Seven Coping Strategies For Better Mental Wellness

When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.
Winston Churchill

You can’t always control what goes on outside. But you can always control what goes on inside.
Wayne Dyer

Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future.
Deepak Chopra

You don’t have to control your thoughts. You just have to stop letting them control you.
Dan Millman

I’m a mental wellness coach, a performance psychology coach and an executive coach. When people first come to me they complete an extensive assessment that gives me an excellent snapshot of their strengths and capabilities and of the areas they need to work on. Often, they come to me with a very thin tool kit of coping skills. They just haven’t been introduced to critical mental strategies and stress control techniques that can help them with self-regulation. Because they don’t have these skills in place, they simply are unable to handle the stress, pressures and problems that come their way. There’s nothing innately wrong with them as people. They don’t have character flaws. They’re not lazy. They just don’t have the proper array of coping strategies that will help them handle the difficulties they face.

For example, if you’re a tennis player who wants to learn how to hit a spin serve, but you have no idea whatsoever how to begin that process, you will flounder and struggle for a long time if you attempt to learn it on your own. This is because the spin serve has a set of very complicated techniques to learn and to master. But, once you learn a few rudiments about the spin serve, and you practice the techniques regularly, you soon come to discover that you can indeed hit a fairly decent spin serve.

Life itself is very similar to this tennis example. If you have stage fright when you speak in public, but you don’t have the proper coping skills to call upon, you will continue to have stage fright. No amount of positive thinking, or motivational quotes, or encouragement from other people will enable you to reduce your stage fright. If you don’t understand the strategies of public speaking and the ins and outs of how to communicate to an audience, these will also add to your stress. But, unfortunately, plenty of reasonably experienced speakers know all of this, yet they still suffer from stage fright. Why is this? Only specific coping skills aimed at reducing the anxiety will help you manage the stage fright. You notice that I used the word manage, and not eliminate. That’s because even highly experienced professional public speakers experience a degree of nerves before they speak. The difference with these professionals is that they know how to manage their nerves to their benefit. They have mental strategies in place, along with excellent stress management coping skills.

Here are seven coping skills you can put to good use immediately, in whatever performance arena you’re in, or simply in daily life.

1. Manage Your Inner Critic: It’s good to evaluate what you’re doing and to be discerning, but if you often judge yourself harshly and feel what you’re doing is rarely good enough, you’ll only be working against yourself. Ask yourself, are you your own best coach or your own worst enemy?
   
   
2. Trust Your Training: If you don’t really know what you’re doing, then you need to get those skills in place so you feel more confident. However, many people do know what they’re doing, but they forget this. Before you perform, remind yourself that you have the goods. You’ve done this well before. You do this in practice all the time. This is called “trust your training”.
   
   
3. Warm Up Before Every Event: Even a phone call or a Zoom meeting in business is a performance, an event. Don’t just dash from event to event and start your business meetings cold. Warm up your mind, voice, emotions and behavior. If you’ll be asking questions or presenting, go through a two or three minute dress rehearsal before you log into zoom. Then, when the real meeting begins, what you’ll be saying will be the second time you said it that day. You’ll feel much more in flow.
   
   
4. Get A Game Plan: When people perform, whether it’s in sports, public speaking, being interviewed, or leading a meeting, having a game plan helps make them feel secure, organized and grounded. A game plan is just a simple outline or structure of what you plan to do in your performance. Without a game plan our mind tends to be jumpy and fragmented. A game plan gives you focus.
   
   
5. Embrace The Growth Mentality: If you’re interviewing for a new job, it’s natural to feel nervous. Many people truly dread going to an interview. They view it as a necessary evil. If you have this degree of anxiety about interviewing, it will of course negatively affect your performance. But there’s a better way. You never know if you’ll get the job, but you can take away something tangible from the interview experience, no matter what. That is, you can always learn something from the situation. You can learn more about the process of interviewing, and you can learn more about yourself. Embracing the growth mentality allows you to “win” no matter how the situation turns out.
   
   
6. Stop Wishing Things Were Easy: My clients often hear me say, don’t hope for an easy life, strive to be a strong person. When we hope that an upcoming performance or experience will be easy, this is really our anxiety talking. We’re afraid that we may not measure up. So we fantasize, and wish for an ideal, stress-free situation. Instead, expect the upcoming situation to be challenging, and if it is, well, you should be all set for it.
   
   
7. Quiet Your Mind: A quiet mind is the doorway to flow and the zone. A busy, fragmented, jumpy, overactive mind blocks flow. To reduce the noise in your mind, sit still for 30 seconds to one minute and simply listen to what is around you. Each time you identify a sound, label or name that sound, in your mind. For example, if you hear birds chirping you would think “birds chirping”. If you hear a car in the street you would think “car”. Continue listening for what is there as you label each sound. When you conclude this exercise, you will think back and realize that aside from the words naming what you heard, the rest of your mind was relatively quieter than it was at the outset. This little technique is called “listen and label”.

I recommend that you become a connoisseur of coping skills. Collect as many coping skills as you possibly can and begin applying these to all sorts of situations that cause you stress and anxiety. Here I’ve given you seven coping skills that you can put into your mental wellness tool kit. The more coping skills you have in your collection, it will take far more stress and pressure to get you off balance.