Apr

The Top 5 Tips For Living With Care Workers – Tip #5

By gbaker

Tip #5 – Don’t let your care package rule your life!

This is actually a bit of a paradox because if your need a care package its quality will always rule your life to some extent. However, just because it is a necessity doesn’t mean it should consume you if you can avoid it!

It would be very easy for me to spend all my time filling in timesheets, phoning round trying to cover people’s holiday leave and most of all worrying about ‘what ifs’ like people leaving, being off sick or any number of other things!

Worrying is pointless, what will be will be!

I know it’s easy to say, but it’s also true. I’ve now adopted a zero tolerance policy on worrying and it is, without doubt, the most liberating feeling I’ve ever had!

How did I do it? Well starting was simple…I accepted one fact:

The future is the result of any number of uncontrollable variables and I can’t predict it, at all.

If I can’t predict the future, why worry about it?

Chances are the things I worry about aren’t what will happen. The actual future might be worse than what I imagine, or it might be better.

AND…You’re going to love this cliché…

‘Every cloud has a silver lining’

Or as I prefer to say ‘with every adversity comes the seed of equal or greater opportunity’

I’m sorry, I appreciate you weren’t looking for a self-help book when you downloaded this report, but, this advice IS, contrary to what most of you will be thinking, entirely practical and extremely effective.

I’m not in the business of talking, excuse the expletive, shit. I will only ever write about things which I have seen work with my own eyes.

All worrying does is block the path to finding a solution to a problem, it serves no other purpose. The weird thing is, we all get a perverted enjoyment out of worrying and it’s a hard habit to kick.

Because having carers and running a care package can be very stressful it is a prime opportunity to become an obsessive worrier. The result of which will be you become a nervous wreck who gets very little, if any, enjoyment from life. I implore you; don’t let yourself end up like that!

Before you can truly stop worrying it’s necessary to understand a bit about why we do it. Worrying is a form of ’scripting’, in other words, we act out different ‘futures’ in our heads. We do it with the intention of making the actual future less scary by working out what might happen, but it tends to have the opposite effect. That’s the ‘why’; now let’s discuss the ‘how’.

We start to worry using little ‘what if’ scenarios; “what if I miss the bus?”, “what if I fail the maths exam?” The absurd thing is we always come up with the most depressing conclusions; “if I miss the bus, I’ll be late and my boss will fire me”, “if I fail the maths exam I’ll get kicked out of college”. What’s even more absurd is we then accept these possible outcomes as near definite ones and go over them again and again in our heads. In doing so we completely ignore two facts, firstly, there are other, usually more likely, possible outcomes and secondly, even in the worst case scenario, the consequences might not be as bad as we think.

The best way to stop worrying is to develop a goal orientated approach. When a problem comes up, rather than worrying about the possible outcomes, write down the following:

A statement describing the problem.
A list of its implications.
The positives and negatives of each course of action you could take.
IMPORTANT: if you can’t do anything, just accept it as inevitable and move on.
A Statement committing you to one course of action with a deadline for its completion.
All the things you need to do to complete that course of action (include deadlines).

All you have to do then is focus on doing the tasks you have set and you can be safe in the knowledge you’ve done everything you can, the rest is out of your hands.

Notice I’ve mentioned the use of deadlines. These are extremely important because they compel you to action. Humans are, mostly, lazy beings in that they need a good reason to bother doing anything, which is why the sensations for things like bladder control, hunger and sex are so strong. Deadlines also help foster a sense of achievement, which counteracts worrying.

In short, worrying is a ‘mugs game’.

George

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