Recently I started watching Ted Talks, I watched this video of a lady who was talking about stress and how to make it your friend. It dawned on me, I need to write a blog about stress, here is why. I suffer from reacting horribly to stress, usually when I am stressed out, I either explode into a fury of anger and rage or I turn into a ball of sadness. This lady, was saying that it's not bad for us to be stressed, it can be good. When stress come a person's heart rate speeds up, breathing starts getting faster. These are all natural reactions from the body, but when this happens many begin to panic, not anymore.
Let's begin with what happens when I get stressed. When I get stressed my brain perceives it as oh no I am going to explode. I feel as though too much weight has been put on my shoulders and nobody is willing to take some of the weight off. Many would think what do you have to be stressed out about, you work at a Café. That is very true, I work at a café, it's coming up on summer where I live. Our customer traffic is picking up, and we don't have a large staff. Since I started working at this café last year in August, about 85% of the staff went away to school leaving a staff of at least six people on staff and we are open seven days a week. Out of the six people on staff four of us attend school at a local college or university full time. So the days that we are not at school we are at work, even on the weekends when we tend to be the busiest even during the fall and winter. During our Saturdays there would be all but one person working, and it was the same people for about five months. So after about five months of roughly the same people working, as you can imagine, we all became burnt out. Yeah of course we had days off but those days off we were at school, and it didn't make it easier on the people that were at work. The days that I was not at school, I would be working with the same crew of two to three other people. Unfortunately that made things really chaotic, for the amount of work that had to be completed to get the café ready for business and the customers waited on, we clearly all had our hands full. Now when I first started working there my boss/ neighbor had every intention on grooming me to be a leader (manager). Nine months later, i'm exactly where my boss/neighbor wants me to be, I would attend school two days a week and then work four days from open until closing. I feel as though I do a lot for the café, however I have noticed I have an issue with letting my emotions take over when I have had enough. When the boss man or chef has an idea of how to make the café a better café they start implementing this, some of the crew jumps right on board and some take a little longer. As a leader when one person tends to slow down or get lazy as a leader there is an added pressure from the owner to step up and help this person out. Getting calls from the owner is no fun, unless it's good news. There have been times when the owner has called me and I would end in tears.
Now after nine months a couple of factors have to be pointed out, i'm one of the oldest in age crew members. I have had a little more experience working, just because i'm older, I've also had a little more time to develop a work ethic. Now I have to be careful because some of my co-workers may be reading this, the roughly six of us that have worked for the past six months have each had good days and bad days. I'm glad of where we have come from, we've all become really close in the past six months.
Let's get to how to make stress your friend, stress isn't supposed to make you explode it's not supposed to turn you into a monster or a freak. Stress is supposed to prepare you for battle, it's supposed to prepare you to step up and take action in a good way. When you get stressed out trying imagining yourself in your happy place, the one place that no matter what happens your happiness is at it's peak. Remember, "Stress is not what happens to us. It is our response to what happens. And response is something we can choose."- Maureen Killoran. So for me instead of choosing to explode in to a ball of fury and rage or a ball of emotions. I'm going to choose to channel the stress into working harder and changing what needs to be changed in order to do better.
No comments:
Post a Comment