Stress coaching with The CASE® Method

Stress coaching is the title of the reflection I want to share today. Why this title? We could say that I was inspired by a photo I took almost by chance in the mountains a few days ago.

In this photo, which illustrates this article, you can see a classic example of what in recent years, has become popular as “foliage”. It is nothing more than the colours of autumn, when deciduous trees and bushes shed their foliage for the current year to prepare for winter. The evergreen plants do so continuously, little by little, so it is less noticeable. After all, anyone familiar with fir or pine forests knows that their soil is carpeted with fallen needles. But what is this biological phenomenon really?

Leaf fall in botany

More or less all plants are subject to this phenomenon. What is its purpose? It serves to expel and eliminate toxins and waste substances that the plant no longer needs to keep inside itself. In practice, it serves the tree to continue its life with greater “lightness”, without carrying unnecessary burdens. At a certain point, the plant begins to fill its leaves with waste – which is why the leaves change colour – then it produces a small cork plug at the base of the petiole to seal the lymphatic vessels and… zap! The unnecessary baggage is gone, enriching the soil. A very effective mechanism.

Similarly, healthy human beings…

Similarly, human beings who maintain good health and a good psychophysical balance are those who are able to take a break from time to time and unload their excess baggage. All of us, especially in today’s world, accumulate stress over time. This accumulated burden can reach such proportions that it exhausts all our driving energy, our vital forces. If we do not learn effective ways to let it go, the consequences can be very serious.

Some people find themselves stuck in an insurmountable impasse in life; some react by becoming unbearable and harmful colleagues to their team; there are those who vent their frustration on their family or partner with varying degrees of violence;  those who turn their stress inwards and eventually become ill, even dying as a result. A large part of our daily problems, and even our long-term problems, stem precisely from the accumulation of stress that we are unable to dispose of properly. Or we do not know how to transmute it, transforming it into a driving force for action.

Therefore stress coaching is…

So what I have called “stress coaching” is a way of helping and accompanying individuals or teams through phases of periodic release of accumulated tension and stress. Unlike other more traditional forms of therapy, this coaching also helps people to reset their lives so that they can pay constant attention to stress levels, providing them with tools to eliminate or transform stress.

Why do I talk about transmutation, a term that belongs to the language of alchemy? Because stress is not necessarily something negative; otherwise, it would not exist as a natural and rather frequent phenomenon. Stress itself is simply the energy needed to initiate a reaction to a dangerous situation.
Therefore, transmuting stress means making the most appropriate use of it: using it as an energy source to initiate and bring about healthy changes in one’s life. Transition coaching with the CASE® Method helps to focus on the current burden, removing masks and denials so that the person – or team – can see their situation clearly.

The root causes of stress are revealed and analysed, and possible actions are examined to harness stress as a driver of change. Coaching with the CASE® Method allows us to unleash the full expression of our potential, or that of our team.

Make this autumn the best preparation for your spring

After autumn comes spring… but first there is winter. So how do we prepare ourselves to get through these seasons?
Coaching with the CASE® Method also helps you beyond the transition of autumn, i.e. the phase in which you need to identify and release stress and the rest of the useless or harmful ‘baggage’ you have accumulated. In fact, after autumn, which is a time of release and regeneration, comes the long darkness of winter. What does the metaphor of winter mean in our daily lives?
Winter is a time for reflection, for inner searching to develop new projects and plans from which the next harvest will sprout. Therefore, the reflection on one’s Essential Needs that CASE® carries out in the Analytical Phase is fundamental for understanding where we want to focus our energies for the immediate future, and perhaps even further ahead.

Remove the causes of stress, improve your own and/or your team’s productivity, develop new ideas, business models, ways of relating… the winter that follows the transformation of your excess baggage becomes a dynamic and profitable season of planning. At that point, the following spring can only give rise to strong shoots, begetting abundant and juicy summer harvests.

Outside the metaphor

Leaving the metaphor aside, in case it seemed too abstract a way to address a problem that you feel is real, the stress coaching approach I propose works more or less like this:

• Map and measure your current level of stress/overload or that of your team.
• Find the origins and roots from which these stress loads develop.
• Design positive and healthy actions for which to use the energy of stress, transmuting it.
• Act in the direction of well-being and health through transmutation.
• Effectively manage your energy so that you can avoid future stress.

This is clearly just the minimum operating framework. Everything depends on your and/or your team’s specific, real-life situation, but this is basically how a CASE® programme works to help you transmute excessive levels of stress. This allows you to leave behind accumulated burdens that are too heavy and prevent the formation of new unwanted ‘baggage’.

If you would like to try the CASE® Method

If you would like to try the CASE® Method or assess what it can do for you, feel free to send me an email by clicking HERE to set up a programme (which can also be very short, don’t worry) tailored to you and your condition so that I can help you in a practical way.

For more information, visit my website www.federicofioretto.biz.

I wish you a good life!