Where you choose to put your focus is crucial to how you experience a situation. It’s about to be the holiday season and while for some Thanksgiving and Christmas can’t come soon enough, for others these holidays can be a source of stress. A lot of planning and organization is required to host and entertain and sometimes house family and friends. Then, there’s the added pressure to purchase and wrap gifts. So, if you find yourself starting to panic, you are not alone! The best way to manage this (or indeed any potentially stressful situation) is to first notice and name the feelings and then set out to create an action plan for yourself.
Creating an action plan will help you to break down the challenge into manageable chunks and allow you to prioritize. Rather than looking at everything you need to accomplish pile up into one insurmountable wall, you can tackle a small piece at a time which immediately alleviates stress and anxiety.
A good place to start is visualizing the perfect or desired outcome. Whether it’s Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas shopping or holiday travel, find a quiet place to close your eyes and immerse yourself in the images of your event playing out perfectly. What does it look like? Who is there? What are you eating and drinking? What roles are people playing? Spend as much time as you need until you have a really clear picture of what you want to achieve. Then take a deep breath and slowly come back to reality ready to begin that action plan.
The next step in creating your holiday action plan revolves a little reverse engineering. Let’s say your visualization was of a sumptuous Thanksgiving dinner. We will break that dinner down into categories:
FOOD
an optimal route to minimize travel time and make myself more efficient?
• • •
What food did you picture?
Which stores do I need to visit to purchase what I need?
If it’s multiple stores, can I group the stores and create
Happy Holiday Planning!
