuate other stressful situations. The more that you choose an unhealthy coping mechanism, then you'll regret it and you'll feel bad about it and you will beat yourself up more about it after whatever originally stressed you out. The next couple of areas to talk about for emotions are the big ones, the two big ones that I see that underlies most people's stress.

That's fear and that's anger. These come with so many different names and different intensities. You'll want to get a chance being able to learn and to recognize those because different words can trigger different levels of awareness of what's going on inside you, but just at the most basic level.

Fear. Fear means that you are recognizing that there's a threat. You're scared that you're unsure of how things are going to end up going.

That truly feeds into the classic survival stress reaction. Anger. Anger is so often triggered because it's that fight response.

You're there and you recognize what's right, what's wrong, what's unfair, what's fair, and you're all charged up to get into that fight. It's part of that thing that comes with that fight flight response and which is why you see it associated so much with stress. There are other emotions that feed stress as well.

These two are just a sampling and I just see these so often with people that are dealing with chronic stress and overwork. These two are these big emotions. They're sometimes ones that we think are bad or we shouldn't be feeling.

They most often get suppressed and then they come and they act out in different ways or we don't necessarily name them and recognize them from that standpoint. They just can cause havoc in terms of what it is that we're behaviorally responding from with what we're thinking. Because as you recognize it, I'm sure you've seen it in your own life, emotions can create thoughts and thoughts create motions.

So whether you know what you're feeling or not, they can still generate a cycle of a stress response. Because so many of the people that I work with that are like you, they live in their heads. They don't really pay attention to the emotions.

The emotions are something that just slows them down. They don't let them get as much done as they want to. The emotions may be difficult to process or just easier just to shove it and deal with it later or forget about it.

So the most common approach that I take with my clients and emotions is just to use them as a barometer. What's the weather? A warning light on the dashboard of a car just to give you an idea of where thoughts or beliefs are starting to pop up into act. With that common behavior and act of suppressing emotions, we got to get friends with them and being able to feel comfortable with acknowledging and expressing them.

Because emotions, they're not good or bad. For example, fear is designed to keep us safe. When you are fearful, you are going to be more cautious and you're going to choose to end up making the decisions that are likely to lead to your survival.

When you're angry, it indicates that you have a moral awareness of right and wrong. You want to end up having these emotions to help guide you through life. It's just in that suppression of them.

That's where we just got to take a little bit of time to heal and to honor, name them, feel them, not change them. I'm really not going to talk too much about changing your emotions. By focusing on your behaviors, your thoughts, the sensations, the beliefs, we'll be able to identify areas that can change so that you can get the healing power of the emotions that's underlying your stress.

That's much shorter. Moving on to beliefs. That's the last category of internal stressor that we're going to talk about today.

A belief is an idea that one accepts as true or real. So often, these are those limiting beliefs that you place on yourself, others, God, the world. These can end up including subconscious blind spots.

The only way you can detect them is through the more apparent behaviors, the thoughts, the feelings. When you see these patterns, it gives life to these underlying beliefs that you don't see, that you're not aware of. In essence, these limiting beliefs, they act like glass cages confining you and distorting your view of reality.

It's like looking through the world from these beliefs with different lenses on, depending on where you're looking through. So you may have a different cognitive distortion, one of those automatic negative thought patterns based upon who you're interacting with, what's going on. And that's all just a mirage.

It's an impact of the glass belief, that glass cage, that belief system that's keeping you trapped in stress and overwhelmed and in cycles of overworking that need to be addressed. So as you can think through these, you can probably identify a couple of these beliefs, the ones that you're more aware of, your conscious beliefs, pretty well. It's just these subconscious ones that are in the unconscious ones that you need to address.

Because so many of them, they've been with you since childhood. It's the things that have been formed from there. And if you've never challenged them before, if you've never uncovered them before, you may just think that that's the way that the world is.

And that's a sign of a fixed mindset. If you believe nothing can change, or this is just the way the world is, you're not leaving room for that opportunity for growth, and to allow God to come in and to change things in a positive way and to work in you. All of these things are just reflections of shame-based thinking, I am bad, where you are, for some reason, holding on to these negative self-perceptions that are so ingrained.

These could be things that started when you were two or younger. So as you think about these sensations, thoughts, emotions, beliefs, all of this can be changed, except for what happened in the past. Once something's in the past, you can't change it.

But all the rest of what I've talked about can be influenced and changed. You can build physical resilience to improve your health with changes in diet, sleep, movement. You can make new memories, and these can replace old associations that you have.

You can change your thinking and emotions with different mindset and sets of beliefs, which allows you to change your perception of stress and reduce the impact of these stress triggers. Through your identity in Christ, you are powerful, love, strong. When you recognize and embrace it, you will find the peace and the harmony that you're looking for.

You'll be able to see that things start to fit into place so that you can have that work-life harmony that you envision for yourself and your loved one. By shedding the deceiver's lies and focusing on reality, God's truth, not this distorted view of all of these different prescriptions of glasses that's in your glass cage of limiting beliefs, but the real reality and God's truth, you can change your beliefs, your thoughts, and emotions. Going back to 1 Peter, the Bible is clear that to defeat the devil seeking to devour you, you resist him and stand firm in the faith.

Repeatedly, we see in the Bible how God wants us to turn this all over to him. This is why I love identity-focused changes, faith-driven tiny habits. You start at the heart of who you are and with the aid of the Holy Spirit, you can transform who you are, reducing stress, improving work-life harmony. These are the outcomes that will result by starting with a focus on who you are in Christ. God will help you thrive and flourish as he intends.

Now, are you ready to check in with how this applies to you? As a quick thought exercise to capture some of your first impressions of these internal stressors, feel free to pause the video to jot some notes and think about each question. I encourage you to do this as needed throughout the rest of the video whenever we come up to the exercises. So one, what contributes the most to your stress from these categories of internal stressors? Sensations, beliefs, thoughts, emotions? Then, off the top of your head, for at least one of these categories of internal triggers, the one you just noted at least, go one level deeper.

What are examples of stressors, triggers in your life that are impacting you today? Maybe you have some awareness of those automatic negative thought patterns or those limiting beliefs. Maybe you recognize where you've got some physical sensations that are repeating patterns that show that there are some suppressed emotions you need to deal with. Or maybe you're even aware that you've got a pattern of resentment or other emotions that needs to be dealt with that's leading into your stress.

What's that one level deeper? So how have you dealt with some of these stressors in the past? Since this one's already in your awareness, capture any ideas that might help you with whatever is stressing you out this week about work. Three questions for this exercise. So moving on, when you are totally stressed and your brain is whirling from non-stop shatter, it can be helpful to put everything into a more objective framework so that you can figure out where to start building a calm center or identify where there's a high impact, highly leverageable pattern that can allow you to relieve stress fairly quickly.

So that leads us to today's exercise. I'm going to focus on the same worksheet that I covered last time we talked about triggers. While it's simple, you can drill into finding patterns to develop a stress management plan.

We'll talk more about that action plan next week. This week's all about building the self-awareness of these triggers. So in your favorite visual journal method, you'll want to create a simple and daily quick tool.

Something like this. There's a download link available in the description. You can also make this into a daily repeating set of tasks on your favorite electronic tool.

Whatever works for you, whatever is easiest. You want to make it simple so it only takes minutes to do and you want to consistently find the time. So if needed, given how tired and how busy you are, you may need to design a tiny habit around journaling to make sure that it's effective and sustainable.

So check the download link if you want help on how to do this. As you identify the pattern, they help you get to the root of the problem. This works the same way that you do when you're doing problem solving at work or like the gardener trying to pull weeds out of the yard.

The most effective way to deal with stress is to pull it out by the root. Stress is an outcome of so many different factors and laying them all out in a journal entry, you can identify which of these inputs that you want to change so you don't have the same outcome. So in the journal, every day you want to note if there was something stressful that occurred.

Now if you've got a lot of stress going on and there's a lot of different categories, you may end up wanting to narrow it down a little bit. So maybe in that earlier exercise, you identified something when you went to that one level deeper and you want to work on that because since you're aware of that right now, maybe you can start figuring out an immediate plan on those and then come and identify another pattern in a little bit. So let's use as an example for today.

I'm not good enough. I'm an imposter. I'm not qualified.

I need to work a lot harder than everyone else and if I don't, they're going to see through, they're going to think less of me. Document the situations that cause you to have that thought and don't overthink it or make it a big deal. You just want one category because this exercise has to be quick so you can get to it consistently.

Once you've built in the habit of stress journaling on a daily basis, you can take a look at adding more categories if that's something that makes sense. But to get the habit going and to start using the tool, start small. Pick something that you partway recognize already and see how much benefit you can get from this.

So now when you have something stressful happen that meets your definition of what you're tracking, you're going to enter that in the first column and that's going to be indicated just by coloring it red, you had a stressor. On the far side, you want to end up noting if you turn the situation over to God. So if you didn't do it earlier in the day when that stressful situation occurred, I suggest that you do it now as it will help to settle and calm you.

And in the center, and that's where we're going to really focus today, you want to capture a quick summary of the situation including your response. And if this is new for you, you may find some limitations in your vocabulary or how to assess some of these things because I really want to make sure that you're getting into those sensations, thoughts, emotions, so you can start identifying where those beliefs are that are popping up. There's a lot of great tools on the internet to help you expand that vocabulary or just get you some multiple choice type items to help you assess a little bit more.

So here are a few of my favorites. So Human Systems, they have a YouTube channel and they've got a less than five minute video on assessing and expressing what you are feeling in the body and they go through and talk about these two different tools that you see on the screen here. Then there's Lindsay Brahman, she has so many great visuals and fun journal layouts.

For this exercise, her emotion sensation wheel, you can see a little bit of a sample of that here, it's great for connecting sensations and emotions. So if you've become a pro at suppressing your emotions, like I was at one point in my life when I was dealing with a lot of stress and deep in the depths of workaholism, the physical sensations helped me to better identify the emotion until I got more comfortable recognizing and acknowledging my own feelings.

Then there's the Geneva emotion wheel. So if you're more logical and you don't really want to use a lot of words but you want an objective way to assess, the way that this tool works is you take a look at any of the emotions that are listed there and then you give yourself that rating, that one to five on that list of emotions there. If you're not feeling an emotion that connects with this, you'll just note that it's no emotion or if there is a different emotion than one of the ones that's listed, you'll just note it there. So it's just another great way to express and uncover some of your patterns and you just want to find something that really works for you and gets you into a broad enough vocabulary to really understand what's going on because different words will help you uncover really what's going on.

And then there's another version, it didn't show up very well, but it's got some bible verses tied to it. So if you do a quick search on emotion wheel bible verses or feeling wheel bible verse or you take any of these words and you throw it in the search engine, you can come up with some bible verses to help you sit and meditate if that's an extra step that you want to take in this exercise to help get some better perspective. But maybe you don't need any of these extra wheels, that's perfectly fine too, just start where you're at.

The important thing is to start documenting so you can find your patterns and be able to take action. Then at the end of the week or after a few days you want to review and see what patterns can you find. The learnings from this daily journal exercise can be then applied to your wellness toolbox or your habit strategy to reduce stress and improve work-life harmony and I'll talk more about this next week.

This journal template gives you an objective framework to build increased self-awareness which can help lead toward a transformed life. Once you know where to focus using faith-driven tiny habits you can find that small bit of space of time and energy in your day to create leverage for a high impact change that leads to reduced stress and more work-life harmony. If there's any questions on this exercise email them to sharon@whisperingfieldswellness.com. 

Will you commit to trying this out? In next week's episode I'll address developing plans to avoid mitigate or deal with these internal triggers.

That episode will integrate the prior discussions on wellness toolbox and habit building as well. Recapping what I covered today, stress can be triggered by internal or external factors. Internal stress triggers can be thoughts, feelings, sensations, beliefs.

You can change your perception of stress by influencing or changing any of these factors. Through daily stress journaling you develop the awareness of where you can make high impact changes that will reduce stress and improve work-life balance. True transformation begins when you acknowledge your weakness.

All those things that stress you out, have you been able to stop doing those things on your own? Have you been able to get a different way of dealing with them? That's weakness. As you think about how long have these inner voices, these negative thoughts been running your life? Most of it, I'd call that a weakness. So when you acknowledge this weakness that you can't resolve on your own but you let God do it, you will be able to thrive and flourish.

He's got a plan for you and he will guide and direct you as you grow in your Christian identity and closer to Christ. You will find less stress and improve work-life harmony as you take a faith-driven approach. I know this was a very high level run through on internal stress triggers.

Click the link to download my journal worksheets to help you cultivate greater awareness. Within this set of journal entries, there's more than just the tool shared today included in the download. Or if you want to work with me so you can put these stress recovery tools together better and to go deeper, click the services link below.

As a Christian 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. You deserve to thrive and flourish as God intends.

See you next episode! Have a blessed day!

Hello! I'm Shara McCall with Whispering Fields Wellness. Today in Grace Over Grind, I'll address what happens when you get stuck implementing tiny habits. Sometimes despite your best intentions and greatest efforts, those small behaviors just don't end up occurring quite the way that you planned. I'll share the story of someone who followed the process that I've laid out in this video.

[00:00:23] Video series about how she got unstuck to achieve her goals of reduced stress and improve work life harmony. Let's start with a prayer for today. 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.

[00:00:47] In our lives, there are times when it is difficult to do what is right. Maybe there is a negative coping habit we keep repeating, like alcohol use. But don't want to? Or maybe it's a positive coping habit that we are working toward, but we just can't seem to do it with our own self will consistently. We all get to that place and need your help, God, to help do what we cannot do on our own.

[00:01:10] Help us through these moments. Also, shine your light on any deceptions we tell ourselves or believe that prevent us from doing what is right. Grant us clarity to recognize how our beliefs and thoughts can hold us back from doing what is right and what is in your will for us. Through you we are made stronger and able to take the right action.

[00:01:31] I pray all is well with every listener, healthy in body, renewed in mind, and strong in spirit. May they know your will and your love as they grow greater in Christian character. In Jesus's name, Amen. This week, I'm focusing on what do you do if you are getting stuck with implementing some of your tiny habits.

[00:01:52] The examples in the exercise that I'll cover today focuses on how to uncover and start addressing how beliefs, thoughts, and feelings can be transformed to better align with your identity driven habits. Let me introduce Penny Pleaser! Everybody say hi Penny! When I first met Penny, she was having a couple of problems.

[00:02:15] After work and family, she never had enough time for herself. Besides work related stress, digestive issues and fatigue were the things she wanted to tackle. Breakfast was a whole grain fiber bar as she drove into work. Lunch was a protein bar while working. Multiple cups of coffee with low fat non dairy creamer kept her going all day.

[00:02:36] And dinner was whatever she had the energy to microwave, or one pot meal to whip up, or pick up on the way home. So they usually sat down to eat dinner around 8 p. m. And while she scheduled 7 hours of sleep and was exhausted, going to bed at 10 p. m. she did not sleep well and was frequently hot. So, as we were talking and going through, she decided that instead of drinking most of her calories in sugary coffee drinks and barely eating, she wanted to focus her tiny habits on getting dinner sooner, so digestion wouldn't impact her sleep, and eating a more well rounded breakfast and lunch, which might make dinner a little less heavy on her.

[00:03:15] So once Penny established what her coaching goals were with me, we went through and identified her Christian identity statement. She decided that she wanted to focus on her body as a temple to the Holy Spirit and that she could only love others as well as she loves herself. She used the parable from Matthew on taking care of the log in her own eye before dealing with the splinter in someone else's eye to be what she focused her design of her habits around.

[00:03:46] This would enable her to make some better choices and start setting some boundaries on her time and energy for critical self care. Her choices now are just making it too hard for her to fulfill her purpose as a spouse, a parent, her support to others. And this was not about being selfish, but loving. She could not continue to be too tired to get involved with her loved ones, and too involved with work to have time to spend with them.

[00:04:14] So as we went through and did the tiny habits and went through this a couple of weeks, she was most successful were changing her coffee order and keeping what she kept as readily available snacks and getting to a 15 minute focused breakfast and lunch. Getting dinner earlier though, she wasn't making much progress.

[00:04:31] That was a difficult one for her. So as she went through the stress journaling, she uncovered a pattern. She wasn't just putting her family's needs before her own. She was doing the same thing at work. As a recognized expert who is easy to get along with, she was regularly doing favors for others in front of her own work.

[00:04:53] Most of the time, her boss didn't even know because they just would come straight to her with these requests. And what was easy for her to do in an hour or less, it might take some of these people that were still learning it a couple of hours, or using the reports that she provided, someone could do their own analysis, that she was regularly asked to custom format the data and report it in multiple different ways to make it easier for whoever was doing it.

[00:05:18] the person that needed it. So depending on the week, she'd found that it was taking about five to 10 hours of her work time was these discretionary favors that she would do for these other people. They were needed to get done for the business, but they weren't her responsibility to get done. They just came in and they asked her because of her expertise and that it would take her less time than them to get it done.

[00:05:42] It's not getting the desired outcomes of being home earlier and able to eat dinner earlier. So that she could get more sleep, but from this pattern that she found in her journals, we needed to dig deeper. She needed to better align her underlying beliefs and thoughts with her desired identity so that she could end up doing what was right for her.

[00:06:03] So just as Jesus took time to withdraw and rest and make sure that his disciples did, she also needed to, because at this point she was still worn out and exhausted and on edge from stress and overwork. She was not helping herself. her co workers or the company. She needed healthy boundaries and collaboration in a different way that would allow her to be more effective at work.

[00:06:28] By making the right changes to her thoughts and her beliefs, she could still be recognized for the traits that she was proud of, her expertise and being a team player, even with stronger boundaries. So to progress her On her tiny habit of eating dinner sooner, we had to work more closely on developing an alternate set of responses when someone asked for a favor.

[00:06:58] We narrowed it down a little bit more to just a few people who were regularly taking advantage of her kindness to work on getting to the point of being able to say maybe, at least, instead of an automatic yes. And then developing a strategy to address custom requests better. That one we handled outside of Tiny Habits since it was just a one off deal that we'd come up with.

[00:07:21] So today I'm going to share with you some additional ways that you can take your stress journal entries, just like she did, a little bit further to address where there are negative thoughts and limiting beliefs fueling your stress and preventing you from doing what is right. Whatever is basically getting you stuck so that you can't implement your tiny habit the way that you designed and planned it.

[00:07:43] So before I get into the exercise today, let's do a quick reframe of Penny's stories using the tools that I've shared so far from prior episodes. And if you haven't looked at those, please do so. And I've also included the downloads for any of the worksheets and the journal templates that I'm referencing in the description below.

[00:08:01] So from the story that I shared, you can see how Penny, one, recognized God's plan for her as best as she knew. Um, She identified a Christian identity statement that resonated with her vision of work life harmony and what it meant for her to thrive and flourish in body, mind, and spirit. She selected specific areas to work on that would have a high impact and fit the time and energy she had to dedicate to this effort.

[00:08:27] Then, two, she examined and tested her ways, which was basically comparing her current habits, For her newly designed habits. So using a habit cloud, she identified more precisely the behaviors that she wanted to change to become more like who she wanted to become, and less driven by a work centered identity.

[00:08:47] She designed her new tiny habits with a clear anchor, starting behavior, and a plan to celebrate. Then she moved into step three. Act in his will to do what is required, which is all about implementing, monitoring, and adapting the plan as you go through and do it. So she implemented her starter habits and got them established by making small adjustments each week as she reviewed her progress.

[00:09:11] And in several of these we saw she made some really good progress. Then she went into the fourth step. She persevered and grew. So she, this is all about training and iterating. So once you have that habit established, that starter behavior, she continued to train until it became more habitual. And then added the next right action and incremental behavior to build her routine.

[00:09:37] So like I said, she ended up taking what was initially just eating a bar as she was driving to work. She found time to eat at home and slowly increased that amount of time where she actually focused on just the one thing of enjoying her food at a time. Um, and she iterated through that and just continued to grow that behavior.

[00:09:57] So through her weekly process of reviewing her habit tracker and her journal of stress triggers, that's how Penny found and recognized that she was getting stuck on this one behavior of being able to get home a little bit sooner and wasn't making as much progress as she wanted. So today we're going to go through an exercise that I've borrowed from Dr. Daniel Amen. He's a brain health expert and it is a simple way to capture a thought in the challenge it and change it. And it's all through this faith centered identity that we've been talking about that we're anchoring the habits in and this whole stress recovery journey. And the goal is not to turn every stressor, negative thought or limiting belief into a positive piece of inspirational motivation.

[00:10:42] You can't live in this false toxic positivity. It's just not healthy. But we want your thoughts being able to go from negative and limiting and preventing you from growing and changing to be more accurate and realistic. We want you to see through the deception and the lies that you or The opposing forces, depending on your particular viewpoint on this, is telling you and is holding you back.

[00:11:07] So let's jump into the exercise. It starts with capture. From your stress journal entries, you want to go through them and pick an area of focus. And then when you feel more comfortable with this approach, you can then use this technique at the moment to specifically capture a thought and go through these four different questions.

[00:11:28] Just It's a time that it crosses your mind. But to learn it, it's best if you just grab something from your stress journal and pick that item that's been coming up with some regular frequency. Then you want to end up challenging it. So there are four questions as I mentioned about this. One, is the stressful or negative thought true?

[00:11:48] Two, can I absolutely know that it's true? Three, how do I react when I believe that thought? And then four, who would I be without that thought? Or how would I feel if I didn't have that thought? So those are the four questions to challenge it. And then the next thing that you do is you're going to change it.

[00:12:15] So with the answers to those questions, you want to try and look at this from that Christian identity statement, from God's perspective, as best that you can. Filter, Your answers through those two lenses and see where you can end up focusing your change efforts around. Maybe there's some affirmation work, maybe there's some action plans.

[00:12:38] So it all kind of depends on the scenario with what that change looks like. So let's go through today's example. So capture. So, from the stress journal, Penny identified that when she's asked to do a favor or a special assignment for someone that's not part of her regular work, some of the thoughts that she notices are that she's proud that someone asked her and that they value the work that she does and she wants them to continue to think well of her.

[00:13:06] And when she looked a little bit deeper into that, like what would happen if she actually said no, it came up that she believed that they wouldn't like her or would think less of her work and value her work. No, work less just because she said no. So this is what we decided to run through the exercise so that she could get to feeling more comfortable with saying no or maybe to these extra requests and setting up a healthy boundary and figuring out different ways to collaborate with people.

[00:13:40] So then we move into the next phase, challenge. So on this one, we're going to go back and forth just in a dialogue between Penny and I so that it's easier to follow and to understand. So, the first question. Is it true that the person wouldn't like you if she said no when they asked for a favor? Yes, it's possible that they wouldn't like me.

[00:14:05] John held a grudge and was nasty that one time I told him no, because I was already on the way out for the day and he wanted it, like, now. He wasn't going to give me enough time to be able to turn it around, so I just told him no. So now to the second question. Can you absolutely know that it's true that everyone asking you for a favor won't like you if you say no?

[00:14:30] Come to think of it. I told Julie no once. I was leaving for an emergency. I needed to get out immediately and She was okay with me saying no. She went ahead and said thank you and appreciated that I gave her a little bit of time to give her some suggestions on how to do it and She went ahead and did it, and I headed home to being able to take care of it.

[00:14:51] So I did tell her no, and she didn't end up changing her opinion of me. And moving on to question three. How do you react when you believe that the person asking for the favor won't like you if you say no? I automatically just say yes when somebody asks for a favor. So, what I'm also noticing though is, you know, I've been trying to work on becoming more aware of my emotions instead of just shoving everything down.

[00:15:22] That there are certain cases that as I'm doing the favor for someone, I get resentful because Why am I doing this again when they are perfectly capable of it and it's part of their job? Their emergency shouldn't make it mine. And then there's other cases when Later, I'd notice I'd be super stressed out I wouldn't have given much thought to it as I was doing the activity or the favor But then like when I look at my own work and what I need to do And how my work plan for the day is impacted.

[00:15:53] I just get stressed up and And then I get to thinking about what am I giving up for my family to get yet one more thing done at work. So I think I've been aware of some of this, but I just never said anything other than yes. Except for those two cases that I told you about before. And then the last question.

[00:16:17] Who would you be without the thought that people wouldn't like you if you said no to a favor? What first runs through mind is selfish. so much. Putting my needs before others, that's just not what I'm comfortable with. I know I'm still working on that belief. And as I try and view it from who I want to be, someone that cares for my needs enough that I'm able to give back to others, and particularly my family, I really am better off without that thought.

[00:16:51] It's not like I'll be mean or nasty when I say no. I'll just avoid over commitment, resentment, and being able to have a better balance. More time for myself and my family. It'll let me be able to work more effectively as well. Taking on all this extra work is really not helping the company either. So many of these people need to improve their own skills and by doing it for them, they're just not developing and improving in the way that they need to.

[00:17:23] So, as I was working with her, it did take a couple of iterations and going through a couple of different scenarios to put those responses together. This is a bit of a compilation, but so you can see the power and the simplicity of these four questions and what can come up if you're persistently going after those repeating negative thoughts and limiting beliefs.

[00:17:44] So, moving on to this next phase, change. With all of this information, here's what Penny decided to do. She decided that part of what God wants her to be is someone who can say no. This way she can better support others as needed. She can change the thought to, even if people, even if some people don't like it when I say no, it doesn't change who I am.

[00:18:13] Or that God loves me. And it doesn't impact the opinion of people who are closest to me. That's what she held on to. So moving forward though, her action plan was with a few target people. Her starter habit was to train herself to automatically say maybe, and ask for a few minutes to look at it, to see how it would fit with her workload.

[00:18:37] Then she would take a pause. Uh, Um, Um, Um, practices of conversion. We think most people who are working in a partnership, such as you have two partners below you. So you are highly likely to be working together because we think for the most part, you are basically your own two partners. Next. So the P Course is, or in order to help others, With a few people, she offered to end up working near them so that that way, as they did the assignment, as they did the task, that she'd be there to answer any questions and offer suggestions in terms of how to be more efficient.

[00:19:14] So that way, that person was learning and growing and developing their skills while she was still able to do her work. And ultimately, what this happened is that she was able to redirect some of these help requests or other work to these experts. Transcripts. Her boss really appreciated her initiative in regards to how she was developing others and allowed the team to be more effective.

[00:19:38] Overall, there are still plenty of times that she said yes, but it was not out of fear of being rejected, but based upon what her time and energy was that she had available and the importance and the urgency of the request to the team. So ultimately, in the end, she was better able to manage her time.

[00:19:59] Overall, reducing her work hours because she stopped taking on these discretionary favors for others. It allowed her to eat her dinner earlier with her family and get better quality of sleep. Personally, I love how these tiny changes have such a cascading effect. Ready to try this for yourself with one of your stressful situations or negative thoughts?

[00:20:21] If you have any questions on this exercise, email them to Sharon at whisperingfieldwellness. com

[00:20:36] So here's the four questions again. Is the stressful or negative thought true? Can I absolutely know that it's true? How do I react when I believe that thought? Who would I be without that thought? Or alternatively, how would I feel if I didn't have that thought? That's the four questions that are part of the challenge.

[00:21:00] So in summary, by changing who you are and what you believe through this process of leveraging identity driven tiny habits and stress journaling, you can effectively change your thoughts, beliefs and behaviors. These strategies take very little time and energy daily and can result in time in major transformation aligning yourself more closely with God's plan for you and leaning on your Christian faith.

[00:21:26] It allows you to reduce stress. Improve work life harmony, and eventually thrive and flourish as he intends for you. In the next episode, I'll cover more on cultivating awareness of internal stress triggers. These are the perceived stressors based upon thoughts, feelings, sensations, and personal association.

[00:21:48] I want you to be well equipped to be aware and able to handle a variety of stressors. If you haven't already, click the link to download my habit building guide so you can begin to reduce your stress. It all starts with being clear on who you want to become and then proving it to yourself with small wins.

[00:22:07] Because the Lord prompted you with his wisdom on how to get closer to him, take small steps towards something you know is a better path. Or, if this series and working through the downloads have you thinking that you want to work with me, you want to go deeper than do it yourself effort, click the services link below.

[00:22:27] As a Christian 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. Only you and God know how to heal your stress. I can come alongside to support and encourage you and share a few strategies and tools to help you with mindset, lifestyle, and diet changing.

[00:22:51] See you next episode. Have a blessed day.

[00:00:00] Hello, I'm Sharon McCall with Whispering Fields Wellness. Today in Grace Over Grind, I'll address the importance of tiny habits and building effective daily routines to reduce stress and improve work life balance. Following up on last week's toolbox topic, the examples will focus on spiritual and social dimensions of lifestyle.

[00:00:20] Let's open up in prayer. Lord, thank you for bringing my dear friends to listen today. Help them find the motivation, guidance, strategies and tactics to reduce stress and improve work life harmony. As we discuss habits and routines, may they find an idea to inspire and help them make more time for you, God, and for nurturing social connections.

[00:00:41] Humans are designed for rich and supportive relationships with you and others. Help us develop behaviors that reduce the time spent in an isolated work environment to empathy of faith. Encourage us to build a lifestyle where meaningful social engagement goes beyond our coworkers. I pray all is well with every listener, healthy in body, renewed in mind, and strong in spirit.

[00:01:05] As they reduce stress and improve work life balance, may they know your will and your love. In Jesus name, Amen. God intends for us to prioritize our relationships with Him. Get your stress filled, hectic, 55 plus hour work weeks, squeeze out time for meaningful connection and drains energy away from other important areas of life.

[00:01:27] It is time to take action to restore balance and harmony. So you understand my underlying bias. I strongly believe that you are bio individual. From your DNA, to your mind, to your spirit, you are unique. As a result, only you and God know how to heal your stress. 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.

[00:01:53] As a Christian 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 that you desire in your life. Only you know what it takes to put these tools into effect in your life. Your stress recovery journey will look very different than someone else's.

[00:02:15] Today I'll cover how you can reduce stress and improve work life harmony by focusing on building tiny habits. The practical exercise today will include some of the introspection from last episode on spiritual and social dimensions of lifestyle. If you want, I do suggest you go and check out last episode so that all of this makes sense.

[00:02:34] Healthy habits and routines are great for building resilience and grit. The more automatic your behaviors become that support your goals, the more you can focus your brain on complex decisions and activities. So think for the first, think for example, of the first time that you learned to brush your teeth, or drive a car, navigate the route to work, or type on a keyboard.

[00:02:55] Required a lot of thought and focus, right? Personally, I can think of many amusing memories as I figured out how to drive a stick shift or a motorcycle. And it took a while before they became automatic. With repetition, it frees up your mind to start doing other things as it becomes more engrained in your body and what you need to being able to do.

[00:03:16] I'm sure each of you can remember a time when you end up finding yourself in the parking lot with a whole plan for the day, but you don't remember anything from the drive in. That's an example of what habits free you up to being able to do. So the same goes for unhealthy habits and routines. They are automatic and engrained just as well and can be hard to break.

[00:03:37] So going back to the example of driving, we've all picked up some bad habits along the way. Speeding, close following, rolling stops, it takes getting a ticket to start addressing and fixing some of those things or having a near miss in an accident. So we just continue those behaviors regardless of the risks that they bring on to us.

[00:03:55] Or the dentist telling that you, telling you that you've got a cavity and you aren't brushing well enough. Have you ever tried to change how you brush your teeth and have to start thinking about what your technique is? That's a really hard habit to change and to break. I'm sure you get the point. So when you have very little time and energy and want to make changes, you want to start small and try to engrain any new behavior so that they become automatic.

[00:04:22] And it's easier to start with building something new before breaking down something that you want to eliminate. As you build the confidence doing something new, then we can come back and being able to work on bad habits that you want to end up eliminating. for listening. So as discussed last time, building habits start with one, recognizing God's plan for you, building habits based upon how you want to grow your Christian identity and the vision that God has given you of what thriving and flourishing means.

[00:04:52] I know none of us understand what God's plan is for us, but to the best of your ability, based upon what you see, the direction that he's pointed you in, what is he calling you to being able to do? Then we went into the next step, which was to examine and test your ways. So we did this as an exercise to compare your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to the ones that you aspire on your identity statement.

[00:05:16] And that vision of work life harmony, where is that gap between your worst day and your most Christlike day or a good day? So we're going to continue on our habit building from that step today. So you're going to take everything that you learned last time related to the spiritual and social lifestyle dimensions, where you identified what habits and routines you need to set to reduce stress or to improve work life balance.

[00:05:41] The areas that you decided that would be the most impactful to add or improve upon in your wellness toolbox. We'll start with those. So that area of lifestyle is what we'll build a habit cloud around. A habit cloud is a concept from BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits. It is a grouping of behaviors that you want to turn into a habit or routine.

[00:06:02] It's a concept to help lay out visually all the different options to achieve your goal. It's basically a mind mapping exercise. You'll write down the area of improvement and brainstorm current and future behaviors that you associate with that area of improvement. For example, you decided that your identity statement is to be a godly and encouraging parent.

[00:06:24] You want to improve your relationships with your kids. As you went through the wellness toolbox exercise for spiritual and social dimensions of lifestyle, you realized that having more family time each evening would be the highest impact change to reduce stress. And improve work life harmony. As you think about the current dynamics at family dinner, you realize everyone has started to behave like you.

[00:06:47] Most evenings, you've got a distracted style of communication as you check your phone or are quiet with work related thoughts, just kind of inhaling the food so you can get back to your laptop and get back to work. So likewise, everyone else is doing the same thing. They're gobbling their food, distracted by devices or TV, and then they scatter for other activities as you head back to the laptop to wrap up your workday.

[00:07:11] You want the family dinners that you remember from childhood, laughter and connecting conversation that often led into family activities afterward. Right now, it just seems like an impossibility based upon your workload and everyone else's behaviors. With that as the central idea to make the habit cloud around, this is what we're going to do.

[00:07:35] So you want to grab a blank sheet of paper, and at the top of the page, write your identity statement. So in this example, it's, "I am a godly and encouraging parent." In the center of that blank sheet of paper, you want to put your area of improvement. So, for this example, it's the family dinner. Now, brainstorming, you want to branch off of that main area with all of the current behaviors and your desired future behaviors that you can brainstorm that support your identity statement and God's plan for you, as best that you understand it.

[00:08:07] You want to break this down into discrete, small steps, get to individual behaviors and actions. Don't take too long on this exercise. It's just a starting point and it'll help us get going with the related next few steps. You'll keep revisiting this and using this tool over and over again as you're looking to grow your habits and routines over time.

[00:08:28] So feel free to pause this video to jot some notes and to think about this. I encourage you to do this any time that you need to throughout the rest of the video as we proceed with this exercise.

[00:08:42] From this habit cloud, you want to look through it to identify what are the most impactful behaviors that you can easily get yourself to do. You don't want to pick anything that's too hard or something that you know that honestly, well, it sounds good. but you're not going to do it. So you want to star anything that you've got on your habit cloud of anything that will be the most effective.

[00:09:05] And you want to put an asterisk next to anything where you can easily get yourself to do it. The behaviors with both a star and an asterisk are a good place to start with designing your new tiny habit and the routine that you want to create. So continuing with this example. You decide that the new routine would be to leave the work phone on the couch while at dinner.

[00:09:30] You're going to turn off the TV and reinstate grace before eating. This allows you to role model being more present. And leaving the device alone and not having any background noise, and hopefully this will allow more conversations to initiate into being able to get better quality family time. So this is a good example.

[00:09:53] So the reason why is because it's a short sequence of multiple behaviors that can have a high impact toward that identity statement, that desire to be a godly and encouraging parent. And it also supports the vision of work life harmony, where there is more quality family time that's part of every single day.

[00:10:14] So this doesn't seem like it's that difficult of an exercise to execute, even with all of the demands that you face on your time and energy at this time. It also leaves open an organic opportunity based upon how others respond to see how this all plays out. Maybe as soon as you, they see you leaving your device on the couch, others will follow suit and you're going to end up getting the benefits of what you're looking for, a more focused conversation at dinner.

[00:10:42] Yet there's still the flexibility because you're not defining specific outcomes that if your phone blows up during dinner, that you can go deal with whatever emergency it is afterwards. You're not setting up that expectations or setting yourself up for something you may not have success at. So I'm not going to end up getting into the theory today, but I do want to show you that there are two dominant views in regards to building a habit.

[00:11:06] Really, it's the same thing, they're just sliced a little bit different in terms of how do you respond to solving a problem, and then how do you get to that solution and reinforcing that so that it becomes a repeatable habit. So the two main authors that are out there that have done a lot of evidence based research are James Clear and BJ Fogg. You can see from the chart on here that James Clear has the problem broken down as a cue and a craving, and then the solution is a response and a reward. Whereas B. J. Fogg breaks it down just into three simple steps. ABC, anger, behavior, and celebration. And just for simplicity today, we're going to work with his model, because ABC is a great mnemonic, it's easy to remember, and it's really easy to break down with just a couple minutes of explanation without getting into a lot of theory.

[00:11:55] So, just to quickly summarize, then, the ABCs from, BJ Fogg's model. A new tiny habit has to anchor A, into existing routines starting with the smallest possible behavior, B, and be reinforced with celebration,. So that's what we're going to do. So now go back to that habit cloud and the selected set of behaviors or the routine that you identified and you want to pick what is the smallest starting action that can lead to a cascade of other changes.

[00:12:28] You want to pick something that requires less than three minutes, preferably a few seconds that you can anchor into one of your existing behaviors and routines that you do. And you want to end up making sure that this is really simple. This is where we're starting with being able to ensure that you have success with this.

[00:12:49] So with the example that we have, you decide that the most impactful and simplest starting action is to leave the work cell phone on the couch. That's the new behavior. And that in your existing routine, that you want to end up anchoring it then that every day before dinner. You end up going into the powder room to go to the bathroom and to wash your hands before dinner.

[00:13:15] You have to pass the couch on the way to the table. So it's just really should be really simple. You're not going out of your way. You just need to take the phone out of your pocket and drop it on the couch. So your anchor is when you go to the restroom and on your way back as you pass the couch. And then the behavior is to put the phone on the couch.

[00:13:37] They're simple. So that's in the A and the B only like a 10 second activity, depending on how hard it is to get the cell phone out of the pocket. Okay, so sounds like a simple place to start. Now, we're going to end up getting into celebration to be most effective. You want to celebrate at three different times in this process when you think about doing the behavior.

[00:13:59] But before you do it, so, for example, you want to end up having. An encouraging moment is you're in the powder room, washing your hands and you think about dropping your cell phone in on the couch. You give yourself that mental reminder that, yep, I'm going to do that in just a few seconds as I walk by the couch.

[00:14:17] So you want to figure out what is something to encourage you. So whenever you have that thought, how are you going to encourage yourself to make sure that you follow through with it? Is it a smile, an affirmation, a short prayer, God helped me do this. whatever is the most positive for you. So then the second time for celebration is when you do the behavior.

[00:14:41] So as you take the cell phone out of your pocket, so this is a chance to rejoice that you're doing the right thing and thank God for the strength to do it. Just like the other one, you want to pick something that's really motivating and encouraging for you because you want to make it so that there is enough reward so that you will repeat this behavior over and over again.

[00:15:02] So then the next step is immediate time. So the third time for celebration is immediately after you do the new behavior. So as you see the cell phone on the couch and you are stepping away, you want to reward and reinforce that you did it. You followed through all the way that as you're active, that you are actively taking a step towards being a godly and encouraging parent.

[00:15:32] Which also means that you're going to end up having more work life harmony and greater quality family time in your life. So you want these three moments of celebration and you've got to figure out whatever is going to end up being the most encouraging for you. Maybe you're one of those that likes to do the little fist bump in the air, do your little touchdown dance, whatever it is.

[00:15:53] You want to pick something that's right and appropriate for you. So this is the design of your first tiny habit. A. B. C. Anchor, Behavior, Celebrate. It's really simple, so you can take this and being able to start putting this into effect right now. Very straight forward. So that gives you enough being able to design and start your habit.

[00:16:19] But there is more to this process to being able to ensure that it is successfully engrained and becomes automatic over time. So the remaining two phases we'll get into in a lot more detail in a future episode, but here's a quick summary. So you can start implementing effectively and be successful. So the next phase.

[00:16:37] Is act in his will and do what is required. So this is all about implementing monitoring and adapting. It's a focus on continuous improvement to get this first tiny habit well established. So it becomes automatic and almost without any thought or reminder. It's about encouraging yourself to stay motivated by going back consistently to that identity statement and your vision of thriving and flourishing.

[00:17:03] So you can set up yourself for success. Here's a tip that fits in this step. So you want to conduct an initial assessment of what you need to do to increase the likelihood of you successfully completing this habit. So think for a second, what makes this activity hard to do? What is it that you do now that you know that makes this hard for you to do?

[00:17:30] Then you can be able to design the environment, the activity or the rewards to being able to address this factor. So let's go back to our example with the cell phone. The fear of missing out, whatever is going on on that phone, that is probably the hardest thing about leaving that phone on the couch. For some reason, you've always been distracted by it.

[00:17:51] There's things that are happening is everybody ends up wrapping up their day and doing final communication. So you need to being able to get comfortable with disconnecting for 30 to 60 minutes as everyone else is putting out their final notifications for the day. So you might need to take a one time action to automatically put your phone into do not disturb mode at this time every day so that it helps you to being able to get over your FOMO, or to block off your calendar, communicate to a couple key people that you're not going to respond, whatever is the right thing for you to being able to do to increase your comfort with leaving the phone 20 feet away from you while you have dinner.

[00:18:33] So the other thing is maybe you need to encourage more positive and reinforcing celebration activities. So, Maybe one of the things you can do is being able to get the kids to design a reminder. You can put it up in the bathroom on the mirror to remind you something silly. You can make a fancy cell phone box with all the kids- glue and construction paper.

[00:18:58] Um, that makes you smile at the memory of it all and being able, the silliness of it, if they're trying to help you. Whatever ends up making this habit easier for you to overcome the resistance of leaving the phone on the couch because that is your biggest hurdle. That's why you haven't adopted this behavior before, even though it seems like some things are simple.

[00:19:18] So you want to design around it and figure out a way to being able to make sure that this is not your biggest stumbling block. So then the final phase, because remember, we're only talking about dropping the cell phone on the couch so far. So once you've got that engrained and you're ready to being able to grow that, the final phase is to persevere and grow.

[00:19:37] So this is all about slowly expanding that starter action into the next step. So, in our example, maybe that next step is muting or turning off the TV as you drop the cell phone on the couch with the remotes right there next to the, where you're putting the cell phone. Or maybe you decide you want to work on other areas of your life, because kind of once you get the mechanics of how to build and adopt tiny habits, you can have many of these running just at various different stages in the process.

[00:20:06] So for example, maybe family dinners are going so well that you realize you need to start changing some work habits so that you can end up being more productive. So that there's less pressure for you to work in the evening. That way, as you end up enjoying these longer family dinners, because the conversations are good, and every now and then the kids have a suggestion about wanting to do something with you guys and play a game or have a go outside, but you can end up enjoying that and not feeling the pressure of work.

[00:20:33] So you may need to end up addressing an entire another series. So you can go back to the habit cloud and design that for that area of your life. In time, the whole desired sequence of behaviors that you identified in the Habit Cloud exercise can be executed, plus any others that you come up with. As you stay focused on your larger end goal and include that in your reinforcement, you'll find also that God starts meeting you part way.

[00:20:59] And you'll find that it becomes easier if you put in the discretionary effort that goes beyond the specific tiny habit that you're working on. Because remember, we're starting with that starter habit. Anything that you do over and above that starter habit, that's discretionary. That's not part of what you're building in right now.

[00:21:17] It may be part of a long term plan, but it's not part of that tiny focused win that you're looking at being able to solidly establish. You'll find that in time you'll be transformed by God's power into that identity statement that you have. So in this case, the godly and encouraging parent, you will have less stress and more time at home for yourself and your loved ones by taking this approach.

[00:21:42] And it all starts small, so you can be able to learn and adapt into being able to make other changes as needed before an issue comes up. Thank you. The tiny habits approach gives you a way to start taking those tiny, itty bitty little steps that lead toward a transformed life. Any questions on this exercise, email them to Sharon @whisperingfieldswellness.Com. So in closing, Change begins when you have a view of the opportunity of what can be different. Last time we looked at the really big picture from the spiritual and social dimension of lifestyle. Today we got into this fine little tiny details where you can really end up seeing by connecting the dots of how you can being able to start having that life that you want.

[00:22:28] True transformation begins when you acknowledge that your weakness, your inability to being able to drop that phone on the couch without a little bit of help, and having a plan to being able to do it. As you have that humility and recognize that weakness, so let God restore you and to surrender your life and will to God's care.

[00:22:45] He will give you the strength and courage and lead you through that transformation. In the next episode, I'll discuss how to raise awareness of common stress triggers. With this awareness, you can develop a better plan for stress prevention and reduction. It's still built upon the concepts addressed so far.

[00:23:03] I'm going to give you a couple of weeks to work with these habits before we come back for another episode in regards to building habits. So I know this is a very high level run through on how to design tiny habits. Click the link to download my worksheet to help you effectively design new habits and to get you some things to help with the implementation on it.

[00:23:23] Or if you want to work with me because you enjoy this approach and you found after you've been working with these habits that's the natural next step for you, click the services link below. See you in the next episode. Have a blessed day!