Is Workplace Stress Frustrating Your Effectiveness?

The hidden key to career success is how you react to workplace stress.  Much more than your technical skills, your people skills, or even your suck-up-to-the-boss skills, it is how you manage and deflect stress that determines your success in the company.  This is because the company can train anyone to perform technically.  They can hire gregarious people and educate them technically.  And the boss will always find someone who will suck up.  But it is a rare to find someone who can keep his or her head in the middle of chaos, or who doesn’t call in sick every time a crisis deadline looms.

Workplace stress is relentless.  It presses on you without relief.  It attacks you from all sides, in all situations, at all times.  It causes pain.  It causes health problems.  And ignoring it, or treating it like just-part-of-the-job, means that you will never rise above it.  It will frustrate you.  And you – the real you, who can do the job and command advancement – will fade from anyone’s notice.

Here are 5 ways that workplace stress frustrates your personal effectiveness at work:

1. You spend so much time dealing with stress that you have less time to do the extras on your job that get you noticed as a go-getter.  This is mischaracterized as time management.  Real time management is creating those gaps in your day that you fill with what you want to do.
2. You spend so much energy on stress that you don’t have the ability to compete with younger or newer co-workers.  Stress is like a hole in the gas tank of your car.
3. You spend so much money dealing with the bad health effects of stress that you cannot afford those social outings that develop teamwork between you and management.  Upper management is looking to promote the people they know and trust.  Social outings help establish this.
4. You spend so much emotional energy on fighting off stress that your personal attractiveness and appearance look neglected and older.  This does not mean “dress to impress.”  But it does mean that those bags under your eyes from lack of sleep make you look incompetent.
5. You spend so much social capital complaining to your co-workers about the stress in your life that they cannot view you as their effective leader.  People will not follow someone who tells them that he or she cannot get the job done.

It is very easy to go along with everyone else and treat workplace stress as a sort of natural disaster: something you plan for, but cannot prevent.  This approach leads to an attitude of complacency and passivity.  By attacking stress, you can break out of this mental defeatist attitude and take control of your life in a tangible way.

The way to attack stress is with a comprehensive stress management strategy and system.  Stress attacks you externally and internally.  It affects and weakens your physical body, your emotional systems, and your will.  Having a system built primarily to help one of these, with some add ons for the other types of stress, is the least effective.  Stress needs to be met as hard and aggressively as it attacks you.  Take control of stress and you take control of your life.  Remember: life is what happens to you; living is what you do to life.

 

 

THE Answer To “How Can I Fight Stress?”

Too many stress management programs focus on the question “How can I relieve how stress makes me feel?”  This is an important question, because stress makes you feel miserable.  And the bad health effects of stress make you feel bad for along time after.

However, simply focusing on how you feel internally really doesn’t do anything about the stress that caused the bad feelings in the first place.  What if you took up the question “How can I FIGHT stress?”  Answering this question will help you eliminate stress, not merely manage it.

Stress Judo Coaching.   The exclusive coaching program that helps you answer “how can I FIGHT stress?”  And win.

The Evolution Of Stress Management Coaching

Most stress management programs focus on your internal reactions to stress.  Things like deep breathing, relaxation, visualization – these are great, if all you want is to feel better.  However, the stress is still there.

Not dealing with the stress is like focusing on your feelings instead of dealing with the mugger waiting in the bushes to beat your ass when you step outside.

You need a program to train you to attack stress, while at the same time you are preparing yourself internally to stand up and go toe to toe with it.  You defeat the bad health effects of stress and make yourself physically and emotionally powerful.

Stress Judo Coaching.   The evolution of stress management coaching.

How To Eliminate Stress

Too many people think and believe that stress is a fact of life.  Well, it is.  But what is NOT a fact of life is how you react to stress.  Instead of enduring the bad health effects of stress,  stomach aches, headaches, and general feeling of dread – you can learn how to eliminate stress.  Using the principles of judo, and the experience of trial litigation, Rick Carter has developed STRESS JUDO COACHING.  This proprietary system of coaching focuses on training you to attack stress and find the opportunities in every stressful situation.

Joining the STRESS JUDO COACHING community give you 3 free exclusive reports: STRESS JUDO The Truth; STRESS JUDO The Remedy; STRESS JUDO The Overview.   These reports explain the STRESS JUDO COACHING system and how it can be applied immediately to your life and turn stress inside out.

For personal transformation and help with managing stress in the workplace, go to STRESS JUDO COACHING.

Stress And The Workplace A New Paradigm

As the pressures of the economy increase, stress and the workplace gets worse. It hits at every level of employment. Upper management has the stress of keeping the company afloat. Middle management has the stress of doing more with less. Line workers and research have the stress of putting out the company’s product or service to an increasingly hard to please market. And this doesn’t even touch on stress of your co-workers!

Read the rest of the article: stress and the workplace

How I Almost Ruined My Career to Succeed

I was watching a video from the TED conferences.  The video was on creativity and how education kills creativity. Interesting and pretty funny. But it got me thinking about how I – at the beginning of my career – deliberately set out on a course that probably should have killed it, for the purpose of actually succeeding. 

So I wrote a blog post about it–> stress management coaching.

Increasing Workplace Productivity Through Simple Time Management

Ask yourself these questions:

• Am I working effectively?

• Is the work I do efficient?

• Do I have many fruitful hours of work or am I always distracted?

Here are some time management tips focused on increasing workplace productivity to get more out of your usual work day.

Read personal effectiveness.

Creative Problem Solving For Increasing Workplace Productivity

Increasing workplace productivity is a major source of stress in the workplace. Management is under pressure to get more done in less time at less cost. Workers are under pressure to learn new technologies, or new procedures with out-dated technologies. The resulting stress can be crippling, physically and emotionally.

For more information, read Increasing Workplace Productivity

5 Steps To Managing Workplace Stress

Workplace stress management is a unique form of stress management. This is because workplace stress can have consequences that last well into your time at home or even your vacation. It also has stress management techniques that are adapted to the workplace. Desk yoga is one example. But confronting your boss about an unreasonable deadline is another.

For the remainder of the article: Managing workplace stress

Work Anxiety And Taking Control: 4 Steps

Anxiety, according to dictionary.com, is “distress or uneasiness of mind caused by fear of danger or misfortune.”  Fear is defined at the same site as “a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined.”  So anxiety can be defined as “distress or uneasiness of mind caused by a real or imagined threat.”  When you see work anxiety in that way, the 4 steps to deal with it practically write themselves.

The four steps to taking control of work anxiety are:

1. Define the threat.  Knowing what you are afraid or or should be afraid of many times makes you realize that there is nothing to be afraid of at all.  One useful phrase to use at work is “…and that affects me how?”  because that defines if it is a threat or if it is just some interesting gossip that is going around.
2. Decide if the threat is real or imagined.  Real threats need to be dealt with right now, and worrying about them do nothing productive.  Imagined threats can be planned for and worked around.  And, more importantly, avoided.
3. Develop a plan to deal with the immediate threat.  Decide how much harm this threat will do to you if you do nothing about it.  Sometimes you can handle the harm and just roll with it.  Maybe all you need to do is minimize the harm.  Or maybe you need to make the threat go away, so that you suffer no harm at all.
4. Develop a long-term plan to deal with these kinds of threats.  You may have to research the subject.  You may have to reach out and develop team to support you.  You may have to develop a system to delegate some responses.  But you must have a plan to face this threat the next time it pops up.

 

Let’s use an example for this. You develop work anxiety because your friend in another department told you that management is developing a new way of measuring performance for reviews and raises.

Step 1: define the threat.  The threat is that this new measurement will drag your overall scores down and you will not get a raise.  So you take action and find out what the new measurement is.

Step 2: decide if the threat is real or imagined.  Your investigation reveals that the new measurement is “lifetime value per client.”  Well, since your job is computer programmer, this measurement doesn’t apply to you so your anxiety is reduced.  But if you work with clients, then you need to consider this as a threat.

Step 3: develop a plan to deal with the immediate threat.  The immediate threat is how this new measurement relates to your job.  If management simply measures the gross value of each client, then your plan might be to distinguish classes of clients (short term vs. long term, for example), to gain a more accurate measurement of the lifetime value of the clients you work with.

Step 4: Develop a long-term plan to deal with these kinds of threats.  In this case, if getting measured by management is always causes anxiety for you, maybe your long-term plan is to develop an informal system of relationships to tell you far ahead of time whenever management makes a change like this.  Or to start keeping your own statistics, so that you can present alternate measurements to management that more accurately reflect your performance.

Dealing with work anxiety means dealing with anxiety on two levels. First is the external threat that is causing the anxiety. Second is dealing with your internal reaction to the threat by reacting more positively than simply being anxious.  Not dealing with it can give you all the bad health effects of stress that give you all that fear in the first place.

For the best program to attack and destroy work anxiety and stress in general, look at STRESS JUDO.  Join the community and get 3 FREE reports (including 1 on why your current stress management program isn’t working).