The Good Stress

                   

“A diamond is just a piece of charcoal that handled stress exceptionally well.” – Unknown

Many times I find myself sitting, in thoughts, one time it was just after I Quit a job I thought I’d probably spend the rest of my life doing because it was just that great. Assessing my feelings of stupidity, anger, fear and dissapointment...in myself .

But I didn’t feel any of these things. Instead, I felt an unexplainable happiness—like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. When the shock of the moment wore off, I realized why I was so happy; all of a sudden, anything was possible!

It had been years since I’d tried something new. It’d been years since I’d taken a risk on myself. It’d been years since I’d actually felt alive. And this moment had snapped me out of it.

So, sitting there in my car that day, faced with no idea what my life was going to look like starting tomorrow, I asked myself a simple question:

What would my life be like if I did something that scared me every single day?

One year passed and I’m relatively convinced it’s the best question I ever asked. Taking up different opportunities big or small, adventuring with my livelihood haha, pushing my body physically and testing my own limits.

None of these things were comfortable—quite the opposite, actually, but they were all worth the effort.

Giving Stress a Good Name

I think it’s been a while since stress has gotten a fair shake. It’s no four-letter word—literally or figuratively—and for the bad rap it’s gotten in ruining lives, it’s also reaffirmed just as many.

Stress doesn’t come in just one flavor; it comes in two. Most of us are keenly aware of the kind we  feel when we’re under pressure to do something we don’t want to do for people we don’t want to do it for. It makes us lethargic, tense, and irritable.

But we’re not always as quick to recognize when that same force is making us happy, energetic, and healthier.

Stress isn’t good or bad, it just is. What we need is less bad stress and more good. But where does good stress come from?

In my case, it comes from doing difficult and uncomfortable things that also make me happy. It comes from a curiosity about things in my life that take hard work to learn about and explore

What I’ve found is the difference between good and bad stress depends entirely on the direction it’s 
applied.

When I work hard and worry about something that isn’t important to me, it takes a lot out of me. But. 

 when I work hard and apply myself towards something I care about—when I take a risk on something important to me—it adds a great deal to my enjoyment of life.

What I’ve learned, ultimately, is that stress can be a positive thing, and the times that I learn the most and am the happiest with my life are also the times when I step outside my comfort zone and take a risk on something that’s meaningful to me.

Serenity and Pushing your limits

Last year I took a challenge or some might call it a risk where I ran a half marathon, something I'd 
never done before, infact the closest thing I had done prior was a 5k, but remember this was about testing my own limits.

There were lots of complications while I trained, but I never felt like I was doing the wrong thing.

Should a life well lived always be in a state of quiet serenity? Or should you always be in pursuit of some kind of challenge? Those questions seem like opposites, but I think they actually go together.

To me, a life well lived strikes a balance between both of those worlds. And I reject the idea that you have to choose one over the other.

My life, at times chaotic, but I feel a sense of serenity throughout it because when challenging myself with something I love. Be it travelling to somewhere I'd never been, taking on a marathon, quitting a 
job that I once considered EVERYTHING ,The stress is welcome.

More importantly, I try to take each piece of that experience for what it is—one small but manageable risk that is important for it’s own sake, able to show me something special about life regardless of 
what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow. When you embrace the idea of risk-taking and what it can do for your life, regardless of success or failure, scale becomes mostly unimportant. What looks insignificant to everyone around you can be quite life altering. And many small steps tend to add up to big ones.

The Tiny Risk-Taking Challenge

If you believe, like I do, that stepping outside of your comfort zone on daily basis and trying new things is a good way to live, then I’d like to challenge you to ask yourself the same question that I did.  Take seven cards ,for Seven days ,think about things that scares you everyday, then DO IT ! 
Then write down  how you felt when you took that risk. When the seven days are up, look through 
the cards again. Read your responses, and ask yourself: Is my life better today than it was seven days ago?

If the answer is no, then feel free to stop; nothing more is required. But if the answer is yes? Welcome to an exciting new world.

Love and light.... X

Toke