I accept the fact that I need stress to progress.  I even welcome it.  But I want to pick the flavor.  I choose vanilla stress.

Vanilla stress is one of the flavors that serve as the extension cord to get us from accepting the commonplace to wanting excellence.  Anytime we want excellence in our lives, we know we have to pay the price of dealing with stress.

The trick is to keep the stress vanilla.  It is not the only flavor of stress.  There are many flavors, including rocky road - not my favorite!

I have sampled all the flavors of stress over my years.  Knowing who I am, I expect I will always choose the exciting avenue that is strewn with stress, but I've just recently realized that I can settle on one primary flavor - vanilla.   Vanilla piques the senses and stimulates us to want more, but is not strewn with rocks along every path.

Here's how to keep vanilla as the stress of choice.  There are things I do very well and I feel good about myself, and the world around me, when I do them.  There are many other things I do not do well and when I try to do them anyway, I ride the rocky road flavor of stress.

How it took all these years to have this light bulb go on for me I don't know.  But here's what it illuminates for me.  Things I don't like to do and things I don't do well, I am not going to do.  (I don't mean I'll never take out the trash, I mean I won't accept it as my job.)

When we look around our lives and see what works,
and what does not work for us,
we can make simple changes,
which are actually profound
in their results.

Certainly there are things in life everyone has to do.  But there are many things we really don't want to do.  We can stop!

I'm writing this on vacation, and I won't return until after deadline for our April issue. Hooray.  I don't know who is happier - me or my team.    Probably both.   There was a time, all too recent, when I thought I was indispensable on deadline.  Not.  And that means I have been successful, not the opposite.

When we look around our lives and see what works, and what does not work for us, we can make simple changes, which are actually profound in their results.  Vanilla, please!

Jean Loxley-Barnard has been a writer all her life and studied both sociology and psychology at George Washington University where she earned a B.A. Her company, The Shopper, Inc., encompasses all the Loxley-Barnard family publications - The Shopper Magazines and Doctor to Doctor Magazine. She has been in the advertising, consulting and publishing business for 39 years.