If you are like most people today, you probably experience stress from time to time. Maybe you sometimes feel angry, irritated, or completely overwhelmed with too many things to do and not enough time.
Maybe you feel stressed at work or at home or both. Maybe you’re having marital problems, trouble with your kids, financial pressures, or you just lost your job. Or maybe someone close to you recently got sick or you recently developed a health problem yourself.
Whatever the case may be, you may already have tried to reduce your stress in the past, or you may be thinking about learning how to deal with stress better right now. If so, you might be contemplating reading a book about stress, doing an online stress reduction home-study course, attending a live group workshop, or hiring your own personal stress relief coach.
In this blog post, I’m going to give you a powerful Stress Program Assessment Tool that you might find very helpful. We’d all like to know, before we invest any of our time or money in a stress reduction program, whether the “solution” we are considering is likely to help us or not. Unfortunately, many programs and stress relief resources don’t really help.
I’ve been working in the stress relief field for more than 30 years, and I’ve seen all kinds of stress reduction programs, good and bad. I’ve also personally bought and read over 300 self-help books on how to deal with stress. And quite frankly, most of them were very disappointing.
The typical stress reduction resource starts off by defining what stress is, what the signs and symptoms of stress are, and then explains how damaging stress can be if you don’t get a handle on it. All good information—but not terribly helpful. Then, they may move on to giving you specific tips and techniques for reducing your stress, but most of these require way too much time and effort for most busy people to use. Again, good information, but not very practical for what most highly stressed people need.
10 Question Stress Program Assessment Tool
That’s why I developed a 10 question Stress Program Assessment Tool to help you determine if the self-help book, online home-study course, workshop or stress relief coach is likely to help you. If it’s more of the same old advice that hasn’t helped in the past, it’s not likely to benefit you. On the other hand, if it is new and different and it is based upon some essential key principles that really can change your life, then you might want to explore it further.
Simply ask yourself these 10 questions whenever you are trying to make a decision, and they should help steer you away from programs that won’t do you much good (and toward programs or resources that really can help).
My Stress Program Assessment Tool
- Are you having just one, big stressful problem in your life right now? Or are you having multiple stressful problems (large or small)?
- For whatever stressful problem(s) you are struggling with right now, are you interested in simply reducing just your symptoms alone, or are you also interested in learning how to identify and correct underlying causes? (NOTE: if you answered just reducing symptoms alone, then a stress management course or resource might meet your needs. However, if you want to address root causes, most stress management approaches are not going to help you do this.)
- With regard to causes, does the program or resource you are evaluating make a clear distinction between external causes and internal causes of human stress?
- With regard to internal causes, does the program offer you clear explanations (and examples) of what the most common internal causes of stress are for human beings?
- With regard to internal causes, does the program offer you tools and techniques to rapidly and accurately pinpoint specific internal causes?
- Does the program or resource provide you with a proven coping method that does not require a lot of additional time or other significant extra work demands for you to use and benefit from?
- Does the program or resource provide you with a coping method that is flexible enough to work for any type of stress you might ever experience, or does it only work for certain types of stress and not for others?
- Does the program or resource help you build new skills and abilities that can enable you to use the recommended coping method to achieve tangible reductions of stress in your life?
- Does the program or resource have a proven track record of generating successful stress reduction outcomes for people similar to you?
- Does the program come with an iron-clad guarantee and full refund offer, if you don’t see your stress levels decreasing in a reasonable amount of time?
If you ask yourself these 10 questions, you can use them to assess the likelihood that any recommended stress reduction program or resource is going to end up helping you or not.
To validate this assessment tool, all you have to do is go back and review any previous stress reduction program or resource you tried in the past and that either helped you or failed to help you. If it failed to reduce your stress significantly, was it missing many of the critical success elements listed in the tool? And if it did help you greatly, did it have some of these elements, which are important for long-term success.
Hope you find this Stress Program Assessment Tool useful. If you enjoyed this post, please sign up for our email list to get additional stress relief advice from us.
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You'll also hear Dr. Orman talk to you directly about his excellent stress mastery introductory training program.
