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 Can I Fight Stress? Well, Since You Asked…

Too many people ask for tips on managing stress.  Or on how to relieve stress.  This is the wrong approach.  Because this method leaves the stress in place.  The correct question is “how can I fight stress?”  Because fighting stress means that you intend to beat it.

For a comprehensive article on fighting stress effectively, please read stress and the workplace

And for probably the most effective and efficient way to train you to fight stress, too please look at stress management coaching.

How Can I Fight Stress? Like A Champion

I have always taken an aggressive approach to stress and specifically, to eliminating it.  I got this from my early training in martial arts.   The goal of martial arts is to be in a state of peaceful-coexistence with your neighbor.  If your neighbor is attacking you, then the goal shifts to getting to the state of peaceful-coexistence as quickly and efficiently as possible.

So I have applied this to stressful situations.  When you are under stress, the goal is to get to a stress-free situation as quickly and efficiently as possible.   The typical approaches to stress management – meditation, exercise, taking a long walk – simply do not do this.   They are components of how to get there.  But, a black belt martial artist will not rely only on his devastating right hook or his crushing left thigh kick, but instead has an arsenal of techniques to draw upon.

Just so, handling stress is not only about feeling stress-free. It is about being stress-free.   And the best way to do that is to get rid of the stress, by personal, high-quality stress management coaching.

So the answer to “how can I fight stress?”  Stress Judo Coaching.   With 3 exclusive reports, showing you our proprietary system for immediate stress reduction.  For your FREE coaching session, click on CONTACT US.

Thank you

Rick Carter

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.