Can we define what we mean by stress? Stress is our mental, physical, and behavioral response to anxiety-producing events. Too much stress can result in serious physical, psychological, interpersonal, or performance problems.

The amount of stress that we experience depends on how much stress we have, how long we have it, and how we are able to manage it.

Not all stress is bad. In 1974, Richard Lazarus coined the term eustress to describe stressful situations that have a positive benefit. Positive stress motivates, increases energy levels, and can drive people forward to embrace the work before them. Having positive energy and stress available will support the initiative that is underway.

What about having no stress at all? An absence of stress can actually lead to boredom or frustration. When people who enjoy a variety of activities as a part of their day suddenly find themselves caught up, they can actually become bored and experience feelings of fatigue. A balance of positive stress is ideal, although the human component of that is that each person responds as an individual. So, what is good stress for one person can be negative for another person.

The Causes of Stress

Different things stress different people out. For some people, a messy house can cause stress. For others, being late makes them feel anxious.

The Cost of Stress

 Costs of stress on the job can include:

·         Errors

·         Absenteeism

·         Conflict

·         Low morale

·         High staff turnover

·         Poor decisions/no decisions

·         Accidents

The physical and mental symptoms of stress can include:

·         High blood pressure

·         Risk of heart attack

·         Risk of a stroke

·         Risk of diabetes

·         Migraines

·         Always tired

·         Always angry

·         Not feeling much of anything

Your Personal Stress Inventory

The Holmes- Rahe stress inventory is one of the most common stress identification tools. It can help you identify where your current stressors are, and knowing where the problem is can help you create a plan of action.

Circle the events that have happened to you in the past 24 months. Then, add up your life change units and write it in the area provided.

The more changes you have, the more likely you are to get sick. Of those people with over 300 Life Change Units, almost 90% get sick in the near future; with 150 to 299 Life Change Units, about 50% get sick in the near future; and with less than 150 Life Change Units, only about 30% get sick in the near future.

(Holmes & Rahe, 1967, Journal of Psychosomatic Research, Vol. 11)

Dealing with Stressful Situations

The Triple A Approach

When we have situations that cause our stress levels to rise, we have three basic strategies we can use. We can alter or change the situation, figure out how to avoid the situation, or accept the situation and alter our response to it.

Alter

Sometimes changing the situation is the most promising strategy. Let’s say you are always stressed when you get home from work and you’re hungry. You could purchase a slow-cooker and start supper before you leave for work, so it’s ready when you get home. Or, maybe you could start keeping a piece of fruit in your car and munch on it on the way home.

Avoid

On the other hand, that mouthy neighbour may be somebody you can avoid. You know that milk upsets your stomach so you avoid it. You know that your spouse prefers to eat breakfast at 7 a.m. sharp so you accommodate that preference. Forcing ourselves into situations that make us stressed, when we really don’t have to be in those situations, is just being a masochist.

Accept

There are some things in life, like taxes, that are unavoidable so we may as well accept these situations with good grace. Let’s say going to the dentist makes you stressed. Accept that and deal with it accordingly. Play music before you go. Give yourself some positive self-talk like, “By this time tomorrow it will be all over,” “I won’t have to do this again for six months,” or, “I can handle this.”

Becoming Stress-Resilient

Become more flexible and resilient, enhancing your ability to handle change and the stress that can accompany it.

 Change expert Daryl Conner has identified these five characteristics as key to developing resiliency:

•           Positive

•           Focused

•           Flexible

•           Organized

•           Proactive

Positive

A positive attitude is crucial when dealing with stressful situations. Let’s say that your job assignment has changed. You could think, “This change means I have to work the night shift all the time. Blech.” This will have negative impacts on you and your colleagues. Instead, you could look at the new opportunities that will arise, like being able to shop for groceries or make appointments in the middle of the day when line-ups are smaller than on the weekends. If you have difficulty staying positive, practice smiling. When you smile, your body expects that there is something worth smiling about; you can actually increase the number of endorphins released in your body by forcing yourself to smile. As with many good things, the more you practice, the easier smiling becomes.

 Focused

Stay focused on the situation itself and what you can do to manage it or make it the least unpleasant. Try not to worry about things that are out of your control.

 Flexible

Life will be much easier if you try to embrace it. Think of ways that you can adapt or things that you can do to make things easier. Continuing with the job assignment example, you could identify training that you will need or create a list of questions that you have about what is happening.

 Organized

If you are able to keep your work and routine organized, then stress can be something that you can celebrate in the sense that it is not disrupting your routine. This can help it to be less personal and easier to accept.

 Proactive

Proactive is another of those words that can be overused, but it really is necessary here. If you anticipate stress in the early stages and modify your expectations accordingly, it can be much easier to prepare yourself and cope with it.

Dealing with Anger

 Managing your reaction to a stressful event can be complex. Something can take place in a split second that can trigger an angry reaction on your part. Afterward you shake your head and think, “Well, I could have handled that better.” Perhaps you had a parent or teacher tell you to count to ten as way to avoid jumping into a rage, or to go bounce a basketball and blow off some steam. Unfortunately, those delay tactics often do nothing to help you figure out how to deal with that underlying anger in a healthy way. Most often, the outcome of counting or distracting ourselves simply meant stuffing the anger deep inside ourselves and then applying a mask before we re-joined the world.

Now we know better – that a constructive release of our anger is a way to rid our bodies of the physical effects, invigorate our minds with positive and healthy cognitive effects, and enrich our spirits by not hanging on to baggage.

First of all, we need to analyze our anger by examining the perceived loss or injustice. Ask yourself the following questions in order to uncover what is really behind your reaction.

·         What have I lost? Is the loss real?

·         Was it something important to me? Why was it important?

·         What was its value?

·         Is this my loss or someone else’s? If it is someone else’s, how do I know about it? Why do I care?

·         Do I feel like someone has attacked my dignity? Have I been humiliated or embarrassed in some way?

·         Has my reputation been damaged? Was I denied a fair reward or a form of recognition?

·         Is the insult unfounded or is it an accurate interpretation of something that I have done? What is it that bothers me so much about this?

·         Has my freedom or safety been threatened or removed?

·         Have I lost power, authority, influence, or status?

·         Thinking objectively, how big is this loss? Will it have an impact anywhere in my life? Are there ways that I can recover or minimize the loss?

·         What will happen if I just ignore the issue?

Your answers to these questions will provide you with some insight about your values and beliefs. Based on what you learn, you can use this framework to help identify the cause of your anger.

I have lost __________________ and this makes me angry. This loss is important to me because I (value/believe/want or need) __________________________________.

Next, look at the individual or issue who is the target of your anger, and evaluate their intent. Ask yourself:

•     Who is responsible for what has happened (the culprit)?

•     Did they do this deliberately? If so, how do you know that? How can you find out what their intention really was?

•     Do they consider themselves responsible for what took place?

The culprit is someone who behaved in a deliberate manner. If you are angry because you got a traffic ticket for driving through a red light while you were speeding, your choice of culprits will be one of the following:

1.         You, as the driver of the car

2.         Someone in the car telling you to hurry and not worry about a ticket

3.         The traffic light

4.         The car

5.         The police officer who gives you the ticket

6.         Some innocent person who was not even with you at the time

Note that culprits 3 and 4 cannot act intentionally and the last one did not do anything! If you find yourself blaming an unwitting agent (such as the car, the light, or your kids when you get home) for your anger, step back and look at your actions. Who had the power to avoid that situation? So, who are you really angry with? Sometimes we have to admit that the change that is needed in a situation is for us to take more responsibility for our own actions.

One final component is to understand whether a culprit acted unfairly.

·         Why do you believe that this action was unfair?

·         What would it look like for you to consider it fair?

·         What is the culprit’s point of view?

·         If the willing culprit were a good friend or someone with a strong sense of fairness, what would they have done? How do you know this?

·         What would you have done in a similar situation? What did you do the last time you found yourself in a similar situation?

·         What do you see as a fair outcome to this situation? What standard did you use to determine “fair” in this case? It is a widely accepted and well-founded principal of fairness? Is it a standard that the agent would accept?

·         How can you check any assumptions that are in this list?

Fairness can be a very difficult concept to define. What is fair to one person may not seem fair to others. Fair is not the same as equal, except perhaps when dividing sweets among children.

We all have a sense of right and wrong, a code of behaviour that we live by, but we also know that some people do a lot more right than wrong. If you apply standards of empathy and compassion, you can develop a deep understanding for other people’s point of view, and the situations they are faced with.

·         Empathy is the ability to understand and share someone else’s feelings.

·         According to the Oxford Dictionary, compassion is the “sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.”

This is not to say that applying empathy or compassion means that you have to give in to someone who is angry. Compassion may be about sympathy and concern, but it does not have to lack limits. The fact that someone lashes out at you in anger and their underlying issues include things you can sympathize with does not mean that you have to tolerate the behaviour. You will have understanding of the drivers behind their anger, but you do not have to own their feelings or responses like they were your own.

Reducing Worry

Let’s say you’re driving to work and you notice someone is tailgating you. You think, “Geez, that car behind me is driving awfully close. What if they rear-end me? I’ve got all the kids’ Christmas presents in the trunk. If they get damaged, I’ll never be able to afford to buy more! We’ll have the worst Christmas ever.”

In this situation, you’ve taken a normal, everyday occurrence and turned it into an absolute disaster in your own mind. You’ve created more stress than was necessary. Being able to control this Chicken Little type of thinking can be a good way to reduce your stress levels.

One way of controlling this is to stop yourself in the middle of your train of thought. Next, use a tool that’s popular with project managers. Assign an impact rating, a probability, and a control rating to each risk. (You can do this in your head with a little bit of practice.)

You can see that although each event would be disastrous, you really have very little control over the situation (although you could move away from the offending vehicle if traffic permits). This boils down to: it probably won’t happen, and if it does happen, there’s not much you can do about the consequences. The only thing worrying will do is increase your chances of getting in an accident!

Another way to control worry is to give yourself a worry break. Let’s say you choose 2 p.m. as your worry break.

Defer all worries until then – don’t let yourself worry about anything. Then, at your chosen worry time, find a quiet spot, get a piece of paper and a pen, and set a timer for five minutes. Write down all your worries, imagine the worst thing that could happen, and be as much like Eeyore as you want! When the timer is up, put away your paper and pen, and return to life – worry-free.

Wipe Out Worry

While it is prudent to think about consequences for any action we are about to take or any decision we are about to make, we can also burn up a lot of time and energy by worrying unnecessarily.

Try these techniques to put your worry habits into perspective.

Postpone worrying.

To do this properly, schedule a 30-minute worry break. As soon as you catch yourself worrying, tell yourself you’ll really be able to worry about the matter at, say, 5 p.m. When that golden time rolls around, sit down with paper and pen and worry to your heart’s content. However, be sure to think your problems through completely, to the point where you figure out what you would do if catastrophe actually did strike.

Be realistic about the downside.

While you are sitting there with your paper and pen during your worry period, make yourself write out what could be the worst thing that could happen, regardless of what it is you are worrying about. Force yourself to be realistic about the possibility that that will occur: 30% likely, 50% likely, 90% likely?

Focus on your successes.

Still with your paper and pencil, compile a list of the many projects you’ve been involved with at work and what the outcome was for each. Chances are you’ve had a lot more success than failure. The trouble is, we have a short memory when it comes to success and a long memory about our failures in life. Writing that list of successes can make a dent in your self-doubts.

Take a short relaxation break.

When worry strikes or nearing the end of your worry break, spend a few minutes to let the stress dissolve. Sit quietly and focus on your breathing, sip herbal tea, and visualize a restful scene, or give yourself a 10-second neck and shoulder massage.

Try this experiment:

Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and try to feel happy by recalling a happy experience from the past, or by imagining a future happy event. Put a big, bright smile on your face. Sense the positive feelings this picture generates.

Close your eyes again. Now try to feel sad. Recall a sad experience from the past, or imagine what one could be like. Put a droop to your mouth, and a frown on your face. Sense the negative feelings this generates.

Notice that as you completed these two little exercises, nothing had changed in your external environment. It’s not what happens to us but how we think about what happens to us that is important.

Meditation Techniques

Meditation is learning to live naturally and to be in contact and control over oneself. Living naturally means being sensitive to nature’s in-born resources and innate intelligence.  Being in control of oneself means having control of the inner levels of your mind.

Meditation is accomplished by using one or more techniques to withdraw the five senses and the mind from its attention to the world outside oneself and to make contact with the inner mental world of one’s mind.

There are two types of meditation;

·         Contact meditation – where a person tries to get into touch with his/her inner resources or reality

·         Control meditation – where one controls different levels of the mind through thought pattern programming.

Quiet the Mind

Once we have found our quiet, comfortable place, we can begin to quiet our mind. At first this can be difficult for many folks. We spend our entire day running from place to place, dealing with issue after issue and it’s hard to just turn all of that off. But here is the good news: it really can be done. Start by sitting still. You can keep your eyes open or close them. 

In order to quiet the mind, we need to focus on something else. For centuries focus on breathing has been a choice for many and for good reason. It is something we have to do while we are sitting and something, we usually don’t pay any attention to throughout our day.

We just breathe naturally, in and out, in and out. But as we do it as part of our reflection practice, we need to pay attention to each breath. Let everything else go and focus on each breath. If you need help staying focused on each breath, try counting breaths backwards from 50. Each inhale is 1/2, each exhale the next whole number. So as we start, inhaling the first breath, we think 1/2. On the exhale we think 50. The second inhale is 1/2; exhale is 49 and so on. This helps to keep the focus on our breathing.

Reflection focus

As we get more adept at focusing on our breathing, we find that our mind begins to quiet down. It is at this point that we are able to begin seeing what is most important. With a quiet mind we can begin to bring to the front of our thoughts those things that we want to reflect on today. It is not possible to reflect on all of the aspects of Reflection Leadership at the same time, so this is the point where we need to decide what our reflection focus will be today. Maybe it is our personal values or understanding why certain systems in the organisation are blocking us from success. Whatever it is we need to choose what today’s focus will be and put a clear statement in our mind of exactly what we want to reflect upon.

Accept what you find

The key here is not to force any particular thoughts or feelings to the surface. While continuing to focus on each breath, we need to pay attention to where our thoughts go. At this point we shouldn’t judge or try to influence the flow of thought; just let them happen and experience them. If we find that we are heading away from our reflection focus for the day, we need to calmly review the clear statement of exactly what we want to reflect upon.

Reflect on what it means

After we have allowed ourselves to generate what seem to be random thoughts about our reflection focus, it is time to reflect on what it all means and what we can do about it. While we are still in our quiet time and space, we should start to reflect on what we have found. Sometimes there will be a clear picture that gives us the answer that we are seeking. Sometimes the picture isn’t so clear. It may be that we won’t get any answers from a particular reflection session and will need to come back to the same reflection focus again. We may need to take our reflection away with us to another place and time where we can be more creative in our reflection. But at this point we have accomplished the act of finding the issues that are most important for us to pay attention to.

When we are able to take these steps and follow them every day, we will have a reflection practice that begins to yield results. We will be able to quiet our minds to cut through the daily noise so that we are able to focus on those things that are most important.

Reversing Negative Trends into Positive Ones

Everybody goes through a time of negativity or difficulty. These difficult periods are called the outer crusts of change that must take place for the greater good in one’s life. If negative trends occur, it is important not to go into a panic, believing that one’s life is coming unravelled. It is important to handle the negative trend and in the end this trend will have produced positive benefits. Do not allow your thinking to become negative about yourself and life – NO MATTER WHAT!!!  You must keep your thoughts positive by realising that you are going through a transitional period, which appears on the surface to be negative and destructive. The only thing that is being destroyed is the “old” in your life to clear way for the even greater good in your life.

Ways in which to handle negative trends:

·         Don’t go around telling everyone what a difficult time you are having. This only builds up further negativity in your mind, and will reflect back to you psychically by people to whom you tell it. 

·         Never feel that life has failed you, or that you have failed at life during difficult times. Blaming others or yourself will only lengthen the negative trend.

·         Be particularly aware of new ideas that may enter your mind at this time.

·         Always say you have enough as your present state of mind is what creates your future self and situation.

·         Attend motivational seminars, self-help courses such as this as the exposure to positive atmosphere will make a great difference.

To boost your self-esteem, try turning negative messages into positive ones. Here are a few examples.

 Problem Solving Tools

Stress often results from problems that we can’t solve. Having a defined problem-solving approach can help you gain control of a stressful situation.

Whenever you read a book on problem solving, this model, in some form or other, is sure to be there. It may have six steps rather than seven, or it may have five steps. However, the model doesn’t really change… just the authors’ ways of breaking it down.

As you work your way from problem to solution, you are actually shifting your focus.

·         When you define a problem, you ask yourself: What is my problem?

·         As you try to analyze the root causes you ask: Why is it a problem?

·         When you are generating options, you ask yourself: What are some ways I can solve my problem?

Phase One

You ask yourself: Is there a problem? Where is the problem? Whose problem is it? This is the sniffing, groping, grasping stage. It includes whatever you do to get a handle on the problem.

Another thing you will ask is, “What are the symptoms?” Funny noises in the engine, an unhappy look on your employee’s face, or a change in the productivity rate? You’ve got to find out what the problem is

Phase Two

Once you have identified the problem, it’s time to identify some possible solutions. Once you have evaluated the options, it’s time to make a decision.

Phase Three

For the planning portion, start by breaking the task down into smaller portions. Then, for each mini-task, plan the following information:

·         What needs to be done?

·         Who will do it?

·         What resources will we need?

·         How much time will it take? (Set a deadline)

Once all the smaller tasks are planned out, you will have an idea of how long the main solution will take to implement. You may also want to make sure that the above questions are answered for the main task.

Then, it’s time to put the plan into action, evaluate it, and make changes as needed.

Building Supportive Relationships

Having good relationships with yourself and those around you is an essential tool for managing stress.

Now, let’s talk about your relationship with others. Many people find it difficult to talk about their feelings, opinions, and experiences. Start with yourself. Are you the sort of person that others come to talk to, or do you feel like your relationships are shallow? To help your relationships, develop your listening skills. Really hear what others are saying, and respond to their message.

Another way of improving your interactions with others is to ask for help or advice. This doesn’t mean you’re weak or stupid – it means you’re smart enough to use your resources. Remember, support is reciprocal: support them and they support you.