What is your attitude and perspective toward pressure in your life? This attitude will be the determining factor in how well you handle stress and any other pressures in your life.
Where Do We Experience Pressure in Our Lives?
Pressure comes in many forms or ways in our lives. As people we have biological drives like hunger and thirst that cause us to feel a form of physical pressure to eat and drink to meet our needs. We feel pressure to reach for personal goals for various reasons. We feel pressure from other peoples' expectations in our lives. Can you name other ways we experience pressure in our lives? The One Thing We Can Control We all experience pressure in our lives and this is something we have a limited ability to control. We can always chose to remove ourselves from situations where we have no healthy and/or profitable reason to part of. But we will never be able to avoid all pressure since we are human and we live in a world with many
changing factors and variables. The one thing we can control is how we respond to the pressure that comes our way. Where Did You Learn That? The first question we need to ask ourselves is where we learned our current attitude toward pressures in our lives? This will give us a clue as to where to start in making positive changes in how we handle the daily pressures of our lives? Part of discovering where we learned our current attitude is admitting our responsibility in learning what we learned. This, in turn, gives us the hope that we can unlearn this negative response and replace it with a more productive approach. Proactive and Reactive Pressure
So what is the difference between proactive and reactive pressure? Reactive pressure occurs when we experience pressure from an outside force and react in a way to manage that pressure. Proactive pressure is self-imposed pressure that we use to motivate ourselves toward positive change. The Pain and Pleasure Principle Again Motivating yourself to reach goals through proactive stress goes back to "the pain and pleasure principle." This is one of the most basic and primitive principles that affects all life on earth and correlates with the survival instinct of all life. To illustrate this, think of a specific goal you have set in your life. Now close your eyes and imagine as many of the painful
consequences you could experience as a result of not reaching this goal. Now visualize all the rewarding results of reaching your goal. Are you starting to feel the pressure?
Balancing Proactive Pressure with Acceptance I think it's vital and very important to balance our mentality and attitude resulting from proactive pressure with a realistic acceptance of what we cannot control. This truth is is explained well in "The Serenity Prayer." Serenity, as you may know, is another word for great peace. There are very few things more disturbing from a long term perspective then attempting to change things around us outside of our control. Focusing on these external things often lead us away from what we can control which is our own thoughts, perspectives, attitudes, and decisions. Bringing It Together There are two kinds of pressure mentioned in
this article: reactive pressure and proactive pressure. Reactive pressure is how we respond to unexpected pressure that occurs in our lives. Proactive pressure comes from within ourselves when we think through painful consequences of not reaching a goal and the pleasures of reaching our goal. Proactive pleasure needs to be balanced with acceptance of things that are out of our control. Your Turn Now So how do we handle reactive pressure and where did we learn this attitude and response? Do we use proactive pressure by creating this pressure through pain and pleasure in order to motivate us toward positive change in our lives and do we balance this with acceptance of what we cannot change?
This article was written by an SFM affiliate. If you are interested in learning about an online business that can allow you the opportunity to manage your life more proactively, please check out this website: http://connect.thesixfigurementors.com/sp/free -trial-long-vid/sales-pages?id=skmartin