Manage Your Stress During Difficult Times
Many who fear they have lost part of their wealth these days of high oil prices, frozen wages, and increased cost of living, also feel like they are losing their minds. Our response to stressful situations is a combination of our genetic make-up and our response to environmental triggers. Some of us will shoot our physiology to the roof with a good dose of norepinephrine in the fight-or-flight response to this stressor, experiencing a wide range of physical symptoms including heart palpitations, clammy hands, dizziness, or a sense of impending doom with fear. Others will, seemingly coldly, continue to conduct business as usual, resolving all challenges with ease and continuing to juggle multiple responsibilities. In fact, there are no psychological studies that will help us predict who will rise to the occasion and who will fold, hiding in a corner, waiting for someone else to take charge. While many wrongly believe the Myers-Briggs or the MMPI may bring light into this subject, those of us who advise others while managing stressful situations and help them as they lead in critical times know better. This may be shocking, but a boss may seem to deal with stress at the job while he drinks liquor every night whereas their executive assistant may show a hand of steel assisting their boss to execute the plan in stressful times.
With no way to predict, there are still some common characteristics of those who effectively face the daily challenges of doing more with less, dealing with increasing pressures in the workplace and difficulties with keeping up with the lifestyle they have created for their family. The following five “Cs” offer simple characteristics that are essential to manage challenging situations:
1) Maintain your COOL: You may feel the pressurized gage about to explode but you need to avoid the display of strong emotions, particularly in public. If you explode, not only will you lose your ability to plan in a rational way, others around you will add more fear to their already stressful situation at stake. Some stress is good to resolve a problem but too much of it paralyzes people.
2) CONTROL your own physiology. If you know you tend to have a short fuse, take time to breathe deeply, control your pulse rate, take a break to decompress and then come back and manage the situation.
3) CLARIFY your thoughts and your plan of action before telling others what to do. It is always best to have a plan in place that you can fall back to but, if you don’t, assess your situation and look for three first steps that need to be taken to start resolving the problem.
4) CARE: Show others that you deeply care about them. No employee of yours should ever perceive that you care more about things than about them. If they feel you acted for your own benefit without taking them or their safety into consideration, they may stay to help you out during the acuity of the problem but there will be a high chance of them becoming upset and leave if they feel your true colors are different from what you wear.
5) COMMUNICATE you care about your employees and their families. Communicate your plan for recovery effectively. In a time of crisis you will need to call the shots. On the other hand, when there is room for collaborative leadership, invite others to participate and become a part of the joint solution.
Tags: anxiety, cost of living, fear, frozen wages, gas prices, manage, physiology, stress
September 25th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
[...] early August, Dr. Cor� recommended several easy-to-implement strategies for managing stress. We all respond to stressful situations [...]