Do You Want to Change How Stress Affects Your Daily Life?
Changing the way I deal with stress changed my life
My experience in recent years changed my life completely and set me on a new path. I’m sharing my story about how I came to my breaking point with stress and anxiety two years ago and how my life and career changed as a result.
My sincere hope is that this will resonate with someone else feeling like I did, and give them hope that change is possible for them in the New Year.
2020 began with a series of personal blows:
My beloved 21 yr old cat died
The pandemic hit
A family member was battling cancer and I couldn’t be with them to help (thanks Covid!)
I was dealing with my own physical illness which worsened with stress and anxiety
I was contemplating closing my first entrepreneurial venture
Cue the debilitating stress and anxiety!
In the past, as in my whole life, I always pushed through whatever troubled me. Keep the chin up, don’t let on, bury that stuff deep in the gut, and soldier on.
And God forbid if I ever let on what I was really feeling on the inside!
When full-blown anxiety attacks started during college I told myself it’s only temporary.
It wasn’t.
It was the beginning of 30 years and counting relationship with stress and anxiety.
2020 Was My Wake-up Call
The events that started the year sent me into a downward spiral. For several days I couldn’t function. I felt like my life was falling apart and that I was on the brink of never being the same. That stress and anxiety would control my life forever.
I felt so weak, physically and mentally.
Something had to change.
I worked with my doctors to get a grip on the medical issues I was dealing with
I committed to my meditation, yoga, & breathwork practice to ease my stress & anxiety, starting with a few minutes a day.
Slowly, I started feeling calmer, but most importantly, I felt like I had better awareness and control over my responses to the stress in my life.
I was no longer quick to react or short-tempered.
I was able to assess situations and my responses more objectively.
I felt my mind & body becoming more in sync.
This didn’t happen in a matter of days. This happened gradually over a matter of weeks and months of consistent practice.
A few months in, after bearing witness to these changes I realized what was happening: I was building systems in my daily life to manage my daily stress and anxiety.
I knew if this helped me, it could help other women struggling with stress & overwhelm on a daily basis.
As the pandemic went on I could see the strain it had on my friends as they juggled work and homeschooling on top of everything else that stressed them out daily pre-pandemic.
A New Path Forward
It’s a cliche I know, but I felt called to make this my career.
So I dove in and got certified as a yoga teacher, breath coach, and mindfulness/meditation teacher so I could share these methods with them and anyone else who needed them.
I’ve spent the last year teaching others simple techniques using yoga, breath, and mindfulness to help them reduce the impact daily stress has on their lives. Some folks are skeptical at first, but when they see the results of a consistent practice they tend to come around!
Some love restorative yoga, others vinyasa or yin. Others still, gravitate towards meditation, mindfulness, or breathwork. I enjoy guiding them and seeing them realize the impact of their efforts.
It’s deeply satisfying to not only help yourself but to then be able to come full circle and help someone else in need because of your experience. It’s been a lot of hard work and I don’t regret one second of it!
What’s Next?
So far I’ve offered group and private classes, corporate wellness programs, and I share meditations on the Insight Timer app to meet people’s needs. But, I kept feeling like there was something missing. That I could be serving clients even better options.
So, after months of research and work, I decided to add personal stress management coaching to my services. I’m still teaching the same methods but in a highly customized way, where I can offer more support and accountability to clients over 90 days while we build them their own custom system for managing daily stress.
I start enrolling new clients in January 2022 to start sessions in February.
If this sounds like something you need or want in your life in the next year, I invite you to join my waitlist. As a waitlist member, you’ll get all the details and priority status when the doors open to enroll.
If you are interested in reading more about me and my journey with anxiety, you may like this article.