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When I get to work and start working, I notice all the goes around me with my co-workers and what they’re saying. In every workplace you will undoubtedly hear your co-workers complain about how they have to meet deadline after deadline only to come up short of their work in the end. You hear about how stressed and freaked out they get and how they might have gotten scolded by the boss or client. I’m sure some of you have been there yourselves. Whether it would be in school or in the workplace, we have all been there. I myself have been there. And we deal with whatever comes our way. Sometimes we deal with it by pulling our hair out, yelling at someone else, kicking and screaming, then maybe developing habits that we should be not be getting into.

We all know that stress does bad things to our body and minds. And we all would like to have no stress in our every day lives; a no-brainer. Think about this; how many ‘older’ people do you know that have made this far in their careers or maybe you have relatives that have been in work or have worked for the same company for years and years. Throughout your life you probably run into a lot of people who are well seasoned in their careers, hobbies, studies, etc. Out of all those people who are advanced in their careers and lives, ALL of them have made it as far as they have, and you know very well that they have had their fair share of mishaps, mistakes, deadlines, dealing with people, and just being involved in life. Out of all the times that they have been in stressful situations, you can bet that most of situations brought on unnecessary stress during those moments. And the stress is usually brought on initially by our thoughts. “What if I don’t make this deadline?” “My boss is gonna be so mad at me!” “What if I don’t make this person happy because my work’s not good enough?” What if, what if, what if…

What if I were to tell you to really think about something. Every time you are in a what-could-be a stressful situation, think about all those people who have made it through their own situations and about how each and every one of them survived. Everything turned out just fine in the end. Some of you might think, “well my situation is different and is probably worse than most other people’s” when truthfully, it probably isn’t. Now realize here that I’m not talking about life or death situations, or situations where something is going gravely bad like your house is on fire or something. That would be unrealistic for me to tell you, “eh, just watch your house burn down and don’t worry about.” That’s a little different. I’m talking about the situations where you might be at work and you have a big project deadline. Or when you’re at school and you have a big test coming up for a class or even for your certification or perhaps, your degree.

Anything that is not a life/death situation can be dealt with stress free

Let’s say you are about to take a test. You’re nervous, as is natural. You might be stressed. You go to take the test, you do your best and you know that you studied very, very hard. You might drip a couple of beads of sweat onto your paper because you get a little stumped. But then you turn it in. You take a deep breath and you feel incredibly relieved that it’s all done and over. You get the test back and find out that you passed with flying colors. Was the pre-test stress necessary? I think not. Why? Well because look at where you are now. All those tests you endured; you did just fine! So now take that thought everywhere you go, and you will find that stress in your situation is unnecessary. And what do I mean by take that thought wherever you go? Say you have a project for work due tomorrow. You don’t have it all done and you think you need more time. But in your mind, fast forward 10 years from now. Do you think you’ll be working somewhere else because you got fired over not finishing your project on time? Probably not. Take that same thought before you are taking a test. Think 1 year, 3 years, 5 years from now. Will you not be working because you failed that one test? You will probably be successful. Thinking about situations like that will help you get a new perspective on things and help you realize that we stress for no good reason most of the time.

What if I legitimately fail at what I tried to do?

So what? Are you going to die because you failed a test in school? No. Are you going to die because you didn’t finish a project for a client at work on time? Well, maybe, if your boss loses it and decides to deal you a head-severing uppercut to the chin. But for real, that won’t happen (I hope).

Again, even if you failed to do something you thought you could do, think about 5 years from now. Everything will somehow, someway workout just fine. Do you have to repeat a class? No big deal, just do your best and walk away feeling satisfied knowing that you put all of your effort into it. Same goes with everything else. If you can walk away knowing that you put everything into what you were doing, then you are good to go. Everything will work itself out.

Having this sort of mentality has really helped me to overcome stress in my life. It has helped to look at things in a different way and know that there is a bigger picture. Look at where you are now, and how everything has worked out so far. There should be no reason to believe that things won’t continue to work out in the future. So remember that every time you feel stress coming on, take a deep breath and know that everything will work out no matter the outcome.