Tag: emotional

Surprising and Simple Ways To Ease Stress While You Sit At Your Desk

Dealing with families when they are at an emotional low point is likely to take its’ toll on anyone and funeral directors, arrangers, celebrants, and other funeral professionals are expected to do this on a daily basis.

When you invest so much of your own emotional well-being into giving bereaved families what they want, it is impossible to prevent your own emotional well-being from taking a bit of a battering. Little surprise then that funeral professionals are likely to suffer from ‘compassion fatigue’. ‘ a secondary traumatic stress disorder. Essentially, it’s about caring so much it begins to hurt.‘ https://www.frazerconsultants.com.

Sound familiar? What can we do?

In recent posts, https://celebrantglynbawden.com/5-reasons-why-its-hard-for-us-to-say-no/ and https://celebrantglynbawden.com/5-reasons-why-you-should-say-no-more-often/ I covered some of the reasons why its’ hard for funeral service professionals to say ‘No’ but why saying ‘No’ is actually important. In today’s post, I want to look at some simple and perhaps, surprising ways you can combat stress.

They aren’t expensive and they are things that anyone can do easily in just a few spare minutes.

Breathe

Breathe? Did I read that right? Yes, you did. Breathing is the one thing we all do but hardly any of us does it to benefit our health efficiently. One of the single best ways to reduce stress and to give you an energy boost is deep breathing and this can be done LITERALLY anywhere. Hard day? Try it while you’re sitting in a traffic jam on the way home.

Inhale through the nose for 3 seconds and exhale through the mouth for 3 seconds and repeat this 10 times. It is remarkable just how simple and effective this is. For more information on Perfect Breathing check out this site http://phttp://perfectbreathing.com/

Drink Orange Juice

It sounds unlikely to say the least but studies have repeatedly shown that food and drink high in Vitamin C, such as Orange Juice, reduce stress by lowering the levels of stress hormones such as cortisol. Two glasses a day should work fine.

Smile or Laugh

‘Smile, it might never happen!’ How many of us have heard those wonderful words of wisdom in the past? Having a laugh or even a smile does things that reduce stress in the long term. It can reduce cortisol levels, and release those endorphins that we hear so much about.

We all have phones, find a video of a cat on a skateboard and enjoy it for 5 minutes.

Pet a dog

It’s no surprise that many funeral homes have now started to have a resident ‘bereavement dog’ to hand. Stroking a dog can reduce blood pressure and ease anxiety and dogs are especially good at de-stressing us because over thousands of years they’ve been bred to be good companions and are particularly adept at feeling and responding to human emotions .

So, it’s not a mistake when people say that they are ‘man’s best friend’

Massage Your Ear

Or ‘auriculotherapy’ to give it its’ proper name. Our ears are home to multiple nerve endings and pressure points that benefit from being massaged. A gentle massage of the ear lobe can have effects like releasing endorphins ( again), boosting the immune system and stimulating relaxation.

Try rubbing the ear lobe between your thumb and forefinger, or gently tugging it away from you, stroking where the ear joins the head or massaging the cartilage which forms the main part of the ear for just a few minutes.

Act As If..

This is a strategy used by salespeople or for someone going to an interview to trick the mind into believing something else.

Our mind is such an astonishingly powerful tool, a simple trick like this can work wonders.

Because our mind is unable to differentiate between reality and what we tell it is reality, we can make it believe virtually anything. So why not tell your mind that you’re not stressed and in fact, you’re coping brilliantly with everything that’s thrown at you. Make sure that your physiological signs display the same as what you’re thinking, so slow your breathing and act calmly.

So, next time things start to get a little too much, why not try one or more of the above? Who knows, it might just help and if it doesn’t then you only wasted 5 minutes.

5 Reasons Why It’s Hard For Us To Say ‘NO’

It’s a mere two letters long and it can make life so much easier at times, so why is it that we have such problems saying it? Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why we may find it hard.

GUILT

We live in a ‘yes’ culture, where we are socially-conditioned from an early age to say ‘yes’ to things because what we don’t want to do is upset someone but rejecting them or their proposal. If we say ‘no’ to someone then we feel like we’re rejecting them and no-one wants to do that, but we are quite happy to put more onto our own plate.


FEAR OF NOT BEING USED AGAIN

We spend months contacting our Funeral Directors and Arrangers and building up those relationships and when we say ‘no’ there’s always the question at the back of your mind, ‘Well, if I don’t do it, who will they ask? And will they do a better job than me? If they do, then maybe I’ll never hear from them again.’

We work in a very competitive field and more and more celebrants are coming along all the time. Face it, we can’t do every single service. There will be some we can’t do for other reasons and don’t kid yourself that you get chosen for every service the Arranger or FD has. If they’re good at their job then they’ll put the right celebrant with the right family.


SELF-EMPLOYMENT

We’re self-employed and we get it that it may be feast or famine. If we don’t accept every single job that is offered then who knows when the next one may come along?

Well, guess what. People have been self-employed for years and that’s the nature of self-employment. Sometimes the phone will ring off the hook non-stop. Sometimes you won’t hear anything for weeks, but in the end, it all has a tendency to work out and saying ‘no’ to one or two jobs isn’t going to make a big difference one way or the other.


EMOTIONAL INVESTMENT

Our role, by its’ very nature, means that we come into contact with people when they are at a very low state emotionally. They may be still coming to terms with their grief and will need to have their hand-held throughout the process. And who better to do it? Us of course!

And it doesn’t matter that we already have a number of services that day or week because obviously there’s no-one else that could shoulder that emotional load better than us, is there.

Once again, let’s not kid ourselves that no-one else is capable of dealing with these grieving families. All the celebrants should have been on a training course and will probably have a good few services under their belts, some will have plenty more than you, so stop thinking no-one else can do it.

IT’S VERY FINAL

Even though it’s only two letters long, it sounds so…well, final. I’m pretty sure that none of us would be so abrupt as to simply say ‘No’ and hang up the phone but there are ways of tempering the blow and making sure that you leave the door open for future business.

You could always suggest another celebrant that you know and have a reciprocal arrangement with them, so even if you did lose a service there’s always the chance that you’ll pick another up at a later date.

If you don’t know another celebrant well enough, just say ‘I really hope you find someone’ and arrange to call back after the service to see how things went.


There are always going to be times when we have to say those two little letters and I get it, it’s hard but hopefully, we can understand why and accept that saying ‘no’ is an important part of life and we can grow from that.