Is All Stress Bad? Well-Being Coaching for High-Performers

Read time: About 2 min

Some try to stop stress. Others want to avoid it, eliminate it all together. Stress is not evil on its own. The problem is when you get stuck. Stress can be a signal. A challenge. An opportunity. A way forward. How will you navigate getting unfrozen and changing your relationship with stress?

Researchers have studied this for decades. Hans Selye named healthy stress, eustress. The kind of stress that helps rather than hurts. Performance research, the Yerkes-Dodson law, shows the same pattern. Performance rises with pressure up to a point, then falls. Zero isn't the peak. Too much isn't either.

An athlete I worked with didn't think stress was holding him back. Ask about a bad practice or a lost game, and the answer was always somewhere else: the other team, the other coach, a bad call, his shoes, his car, his schoolwork. Anywhere but the stress itself.

During sessions, he started by noticing what was actually there. Inside him. Then facing it, without needing someone or something else to blame. He called it butterflies and anxiety and worry. From there, a direction: what to build, what to practice, what to carry into the next game. Not fixed all at once. Learned, step by step, the same way you build mental muscle.

Life doesn't hand you a stress-free existence, and it was never supposed to. Stress is like the air you breathe: try to eliminate it completely, and you'll squeeze out what makes you feel alive. It may not be about escaping the pressure. It may be about learning to walk with it, face it.

Through coaching sessions, you might find a new relationship with stress, one built on clarity, resilience, and intentional change. The goal could be to walk away aligned and ready to keep going.

Let's sit down and start to face this together.

Written by Andy Culbertson from 314Coach.com in St. Louis, Missouri. NBC-HWC and Anthropedia Coach with 25+ Years of Business Ownership Experience and 2,000+ Performance & Well-Being Sessions Helping Professionals Navigate Change with Support, Strategy, and Vision to Get Through Whatever Is Going On.

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