One of my coaching clients recently texted me in between one of our sessions asking how can she make the job search less stressful; how can she balance the stress of job searching and also make time to have fun?
Normally, we would have explored that in our next session together, but because she’s in the middle of a move, that won’t happen for another couple of weeks, so I recorded a video + customized a worksheet for her to help her explore this a little further on her own. While there are definitely some things that we can do around stress in the moment, to me, it sounded like there could be something deeper going on there – perhaps a belief or story that the job search has to be stressful, so in my video and questions to her, I asked her to take some time in the coming days to reflect on a few questions and really explore why stress is even in the equation.
Which may sound odd – you may be thinking of course stress is in the equation Ashley, finding a job is hard and stressful, especially right now. And I get that and am sensitive to that (and I am certainly not perfect myself!). But I come back to…does it have to be stressful? What does adding stress to the equation do for you? It doesn’t help you find the job. It doesn’t help you feel better – it actually makes you feel worse (emotionally and physically), and a lot of the time is counterproductive.
I’m sharing here with you because whether it be a job search, something with your current job or something (or someone) else that is causing stress, this still applies. Stress is optional (yes, it really is!). And taking the time to reflect on that and explore what beliefs or stories we may have around stress and where those beliefs came from as well as what’s triggering the stress can be helpful.
If you want to explore this further with yourself, below are some of the questions I asked my client:
- What does the stress do you for you? Why is stress in the equation when it comes to ____ [fill in the blank]?
- What beliefs or stories are creating or causing the stress?
- How would you feel without the stress and/or the thought or story that is creating the stress? What would your experience be like without the stress and the thoughts causing it?
- Who would you be without the stress? What would you be like without the stress around X? How would you approach X if the stress and/or the thoughts causing the stress wasn’t there? What would it look like? How would you feel about it?
- Is the stress necessary?
I’d love to hear what came up for you and any insights you had!
