leaves you in a frame of mind in which you can negotiate the price from a position of strength. If fearing you won’t get the house and believing it is the only possible one, you get anxious, you are likely to offer a higher price than necessary and the owner will recognize your desperation and hold out for an even better price. If on the other hand, you choose to believe that if this purchase doesn’t come off you will find an even better house, you are more likely to base your offer on what you truly believe the house is worth rather than on how much you want it.
A word of warning here. If you translate this to mean that you don’t care if you get it or not, on a ‘laissez-faire’, ‘she’ll be right’ basis, this is a cop-out and you are missing the point. Stay positive and do go for your target but don’t live as if your life depended on it or as if another even better option isn’t possible.
9 Much stress is caused by your fear of other people’s opinions of you and your deeds. Decide who you are and who you want to be. Get a clear statement of purpose, develop your own Life Plan. Keep this clearly in your mind, live by it and many of your stresses will dissipate.
Much stress occurs simply because you don’t know who you want to be or what you want to achieve. Thus you are tossed around in a sea of other people’s opinions with no firm anchor.
If you are too timid the go-getters and positive people will call you a wimp. If you are too strong the nervous and the under-achievers will call you aggressive. If you are too noisy and outgoing the timid will call you brash. If you are too quiet and retiring the extroverts will call you dull. If you do too much for other people the selfish will call you a doormat. If you do too little for others the generous will call you unhelpful.
Too timid, too strong, too noisy, too quiet, too helpful or selfish for whom? For them? For you? By what standards are you judged? By what standards are you willing to be judged?
Create your own standards. Decide who you are and what you want to be. Once you have decided this and are happy with your description of your ideal self then live by it. If someone criticizes you, check it out against your own standards. If you have done the right thing according to them then relax. If you have not then use this as a learning experience and plan how you can change in future.
When you are behaving according to your own standards it is not possible for you to feel stressed by the opinions and criticisms of others. If you find repeatedly that you still feel stressed, even when you are doing what you think is right, it may be time for you to reassess your own standards. If they need to be changed, change them. If they don’t then find out what the underlying problem is, why you are still feeling stressed. There are many ways described throughout the book for doing this.
In the same way set out the plan for your life. Be very clear on your goals. Once you have done this, work towards them. Recognize the things you will have to avoid and omit if you are to reach them. Recognize the things you will have to do if you are to reach them. Once you are happy with this then get on with your life, head in this direction, clear in the knowledge of where you want to go.
Many stresses will then fall away. The stress or anxiety of not having a fixed income will be lessened when you recognize you are doing the appropriate study to reach your goal. The anxiety or discomfort of being pregnant will be reduced when you keep in mind the large family you want. The stress of not being invited to a party is reduced when you know your career is of prime importance to you.
Having a clear idea as to exactly who you are, who you want to be and the type of life you want to have leaves you much less vulnerable to other people’s opinions and criticisms than when your goal is to please everybody else at all times, an impossible task, and when their opinion is of paramount importance to you.
10 You are terrific. Most stress comes from your feelings of inadequacy. Develop full confidence in yourself, be willing to like, love and approve of yourself. If you don’t, who will?
You grew up in a world where, under the disguise of modesty, you were taught to put yourself down. You were taught, under the guise of generosity and caring for others, to put other people first, to put others ahead of you, to give them the biggest slice of the cake, to let them go first, to praise them before praising yourself.
This is fine as far as it goes, but sadly it is all too easy for it to have negative repercussions. For most people, having been taught, as children, to put other people first has resulted in a diminished respect for themselves and their own achievements. In clinic work, in workshops and in life in general I have found that most people have a poor opinion of themselves. Even the boasts and bombasts, under all the external cover-up, have, deep down, the fear that they are not good enough, not clever enough, not loving enough, not helpful enough, not successful enough, not sufficiently worthwhile.
Learning to love yourself, like yourself, approve of yourself and be comfortable with yourself and the way you are is a major way to reduce the stress in your life. This does not mean you should be aggressively telling everyone else how wonderful you are, boasting, hogging the limelight or telling everyone else you are better than them. It does mean having the inner certainty that you are OK. You are perfect just the way you are, for this moment in time.
This attitude does not mean that you do not recognize things about yourself that you wish to change. We are, hopefully, all on a path of growth, change and development. It does mean becoming content with yourself, being willing to give yourself the unconditional love and acceptance that you give to other people to whom you are close.
It is a sad comment on the way we bring up our children and that you were probably brought up as a child, that for most people this is one of the hardest steps to make in reducing stress. Learning to give yourself full love and approval may be the most difficult step to take; at the same time it is also one of the most powerful.
These and many other similar concepts are discussed in detail with practical examples throughout the first part of this book. These ideas follow on from the ideas developed in two earlier books, Choosing Health Intentionally and Choosing Weight Intentionally. In these, attention was focused on the way that thoughts, emotions and past experiences affect an individual’s health and weight. Here these ideas have been developed further and applied, specifically, to the stresses in your life.
There are other topics covered in the first part. You are given tools that will help you to understand yourself better and to learn more about past problems and past experiences that you are letting, often subconsciously, contribute to your present stresses. You are given tools with which you can unearth some of the subconscious reasons why particular situations stress you. One such technique is Running a Phrase. You are told how to go back into the past in ways that will help you to unearth buried memories, memories that may have been suppressed yet may be the cause of much of your stress. You are shown how to take the remembered trauma out of past stressful situations and to reduce the impact of these situations on your present stress. You are encouraged, and shown how, to have positive beliefs about yourself instead of being self-critical.
In these and other ways you will be able to understand and remove the stresses in your life. Having recognized old triggers and old sensitivities, you can reassess present situations and will, almost certainly, decide to view them in a new light.
You will learn to be proactive and to create your own life, just the way you want it, rather than being reactively jerked around on the strings of other people’s opinions and emotions. You will spend time assessing just exactly who you are and who you want to be, which values are important to you and which aren’t, and therefore which criticisms are relevant and may assist in your growth and which aren’t. You will learn a lot of wonderful things about yourself that, so far, may have gone unrecognized.
You will also be encouraged to
