Upside Down

This Louis Armstrong classic, Hello Brother, combined with this Christmas and New Year video by Lab Ottagono from Italy creates a moment to forget about reality and the waves not only taking our breath away, or knocked us off our feet, but also turned our lives upside down.

Do you find yourself in an unknown space? A place in your mind where nothing seems right and everything seems to take a couple of moments to make sense? Where you feel like a stranger in your own known reality?

When major change occurs, we need to find new ways to center ourselves, to find a renewed understanding of who we are in the new context or realities we find ourselves.

Types of Stress

Positive stress affects our activities; it is a type of short-term stress that increases our immediate strength. Eustress is affecting us at times of creativity, physical activity, enthusiasm, or excitement.

This positive stress aids an individual in motivation and inspiration to finish a certain project or creative thinking when completing a task. Eustress (positive stress) is present almost everywhere that inspiration or motivation is required.

Negative stress arises because our normal routine is constantly altered and adjusted, while we try to adapt to new situation we are faced with distress.

Distress usually causes feelings of discomfort, anxiety and unfamiliarity. We are faced with distress when we are in the new workplace and we didn’t adjust to the situation yet.

When we feel as if everything is upside down, and we are unable to balance the amount of stress we allow in our daily lives and lack the skills to problem-solve stressors, we are in greater danger to cause conflict and imbalance in our relationships and lives.

Personal Well-being

Now, more than ever before, we need to ensure our own well-being. We are needed in our world to provide leadership and stability to the people looking up to us for guidance. We need to understand how we are affected, find balance in an uncertain reality and re-focus our response to life in such a way that we can provide direction.

When you enroll in our online Promotion of Personal Well-being course, you will guide yourself in this direction. This course focusses on how to apply problem-solving techniques in decision making, to identify stress factors and stress-management techniques, how to apply established strategies and procedures to deal with risk behavior and promote personal wellbeing and how to strengthen interpersonal relationships.

Some of the topics addressed are listed below:

• Distinguishing between problems, challenges and matters requiring a decision.
• Investigating techniques for solving problems and making decisions.
• Identifying a problem in a real-life situation.
• Applying a problem-solving process or technique to propose a solution or make a decision.
• Explaining stress and its role in daily living.
• Explaining different ways in which people react to stress.
• Identifying stressors in the workplace and their relationship to work performance.
• Identifying stressors related to home and the greater environment.
• Investigating techniques to manage stress in the workplace.
• Explaining risk behaviour.
• Explaining the promotion of well-being.
• Explaining human motivation and behavioural change.
• Using accepted strategies and techniques to facilitate behavioural change
• Explaining different types of relationships.
• Investigating factors that impact on interpersonal relationships.
• Developing skills and techniques for managing interpersonal relationships.
• Demonstrating the ability to manage self in relation to others.
• Exploring aspects of intercultural communication that have implications for relationships

Let us lead the way in going back to our inner child, where we felt free to explore our dreams, did not mind if other’s see what we are made of and lead the way into a new awareness of freedom to be who we need to be…

Let’s turn our upside down experience into an opportunity for personal growth!