Self-Esteem Is Key to Helping Women Control Stress

Carol Price was having lunch at the Belvedere Hotel. She had just taught three hours of a women’s workshop on stress and had asked the maitre d’ in the John Eager Howard Room for prompt service so she would have time to check out before the afternoon session.

In a very few minutes, an amiable waitress brought the food.

Price thanked her.

“Oh, it’s all cold food. I didn’t have anything to do with it,” replied the waitress, shunning the compliment.

It was a stunning example of what Price had been preaching: how women need to overcome their inability to accept compliments and to think well of themselves. This tendency to play down accomplishments and abilities is a failing that in many women brings on stress, perhaps the malady of the ‘80s.

“Why couldn’t she just say, ‘Thanks, I’m glad I could help,’ ” Price said, recounting the incident for the afternoon session.

It happens all the time, she said. Someone says your dress is beautiful; you say it’s old. Your boss comments on the thoroughness of your report; you reply, “I hope so” instead of “Thanks, I worked hard on it.”

“Men have been given permission to know they are OK; you have also been given permission to know you are OK,” Price told the 200 business and professional women who paid $48 each to attend the session sponsored by Career Track, a Boulder, Colo., company that specializes in inexpensive training workshops.

‘Believe We Are Valuable’

“When we believe that we are valuable, we have far less stress,” said Price, who then spent much of the day showing and telling women how to recognize their value and, thus, raise self-esteem while lowering stress.

“We’re not going to talk bad or good, we’re going to talk comfortable and uncomfortable,” she said of habits and life styles.

When a person is comfortable with herself and the choices she makes, her self-esteem is high and her stress usually low, added Price, who has been giving training workshops for five years. Before that she taught elementary school, did counseling and managed the office of a group of gynecologists. She has a master’s degree in criminal justice and has taken graduate courses in counseling.

Price lives in Reddington Beach, Fla., but travels about 40 weeks a year teaching workshops. Not all are on stress and not all are exclusive to women.

Nor is stress.

Men don’t necessarily have less stress than women, but “they have more avenues to get it out than we do,” Price said. Stress, she said, comes from two emotions: anger and fear. Anger is the acceptable male emotion, fear the female.

So it is in controlling their fears that women conquer stress.

Easy? Not necessarily.

First, women have to want less stress in their lives.

And they don’t?

Many women do not really want less stress, contended Price. “Your stress is chosen, nurtured and heralded, like a first-born child. You like it,” she told the workshop. “We advertise our level of stress as being our reason for living. We wear stress like a badge of honor.”

But there are other, healthier symbols of self-worth, such as control, calmness and competence.

“The key to surviving, and thriving on, stress is control,” Price said.

Controlling Stress

She described controlling stress as a three-stage exercise that can become a way of life: Preparation, process and maintenance. Price dwelt on preparation: “allowing the body to be in its best form” to deal with stress.

This preparation stage relies heavily on the power of positive thinking: building and reinforcing a good self-image. It begins with physical readiness achieved through good diet, exercise, sleep and relaxation habits and includes two mental techniques, which she called visualization and affirmations.

Visualization is a process of seeing oneself, mentally, achieving a goal or mastering a difficult situation. Basketball players, for example, might repeatedly visualize themselves making perfect free throws, so that when they stand at the foul line they can make the basket.

Affirmations are positive, present-tense statements that a person repeats to herself often. Price, for instance, advocates saying these four things every day:

“I am competent.”

“I am attractive.”

“I deserve respect.”

“I own this day.”

Inherent in the last statement are choice and control, which everyone needs to exercise, Price said.

Controlling Your Life

“Every act in your life is a choice,” she said. “The time has come for you to start owning your life . . . You own it for what you choose to be. If you don’t take ownership, let me make you a promise: someone else will. And they do it through guilt and they do it through demands. When it’s your day, you choose how you live it; when you don’t choose it, they choose how you live it and then you meet their demands.

“Affirmations make or break you. It’s just that simple.”

Although there are stages and techniques--deep breathing, muscle relaxation, exercise, visualization--Price summarized stress management in four commands. When some event becomes stressful (it is not the event that produces stress, but one’s interpretation of an event that brings stress):

Calm down. Deep breathing is the key.

Take the problem and break it down: Is the problem based on truth? (70% of women’s fears are not, she contended, and can, therefore, be dismissed along with the accompanying stress.) If the fear is real, consider what can be done about it.

Choose the most comfortable solution.

Stick to your choice.

Price professes to practice what she preaches--99% of the time. She has worked at controlling stress so long “that I’ve learned how to do it,” said Price, who is 39. Most women her age, however, have 35 to 37 years of being taught to live another, less-in-control, way. Those well-learned lessons must be overcome, and that does not happen overnight, she said. It won’t, however, take another 35 years.

“You have to be willing to change dramatically,” she said over lunch.

Dealing With Events

Part of that change is how a person interprets potentially stressful events. “No event has ever produced stress; no event produces anything,” Price contended. “When he talks to you in a way you don’t like, it does not make you feel crummy. You color what he says and that’s what gives you pain.”

Coloring, which Price described as self-talk, is the unnoticed step between an event and a feeling about that event. Women and men “color” with beliefs, values, attitudes and habits, and these “crayons” produce feelings. “You color every event in the world and then you feel; you do not feel before you color; you cannot feel before you color,” she said.

Another key to stress control, Price said, is accountability--making others responsible for their actions and reactions and, thus, ensuring you get the respect you deserve for your actions and reactions.

When, for example, someone answers you sharply at work, resist the desire to fire back, Price advised. Say instead, in a calm voice, “Have I done something to offend you or are you having a bad day?”

This forces the other person to look at his actions, she said, predicting that the potential stressor’s behavior will usually change and his response become more reasonable.

And the color of the feeling he evokes will probably be a cool blue instead of a fiery red.