Holidays are magical creations of human beings. They were created for many positive meanings: celebration, love, family, joy, appreciation, new start, and fun……
While starting in November, many people have started to feel and talk about holiday stress. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year holidays; kids school’s winter recess, family vacation; family gatherings, friends parties, gifts for different generations with different interests; and above all, not just normal load of work, but increased tasks, higher targets, more customers requirements, planning for next year……Even just thinking about all of these, many people could feel overwhelmed, and our tiredness and nervousness could accumulate day by day closing to the holidays……
One of my mastermind group members shared her feelings and asked the question to the group, what are your strategies to deal with holiday stress? She has some good strategies but still feel the stress. This member is the most experienced of the group and one of the wise people I have ever known. If she felt it a challenge and questioned it, there should be many other people who are facing similar challenges or even struggling during the holiday season.
Is work-life balance or even happiness possible during such a holiday-stressful season?
I shared some strategies during my mastermind group meeting, and I feel the needs to help more people by formally addressing this common challenge and introducing practical strategies that are effective and proven by many resources, including tested and practiced by myself. These following 8 strategies are not just for holidays, but great strategies for any time and any challenges.
1. Love Yourself More: Make sure that every day you find some time for exercise, stretch, meditate or pray, use deep breathing, and reinforce the right understanding and application of the Law of Attraction. Eating healthily and getting enough rest are important factors as well. Learn to appreciate yourself more and not feel guilty for not being perfect for every situation. Reward yourself some retreats time from time to keep yourself energetic and feeling being loved.
2. Build Stronger Family Bonding: Have open communications with your family about your and their expectations for the holidays. Plan and schedule affordable vacation or family fun activities together. Holidays are great opportunities to forgive any unpleasant things, appreciate, express love and reunite with family members. Fun activities will also bring more quality family time and help strengthen the family bond.
3. Get Quality Help: Find a safe and trusted person or group to share your feelings with and get insightful mental and spiritual support. You may turn to your best friends, but many times in dealing with holiday stress they may share similar stress and may pour their challenges or problems to you which will not help you any. So it will be beneficial to you if you share feelings with a professional coach or mentor, or a mastermind group in which you are a regular member.
4. Achieve Disciplined Results: Holidays are times when people may lose track of diligent work and ignore targets set before. Without disciplined and strategic planning and work, you may simply enjoy holidays but regret later that you did not accomplish what you really wanted. So keep a conscious mind and plan strategically ahead. Review and set up realistic targets and have proper expectation. Pay more attention to your time allocation to work and life, plan early enough on holiday preparation, vacation and gatherings. Post your targets and schedules at more obvious places to remind yourself. When you can discipline yourself to make progress in work and achieve certain targets while you are celebrating for holidays, you will feel more balanced and fulfilled to enjoy the holiday season.
5. Use Assistance: Prepare backup resources, like hire a nanny to help house chores, ask for proper help from relatives or neighbors for kids care, ask for ideas and resources that friends or other parents use, and get colleagues or partners to help in work. Give others a hand whenever you can, and don’t hesitate to ask for help when you need it.
6. Understand What is Really Important: Some people may feel holiday gatherings and parties are like a waste of time compared with working and making money. So they are struggling in the feelings that they want to work to make money and they also want to please people. They could not feel joy in gatherings and parties. Many people especially entrepreneurs focus only on developing their products and services and ignore that people are actually more important than products and are their real targets to serve. Enjoy the time you spend with others. Connect with them and really understand them and their needs. Eventually your understanding of people and connection with them will make a difference of your work and business development. This does not mean you need go to every gathering and party. Evaluate them based on relationships, importance and your energy level, and select those that you will really enjoy to go.
7. Appreciate and Give: holidays are great opportunities to remind yourself and strengthen your attitude of appreciation. Make a list of everything that you are grateful and add to it every day. It does not have to be big, just meaningful, like finding the beauty of nature and our surroundings, keeping curiosity like a child, being creative, connecting authentically with other people…be thankful for every blessing of life! The best way of appreciation is to give. Not only tangible materials are good to give and donate to people in need, intangible giving is great contribution to the world as well, like your genuine smile, insightful sharing, generous recommendation and support.
8. Gifts for Meanings and Fun: Gifts are for expressing love and appreciation. Many people feel stressful about buying gifts — the costs that will not bring much financial burden, and the right choices so the gifts can please the gifts receivers. Since this year you can shift your focus more on meaning and fun instead of cost. The best gift ever that everyone treasures is: Time. So plan ahead proper time to share with your family, friends and people you appreciate. When tangible gifts are needed, go to local budget shopping centers that concentrate diverse gifts or stay home and shop on internet, which will save much time and money. Don’t worry about how much could make a gift a good one, instead, buy inexpensive and applicable gifts and add meanings and fun to them with your creativity. You can make your own cards and write more authentic thoughts and blessings assuming yourself a writer or poet, or paint something special with your imaginary to make a masterpiece. Better yet, let people get chance to take actions by themselves for fun, such as cooking books with colorful pictures and recipes adding your own favorite recipes, assembling toys that can result elegant decorations for home, or something that they can turn into another form with some creative work…… And instead of exchanging and comparing gifts for kids between friends’ families, you can suggest to change the game rules, for example, every family plays a role like Secret Santa for another family’s kids, or contributes equally to a shared gifts budget and each year let one family be in charge of shopping on behalf of all other families. There could be unlimited ways to make gifts shopping and giving more meaningful and fun activities. Don’t forget to ask your partner and/or children what ideas they have, as this can be a fun brainstorming!
Thanksgiving just passed, Christmas is coming, and New Year……I hope with above strategies, you are now more prepared, confident and excited for holidays, and will fully enjoy these wonderful holidays with your beloved ones in abundant love, wisdom and happiness!
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