Stress and Relationships

Hi everyone and welcome to the world of stress. I was tooling around on Facebook and I saw something that really cracked me up. Those of you who remember the movie, ‘Back to the Future,’ if you don’t, go see it again. The whole trilogy is pretty brilliant. Thank you Steven Spielberg, but there’s a scene where the wild-haired doctor goes to the future, comes back, meets Marty McFly, and wild-eyed he says, ‘Marty, don’t go to 2020.’ So, there you have it.

We have predictions, but we’ll get through this, and we will be the better for it. We will learn from it. We will create new ways of being. We’re already doing that.

So, what I’d like to talk about today is, I’ve asked people and I’ve gotten a lot of questions. I’m going to read some of them about what is it you really want to understand, learn and know about right now, and people are saying, a job searching for the age of over 50, beginning a new job and relationship building online, remotely which is great. How to cope and maintain positive interpersonal skills in an environment at work that just doesn’t seem very pleasant. That’s many places right now. Losing the guilt when terminating an employee because they’re not doing a good job, but I know about them personally, and it really hurts me to have to let them go.

Another is, I’ll figure out why my director is always so short with me, but nice to other people, and it goes on like that. I must have gotten 40 or 50 of these, and one of the things that’s really important is, as I looked for the common denominator, it was all about relationships and interestingly, that’s the work that we at Creative Energy Options have been doing. It seems like forever. It’s all about relationships. So, it’s about relationships at home, relationships that were relationships in our community and relationships with ourselves.

So, I’m going to just talk very briefly today about the core of how I got here, and it really started as I was growing up, and my father was in a family business with his two brothers. That was very, as I say, fiscally successful but emotionally bankrupt. They would fight all the time. So, as a kid growing up, I would have hear him come home from work, and say to my mother, he was always complaining about something, and finally I must have been. I don’t know, five, six, seven in that range, I said to him one day, ‘Daddy, if work isn’t fun, why do you go there? Why do you do it?’ And he looked at me and patted me on the head, and said, ‘Honey, that’s just the way it is, and you just do what you need to do.’ Well that’s the way it was. It’s not the way it has to be.

So, I’d like to give you this little tidbit to take with you about relationships, and think about this for a minute. We are born from a relationship. Do people get together and y’all know what happens. Now, we have other ways of doing it with in vitro etc., but nonetheless, it takes an egg and a sperm to make a kid, right? So, we’re born from ovary, relationship through a relationship, and every woman who’s listening, who has children knows that one. There is some kind of, hopefully cooperation between this infant baby, who is going to be born, and the mother as this very complicated process of being birth comes out. So, we’re born from a relationship through a relationship into a relationship. Somebody’s there to catch the baby, and then the baby is taken and given to nurses, to the mother on her breast. The father may or may not be there. I don’t know. I don’t want to judge any of this. I’m just saying from a relationship through a relationship into a relationship, and relationships never go away.

So, we have to learn, understand and do a deeper dive into the power of relationships. That’s what our work is all about. That’s what ‘Don’t Bring It to Work’ is about. The book I wrote, which is about breaking the family patterns that limit success. What we learned as little kids as we were growing up, I learned that work was the enemy as I watched my father, and I had to come back round and see. No, there’s a different way of doing it. You don’t have to fight all the time. So, there is a place in the work that we do, where each of us has to understand relationships better.

So, remember what I just said from a relationship through a relationship into a relationship, and then of course there’s that relationship we have with ourselves, that inner world, that we live in, and we need to understand what pushes our buttons, what makes us so upset if somebody says something. I love what somebody wrote here, where they said, ‘Where is it? Let me see… cut um, it’s the one about I want to figure out why my director is short with me, but not with others.

Well, that’s going to take some work. So, it really is about a couple of cups of coffee or tea or something to sit and talk with that person, and figure out what’s going on. It’s all about relationships now. Next week, I’m going, I’ve asked my coaches to begin to add their expertise in this, and the first one next week will be, Brenda Thompson, who is one of the first Creative Energy Option breakthrough coaches. She’s incredible. So, she’s a pattern breakthrough coach. She’s also an HR expert. She has a master’s degree in applied behavioral science from John Hopkins. So, she comes highly, highly respected and very well studied. Now, what she’s going to talk about, which is going to be her topic and I’m quoting now is, furloughs, layoffs, downsizing. Oh my, how to bounce back when you unexpectedly lose your job or you’re put on furlough.

So, stay tuned next week for Brenda, and she’s a wealth of information. If you have other questions, please put them under here or comments. We love to hear from you. We’re here to make this world a better place, and we’re here to get through this time. So, 2020 even though it’s complicated and difficult, can end with a flourish, and we can all have grown and move on during this pandemic.

Thank you so much. Have a beautiful rest of the day. Thank you.

About Sylvia Lafair

As a curious kid, I was fascinated watching how often people would make the same mistakes and complain about the same upsets time after time. I observed it in family, neighbors, at school and even in books and films.

As I grew older I saw how specific experiences become behavior patterns that people lived by yet barely noticed. It was “same stuff, different day,” just like in “Groundhog Day.”

My fascination with the power of personal and cultural patterns deepened after my father died from a sudden heart attack when I was 14. The cause? Constant conflict at work.

My determination to understand what happened and why led me to an amazing discovery: unresolved family patterns follow us to work. That’s what was behind the stress my father carried throughout his career.

Work stress became the enemy.

My search for more answers became my passion, to find ways to transform outdated, ingrained patterns that destroy health and the joy of success.

Now, I do what I do to prepare, liberate and empower leaders and teams — and to ensure no one need lose a loved one over unresolved conflict and stress at work.

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— Sylvia Lafair PhD — founder of Creative Energy Options (CEOInc.) and the world’s leading authority in Pattern Aware Leadership Development, Top Global Leadership Guru and award winning author of Don’t Bring It To Work.

Read Sylvia’s columns in INC.com and The National Business Journals