About Kip Flock, MSW
Apex Resource Center was created to support people and organizations in change. In this era of escalating human flux, we must continuously heighten our effectiveness in managing the challenge of intensified contemporary demands on our emotional and interactive lives. ARC Services for Human Effectiveness aim to replenish the gap between the distress of what no longer works and the hope of what might be - what we must release and what we aspire to create. Kip Flock has created the Apex Resource Center in the spirit of an ongoing culmination of the most effective strategies for emotional competence and competent influence in the dawning of this new age of life long learning.
Life Coaching & Upcoming Events
A coach has the questions. You have the answers. As your coach, I'll help you discover how to deepen the learning and forward the action in your life, please call me for a complimentary telecoach session. Tel. 570- 743-1055.
I will be facilitating Sierra Tucson's Healing The Healer Clinical Training at Miraval Spa, Tucson, Arizona (Oct.21- Oct. 25, 2002) Phone: 800-842-4487 for information, also found at my website.
I will be facilitating The Inner Child Clinical Training Ipswich, England (Sept. 9-13)
Kip Flock, LCSW, BCD Psychotherapist, Personal and Professional Coach - (570-743-1055) - P.O. Box 384, Hummels Wharf, PA 17831-0384 -
How to Reduce Stress by Telling Your Story
Get a positive witness to hear your struggles and how you have been resilient in your life. Stress builds up because we don't have the opportunity to process our experiences in a faster and faster paced world. This is not about confessing, but rather coming out of hiding. Find someone who will not give you advice, but who will just listen and hear your story. Many times advice can be shaming even with the best intention to help, and become just another point of stress. This happens in families all the time.
Ask your witness just to tell you what they heard you say and what you did that was effective. James Pennebaker confirms this in "Opening Up: The healing power of confiding in others". Getting non-judgmental witnessing can help any die hard "dummy" feel competent enough to live their own life effectively- a sure way to keep stress at bay.
|
Dear Friends!
The only way to prevent stress from killing us is to meet stress with the most forceful strategies available. The answers are simple but not easy.
|
Why We Avoid Stress Reducing Activities
The undeniable fact is that stress causes or amplifies life threatening conditions, such as chronic disease, depression and addictions. We could drastically reduce emotional and physical suffering by raising our sense of calm and mastery. Yet most of us avoid a wellness lifestyle with reckless abandon.
Such a plight has nothing to do with intelligence. We create our pain with the best of intentions. PERFECTIONISM keeps us from recognizing our limits. We learn early on that failure is unacceptable and that success is the only measure of acceptability.
We've lost the art of "bumbling"- allowing ourselves the time and space to learn something new. Mastering anything demands that we stay on plateaus of imperfection where practice is acceptable and perfection is viewed as a hindrance- the seed of discouragement and/or grandiosity.
According to George Leonard, author of "Mastery" we live in a world where the "quick fix" is our god and obsession rules our moment to moment lives. Yet, our nature is to adapt and survive with flexibility and creativity. Shame and obsession with appearance keep us from such life long learning- raising the anxiety of being ineffective while increasing stress from dysfunctional efforts to ignore the need for change. Since we live in a shame based culture where we continuously live in hiding, in survival mode- afraid of being hunted and found out as imperfect, most of us live in a "fight, flight or freeze" inner state. This bio- physical state of arousal was programmed into our brains as a way of avoiding actual danger in the environment. According to Daniel Goleman, author of "Emotional Intelligence", we were never meant to live in this primitive heightened state of arousal in a constant day to day way. Only the mastery of a stress reducing lifestyle can offset the debilitating compulsions and medical distress resulting from such culturally based self consciousness and tension.
|
6 Simple Ways to Reduce Stress
1. Know your stress map. Make a list of the stressers in your life, what triggers stress, and how you cope. Be aware of excesses in how you cope with stress in terms of frequency, intensity, duration and what is not accepted socially. What are your coping deficits, where your response to stress fails to occur with: sufficient frequency, adequate intensity, appropriate form or under socially expected conditions. H.R Beech suggests these tips in "A Behavioral Approach to the Management of Stress: a practical guide to techniques".
2. Relax. Herbert Benson wrote a book called "The Relaxation Response" where BREATHING has a central role in achieving a sense of calm. One of the components of anxiety is slowed, controlled, shallow breathing. The following are breathing techniques to achieve relaxation: watch your breath from the tip of your nose-mindful only of the air going in and out breathing deeply and slowly; add the word relax to the exhale; add numbers to the exhale, i.e.. relax 1, relax 2 and continue the count; breathe in to the count of 8, hold your breath to the count of 8, exhale to the count of 8; add an extended exhale to the count of 16, then 24, then 32- make sure to give yourself permission to take a breath when you need to in the exhale extensions.
3. Get enough sleep. I recently read where 60 to 70 % of Americans are sleep deprived. Proper rest will reduce stress immediately........
4. Maintain a balanced life style. Mark Guterman tells us that integrating work, family and personal life is one of the great, necessary challenges of a fast paced world. This can only be achieved by deliberate, committed, consistent scheduling.
5. Remember your competence. Be non-shaming and strength based with yourself. Recall how you are creative, resourceful and whole, in the form of concrete sensory based data, especially to counter the occasions noted on your stress map. i.e.. "I was competent when I set my alarm and got to work on time this morning, Nov. 27 at 8:30 AM, arriving unstressed and vitalized"........
6. Find mentors who can model and help you with the above strategies. Hang out with people who can maintain a wellness life style and reflect your strengths in doing so. In a book by Irene DeCastillejo, called "The Knowing Woman", she refers to such people as Rainmakers. Seek out the Rainmakers in your life for support.
|
|
|
