Friday Focus #11

TRANSCRIPT

Hello, and welcome to Friday Focus. I’m Ben Coker, and this morning, today, I’d like to talk a little bit about stress and anxiety and maybe even depression.

Now, you and I and everyone else. All suffer from time to time from stress. Anxiety about something can be very slight, or it can be quite a lot. To me, anxiety, stress, and even depression are just states of mind. They’re not necessarily illnesses. There’s nothing wrong with you if you’re feeling depressed or anxious or stressed.

It’s a state of mind to be in. What about the reason that we get into this state of mind?

My belief is that it’s about balance, and it’s about balance between the four areas of life that we are constantly experiencing. So what are those four areas?

Well, the first one is how we deal with ourself, how we relate to our body in terms of physical fitness and so forth, how we relate to our mind and how we relate to our soul or our spirit or whatever you’d like to call it. It’s who we think we really are, not in relation to other people, but who we think we are in relation to ourselves.

So that’s the first area. The second area, which I just alluded to, is how you and I relate. To the rest of the world, to other people in the world. Now, that might be one to one relationships with people. It might be family relationships. It might be community, might be societal or it might be global relationships.

How do we relate to everybody else? Now, I’m not saying how do we compare ourselves to everybody else, but how we relate to everybody else. Where do we see us? Where do I see myself in relation to you?

The third area, we start to expand out a little bit now.. The third area is, what do you and I do?

What do we do here now in this life that we’re currently experiencing? So the third area, which we have to balance up with the other two, is what you might call your career if you’re employed. It might be your job, it might be your business if you’re retired or not working for any purpose.

If you’re between, it’s what you actually do with yourself, with the time that you have. What are you doing now? That might be thinking, that might be learning, that might be running. It could be all sorts of things. So it could relate to how you see yourself and how you see your body and all those sorts of things.

But that third domain or third area is, what do you do? What do I do? At the moment, I’m making a video. That’s what I’m doing right now.

The fourth area is really a result of the other three, and I call it the lifestyle area. It’s the total of everything else, and. It includes things like how much wealth. You have, how much money you have, how much time you have free. Where do you live, what sort of car do you drive if you have a car, it’s all those other things. It’s your environment. It’s where you are in your environment.

And again, not compared with other people, but in relation to who you are, how you relate to other people and what you do. Now, all those four areas need to be in balance, but before they can be in balance, they need to be understood. So over the next four weeks, I’m going to explore each of those four areas separately.

But the focus for you at the moment, the focus for me at the moment is to think about those four. Areas and just weigh up where you are, where I am, where we are in each of those areas. Who are you? How do you relate to everybody else? What do you do? And what’s the environment that you’re in now? There’s no sense of comparison here. This is just a qualitative, objective view of where are you now?

And so Friday Focus today is in each of those four domains. Where are you now? I’ll see you next week and we’ll talk about the first one.