How to Stay Calm in Stressful Situations

Do some people leave you exhausted?  Do you sometimes find yourself feeling almost physically ill around certain people?

SUE’S STORY

A client of mine yesterday, Sue, expressed to me how she was noticing that she was picking up and sensing all of her students’ feelings of distress and anxiety. It was causing her much physical discomfort.  Sue works with young children who are learning challenged.

I asked her what she was doing to help ground herself at the beginning of each day.  If you work in a service profession, and that can be doctors, counselors, teachers, lawyers, massage therapists, etc. then you probably interact with people who have a lot of crud going on in their lives. If you’re not careful, you can end up taking on all of their grief, pain and unhappiness.  The end result is that you can end up feeling fatigued, ill, depressed and may even experience difficulty sleeping.

For that reason it’s really important that you make a point of doing what we call “self-care” (things like meditation and others, which I’ll address in another post) and to ground yourself on a daily basis so that you can be of the best service to your clients.

In Sue’s case, she was using the practice of visualizing a bubble of protection and white light around her, but since she was still experiencing discomfort, I recommended she take it to another level.  I suggested that she also make the statement (out loud or to herself internally) of something like “Please let me be of service to my clients; a channel for their well-being. Let their “stuff” be there stuff and my stuff be my stuff.”  In this way she is asking for an additional level of protection.  She’s also acknowledging to the Universe that she does want to be of service and the best way for her to do that is to be grounded herself.

Sue was concerned that by protecting herself she would be in some way putting up an emotional wall between her and her students. In fact, by not being properly grounded, she was acting as a sponge for everything they were feeling, which in the end was causing her to shut down emotionally in order to try and avoid the pain and discomfort she was feeling! Instead, by being properly grounded, she can transmute their energy back to them in a positive way.

A SIMPLE PROCESS

I also suggested that if she still notices that she’s experiencing any discomfort physically, that she use her breath to shift the situation. Our bodies are our first set point of what is going on with us. As soon as you notice your stomach tightening, your breath becoming shallower, your chest tightening, or even some nausea, that’s your indicator that something isn’t right!

Our breath is the one tool that we have at our disposal at any given moment.

A simple exercise to shift in the moment, whether you are driving or with a group of people or even on the phone with a client, is the following:

Take a deep breath from your abdomen through your nose (your abdomen should extend as you inhale), hold it at the top for a couple of seconds, and exhale through your mouth, being sure to let all the air out (your abdomen should contract inward as you exhale). Repeat three times. By the third breath you should notice a shift has occurred. Sometimes you may want to repeat that process again, especially in particularly stressful situations.

THE KEY

The key, as I learned from Deepak Chopra, is to hold the breath at the top of the inhale.  Whenever you hold your breath, it causes a shift in the brain because you are altering the breathing process, a normally autonomic bodily function.  That shift is usually just enough to interrupt the stress process and allow you to regain your composure.

Your breath can bring you peace, relaxation, and stillness to your being.

My clients, who have put this into practice on a regular basis, tell me how much it has impacted their ability to handle stressful people and situations.  It will allow you to be of more service to your clients. Which in the end is what I think we all want as professionals.

What has been your experience?  What do you do in-the-moment to shift your energy around difficult people?  Please post your thoughts!

With good energy,

Debra