Signs Of Stress: Mental

Do you know the signs of stress? Not just feeling stress. Because waiting until you feel stress is like deciding to fight the enemy after they’ve come through the gate and over the walls. Your body and your mind let you know that stress is coming.

Stress makes your body go into “fight or flight” reaction. There are countless systems and methods to minimize the effects of this once it kicks in. But what if you got ahead of the stress? What if you could cut off the reaction before it started?

Here are 5 signs of stress that affect you mentally (as opposed to emotionally or physically):
1. Memory problems. Stress acts a silent, internal distracter. Part of your mind is literally always focused on the stress, thinking about it, trying to figure it out. This sometimes results in you forgetting little things (like how to tie a tie) or big things (a missed appointment). If you notice this happening, start looking for stress that you aren’t dealing with.
2. Concentration problems. Since part of your mind is tinkering with the stress, your concentration is not 100% on whatever task you are trying to focus on.
3. Judgment problems. Many times, to escape the pain or unpleasantness of the stress, you will unconsciously make self-destructive decisions. More drinking, overeating, and promiscuous sex are all poor judgment decisions that people make when under stress. If your behavior in these areas increases, start thinking about attacking your stress.
4. Worry problems. A little bit of worry is natural, and even good. It protects you from rash decisions. But if your worry is starting to overwhelm your decisions or your actions, it is a sign that stress is increasing in your life.
5. Uncontrollable thoughts problems. Your thoughts rise up, like bubbles from the bottom of the lake. And you, when you are not being pushed by stress, can pick and choose the thoughts you want to entertain or follow up with. But when your thoughts come faster and uncontrollably, and you are losing the ability to rein them in, take time to step back and find the stress in your life that is contributing to this.

Think back to the last big fight you had with stress. Wouldn’t it have been easier if you could stay focused? If you weren’t fatigued? If you could think clearly, and not be distracted? Wouldn’t it have been easier if you had fought the stress before these signs kicked in?

A stress management system that (kicks in) immediately on seeing one of these or other signs of stress will give you a better chance of fighting through the stress successfully. A system that has components specifically focused on strengthening these areas is more likely to make the stress feel – well, stressless. Having the right tool for the job is a lot easier when the job tells you what tool to use. Learn to recognize and react to the signs of stress.

STRESS JUDO COACHING is a 6 step comprehensive stress management system, designed to train you to attack stress and transform it into opportunities.

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.

 

 

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.

Time management techniques for increasing workplace productivity

Increasing workplace productivity is easily defined: getting more work done in less time. Now, unless you have developed some kind of machine that slows down time or allows you to stop time while you do work, you are going to have to become more efficient in one of those two areas. This article is focused on using your time more efficiently.

To get the rest of the article, go to increasing workplace productivity.

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 the rest of this article, read increasing workplace productivity.

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).

Some Jokes To Combat Work Anxiety

STRESS JUDO has a component that trains you to think like a comedian, because sometimes laughter is the best stress management technique. So here are some silly jokes, to help with work anxiety.  Feel free to add your own (keep them clean!) in the COMMENTS section.  Maybe we will use them in the next newsletter!

Click on Work Anxiety for the jokes (such as they are…)

Work Anxiety. Now Claiming Women, Too.

An interesting article on health related issues from work related stress and women.  Specifically, work anxiety for women increases likelihood of heart attacks, strokes, and clogged arteries.

What can you do about? Click work anxiety for information on how STRESS JUDO can help you eliminate stress.

Interesting Article On Coaching For Leadership

Here is an interesting take on coaching for leadership.  It’s the idea that effective stress management in stressful situations is the best leadership.  People will follow the person who remains cool under pressure and focused in the midst of chaos. 

STRESS JUDO is a training program focused on transforming you to have the mind of a black belt master when it comes to stress and anxiety.  You will not only handle stress – you will eliminate it.  You will not only anticipate stressful situations – you will control the situations that lead to stress.

Go get STRESS JUDO Black Belt stress management.