My head nearly exploded recently.  It wasn’t pretty.

10 days ago the Headache from Hell descended, and it stayed with me for a full week.  Non-stop, unrelenting, eye-ball busting headache.  It felt like Joe Pesci had my head in a vice, and I was about as much use as a tit on a fish.  I had zero energy, couldn’t think straight and was sleeping for 14 hours a day.

Part of it was down to my whole post-viral thang (my body doesn’t co-operate when I want to push myself anywhere near 100%,which is sodding annoying, let me tell you), but a significant part was down to stress.  Your basic, slap me in the face and call me Shirley, stress.

Yes, even us coaches get stressed out sometimes.

My current freelance gig is crazy busy, with projects being thrown at me left, right and centre.  There are times – and this is no exaggeration – when I’m sitting at my desk talking with someone about a project, when a cue of 3 or 4 other Account Managers appears, each of whom want something from me immediately or have a fresh problem for me to solve on top of all the other problems already on my desk.

I’d wake up at night remembering half a dozen things I needed to do as soon as I hit the office in the morning, and then I’d wake up an hour later remembering something else that was way more urgent.

It’s full-on, relentless, demanding and highly pressurised work.  And for me, it crossed the line into stress.

Stress is a condition where you feel powerless in the face of what’s happening in your life, and somehow I’d let that happen.  Aren’t I supposed to know better?

Maybe, but this proves that shit happens and that it’s how you deal with things that makes the difference.  If only I’d remembered that sooner, I’d have acted sooner.

One morning last week on my way to catch my train, feeling exhausted, light-headed with my eyes blood-shot and burning, I said to myself, “Hold on peppy, this isn’t how I want things to be and this isn’t how I want to feel.  What’s missing and what am I going to do?”

I stepped up and out of the stress and drama, and here was my answer to my own question:

1.  I’ve done the same job many times before and sailed through.  That means I can do it again, with knobs on.

2.  It just doesn’t matter.  Being a Producer is something I’m good at and earns me some good money, but coaching is my ‘thing’.  No baby’s are going to die because an ad goes out late and no hospitals are going to burn down because the animation on a banner isn’t perfect.  I do my best work when I stop taking things so bloody seriously.

3.  I realised I’d stopped smiling, and I’d stopped smiling because I’d stopped having fun.  I needed to make my day fun again and that meant engaging with the work and with the people around me.  Stop resisting, start engaging – that’s what makes me feel like I’ve had a good day.

4.  Eat 8 portions of fruit and veg a day, to give my body a fighting chance.

5.  Go buy some jelly beans.  I love jelly beans.

This was a big reminder to me of how easily I can forget what’s important, and how much that can affect me.

All I did was remember I could make a choice.  And it’s made all the difference.