Self Care Series: What is causing stress?

Before we start effectively helping your kids we need to make sure you as parents are in a good place.  A place where your needs are met so you can provide the best possible support for your child.  Stress is part of life, and some stress is good, but too much is harmful to your health. I know from experience what too much stress does to your body and it is not pretty. A person feels stressed out or overwhelmed when you are not in alignment with yourself and your core values.

Core Values

To work or not to work that is up to you, there are so many decisions that one has to make and what it all comes down to is your core values. Some parents will value going to work over staying home with the kids. There is no judgement here as long as your decision doesn’t cause you stress. The truth is you only feel stressed when you are out of alignment with yourself and beliefs.

I find that a good place to start is to look at your calendar, where are you spending your time? For me when I am not working is Swing dancing because it aligns with my core values of fun exercise and adult conversations (since most of my day I work with kids). So where are you spending your time? If you look and you don’t like where you are spending your time then that is a good place to start making small changes. The second place I look to is where are you spending your money? Is the star bucks you drink every day have something to do with not being able to afford that painting class you wanted to take? Is that star buck’s coffee that important to you?

If you would like to go more in-depth with your core value exploration here is a couple of links

7 steps to discovering your Core Values

Family Life work sheet on Core Values 

Life Wheel

The Life Wheel is another tool I use often with families to gage where in their life the stress is coming from. The life wheel looks at your satisfaction with different areas of your life. Follow The link below to run one off and then follow the instructions below on how to use this tool.

Life Wheel

1. Life wheel for this you are going to color in how happy you are in each area of your life. So if you are not getting out with friends as often as you would like you may only color that section a quarter of the way, but if you are happy with your relationship and time with family you may want to color most of that section in. If you were to ask me I never color a whole section in because things can be going great and still have room for improvement.

2. Now take each section of the life wheel and give it a number between 1 – 10 . 1 being it isn’t that important not worried about it, 10 being over the moon important I need to make some changes.

This is an activity that one you have to be honest with yourself or you are not going to get anything out of this. I would encourage you to share your wheel with your spouse or a good friend and have a conversation about it and see what comes up. Feel free if you don’t have anyone to chat with about your life wheel to throw me an email.  Stay tuned over the next few weeks and my blogs will look at each area of the life wheel.