When I am coaching clients around unwanted eating, we often discover stress as the reason. A lot of people are feeling stressed right now. Stress about the pandemic and their health, or the health of their loved ones.

Many feel stressed around the holidays: about not being with their family, or about being with their family. I’m sure you have your own list.

Stress Is Normal

First of all, stress is not the enemy. Too much on-going stress is not healthy, but it can be a useful emotion essential for our survival. Your basic stress response is trying to keep you alive and is a warning signal that something may be wrong or dangerous.

Our instinctive reaction is to try to get rid of the stress as quickly as possible. This reaction has caused many of us to create unwanted habits. A drink or a snack often eases the stress temporarily. It soothes and distracts us in the moment. Each time we get that temporary relief we strengthen the habit.

What Can We Do About Stress Instead?

You might expect me to start giving you other, more healthy distractions to temporarily reduce your feelings of stress. I do love deep breathing, walks, and warm baths myself. But that is not what we are doing today.

Those type of distractions can be helpful, but they don’t always work. Today we are discussing the skill of reducing your desire to get rid of the feelings of stress. Wait, what?

Making Friends with Stress

Maybe the concept of ‘being friends with stress’ is a stretch for you. How about co-existing with stress? Let’s look at co-existing with stress like co-existing with an annoying neighbor.

Imagine thinking, “Oh hey, here you are again, annoying neighbor, okay. I’m really not going to engage with you, I know I can’t get rid of you, so let’s co-exist as best we can.”

Let’s continue to explore the irritating neighbor analogy. Picture yourself outside, working in your yard, and your very annoying neighbor comes over and starts talking about his stamp collection, and you just want to keep planting your flowers.

Of course, you could scream at him, “Stop talking!” You could run inside, faking an emergency and quit doing what you really want to do. Or you could just keep planting and let your neighbor babble on. It is, what it is. Nothing has gone wrong, this is part of the deal, living on this street.

Now, imagine yourself accepting stress as part of life, we don’t love it, we are glad when it is not around. But when it shows up, we could just say, “Hey there, I knew you would be back, I’m not going to do anything about you, I’m just going to keep planting my flowers.”

Why Do This?

I do work with my clients to reduce and eliminate stress by exploring the root causes, but we all seem to create new stress for ourselves on a regular basis. It is important to know how to have stressful feelings without running for a snack or drink to get rid of them.

Stress on Top of Stress

Sometimes we think that things have gone terribly wrong when stress appears. We add anxiety on top of our stress when we think, “I shouldn’t be stressed, why is this happening?” By simply acknowledging that stress is a perfectly normal feeling that happens to everyone, we can avoid intensifying it.

Know this

I want you to know that nothing is wrong with you if you have stressful feelings and can’t always get rid of them. You can feel stress and do nothing about it.

Learning to accept feelings of stress and anxiety, without fighting them, is a valuable skill that can keep us from turning to food or drinks to soothe ourselves.

If you would like more help to work through your stressful feelings, download my Stress Worksheet.

What do you do when you have feelings of stress? Do you think something is wrong with you when you feel stressed? Can you imagine letting those feeling be there without trying to get rid of them?

Tayshia Adams’ White Tank and Denim Skirt Dress With Ivan

The Bachelorette Season 16 Episode 11 Fashion

As it turns out Tayshia Adams’ outfit that she wore on the one-on-one portion of her “hometown” date with Ivan on last night’s episode of The Bachelorette is actually an amazing two-in-one hybrid dress (and not a white tank and denim skirt like I and I’m sure 99 100% of you originally thought). And therefore the perfect choice for those of us who due to quarantine have completely forgotten how to put outfits together and want to enter 2021 with a true bang Wang.

Fashionably,

Faryn

Click Here to Shop Her AlexanderWang.T Dress on Sale

Click Here to See Her Sold Out Alexandre Birman Sandals

Originally posted at: Tayshia Adams’ White Tank and Denim Skirt Dress

For some reason, bangs are always a bit controversial. Curtain bangs are no different. Some love them and some aren’t feeling them and others think people are calling long layers bangs when they’re really just a layer. Bur regardless, Ashley Benson does have new curtain bangs are they look great on her. The actress shared a video of her on set wearing a wavy bob wig and apparently, it inspired her to make a real change.

Not only did Benson get curtain bangs, but she also went shorter allover and much lighter. “The focal point of this look is the cut and color combo,” her hairstylist Joseph Maine said in a statement. “I love how the platinum color really compliments her skin and the dark root gives her a lot of depth, making her light blonde pop. The depth in her root also goes with her eyebrows and makes her eyes stand out. For the style, I wanted it to look effortless and just slightly tousled.”

Instagram.com/ashleybenson.

“I love working with Ashley because we get to try so many different looks,” the Trademark Beauty co-founder said. “She’s always up for new things. This is our first time really playing with her hair since Paris Fashion Week in March where we did eight different looks. It was fun to try something new today! While this is a wig that she’s currently rocking, we were so inspired by it that we ended up chopping her real hair super short too. It’s pretty drastic!”

Source: Instagram

Benson’s new bangs will take a little styling work to get used to but they’re very versatile. She can wear them straight forward, blown-out in a cool ’70s way or even just tuck them into the rest of her hair when she’s not feeling then. They’ll also grow out easily right into her chic bob. We love them and hope she keeps them around for a while—until she switches it up again.

Jen Shah’s I Literally Can’t Even Sign on Her Desk

Real House of Salt Lake City Season 1 Episode 5 Decor

Like Jen Shah, I literally can’t even on most days, either. In fact, Jen’s sign on her desk sums up 2020 for me. The four words seem to even describe her tumultuous relationship with Mary Crosby. While the toxic duo go blow for blow each week, one thing is clear, Jen’s husband is an amazing rock and support system for her, even if only on FaceTime. My only question is, how can I sign up for some of those famous Coach Shah’s pep talks?

Until next time,

Chelsie

Click Here To Shop Jen Shah’s I Literally Cant Even Desk Sign

Originally posted at: Jen Shah’s I Literally Can’t Even Sign

There’s an old expression that seasoned college professors like to invoke about teaching: “The first year you get it wrong. The second year you fix it. And the third year you’re bored.”

As I settle into my third year running my communications consultancy, that comment came back to me. While it applies beautifully to teaching, it applies to everything else as well.

Because I love my job, I’ve made a conscious effort to make sure that I never get bored. Here are three ways I keep my job fresh, and you can too.

Keep Adding New Content

I have a lot of colleagues who love to deliver the same material year in, year out. Whether it’s a lecture for students, a sales pitch or a topic for a column or essay, having some pre-set, go-to content frees them up to do other things with their time.

But if you’re someone like me, who needs constant change in order to feel alive, the worst thing you can do is to settle into a routine. So even though I frequently give workshops I’ve done before, I always make sure that I’m creating new content alongside them.

Just this past week, for example, I developed a new workshop on “virtual presence” – i.e., how to maximize your personal impact in an online meeting or presentation.

Preparing that workshop took several days to pull together. But it was also exhilarating. Even with workshops I’ve honed to the point where I’m happy with them, I’ll still change an exercise or an example. It keeps me on my toes.

Learn New Tools

When the Coronavirus first hit – and like every other workshop facilitator I know – I jumped into the digital workshop space with two feet. We had to. It was a classic case of “adapt or die.”

Back then, the learning was mostly around how to get the most out of platforms like Zoom and MS Teams. I still remember practicing “break out rooms” the day before my very first online workshop back in April. My daughter and two of my nieces stepped in as fake participants.

But as time goes on, I’ve gotten more adventurous and have expanded my digital toolkit. This past week, for example, I incorporated Mural – the visual collaboration app – into a brainstorming exercise for a workshop on project management.

In preparing for that workshop, I spent way more time practicing the app than I did refreshing myself on the workshop content. But it was worth it.

I went into the classroom with that tingling feeling of being slightly nervous about how that exercise would pan out. And that’s a good thing. I leaned into the material just that little bit more. The students loved the app, and I had another tool under my belt to take forward into other workshops.

Experiment with Your Portfolio

I’ve talked a lot here about how having a portfolio career suits my personality. But one of the things the pandemic has done is to force me to experiment with the balance within that portfolio.

When the pandemic first hit last spring, nearly all of my work was one-to-one writing coaching. Universities – a huge part of my client base – were too busy sorting out online learning in their core courses to think about the sort of soft skills workshops I offer.

And corporate clients were focused on keeping their staff. They didn’t have any extra money – or headspace – to spend on professional skills development. Fortunately, PhD students – in particular – still needed help writing their dissertations.

But this autumn, that breakdown reversed. Nearly all of my work since September has been group workshops of various sizes. I’m only seeing writing coaching clients occasionally.

Although I didn’t engineer that experiment, I’ve learned a lot from it. I’ve decided that I prefer the current set up. It’s much more cost effective vis a vis my time. And when I do shift to one-to-one coaching – which is far more labor-intensive than running a workshop – it’s an absolute joy.

The lesson I’ve learned from all of this is that for my life as an entrepreneur to work, I need to constantly mix things up.

How about you? How do you stay fresh in your career? What new tools have you added to your toolbox? How have they helped you advance or balance your portfolio? Please share with the community.