Managing Stress for Success

Motivational Speaker Carole Spiers explains how travel automatically
sets up rising pressure, unless you actively prevent it

Close your eyes and visualise the next journey you’re due to make - perhaps fifty miles in the car. Notice how this little dry run always seems to go without a hitch. Every traffic-light is green. Every motorway lane is open. And you’re driving through a dream world where rain and fog are unknown.

That way of viewing a forthcoming journey is responsible for much of the stress that goes with travel, often ruining a pleasant day out. Remember that ‘only 20 minutes from town’ means 20 minutes under ideal conditions. If you are mentally reserving only 20 minutes for that journey, you are literally asking for stress.

Hold-Ups Are Going To Happen. Learn To Love Them

A journey is basically a sequence of junctions, each of them representing a possible hold-up, with serious knock-on effects for the next one. And the stress builds-up in proportion. Perhaps you think it’s uncool to leave in good time. Well, you’ll be the coolest corpse in the graveyard.

So take the philosophical view of travel - that there simply will be hold-ups, perhaps quite long ones. Have some good music ready to put on. If you’ve got children in the car, the usual video games will pass the time, or even better, join them in a simple board-game or cards.

Your body will thank you for it.

Travel Stress - Summary

• We tend to visualise future journeys under ideal conditions
• Hold-ups will happen. Be ready to use them constructively
• A philosophical attitude to travel will cut unnecessary stress

Another key insight from Carole Spiers, International Leading Authority on Corporate Stress,
Motivational Speaker and BBC Broadcaster.