Ru Sirius Blog

Winning the Game of Holidays #1 – Pre-Empting Stress

uncovering the game changer called 'space' in Gamify Your Life“You used to call me paranoid, but even you cannot avoid PRESSURE”

The Holidays are often the signal of the lack of space we have in our game the rest of the year. And very few games play well in a tight space. Imagine basketball in a closet or chess on a board with only 4 squares or even trying to play Angry Birds on a postage size screen.

I used to have a bittersweet time around holidays. Every year I found myself playing the game of stress management which is a pointless game really, and more on that later.

The game I caught myself playing was that I’d try to see everyone I hadn’t seen much all year long, attend parties, try to shop while everyone else had decided it was time to shop as well. Traffic, ugh. Not to mention all the stuff that my inner self and others were screaming to have completed before year’s end. And money…buying gifts, Black Friday, Cyber Monday (the sales person’s wet dream), paying for stuff to take parties I’d throw or attend, and then there were the family feasts. All of which made what could be a great time of year into one where I worked on mastering my ability to manage stress. It’s crunch time, big time.

And then I got it. I hated the game of managing stress. In order be good at it, one has to get lots of practice at having…wait for it….yup, you guessed it…stress. So why would I want to learn how to manage it when mastering a new ability. Pre-empting stress is a much more powerful game to play. Then I don’t have to have it at all, or if it does ambush me, it’s in the context of so little stress that managing stress is simple.

I looked around for all sorts of game plans, tips and strategies to better anticipate  what might happen, and found little success in attempting to prognosticate what might occur. In fact it created more stress to think that way. Until I finally uncovered the one Game Changer called ‘Space.’

This is an element in the game whose presence, in and of itself, helps you win. Space…pre-empts stress.

Now I’m not talking about the final frontier and all the area that new age guru’s, UFO’s and random black holes inhabit. I’m talking about space in four particular areas of the board. Time, Money, Relationships, and Energy. So rather than crowd all four into this blog, I’ll give them each a little more space in their own blog article. They like it that way.

Oh and by the way…I’ll just say that for this year, it might be too late to implement and integrate Space in how you play your game. But if you pay attention you can watch and experience the stressors playing themselves out. It just might give you sufficient incentive to actually want to change how you play with them for next year. And you could begin to implement this Game Changer on Jan. 1, 2016. Not as a resolution but as a new way to experience the Game of Your Life.

Who knows, there may still be time to change before then, after all, Scrooge did.

 

Posted by Michael Stratford in Gamify for Success.

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