Balancing Stress

The melodic truth gifted to us all by Eckhart Tolle, in the opening of his book: Practicing the Power of Now, recites stepping out of one’s self and simply observing. Whether it be a difficult situation, personal issue, struggle with inner-self conflict or simply loosing life to Father Time. By becoming the observer, you activate a higher level of consciousness. Thus, crystalizing all the things that truly matter – creativity, love, family, friendship and inner peace – take shape, forging beyond the mind. Calmness abounds.

These days, how many of us truly resonate with living seamless and fulfilling lives? We all chase the hands of time, barely winning the race. We run about our crazy days much like robots. Not quite realizing the magnitude of stress building and festering from deep within us all. Stress is a fact of life. The impact that stress carries can for some, be quite overwhelming and for others a charging force.

You could say there is “good” and “bad” stress. For stress to be considered good it must be well managed so that it may stimulate and serve as an aid for achieving balance in all aspects of your life. Good stress may work as a motivator to propel higher achievements within ourselves.



Bad stress unfortunately has an adverse effect on most people. It can cause you to break out in a cold sweat, your heart rate may accelerate, and you may even feel a surge of fear brewing from within thepit of your stomach. All this can make you feel ill both internally and externally, thereby harming your personal health, well-being and happiness.

Logon to Twitter.com and search #TipTuesday for hourly tips on how to reduce stress and anxiety by Bruno LoGreco master life coach, mentor & spokesperson

Join me and a team of experts this week as we discuss Stress & Anxiety on #AskTheCoach Thursday 4pm.

Balancing Stress

When You Are Too Busy To Feel It - 3 Steps to Creating 'Me' Time

If your days seem to be filled with endless tasks to complete without making time for moments to enjoy, perhaps it’s time to put some “me time” on your to-do list.

In my experience as a life coach, I have found that more and more people—women especially—find it incredibly difficult to take time for themselves. Combining the nurturing roles of spouse, parent, child, sibling and friend with the daily stresses of a career is not only exhausting but time-consuming and overwhelming. Fitting in time for yourself is often the easiest thing to cross off your to-do list. When we put ourselves last, however, we often end up losing sight of what is important to us and what we need to be our best.

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with a reporter who interviewed me months ago. Since each person’s experience with a life coach is different, I decided to ask her what she learned from our meeting. In our hour together, we talked how the various aspects of her life that made her happy and sad, and if she was able to find a balance.

“The one hour I spent with you was intense and an eye-opener…how I allowed myself to get THAT busy. The interesting thing about our meeting was that I spent an hour focusing on myself for the first time. I had heard many women speak about women’s intuition—a gut feeling they get when they fall off the beaten path…but not me. I never got that feeling so I didn’t believe I was off. But how could I if I was too busy to even notice it? What’s worse, is when I was too busy, I self-medicated…and my drug of choice was food. I used food to suppress the feeling.”

During our meeting, Susan* mentioned she often resorted to yelling as a method of communicating with her husband and children when her built-up anger became too overwhelming to contain.

“After speaking with you, I realized I was taking out my frustration with the kids and my husband. I’m not saying I am perfect, but I am more aware. Now, I get down to my kids’ eye level when I speak to them instead of yelling at them. This strategy has made me a better person already.”

Changing your behaviour for the long term can be difficult if you don’t truly understand why you behave that way in the first place. After some soul-searching, Susan was able to realize she was battling a lifetime of self-doubt and trying to compensate by taking on more than she could—or needed—to handle.

“I was taking on too much. I probably wasn’t communicating or setting boundaries with anyone because I believed I wasn’t contributing enough…I wasn’t doing enough. I always had a need to prove myself…most of my life I’ve felt as if I wasn’t good enough, pretty enough, smart enough. So I did everything I could to try to get some appreciation/validation to make up for it and when I didn’t get it, the message played in my head like a broken record: You’re Not Good Enough. When I realized where those messages originated from, it was clear who still had control over me—I simply took back my control.”

When we met, time was a major concern for Susan and she was struggling to find the perfect balance between her work and home life.

“I took a strong look at all the work I was doing and what I really wanted to do. I also noticed how much energy I spent fixating on stuff I didn’t want to do. I used that time to make self-serving plans and a strategy to move forward. Family was a the top of the list. Now, I spend more time with my family and work is at a place that feels good. Today, I would say I am a happy person.”

By taking time to reflect on what was really important and examine the reasons for her behaviour, Susan was able to make significant changes in her life.

“You need to take a moment to realize what feels good,” says Susan. “When you are too busy to feel it, you don’t realize what you’re missing.”

Give yourself permission to take a break and to follow 3 simple steps to create 'me' time

1. Schedule “me” time into the calendar. Even if it’s just 15 minutes a day, spend that time journaling about your thoughts, paying close attention to how you feel. If you make it the same time each day, your “me” time will become part of your daily routine.


2. Take up a hobby. Find something you enjoy that you get completely lost in. Having a clear mind can bring about many epiphanies, but the key lies in silencing the mind long enough to have them; hobbies have a way of doing just that.


3. Talk to a life coach. Take an hour and talk to a professional. Making it all about you is extremely soothing, and you may discover the underlying reasons for some of your previous actions and ongoing behaviour.

Bruno LoGreco, life coach toronto, author & spokesperson

When You Are Too Busy To Feel It - 3 Steps to Creating 'Me' Time

Stress management: What is stressing you out?

By Ivana Pejakovic

Dealing with your stress can be easy enough... once you realize what is stressing you out, that is. Our lives are full of activities, duties, and responsibilities. It is full of things making you rush, hurry, and hustle and bustle. Life, however, does not need to be like this. If you put a filter on what you will accept to be a part of your life, you avoid many of the unnecessary stressors that are destroying the quality of your life.

Often times we take on responsibility for things we have to, for things we do not want to do, for things we feel that we need to do, and for things we can’t do. If you want to reduce the level of stress in your life, you must carefully choose what you will commit yourself to.

The key to managing stress is taking charge of your life. The first step is to realize which activities in your life are unnecessary and bring you strain. Although you may not be able to eliminate all of them, you are certainly able to reduce and remove the ones that you do not need in your life.

To help you identify your stressors, start keeping a list of things in life that make you angry, stressed, and anxious or produce any sort of negative feelings within you. Rate each item on your list from 1 to 10 in terms of how stressful you find it. This will give you an idea of the top stressors you are facing.

Identifying the activities that are stressing you out, however, may be easier than trying to eliminate them. You may find yourself in a situation where you’re taking care of your immediate family and your parents, you’re juggling a full-time career (or maybe 2 part-time jobs), taking care of your home and pets, in addition to trying to maintain a relationship with your partner, kids, family, and friends.

In fact, you may just say that nothing in your life can be cut out. Maybe.

Review your stress list and decide on which responsibilities you can delegate to your family members. Ask your partner to pick up the groceries (provide a list if needed) and ask your kids to help clean up around the house, do the laundry and walk the dog. Enforce a rule where everyone needs to clean up after themselves.

See what activities in your life can be avoided all together (there must be at least 2 on that list) and which ones can be reduced. If you don’t know how to distinguish between the important activities and the not so important ones, pay attention to which ones must be done and which ones you feel should be done. Get rid of any of the ‘should do activities’ and focus on the ‘must do activities.’

Don’t forget to say ‘No’ when your schedule is already full. If you have a hard time saying now to your loved ones, see if you can trade off. Maybe they can help you with one of your activities as you help them with theirs.

Dealing with stress can be as easy as filtering through the activities that you need to do and activities others can help you with. Do not be afraid or ashamed to ask others to do their share. Once you share the responsibilities you will reduce the amount of stress you’re facing.

Bruno LoGreco life coach toronto, author and motivational speaker

Stress management: What is stressing you out?

Christmas Shopping Stress No More!

By Ivana Pejakovic

One of the biggest causes of stress over the Christmas season is gift shopping. Over the years we have started competing to see who can buy the biggest and most expensive gifts. It would appear that sentimentality is no longer necessary in our society. The most memorable gifts, however, have always been and continue to be personalized and free of charge.

While store bought gifts are an easy way out, I recommend you put on your creative hat and show those most important to you how much you care in your own way. Your gift idea will be unique, sentimental, and is bound to score you some extra points with your partner, children, friends or boss. So, use the time you would normally be stuck in long line ups and start working on what your loved ones will truly cherish.

Tips for personalized Christmas gifts this year:

1. Create a scrapbook or personalized calendar from existing family photos and materials.
2. Create a coupon booklet. Use your creative skills to make it visually appealing. Your coupons can include things such as your participation in an activity the gift recipient likes to engage in or signing up for a sport together. The type of services you offer will depend on who you are giving this gift to.
3. If your family or friends are interested in personal development, create a booklet with articles of their interest and integrate pages with positive/ encouraging words and images (e.g., goal settings, core values, and behavioural awareness).
4. Give someone the gift of your time by hanging out with them and opening up the lines of communication.
5. Create a family newsletter to be distributed to all family members. You can interview each family member you plan on including in the newsletter and write a short blurb on what’s going on with them, what their hopes and dreams are, their New Year’s resolutions, worries/concerns, values, etc. Don’t forget to include a short bio too.

Bruno LoGreco, life coach toronto, author & motivational speaker

Christmas Shopping Stress No More!

Who cares? People will judge you anyhow

You guys have been great and I appreciate everyone who stops by and takes a moment to read this blog. I know that some of you have been following me since I started down this journey back in 2006, when my writing skills were horrid, but you didn’t care. You were interested in the message rather than my writing skills. I am grateful you stuck with me and continued to come back to read more.

Even though I knew my writing skills were piss poor it did not stop me from writing weblogs, articles, e-books, books and more. I didn’t care how poor my skills were I wanted to share my ideas with you and the only way I could do that is by writing it, or I could have paid someone to write it for me. I’m not sure that would have been feasible as the new life coach on the block.
At first I was apprehensive. I was nervous about publishing my thoughts for the world to read because similar to you I was also afraid of being judged. But I knew the only way I would become successful as a life coach and author, and to get to that place I dreamed of, I would need to put it all out there. All of it for everyone to read and to be judged by. So I had to take a decision. Put it all out there for everyone to read, or regret it later when I think back to what I could have been.

Okay, so I’m still not the greatest writer and forget about grammar, but I really don’t care. I’m still learning to write and because it’s not a natural strength of mine I might be learning to write for the rest of my life, and that’s okay too. That’s what editors are for. My weakness is their strength. How perfect!

If you have a dream, something you always wanted for yourself but are too afraid to go after it because of what people might say and think, I have news for you. People will say and think exactly what you believe they will because that’s just the way negative people think. And there are lots of them in this world. Ask yourself, Do these people contribute to my growth? If you answered NO, then who cares – Put it all out there.

You should also know that the only people who will judge you are those who are insecure themselves. For example, the only people who ever judged me for my poor writing skills were those who were insecure themselves about their own skills. What’s funny is their still vacillating about their skills doing the same thing they were 4 years ago while I’ve moved on and had the opportunity to work on 2 television shows, one of which is a hit series syndicated in 42 countries, a national spokesperson and in development of a docu-series.

“When we allow ourselves to become vulnerable, to take chances, and to risk our pride, that is when we find our own glory.” ~Richard Corman

Bruno LoGreco life coach toronto, author and motivational speaker

Who cares? People will judge you anyhow

Do you need holiday stress tips?

I bet the level of stress in your life is mounting right about now. Take it from me, you need to slow down and take a breath. With just a little bit of planning and some time management, you will feel less stressed and more effective while making time for yourself to enjoy the holiday season.

If you are one of those people who believes giving is better than receiving and does a thousand times more for everyone else and nothing for yourself because you think there just isn’t enough time left for, you might want to find time for yourself before January or you won’t have much left to give to others except animosity and anger.

Take a breath and slow down this holiday season. Here are 5 holiday stress tips that will help you do just that.

• Meditate – Clear the path to the mind and gain clarity to remain calm and focused, during the holiday season. Find a quiet place in your home or at work. Begin with a 5-minute breathing technique, listening to your own breath, and work your way up to 20-minutes. Bring a stopwatch with you if you feel anxious. Let it tell you when time is up rather than looking at your watch.

• Plan ahead – Make a list of everything you need to accomplish this holiday season: menu, gifts, baking, Christmas cards, events, etc., anything that requires your time and energy. Write it down on a piece of paper.

• Take Inventory – When you have a clear picture of your day-to-day responsibilities along with the amount of effort it will require you to accomplish the task, you are able to manage your time more effectively. And one of the benefits of time management is lower amount of stress because you make more time to do other things.

• Schedule – Clearing the mind, planning ahead and taking inventory makes scheduling a breeze. Now that you know everything that is causing you stress this holiday season get it out of your head and schedule it into your calendar. You’ll be surprised at how much time is left for you.

• Me Time – That’s right “me time” The holiday season is all about giving but if all you do is give –give, and give, you’ll eventually run out of things to give. So now that you do have time in your calendar, because you followed my holiday stress tips, schedule some “me time” and enjoy the holidays.

Bruno LoGreco life coach toronto, author & motivational speaker

Do you need holiday stress tips?

Holiday Season Stress Buster and Confidence Builder

It’s that time of year again when family and friends gather to share experiences and to celebrate the festive season. It is also that time of year stress and anxiety shoots up and goes through the roof for many people.

We all have in-laws and extended family that believe they know better. It doesn‘t matter if they don’t have any experience or knowledge in the subject matter being discussed, they insist on being right and you wrong regardless of any experience and knowledge that you might have. And the funny thing about it all is, even if you did produce facts to support your position they will still disagree with you.

Mother Theresa once said, “When you are confident in you and what you speak of, it won’t matter what anyone else says or does, you won’t bat an eyelash.”

Here are 5 tips to help you develop confidence for this holiday season.

• Know who you are – Spend some time reflecting upon the past 5 years. Make a list of successes and zero in on your strengths.
• Positive Affirmation – Write 3 positive things about yourself. Use values and adjectives that describe your natural characteristics.
• Put yourself first – It doesn’t mean you are being selfish it means you are an equal to everyone else.
• Say “no” – You can say “no” to anything being asked of you. Take a stance and have a position. Nobody will be able to argue with it.
• Silence is golden – You can’t control what comes out of anyone’s mouth but you can control what comes out of yours and you don’t need to respond to any comment if you don’t feel you need to.

Bruno LoGreco life coach toronto, author & motivational speaker

Holiday Season Stress Buster and Confidence Builder

The Physical Symptoms of Anxiety and Stress

Physical symptoms of anxiety and stress are enough to knock anyone out. Do something about it before you are out for the count.

Anxiety isn't something anyone enjoys. And in some cases it is debilitating. Reduce if not eliminate anxiety when you apply these techniques into your everyday routine.

Fears, phobias, false beliefs, and procrastination, these are just a few of the culprits, which cause anxiety. The trick to reducing if not eliminating anxiety is by identifying the root cause and changing the belief surrounding it. In many cases anxiety is caused by thoughts and can be treated without medication and with effective life coaching.

Phobia is an overwhelming feeling of anxiety caused by a fear of a certain situation or thing. It could be activities, animals, social settings, or a confined space. The symptoms are excessive and an unreasonable effort to avoid the situation. Phobias disrupt daily life.

To overcome phobias one must determine the false belief associated to it. E.g., The Bridge will collapse if I cross it therefore it is unsafe. The image in the mind is very vivid and real. The mind cannot distinguish reality from fiction and when it sees the image - survival is a human instinct so it warns the body of the looming danger – it reacts with anxiety, which is a natural human response. The trick is to replace the negative image with a positive one.

False Beliefs can also be agreements one has with self about his or her capabilities. The belief has the power to build and destroy self-confidence. Low self-confidence can lead to avoiding experiences for fear of failure. The idea of trying something that poses failure creates an extraordinary amount of stress. It opens the sweat glands and a whirlwind of excuses.

But these are the lessons, which are invaluable, and needed throughout life. It doesn’t matter if the outcome is a positive one or a negative one because in the end the lessons learned from the experience outweigh any experience, which doesn’t require much thought at all. A positive affirmation to counter any false belief will help to reduce stress.

Procrastination is putting off or postponing something until sometime in the future. It is a way to not have to deal with the outcome to a particular situation because the image in the mind is a negative one. So the natural human response is to jolt the body with anxiety warning it of the looming danger.

It is another false belief represented by an image in the mind. The truth to the situation is on the other side. Change the image in the mind and deal with whatever is being avoided, now. Habitual procrastination will turn into guilt.


Bruno LoGreco Life Coach, Toronto Mentor & Motivational Speaker

The Physical Symptoms of Anxiety and Stress

Taking Somewhat Of A Breather

Eruptions reeks havoc and can cause serious damage depending on the force and size of the explosion. After two much needed days of total relaxation, I once again feel the buzz of my soul within my body after the minor explosion I experienced Friday past.

The explosion was not severe, and did not cause any damage. The explosion was minor and by early afternoon nobody could tell an explosion occurred. I take time for self regularly; whether I’m being sedentary in a park or whether I’m being creative at home, I find time for me all the time.

Last week was one of those weeks where time slipped under me, running out of time before it was my turn. By weeks end, which included one day when I did not eat lunch – Sure I was a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. My body told me earlier in the week that something was brewing, but I over extended myself running on autopilot for the past weeks and without an immanent warning I erupted Friday.

Fortunately I do recognize that I’m burning the candle from both ends so, I decided to take a little breather leading into the Christmas holiday. In the past I’ve articulated what the breather entailed, this time I think I will let the breather take its course - ditch my inability to control my daily actions and do what ever I feel like doing when the time comes.

Master Life Coach & Mentor Toronto native Bruno LoGreco

Taking Somewhat Of A Breather

Mood Management

Do you ever wonder why some of the issues which we encounter along our life journey, are easy to deal with, while other issues send us in a wild tailspin with no end in sight?

Any number of issues can and will occur over a person’s lifetime. Some issues will benefit the individual such as a huge windfall, a promotion, or some form of good news, and some issues will evoke emotions, such as a career setback, or disagreements. The severity of each issue, good or bad, will have a different impact and effect from person to person, but the effects will slowly begin to diminish within three months.

The two primary issues that will derail a person and cause long lasting effects that will take greater than three months to recover from are: The loss of a job, and the loss of a spouse. These two issues will set a person back for a long period of time. The person that lost his or her job will typically begin to feel better only after he or she becomes gainfully employed and reestablishes his or her confidence. The later, the loss of a spouse, the effects could last up to eight years and possibly more.

The following are activities that will help improve the mood of a person dealing with life issues and or death:

1. Writing in a journal about things for which you are thankful for
2. Acts of kindness and generosity
3. Write a gratitude letter and leave it to whom ever you are grateful to
4. Forgive the people that have done you wrong
5. Create family time
6. Maintain a regular exercise regiment
7. Smile even when you are in a bad mood
8. Avoid being negative – Use a journal to express your negative thoughts
9. Consider learning a form of meditation such as Laughing Yoga
10. Seek support to help you through the rough times

Bruno LoGreco is a successful Life Coach Toronto

Mood Management