Stress Buster Steps

Stress Buster Steps: finding your calm center

It’s vital to learn some Stress Buster Steps early on in your Hospitality career.   I have said many times throughout my books (What They Can Never Teach You At Hotel School) that working in Hospitality can be stressful.   

And it can feel like it is one of the most stressful jobs there is at times.  

Not only do you have your duties, but you can be working late nights or very early mornings too.  And sometimes you have personal issues which are causing you stress.   

Not only do you have to ensure that you work to your hotel’s standards and levels of guest care. But you have to respond to guest needs.  And sometimes those needs can be extraordinary.  Not just for you but for the guest too!

So, you need to develop your own routines, practices and ways to help you defuse Stress.  For some people that may be a regular exercise regime, which gets the heart pumping.  Others may prefer something like Yoga, Pilates or meditation, to soothe those frantic thoughts and feelings.  

Someone once wrote that Stress is the Silent Killer.  

Well, if that isn’t a sentence to get you addressing how you handle stress, I don’t know what is!

Why not try using the stress buster steps I have set out below.  Believe me it helps to find your calm center, in those moments of stress.

Stress Buster Steps 

1. Finding your Calm Center.
2. Find a quiet place to sit.
3. Sit down.
4. Close your eyes.
5. Take a long slow deep breath in, through your nose, for the count of five.
6. Exhale slowly, for the count of five, through your mouth.
7. Repeat two more times
8. Take another deeper breath in, through the nose, for the count of five.
9. Hold your breath for the count of five.
10. Exhale slowly through your mouth, for the count of five.
11. This is your calm center.

How does it feel?  You can repeat this as many times as you want to.

 “The cyclone derives its powers from a calm center. 

So does a person.” 

– Norman Vincent Peale