The objective is not to completely eliminate stress or anxiety. This is something we need to make clear right from the very start. Believe it or not, stress and anxiety are actually useful emotions. Both put the body into a physiological state of heightened arousal, attention and awareness and can even increase physical strength and power. When you're stressed, you're essentially 'amped up' and this makes you better at completing physical tasks or reacting on the spot. Psychologists have also shown that stress can be a positive motivating force in the right circumstances. Stress is what compels us to study for exams and what motivates us to save money as a contingency fund. Specifically, this type of stress is known as 'eustress' and is a very useful phenomenon. The problem is that many of us have no control over when we become stressed or when we get anxiety. This then in turn leads to us feeling those emotions in maladaptive situations. Being chased by a lion? Then yes, the fight or flight response as it is known is exactly what you need. About to give a big speech to a large audience? Then the same response is going to make you look nervous and unconfident. Likewise, it's important that the stress response be appropriate to the situation that we're in. Being a little stressed in a crowd is normal - but having such a powerful response that you end up having a panic attack and fainting is a problem. So our objective here is not to remove stress entirely but simply to learn to control it, to hone it and to use it to our advantage. That's what this book is all about. This book will teach you to take control of your physiology and your psychology so that you can experience the right emotion when you need it. You can suppress your fight-or-flight response during a presentation in order to come across as calm and collected and you can switch it on again during competition so that you become an unstoppable athlete. You might not think that you currently have a particular problem with stress and this may well be true. But even if you don't experience any crippling anxiety, that doesn't mean you couldn't benefit from being more calm, more collected and more in control of your thoughts and feelings. All of us experience inappropriate anxiety to some extent, the question is simply where you fall on that spectrum.
About the Author: I grew up in Central Minnesota, where my parents owned and operated a fishing resort. Once out of high school I tried a couple of semesters of college, only to quit halfway through the Spring term; I decided at that time that college wasn't for me. Then I decided to follow my father's previous occupation as an auto mechanic. I graduated from a two-year of vocational training course and worked as a mechanic. While in vocational training, I decided to join the National Guard where I eventually ended up working full-time for 32 years. So how does all of this relate to writing? In one of my leadership schools, the instructor, who was an English teacher at a juvenile detention center, presented writing to me in a whole new way - a way that started to develop my interest in working with words. Fast forward about 40 years and I now have over 50 books listed on Amazon for Kindle and CreateSpace. Besides my own writing, I also ghostwrite ebooks, reports, articles, blogs and do Kindle conversions for my clients on a variety of topics. Today my wife and I live in Gold Canyon, AZ, where you'll find me happily sitting in my office typing away on my laptop as I work on my next book or ghostwriting project . . . that is if we are not traveling on a cruise ship - our new-found mode of travel.