Of these three sayings, the one about the towel captures the gist of this article perfectly. It's when the plan hits the real world that you need to keep a clear head --and your towel close. Whatever life throws at you, when you know where your towel is, you're good to go.

Goals are not plans.
Goals are the end point, plans are what you refer to to guide you there. If the terrain sudden changes on the way to your goal, you need adjust and very probably go off-book. Forcing reality to adjust to your plans is a waste of energy. Accept the situation for what it is, without judgment, and get going. What can you realistically do to deal with the situation and turn it to your advantage? Where's the silver lining?

Plans cannot translate to real life without action.
All the paper and diagrams in the world don't mean squat if you do nothing to bring them to life. Your monthly goals, your yearly tracker? You still have to fill those up, they won't write themselves.

A concept in strength training, we generally understand understand "pushing to failure" to mean pushing out as many reps as possible while using good form, until you reach the point where you can't keep that form. When you fail to keep good form, that's when you know you've pushed enough.  Painful and tiring, pushing to failure is only the first part of the equation, the other half being rest.  Muscle growth and strength gains happen after you push to failure and then rest and recover.

With awareness and intent, it's the same with anything we put ourselves into.

• Keep to good form (best practices, best effort, quality work) while working things out. 
• Gain strength and grow in the aftermath of stressful events, leave yourself time to rest and recover (and learn) from these events.

The important thing to remember is to choose to learn everything we can from the hard work-outs, the hard lessons, when we rest. Don't just walk away with the memory of pain.

Have you ever thought about the meaning of your days?

Each day can have a symbolic meaning. For example, Wednesday may be Hump Day. It's when the production reports go out and the new international orders for the past week get processed....one you get past Hump Day, the rest of the week is downhill. Sunday means rest, or maybe Saturday. Friday is Date Night. Thursday is Laundry....it's different for everybody. The day has about as much meaning as you put into it.  So how do you make your days mean something?

You make them count by putting meaning into them. And to put meaning into them you have to know what you're putting first on that day.

Establish the priorities of the day. Think of it as being handed a deck of cards and YOU are stacking them in your favor. It's absolutely legal. You're encouraged to do so, and it isn't even cheating to do it. Deal out your best, most favorable hands each day by knowing what how you want to make the most out of that day.

When you find yourself paralyzed with indecision, what can you do? Anchor yourself in the present.

One definition of paralysis is "a loss of control, feeling or function."  And the most common scenario in which we find ourselves paralyzed is when we're required to make a decision: there are too many details or not enough,and there's not enough time to make a good choice. Where does it go wrong?

Control - Your control is affected when you can't settle on a course of action, or you have no idea or clue what to do.  Sudden emergencies (as if there's another kind), or too many demands and issues vying for your attention all at the same time and you freeze. You can't think. There's too much and it's all at once. So what do you do?

Breathe, step back, and anchor yourself. Take the moment back for yourself, don't give it away to panic.

When you're feel like you're under fire and about to leave the trenches, keeping these tips in mind can help you keep your head in the heat:

Don't over-schedule.
Know your priorities and organize your day, week or month around them. Face it, how many times were you ever able to fully cross-out all the things on your To-do list and have everything go precisely according to schedule? Jamming things into your day for the sake of a "full day" makes for unrealistic expectations and unnecessary hardship, and self-inflicted ones, at that. Build some lee-way in your day.

Leave room for things to happen on their own. This is very important. When you leave room for things to happen on their own, you don't force things into play once you've got the ball rolling. Hurrying things along only shows impatience and poor planning. If you have a plan and you're working things out from it, trust in yourself and your actions, and that you're doing what you can. Don't force it.

Focus.
Know your major goals for the day, or the week, or the month, and don't get distracted by sudden surprises or daily tedium. These goals are part of the structure with which you are building your life, you could waste valuable time and energy trying to make up for mistakes you make when you're not paying the right attention to the important things.

Know your most productive periods. People have their own internal rhythms, their peak hours. Know yours, and take advantage of these times by using them on your most important issues.

Clean up your mess. Rather than waste energy hunting for the things you need for work, keep a neat workspace. Deal with clutter ASAP. Even better, prepare for the next day at the end of your current workday. By laying things out in advance, you carry over un-addressed issues to a fresh day when you're better prepared, and by knowing what you'll need for the next day you save time.

While it would be nice to just have a sure-fire, once-and-for-all way of dealing with stress --one that doesn't involve being planted six feet under ground -- it's a fact of life that what doesn't kill us...sometimes makes us wish it did.

If you've experienced times like this, you understand just how crazy things can tangle up inside your head when you're under pressure. Dealing with and managing your stress is an on-going process , not something you can solve with a one-time application, so it's past time to let go of wishing for impossible cures. When you get stressed on a regular basis, you need to be able to deal with it the same way, regularly and effectively.

An essential part of that coping strategy is to listen to yourself. Observe the signs of your stress, they mean something. Otherwise they wouldn't be popping up.

"Sure, go ahead. Take the easy way out."  At one point or another in your life, I'm positive either you've said this to someone, or had someone say this to you.

Taking the easy way out paints you as a slacker, a shirker, a lazy-assed Captain Slacktastic unwilling and unable to step up and do the job. It's simply unacceptable -- Un-American, even. But what do you think happens when you turn this idea on its head?

Hard work is not the only way to go -  of course, hard work is unavoidable and, but smart work is what's needed too. Know yourself.

• If you're the type who works best in short bursts of energy, accept it and work with it. There's no point to forcing yourself to slog through hours of half-hearted effort.
• If you feel exhausted and burnt-out, then by all means ease up, it's counterproductive to work harder. Many people have high levels of energy, it goes to follow that there are also many people with low levels of energy. It's not a bad thing, it's just the way you're wired. Accept it and work with it.
• If you're excitable and get distracted easily, then you can try and arrange a quiet, distraction-free place to work, whatever lets you do what you need.
• If you perform better at certain times of the day (or night), work with it. Night-owls and early  birds have their spots in the schedule, know when you're at your best in the day and use that time for the high-value tasks.
  

It's a sad truth that we generally spend more time spinning day-dreams than laying-out the steps to make these dreams come true, and even less time actually taking these steps. Admittedly, dreaming cost us nothing. You can day-dream about whatever you want, wherever and whenever you want.

Acting on your dreams, on the other hand, can cost you a lot. That's why it's can be so uncomfortable and nerve-wracking to take action, because it involves risks, consequences and the possibility of failure. Emphasis on consequences. (And the possibility of failure.)

Actions lead to consequences. You want a particular consequence, you have to commit to the particular set of actions needed to get that particular consequence.

Continuing from part 1:

No matter where it comes from, stress generally can come from the feeling that you're being controlled ( when you suffer the lack of personal choice, or feel that you're a puppet), orfeeling out of control (as in having run out, being pushed past the limits of yours;  having no power to change the situation, or that you don't having a handle on things -- and reacting by flying off the handle). However you perceive it, you feel at the mercy of things outside you, and the way you handle things internally decides how stressful the situation is.

Notice what happened there? Outside events influence your internal state. To manage your stressors and your stress, you need to be able to change that kind of viewpoint around, and take the focus from outside influence to inner decisions. This is a shift in locus and focus.

Side note: You might find our two-part special on Focus and Planning ( part one and part two) helpful reading.

Internal locus is, in this sense, being centered. What's outside you is quite literally outside your control, but not always out of your influence, so it's up to you to decide how things can go, using what influence you do possess, and then not get too attached to the results. Attachment is also a source of stress -- the emotional over-investment can drag you under if the results aren't exactly what you wanted or expected.

Stress. Inescapable, ever-present and all too often overwhelming, it is a major cause of billions of man-hours lost to a host of illnesses, lowered productivity, mental fatigue (and even more serious conditions), and just plain more stress. There are hundreds of web sites, tens of thousands of web pages out there detailing the many ways in which stress is created, how it manifests in us physically, emotionally and psychologically, and how you can deal with it, but reduced to simplest terms the bulk of the advice comes down to one thing.

Control.

Not too much control, of course --that in itself is another source of stress-- but a realistic and honest understanding of the things you can affect, and the changes you can put into effect.  A human control, not one based just on technological know-how and mastery, or only strongly rooted in  intellectual understanding, but one managed from the heart.

Think of the popular Serenity Prayer, well-known from various 12-Step programs (most notably Al-Anon).

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;

The courage to change the things that I can;

And the wisdom to know the difference.

Happily enough, there's another version available, one which is slightly altered from what many think of as the original, and the alterations themselves make a very telling difference.