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Stress Solutions: Pray, Plan, and Practice

Guest post by: Sue Miley

Article Overview: Stress in life and business is at epic proportions in America today. Here are simple solutions that you can implement right now and begin reducing the stress in your life.

Stress Solutions: Pray, Plan, and Practice

Things aren’t going very well at work. You can’t put your finger on it.

Sure the economy isn’t great, but that didn’t effect you last year.

Your employees aren’t that different than usual. You are actually putting in more time and effort.

The only results going up is your stress level!

Or maybe for you, things are different. Your team isn’t as good. Or you have been distracted for the last few months.

It has begun to impact your business.

Still, even understanding it, you are stressed!



What happens when you get stressed?

I know for me, my type A personality pushes over my peaceful, easy going persona, and takes over. This “me” wants to fix it and fix it now. My natural tendency a decade ago was to start making changes. What we are doing isn’t working so we need to do something different.

There were two problems with this.

One, I was trying to fix everything in my own strength. I was not connected to God and I was not asking Him for help, or anyone else for that matter. I would rally my troops and we would make it happen! Kind of like the two year old’s “I can do it by myself!”

Psalm 118:14

The LORD is my strength and my defense ; he has become my salvation.

2 Corinthians 12:10

That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

Two, the ongoing stress impacts me physically. I have the constant knot in my stomach and soon I am clenching my jaw. Usually by mid-day my intense concentration has given me a headache.

The people in my work and life can surely tell the difference.

Have You Been On the Receiving End of the Stress?



I have also been on the receiving end of a stressful boss/owner who didn’t try to buffer their stress from anyone. They may not have felt any physical symptoms because they surely didn’t hold it in. However, the collateral damage to the people around them was at times devastating.

In the end, many business owners will fail, some will stay afloat, but are we really succeeding. In God’s eyes, if we pull out all of the stops, and through our own personal physical and mental will, are able to turn things around, are we a success?

Jesus Gives Us The Way To Be Different

I don’t want to join the ranks of the bosses or owners whom half of the adults on Facebook are complaining about every morning.

As a Christian in business, I surely don’t want my team to wonder where God is in my life.

And I surely don’t want my family to ever have to suffer with living with the stressed out, adrenaline burning, type A mother and wife who used to show up at the dinner table.

Since becoming a Christian, I found a better way. Or more accurately, God provides a better way.

I’ve categorized it into a 3 part process:

1. Pray - We need to truly devote time to praying about our businesses. I discuss prayer and provide many suggestions for integrating prayer into our business (even if it isn’t a Christian product or service) in my new home training program - The Christian Business Edge.
2. Plan - Planning what needs to happen, after spending time in prayer, will help you make the wisest decisions and will result in the most efficient use of your time. The opposite, reacting, many times results in poor decisions and more time and energy fixing the mess we created.
3. Practice - Growing up we learn to practice to get good at something: sports, music, and other disciplines. We don’t seem to practice anymore in business. Why is that? How can you practice your business skills to do what you do better?

There is so much to say about dealing with stress through these three areas that I decided I needed to break it up into a couple of posts.This is the overview. There will be more this coming week.

As you contemplate stress in your life; remember stress is a natural reaction to situations that have a high amount of risk for us personally. How we respond to stress is up to us. Having dealt with much stress without God, and over the past decade with God, I choose Him!

What about you? How do you deal with stress in your business? Does God play a major role?

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Article Tags: anxiety, faithstress solutions, life stress, stress in business



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Re: Website Name Help - Its good that you have come up with the idea of setting up a website for your business. Now As it is into Business Solutions, I would recommend that you also include this into the name of the website. This will help you getting better results as far as SEO is concerned. You can start building a brand with this name. As you have already got the name booked, you can try changing it to something on the lines of Business Solutions as in azimabusiness or azimabusinesssolutions. Its a long name but still is good from the SEO point.
Help me name my moms business - I think Infinity Cleaning Services sounds better than Elite Cleaning Solutions... Why the Solutions? What is there to be solved? You simply get a rag with some Windex on it and wipe away.... plug the vacuum and Vac Away, get a mop and mop away. Stick to Infinity Cleaning Services... ICS sounds cool...
Business Innovation - Hi Simon If you can finish off the Business Plan and think about your strategic direction or how you are going to use your product to convince people it's a great idea, it will set the foundation for your programming project. You see, when you are looking for funding you will need a Business Plan and Strategic Plan that will convince companies to invest into your new idea. Has anyone achieved this idea before using another industry besides health and fitness that you know of? You should also design some mockups as a "preview" for your programming project. This will also help reduce your programming costs as everyone will know exactly what you want if you have detailed mockups already completed including any functionality you require. Starting mockups for websites and software applications on paper is the best way if you're not a guru in graphic editing software.
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