Week 3 of 6 Monday Morning Tools to clear your head and lift Your State of Mind

So here’s the 3rd of the 6 tools from my suite of 22, to help you clear your head and improve your State of Mind.

Do you believe you’re a resilient person, stoic and strong and you know you can just keep going with all manner of stressors coming at you, until say, your next holiday. Have you ever collapsed into that first day of holidays and come down with something? You were just holding it together for everyone, the boss, the kids, the husband or wife, running on adrenalin and cortisol to keep all the balls up in the air? But as soon as your body got a whiff of the notion you could actually rest for a moment, it told you how it was really feeling? Which was exhausted. If we can remember that stress builds up like layers of dust, and it takes more effort to deal with it the longer we leave it, we can justify looking after ourselves more frequently. We can learn to dust ourselves off regularly and remain closer to equilibrium no matter the time of year or busy-ness of the office.

One of many ways we can prevent the stress from building up is to make sure we have someone with whom we can vent. Normal venting however needs to come with a word of warning. Has someone ever vented at you or on you and you came away feeling dumped on? If we’re going to vent, we need to do it well. Fine for you to get it off your chest, but not if your ventee ends up carrying it for the rest of the week and never wants to partake in the ritual again.

Mindful Venting has saved marriages and seriously transformed many of my client’s work relationships:

1. Actually ask your venting partner if they have bandwidth for you to vent. This way, if your vent would be the straw that might break the camel’s back, they can decline and say, can you hold off till later today, now’s not a good time.
2. Also let the person on the receiving end know in advance ‘you don’t have to fix anything, I just need to say this out loud.’
3. Once you’ve done that set up, go for it. Keep an eye on the time!
4. At the end, let them know really clearly, you are done. This is for you as much as for them as by saying ‘that’s it, thank you for listening’, you are drawing a line under the vent and in the following few hours, you will know if you really got it out of your system. How will you know? It won’t keep coming back to bug you. If it does and you notice yourself wanting to vent 2, 3 or more times to different people, a) you may have crossed the line into bitching / gossiping and b) you need to go to the source of the issue – the person in question. Have a go this week to test it out. It really works.

To view the first module of the online State of Mind Capability program, please go here. There’s an Enterprise version for businesses and a personal version for individuals. Have a brilliant week venting mindfully and stay tuned for the next 3 tools on each of the coming Mondays.

(Photo credits to www.unsplash.com)