I don't have many tips for reducing stress but this is really effective. All it requires is a small shift in thinking.

I hate being late. I was born with the punctual gene. If they can't find anything else to write on my tombstone it will say ...at least he wasn't late. Being a magician in Brisbane means traffic jams. This is a fast growing city with slow growing roads. But one day, stuck in traffic, I had a revelation.

The Revelation

It came from something performing magicians use everyday of their working lives. There is a saying we use all the time.
Why run when no one is chasing. One of the occupational hazards of being a magician is the stress you feel when you are under close scrutiny ALL the time. Rightly so too. We say we are going to fool you, so you, the audience, watch us like a hawk, trying to catch us out. That's part of the fun, the unspoken agreement that magician and audience enter into.

The problem this presents for inexperienced magicians is something called telegraphing. This is where you are so sure that the audience is going to see you hide some thing in your hand or slip something under the table that you subconsciously start to move awkwardly, holding your hand a little too stiffly, edging un naturally away from your audience. In essence you are signalling to your audience that you are up to no good and this is not what you want.

However a seasoned magician knows full well that the audience has no idea of what is coming up next. It's not like knowing the lyrics to a popular song where you know the next line. Most people have never seen a magician before, let alone know which one of literally tens of thousands of tricks he is performing. This is where we use the term Why run when no one is chasing. As no one has any idea of what you are going to do next, just relax, and do it.

Stress Relaxation Technique
- One of my tips for reducing stress

So what about the tips for reducing stress? How does this fit with being late? Well if you think about it being late requires two parties to be involved if it is to be a stressful experience: the person running late and the person expecting them to be on time. As I was stuck in the traffic jam I thought about the person I was going to meet. What were they doing right at that moment? Probably having coffee, going about their daily routine. One thing they weren't doing was being stressed. Why would they? I hadn't told them I was going to be late. So it occured to me this was an unbalanced equation. I was stressing out about something that the other person had no idea about. In fact at that very moment I was the only person in the world stressing about something that hadn't even happened and whatever happened I still couldn't change the fact I was going to be late.

So I took control and looked at my watch. I had twenty minutes before the appointed meeting time. I got it into my head that my being the only person stressed by this was going to change nothing so I switched the radio on and enjoyed the music, all the time visualing the person at the other end doing the same. All was well in the world at that moment. When you think about that last statement, it's so true.

When the minute hand hit the hour I started cursing again. I was still late but I got back twenty minutes of my life that I would have lost to misery. I use this technique all the time. This is about as close to positive thinking as I get. Really it's just logical thinking.

So that's it for tips for reducing stress. My health is a lot better for it and I reckon I've reclaimed about a week of my life. Give it a try sometime.