![]()
Part One
Your Current Approach: What’s Missing?
To achieve a breakthrough in how you approach problems, deal with stress, and produce desired results, it’s essential that you ask yourself these questions:
How is your current approach to dealing with problems and stress affecting your effectiveness, health, and happiness?
What
is your current approach to dealing with problems and stress? What’s working? What’s not working? What’s missing?
What is the secret to being in control when dealing with problems and stress?
Once you have answered these questions, you will be in a great position to develop a Personal Effectiveness Plan that makes you far more effective, a lot healthier, and a whole lot happier. Part One helps you see yourself as a powerful person who has choices. You’ll learn that you can live in the proactive, create-your-own-life mode instead of a reactive, always-a-victim mode.
![]()
1
How Is Stress Affecting Your Success, Health, and Happiness?
They say a good scare is worth more than good advice. Pain is one way to get your attention, a crisis is another. To illustrate, here is a short story about Larry King (the radio and TV talk-show host) and the heart attack he suffered:
You have a heart attack, first thing you think is, “I gotta change my life.” You know that saying, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life”? Well, you survive a heart attack and that’s it: the day after really is the first day of the rest of your life. What you don’t know is how long that life’s gonna be. All of a sudden, you gotta deal with the fact that you are going to die one of these days. Death becomes real. And if death is real, then you absolutely have to make the most of what time you’ve got.
In a way, if you have a heart attack and survive, you’re ahead of people who don’t have a heart attack—not that I’d wish this experience on anyone! But going through this forces you to really think about your life as almost nothing else does. It forces you to consider what’s important and what isn’t. And it gives you the chance to make changes and adjustments that you might otherwise never even realize you might want to make.*
In today’s turbulent business environment, all ambitious and hardworking executives, managers, and professionals face a constant barrage of problems and stress in their jobs and in their personal lives. Dealing with these pressures and frustrations is a major problem for most of them, including the brightest and most well-intentioned among them.
How are you handling the problems and stress in your life?
An executive once said to me, “I’m juggling about a dozen very important balls in the air. I enjoy the excitement and the challenge, but I’m working sixteen hours a day. I’m overweight. My blood pressure and cholesterol levels are high. I smoke and drink unthinkingly. I’m arguing more with my spouse, who also works full-time at a very demanding job. My teenage daughter was in a serious car accident two months ago. If I continue leading the stressful life I’m living now, it’s going to kill me.”
A manager from another corporation told me the uncertainty and insecurity of a recent merger, repeated reorganizations and downsizings, and the ever-increasing pressure to “do more with less” was finally getting to him. Formerly a strong, vibrant person, he now was experiencing health problems and was becoming disillusioned. He wanted some way t...
