Can a Vacation Relieve Stress?

No, but taking one can give one the time to reflect on their life.  Vacations are good.  But if stress becomes severe enough to be affecting your life then you really need to get some information on managing stress.  A search on the internet will expose a myriad of methods for relieving stress.  The first thing I’ve found to work is to determine that I am in control, not the situation.  In other words, I’m going to decide what affects my life and how it does so, not the other way round where events control my actions.

That being the first step, it is as I’ve said in the past you need to be making some decisions at high noon on a park bench.  Don’t be letting the situation control you, you control how you react to the situation.  If you look at the things that you stress out over you will notice a pattern.  Then you know the things that you stress out over so you can decide to act differently the next time one of those situations occur.

Life really is about choices - we can choose to react to a situation or not.  If we choose to react to a situation then we give control over to whatever caused the situation.  And that can lead to stress.  If we choose to not react to a situation but take the time to analyze it so we can determine the best course of action then it cannot result in stress.  We diffuse the situation so that it no longer has any control.

I was just reading about how a salesman feels immense stress over his job.  First he has to lie to his boss and tell him that he is capable of producing x amount of sales in the coming year.  But wait, then his boss comes back and says - well, we gave you this great territory and now you’re telling us you can only do x amount?  If that is the case then we’ll just have to see about giving some of this gravy territory to someone else.  So the salesman gulps and agrees to the inflated number.  Of course his bonus is totally dependent on him making this ridiculous inflated number.
It all goes along really well until the end of the quarter when the boss wants to know how he is doing.  Well, says he, it looks like I might have a chance at such and such and this and that.  I might make my quota for the quarter (if the company doesn’t do something to screw it up).
Well, it turns out he is a great salesman and ends up landing more business than was expected and has a tremendous year beating hig bogie by 10%.  Thinking he is going to get a nice fat bonus check, he is euphoric…. until the big sales meeting where he finds not only has he lost territory - the part with that big customer in it, he is now expected to bring in a bigger number than he brought in last year.  Not a bigger number than he was expected to bring in but a bigger number than he actually brought in last year.  He is cut off at the knees and goes out looking for another employer.

The company has hurt itself in two ways.  It has lost a great employee and has demoralized all employees by showing them that it doesn’t pay to excel.  This is very counterproductive but upper management just can’t seem to get it through their thick skulls that the more money their sales force make, the more money the company makes.  You would never see an insurance company hamstringing their best sales people like this.

At any rate, just a little story about how companies create stress and disharmony amongst their employees.  If there were a way to make a living in sales without constantly being jerked up and down and all around it would be a lot less stress generating and less need for information on Stress Management get your free report here.