Hey, everybody happy Monday. Welcome to another episode of solving your stress mini series. I am your host Sam, and every Monday, we come together to discuss the things that are stressing you out. We discuss strategies, tactics, and tools to move you through the stress so that the rest of your day, the rest of your week, the rest of your month, and hopefully if you're building the skills, for the rest of you life, where you can find and be less stressed. So today we're talking about control. Now you've heard me about talk about control in the past and how, it feels. If we have things in control, it generally causes us to be less stressed. And that's great. It's especially important if you have received a clinical diagnosis of post-traumatic stress, because the things that we can control, help mitigate stress and help mitigate triggers.
Now, what I'm talking about is the kind of control that causes too much rigidity. And that is the kind of negative form of control because when you're too rigid, things can get really stressful for you. Especially if something has to slide in that you weren't expecting and you need to adjust. So that's the big problem - being too rigid. Something needing to slide in to the schedule or a report or whatever it is, and you being too fixated, too rigid with it. And then that causes the stress. So how do we fix that? We fix it by becoming aware that of our rigidity.
It's looking at how you're responding when it's at work, maybe when you've got things to do with your family, if you've set out a schedule and hey, coming from the law enforcement life, military life, it's like, this is happening at this time. And that's it. Well, when something else unexpected and equally important slides in, it's like, "Oh, this doesn't work." So that's when we feel the stress building up. So that's what we need to be aware of so that we can just take a pause and say, "Okay, I know I was supposed to do this. This is coming here. Let's just take a breath. The major thing will get done." We just might have to do a little bit of shifting. Another way, especially with families, what's important is that, we can deal with the rigidity. If we tell people, tell our family, tell our team that we're working with about our expectations. Because if you have an expectation that everybody's showing up at 10:30, but you don't say that, and maybe people come at 10:30, 10:45, 11:00, and now you're like, "Why? Why were you not here at 10 30? So things get pushed back. So it's about communicating.
When you communicate your expectations, you can say, "Hey, this is the time. This is when we're getting it done." And so you're in control, but again, you're leaving it open. Maybe there's an accident. Maybe somebody's running late because they had to take their kids to camp. Do you see what I'm talking about? Less rigid, still in control, less stress. So we want to be aware, when that's happening and we want to communicate clear expectations. It really is as simple as that in breaking it down into let's be in control, but let's not be so rigid.
Hey, if you want to learn more about this topic and many others visit solve your stress.com. Sign up for my free training. I put together this training. It is one hour long. You and me training together. You will walk away with strategies, tactics, and tools to combat your stress on a daily basis. Please go ahead and visit my website. SamanthaHorwitz.com, where I've got a blog where I post twice a month about stress and really cool articles, about job performance, about law enforcement, about post-traumatic stress about wellness, everything that's related to combating stress in your life. And don't forget to connect with me on social right here on Facebook @TheSamHorwitz and on Twitter, the same. So you can ask your questions about stress and we can do it right here together. We could solve it here together, each week. So until next week, everybody, I wish you a less stressful Monday. I wish you a less stressful week. Remember it's about control and less about being rigid till next week. Sam out.