When you get stressed out, how do you respond? Now that you've had the opportunity in the first introductory module of this course to begin to look at what stress is, it's basically pressure, right? And stress comes from all sorts of areas. It can come from deadlines, it can come from relational conflicts, it could be financial challenges, it could be sicknesses. It could be any type of pressure, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, relational, anything in our life is a stress. It's just things pushing against one another.

And as you had the opportunity to look and add up your own life change units as you fill out that particular sheet that we have in, in our course, and as you've gone further and looked at ways that people often respond to or deal with stress, both positively and negatively in, done your own little t graph on how that relates to you. So how you negatively respond to stress in your life and how you positively respond to stress in life. You've got a feel for how to deal with this now, it's critical again, in my mind that you get in your mind clearly, what you consider the major stress that you're grappling with right now, could be during a period of time, or it could just be a short moment in time but something you're really grappling with, because I want you to use that as the benchmark for how you move forward and evaluate the proper solutions and dealing rightly with stress in the days to come.

Because again, we're all about trying to overcome stress in our life, trying to conquer it, try to really be able to deal with it. So with all that background in mind, let's launch into a clear distinction. I mentioned to you before that I take a little exception to the life change units. And that, by that I mean, the life change units. Look at all these pressures we have in our life during a period of time. You know, whether it's a death of someone near us or or divorce or moving or the hassle of holidays and dealing with different personalities or a job demotion or financial crises, all those things are really terrible, and they do create stress in our life.

But the implication tends to be that because of those things, we are going to have a 6070 80% chance or likelihood of of an illness in the subsequent year. That's why I believe doctors will often say that 75 to 90% of all illness is directly related to or controlled by or influenced by stress on one form or another my contention is that it's not stress that's causing the problem nearly as much as it is our response to stress. And so that's the distinction I want to make. So as you look at this graph that we have up on the page, right now, you'll see stress is at the center, it's at the top. And then you see, whenever there's pressure in my life, whatever it might be, I can choose to respond. And often by habit, I tend to respond either in a distressful way, or a you stressful way.

And yes, use stress as a word. Now, distress is when I worry, get frustrated, get angry, get bitter, go inward, get fatigued, because my I'm mentally and emotionally responding in an unhealthy way to stress you actually did a little evaluation of your own response to stress and you can see whether you respond right now, mostly distressful, Are you stressfully you stress is where I see a problem or a challenge or a pressure as an opportunity, not as an obstacle. I see it as a potential, not a problem. The bottom line is, I look at it differently and I respond differently. And as you look at the chart that we have up here, notice that distress has the following characteristics. It causes anxiety or concern.

It can be short or long term. Depending upon our mindset. It's it's perceived as outside of our coping abilities. So we're feeling a little bit helpless. It feels unpleasant, it it decreases performance. Now, that's what distress does.

More often than not when people say they're stressed out. They they're really thinking about their reaction to stress and so they're saying I'm distressed out. Now on the other hand, use stress has these characteristics. They it motivates or focuses our energy allows us to really focus on something and get something done. It's short term because we can deal with it. It's perceived as within our coping abilities.

So there's things we can do. We can change our attitudes, our beliefs, our actions. It feels exciting because we see it as an opportunity, not an obstacle, and it improves performance. Now, all of this is not psychobabble. That's what I want you to know. This isn't just positive mental attitude.

What this is, is learning how to deal with stress in the appropriate way. It's believing that things will work out. It's believing that hey, I can't control my circumstances. I can't control this death or this disease or this illness, but I can do certain things to be proactive and intentional about resolving these issues. Starting with good attitude. It's what Dr. Seligman calls learned optimism.

He did research among many of the survivors of the Holocaust and compared their mindset versus that of those who came out of the Holocaust in a terrible way. And he learned that the difference was what he called learned optimism, that even though they couldn't control their surroundings, even though horrific things were happening to them, and to their friends and their family, they learned to find some kind of hope, a bit, a ray of sunshine, shine. They had a faith element that allowed them to believed, like the Bible says, all things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose. They believed that even in the midst of that, that their God had a future and a hope for them. And learned optimism is something you can learn and we're actually going to train you in that. I'm going to coach you in that as we get into some of our later sessions, particularly in dealing with how we handle life and how we handle problems.

I'm going to give you some tools and resources on developing learned optimism. But what I want you to get in your mind is whenever there's a stress, you can choose to respond distressed fully. You can choose to respond, you stressfully you can see the problem. Or you can see the possibility. You can see the obstacle or you can see the opportunity. But the bottom line is, it's your perspective on how you see things.

Now, in this next session, we're going to focus in on perspective and the power of perspective. And I want to give you a better feel for what it means to live a US stressful life because that's where we're going versus a distressful life. In fact, as I've guaranteed before, if you will apply the principles of perception Effective. We're going to be sharing with you in our next session in this module, introductory module, you're going to understand and be able to live your life without a day of constant worry the rest of your life seriously. You're going to be able to take control of that area of life because you're learn how to respond with the right perspective. That's the name of the game.

So remember, this is an adventure, right? I want you to be involved in that in the days to come. So what I'd like for you to do is take this chart, we're going to make this available for you on our page, and I'd like for you to now go back and read through the difference between distress and use stress. And then I want you to think about how you respond to stresses. As you've looked back at how you've done into the past to respond more distress fully or more use stressfully because I want you to be motivated to do it the right way they use stressful, you got it. Okay, let's get to work.

Once you get done. With this, we'll go on to our next session. In the meantime, remember, a lot of activity for our premium members is over in the Facebook page, our group, and that's where in this private group we are interacting where we're processing. We're providing ongoing tools and resources and some wonderful videos we're not providing here we're providing they're not just from me, but we, we tend to like to curate content. So we pulled together the best of the best content, I want you to have access to that. So check it out, okay.

All right. Keep going.