If you, right now have a busy stressed out mine, I want you to do this technique. I want you to close your eyes and in your mind just say “Shhhh” you know like that quieting noise you do in a classroom sometimes. And what I want you to do is, as you do the
“shhhh” touch the parts of your head that feel most busy. So, you’ve got these thoughts whizzing around and around in your head or you know doing whatever they’re doing jumping up and down it depends on how you think about them.
Take your fingers and put them on the different spots where you can feel the busyness occurring. When I think about my mind being stressed and I think about it being busy the first place that I start to feel that tension is in my forehead above my left eye. So, I’m going to put my fingers there and go “shhhh.”
Okay and then I see which other areas still feel tense inside my mind. So, I’m moving now over to the left side just above my left ear because there is some tension there. Put your fingers there or wherever else it might be and “shhhh”. You can go over your whole
head in this way, just until you’ve got complete stillness in your mind again.
On a more health related level, get more exercise. If you are stressed your body is full of adrenaline you need to use that adrenaline up once it’s occurred and the best way to do that is to do some good old physical exercise.
Have you thought about your diet? If you are drinking lots of caffeine (I know teachers often do!) you can expect that you’re going to be even more stimulated because caffeine is a stimulant. Everything that you eat and drink is creating chemicals in your body. You want to make sure that you’re feeding your body with the right chemicals so that you’ve got a good balance going on in your internal laboratory rather than making yourself feeling poorly, or sugary stuff is going to send a emotions whizzing up for a time give you high energy but then you’ll experience a massive down in the dumps afterwards.
There is so much stress that we can handle and that we can deal with on a day to day basis but realistically you can’t live every day of your life there because if you do you will exhaust yourself.
When you’ve managed to grasp onto one of those whizzingfleeting thoughts that’s going through your mind, you can ask some questions about what is driving you to behave in this stressed out way.
Here’s an example: The context is that a teacher has to get a report completed for their head teacher and they really don’t feel that they’re going to get it done in time but they’re putting themselves on to this great degree of pressure to try and get it done. So, the question is: what is your highest intention in doing this? And the response is “To be praised by my boss for doing a good job.”
Next we ask: For what purpose? The answer is “to feel acknowledged.” Then we was: What does that do for you? And the answer: “It makes me feel valued.” The we say: And above and beyond being valued what does that do for you? The reply is: “Makes me feel needed.
Finally we say: And what is a higher value than that?
And the answer is “feeling loved.”
So, we’ve gone from: I desperately need to get this report completed by the end of the day because otherwise my boss is going to go crazy and I really want to get it done to an overall feeling loved is what the overall intention is.
Here are some frames we can use now, based on what has been revealed.
“How can you now complete the report while still feeling love for yourself?”
We going to start finding some ways if we consider “What are the many reasons why you can still love yourself even if the report is not completed today?”
Now if nothing else, doing this technique definitely gets your mind to calm down. If you’re able then to take an overall view, a bigger picture idea about these small problematic things that are occurring in life, you can start to say “does it all matter in the great scheme of things?” and if it does “What’s a better way of me representing that to myself?”
People Building in an NLP and personal development training company for teachers and professionals working in education.
For more information about our courses designed to reduce stress in teachers and avoid ‘teacher burn-out’, contact us on 0345 3192 666
By Gemma Bailey
www.peoplebuilding.co.uk
