Sustainable stress reduction:
Building resilience

If you keep drawing from your bank account without replacing what you take, your balance gets smaller. Eventually you'll run out of money.

If you eat fewer calories than you consume, you lose weight. If you drastically reduce your food intake over time, you'll starve.

If you get too much stress in your life, without an adequate amount of restorative time, you'll get depleted, drained, burnt out.

The point I'm making here is that burnout comes from an imbalance -- not so much the amount of work or worries you deal with, but also the lack of what compensates for that.

Within reason, you can tolerate more stress if you have enough "good stuff" in your life to compensate for it.

This simple model helps explain how you can avoid burnout: You need to develop a sustainable lifestyle, that is a lifestyle where you don't draw on your resources more than you're able to replenish them.

This doesn't necessarily mean working less. It can mean paying more attention to your other needs. It can also mean re-examining how realistic you are about your expectations of how much fulfillment your work can bring. And it will probably also entail rethinking how you balance life and work.

To find a really effective stress management technique for you, it helps to understand what causes your stress. Not just the external factors (sometimes, there's not much you can do to change them), but the way these stressful circumstances affect you.

I work with you to better understand how to deal with what you find stressful. I coach you to develop your own resources. What you learn in the process stays with you. You build up your own personal strengths. So the change you achieve is lasting.

It helps to have a healthy respect for the difficulty of this task... but to not let this intimidate us. Together, we go right into the eye of the storm: we explore what happens during stressful moments.

I help you go through a "slow motion replay" of these difficult moments.

We explore together what happens, in a gentle, curious and accepting way. This helps you become more aware of what is happening, and how to fight it.

Change doesn't happen instantly. Supportive coaching helps you overcome the ups and downs that are a normal part of the process of overcoming stress.

As you stick with it, this process brings about changes. And, as you act differently, you experience yourself as a different person.

See also: Proactive counseling