Something I Learned from MAGIC Training: How to Understand Stress

Something I Learned from MAGIC Training: How to Understand Stress

One thing that I learned from the MAGIC training was the way that it explained how people deal with stress in their lives.

The training lesson began with the facilitators asking us to draw a donut shape, and then continue to fill in the ring with things in our lives that we cannot control and to put things in our life that we can control in the center.

Afterwards, the facilitators continued to explain that the center of the donut essentially makes up the intangible parts of us e.g. our personality or our mind. They also explained that when we feel stressed it is because these external forces put pressure on us and become too much for us to handle (Shown Below).

The key to handling this eventuality is by learning the difference between venting and complaining and by learning how to manage these external forces the best that we can in order to reduce stress on ourselves.

First, the difference between venting and complaining; complaining is when someone has a problem with something in their life but they could have done something about the situation that would have yielded a different situation. Venting is when there is an external force that negatively impacted an individual’s life. They both appear the same in action but the difference is that complaining is unattractive to anyone and everyone and venting is healthy to do because it helps verbalize these uncontrollable occurrences and realize that whatever happened was out of our scope of control.

Secondly, we may not be able to completely control the weather, traffic, or what goes on in other individual’s lives but we can attempt to manage these forces to improve the outcomes of our lives. We cannot stop the rain but we can bring an umbrella. We cannot control rush hour but we can leave earlier to get where we want to go in time. We cannot control how people feel, for the most part, but we can learn their personalities and respond with actions that will cause the least friction. This mentality allows the feeling of helplessness to be a less available avenue to go down.

The final overarching theme is that wherever each of us go, there is most likely someone else who has similar parts of their lives that they can and cannot control; therefore keep that concept in mind when interacting with others.

Nick Ferrara

Market Research Intern