Within the ability to deal with difficulties, to overcome obstacles, resolve problems and quickly recover lays our ability to achieve great things. Truth to be told, the greater success, the greater the price you have to pay.
Nothing comes without the struggle, the hard work, the sweat, the effort. That’s why I consider stress management vital for our success rate. Because if you can’t deal with stress and recover properly, you will be fatigue, defocused and underperforming. Or as my mentor, Darren Hardy says: “You are paid to rest”.
But stress management isn’t just about resting. It’s also about the way you react when you are facing adversity. Most of the people sabotage themselves, their 
careers, their relationships, just in those small moments when they lose their temper and don’t control themselves, and they do something that they will regret.
That means, with other words, that stress management is self-control. Your ability to stay calm, think it through and react as your best self in pressuring situations will make all the difference in your results.
Why it’s important
I know that small things that we do every day, called habits, influence our life entirely. But we also have to know how to protect ourselves from our own version of stressed out, angry, irrational maniac. Because, just as we are our own creators, we can also be our own destructors.
Think about it: somebody spent years in creating a beautiful marriage, family life, an amazing place called home, just to lose everything in a split moment when he or she lost control and cheated on their spouse. Or a businessman creates this incredible fortune, with everything you can wish for, just to lose a huge chunk of it one night at the casino. And these are just some random examples.
You can sabotage yourself at your work doing your craft, at your family reunion talking with those you care about or every day when you eat at that fast food place. And while all of these come from different areas and circumstances, I believe the true cause for all of this is bad stress management.
Think about the excuses: I was angry, I didn’t mean that. I was tired, I didn’t notice that. I was sad, I didn’t want that. So I guess we can all agree that if we improve our ability to deal with stress on a daily basis we can dramatically improve the quality of our lives.
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The Big “Don’t”
I said deal with stress, not ignore it. The worst thing you can do is to try to avoid the difficulties you encounter. Take any drug addict, drinker, partier, adrenaline junky person and you will see a disaster in their lives, from all points of view. Because ignoring your problems won’t make them disappear.
In fact, they will pile up and produce an avalanche of even more difficulties that the only solution you will find is to stay higher (with your mind toasted) just to forget about the damage around you for a split second.
It’s like you are a gardener, and instead of going there and clean out the weeds, you just drink wine all day ignoring the growing weed that will soon take over all your goods. So if you care about your life and your own well-being, please don’t ignore the difficulties that you have to resolve. It goes for financial, physical, emotional or mental difficulties also.
The Big “Do”
Learn to treat problems as challenges. Be excited when you meet them. Truth to be told, we are stronger, wiser, better, more loving and more compassionate just because we faced difficulties and our characters and souls were shaped in the process. In the same way, you can only develop yourself on your craft to become the best at what you do by solving problems after problems, and in the process doing it better and faster.
So you can say that stress goes hand in hand with opportunity. The bigger and more important goals you have, the bigger stress you are going to encounter. Your ability to positively deal with difficulties and stress means that you are going to achieve a higher level of success.
I think the most important thing we need to change about stress is our attitude towards it. We should stop seeing it as an enemy, and more as a natural component of success. It comes with it. We can’t get rid of. But what we can do is become better at dealing with it, resting more effectively, and therefore come back at what matters to us and be more productive.
What are your ways to positively deal with stress? Share them with us in the comment below.
