PREPARE, PERFORM, RECOVER

In the army, it’s called Stress Exposure Training – a way to make sure you can deal with whatever comes your way. The system that’s used to increase this capacity is Prepare, Perform and Recover. Preparation is all about situation, reaction and strategy. The first part of this is to identify the situations in which you experience stress.

For the Defence Force, that’s pretty easy. It’s when bombs and bullets are flying. But all of us experience stress and if we predict where it’s going to come from, we’ll cope with it better. For me, I regularly find myself asking my kids multiple times to get ready to go, without these requests having any impact on their preparedness. When this happens, I find myself starting to feel a combination of high energy and unpleasantness, and run the very real risk of losing my temper. However, if

I expect to be ignored by my kids and experience a potential loss of temper, then I stand a far better chance of controlling my reactions. Once we have identified situations that cause us stress, we need to gain insight into our reactions to this stress.

Once we understand our reactions, we can use these as cues to pull the trigger on the mental skills strategies required to manage our emotions. Different people react to stress in different ways. You need to study your reactions to determine your own pattern. Sometimes, it can be helpful to ask someone who knows you well for their feedback, because often you’re so fused with your thoughts and emotions that you can’t clearly see their impact on you.