This is the second part of the series on "Dealing With Stress". The first can be view by clicking here.

I woke up on day two feeling much better and like a load was off my shoulders. My mind was in a position where I could begin thinking about how to better manage circumstances moving forward.
In all my pondering I had two words resonating in my head, “Be Deliberate.”

What do I mean by this? Be deliberate where I put my time, be deliberate which relationships to invest in, be deliberate about what opportunities to pursue, be deliberate about what tasks I pick up, be deliberate about everything in life.

It was like a lightbulb going off inside my head. If I could just be deliberate, then many of the issues that I was wrestling with would come into line.

Upon reflection, the vast majority of my stress was because I let other people push me into the passenger seat of my life’s car. I was jumping from one issue to another because someone demanded that I respond immediately…..in computer terminology this is called thrashing. Nothing is finished and everything half completed.

By being deliberate I had settled once again into the driver’s seat and it felt good. After another day’s contemplation I put some things into place that have transformed who I am and made my life so much better.

What I’m going to suggest may be obvious for some readers but for me it was revolutionary. The first thing I did when I returned home was apologise to the family for my “silent treatment”. Nothing like a good serving of humble pie to start you off in the right direction.

This past week has been pretty difficult for me. Business has been going incredibly well but a personal problem arose with an external social organisation that I needed to work through (not family or anything like that…they’re all awesome!).

Due to the emotions of the encounter with a number of individuals I found myself really stressed out and not getting to sleep until 4am each night for most of the week….which is a rare occurrence for me. I thought that I’d share with you how I dealt with the stress and what I did to get through to the other side of the problem.

The first night was a shocker. My mind seemed to swirl back and forth trying to wrestle with all the issues at hand. I found my brain replaying events on it's internal DVR over the previous 24 hours over and over again. Each time I would think of a witty riposte to a comment made and then the loop replayed again and again.

I must admit that I fell in the trap of PLOM’s disease. For those of you that don’t know, PLOMs is Poor Little Old Me…..it’s an absolutely pointless state of mind that doesn’t solve anything. If you stay in this mode of thinking then you’ll end up severely depressed (get some help if you are)….I made the decision that I wasn’t going to let that happen.

The second night was a lot more proactive as I did a brain dump of about six pages of notes about the situation. What I was trying to do was array the facts and leave the emotion out of things. This really helped calm the internal dialogue down and provided me with the necessary information for my mind to go searching for solutions.

Some of you may have noticed that I didn’t do any posts last week. Yes, I’m fine and nothing disastrous has happened in my personal life. I just reached a point of work saturation.

Have you ever been working so hard that no matter how fast and how diligent you are your in-tray just keeps on mounting up? Well, that was me last week. A number of nights I found myself working until 3:30am and up again at 7:30am because there was just so much going on.

So what’s been happening? Everything from reviewing legal agreements, managing partners, sorting through client issues, working with the ParkLogic team, designing graphics, cleaning up websites, debugging servers, launching new platforms, coding client requests into existing systems and working with spreadsheets that literally take 30 minutes to calculate. The last issue drove me crazy because if I touched my PC during a recalc Excel would just stop! Grrrrrrrrrrr!!!!

I know of very few people that don’t suffer from stress and fewer still that haven’t been massively stressed at some time during their life. So over the years, what have I learned about handling stress?

When I was training for my private pilot's license, my flying instructor explained to me a simple principle about how to handle stress in the cockpit. He said there may be a time when the workload increases to the point where you become incredibly stressed and find your decision making suffers.

I must admit that I thought that could never happen to me, after all, I’m a smart guy so my instructor must have been thinking about other people. How many times have you listened to someone sharing some wisdom born out of experience only to think they were talking to someone else?