AikinenOptimizing the Pieces Together

Date: August 1st, 2020

How Can I Make My Stress Go Away?

I was in Armenia a few years ago preparing for my wedding there that month. My fiancee took me to a fancy Italian restaurant where we got to sit down with her good friend, Mher Kocharyan, who was the General Manager. It was an incredibly busy place, all tables packed with people from morning until night. Maher made special time out of his crazy busy schedule to talk to me. He was interested in my "unique" perspective on things and life.

Within a few minutes the primary issue surfaced in the conversation and stayed there for the next 45 minutes. He told me, he has 40 employees he has to manage every day. Endless problems from morning until night. He said he was "extremely stressed" all the time. And then he popped the magic question at me. "OK, so how do I make my stress go away?" He knew I was an experienced health/executive coach and psychologist with decades of personal and business experience. He looked at me with a look like, OK, you are the doctor/psychologist/health guru/magician, can you take out your magic wand and wave it at me and make all my stress go away? I'm waiting!?

Honestly, the question was so clear and pointed; I really didn't know how to respond. His clear question of "I have big stress! Now make it go away Chris!" left me feeling like I wanted to give him a big long answer of how we can do that. But he didn't want the long answer. He wanted the shortcut. He wanted me to utter the magic words "Your stress will be gone if you just do this or that!" And it was that simple for him.

This led me to a deeper understanding of my perception of stress. We see our stress as a single current idea or experience. One that we can just turn on or off like a light switch. Flip the switch and our stress turns on, flip the switch back and it just turns off.

But our stress is much more like cooking a recipe for food. We can't just go into the kitchen and flip a switch or snap our fingers and we have a gourmet meal. A lot of work goes into making a good dish. We have to think and plan about what to buy, go to the store, buy the groceries, bring them home, and bring them into the house. Then clean, cut, season, cook, plate and then finally we can eat it. Then after all that we still have to clean up the big cooking mess. So to cook a gourmet meal takes a lot of time and effort, it takes many steps to ramp it up and ramp it down to the ultimate finish line.

Our stress is the exact same thing. It is a construction of a lot of different parts, just like a recipe. We spend a lot of time and effort and many steps building up our stress levels just like if we were building a multi-floor house. I studied stress psychology all the way back to my early UC Berkeley years. I even took a psychology class called "Stress and Coping" with the world renown Berkeley psychology professor Richard Lazarus, whose pivotal work and ideas on stress psychology continues to this day. I can never forget Professor Lazarus. I had the privilege of talking to him a few times, and what I remember was walking away from him thinking, "Man, that guy has crazy amounts of stress, he looked to me like the whole world's problems were on his shoulders!" And I think a lot of that stress he had was from people like Maher who would come to him and say, OK, Professor Lazarus, you are the stress expert of the world, now tell me how to "make my stress go away. I certainly wanted that from him.

At the time, my stress was all the way to the level of the Andromeda galaxy, and I didn't know what to do. I surely thought this guy can help me understand how to deal with my stressful life. And walking away from him, and seeing the even bigger stress I saw he was going through and still handling, I thought to myself, OK, if he can handle that higher level of stress, then I can handle my currently levels as well. And that made me feel better knowing I wasn't the only one who was dealing with crazy situations and that caused my stress levels to go through the roof. But all that did not prepare me for Maher's simple question...."How do I make my stress go away?"

I like when a person can bring me a type of problem that I have no immediate answer for. So many kinds of problems are easy for me, that it's refreshing when someone can sincerely give me a challenge to my coaching and psychological abilities. That's when I have to dig down deep and really come up with the correct and right answer to the problem. After pondering it for a long time, it became clear to me that stress is not something that we can just turn off so quickly. We spend years developing reaction patterns to our jobs, our bosses, our spouses, our financial or health situation. It's a patterned learning how we respond to stressful inputs in our life.

So what is required to "make the stress go away"? We have to deconstruct our stress. There I said it. I know it's not the answer anyone wants to hear. It's not the magic wand answer, but it is the correct and most helpful answer. Just like we have learned over many years how to "become stressed out," we have to now learn over maybe many years as well how to "become not stressed out." We have to learn to deconstruct our stress, step by step, situation by situation, piece by piece. We have to learn how to tear down our house of stress. We have to identify and look at all the inputs and factors that are making us have a stress response, and we have to start to train ourselves to have a different emotional reaction going forward. If we are stressed, our current way of reacting to the problem obviously isn't working. It's time for a new approach, a new technique to execute when the "stress attack" arrives.

The stressors that are making us get "stressed out" may not stop, in fact they may stay the same for years or even decades, and in some cases they can even get worse. So us wanting the stressors to stop may not be possible. But what is possible is to change our reaction and pattern to them when they do occur. We need to be able to catch the stress ball gracefully instead of letting it knock us out or over every time. The change needs to be within our own being. That's the magic wand, that's the magic that will "make the stress go away" If we can tear down our current stress response to the stressors we face, and instead build a new stress response catch mechanism, we will be on our way to solving our most difficult problems. OK, Chris, well how to we do that? How do we tear down the old stress response and learn to build up a new and improved one to "make our stress go away?"

That's the easy part. I already built the system, tools, and models for that. The Aikinen AikiTri models and questionnaires I built and based them on very clearly and easily identifies the specific areas of our life that our stress is coming from. Once the inputs are identified, they can be worked on one by one using personal, business, and executive health coaching techniques to deconstruct them one by one and build a better response in each unique area of our life that is causing our stress. Each person is different; we all have unique stressors, so we all need a custom built personalized response system to address our stressors and our reactions to them.

The good news is we don't have to feel hopeless or suffer from our stress forever; we just need to work on it and transform it so that we can handle our situation in a much improved and optimized way and form. Focused, Optimized, Energy - the principles of Aikinen are always the answer.

 

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