Grace Over Grind: Identify Mind Games to Relieve Stress & Improve Work-Life Balance

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!