Five Easy Ways To Increase Your Workplace Stress To Increase Your Personal Effectiveness

Workplace stress is just a fact of working life, right?  There’s nothing you can do to stop it, right?  There’s nothing you can do to get rid of it, right?  Well, the reality is that you can not only control it, but you can turn it to your advantage.  You can use how you handle stress into the stepping stone for advancement and leadership. But if you don’t know this, then you are just stuck with it.

You will always encounter stress.   The key is to minimize the harmful stress that you face, and to maximize the positive stress.  What is positive stress?  The stress you run into when you are growing or taking advantage of a new opportunity.  Maximizing this kind of stress means that you are expanding your life and your personal effectiveness.

            Here are 5 ways to increase your workplace stress to increase your personal effectiveness:

1. Manage your time to never have down time.  It may feel good and relaxing to just waste time at work.  But filling in those time gaps with productive work will increase your stress.  And it will make you stand out as someone who can manage his or her time effectively.
2. Go full steam ahead when your energy is high. Everyone has different energy levels during the day.  If you attack your work as if you have one constant energy level, you will burn yourself out during your low times.  And you won’t take maximum advantage of your high energy times.
3. Spend some time socializing. What? How does socializing increase your stress?  Well, if you’ve ever had the boss poke his or her head into an office and ask “Is this work time or play time, people?” then you know how this can cause stress.  But socializing is important to building a team, and your boss will see the dividends during high stress situations.
4. Stress out over your personal appearance.  Well, “stress out” is not the proper term.  But do be aware of how you look, especially during high stress periods.  Taking the time and effort to focus on your appearance will increase your stress, but evaluating your appearance will tell you al lot about how you are handling stress.  For example, suddenly gaining weight lets you know that you are stress eating.  Bags under your eyes means you are losing sleep.
5. Make a consistent effort to work on your support network.  This can be friends at work or friends that have nothing to do with work.  These are the people who help you with solutions to problems, who give you honest feedback on your life, and who rely on your for help with their lives.  The natural reaction is to isolate yourself during periods of stress, so it may feel stressful to reach out to people.

Merely tolerating stress is like trying to tread water while the Titanic sinks nearby.  Trying to manage stress is like trying to stay dry in a rainstorm by avoiding the raindrops.  Too many stress management systems focus on helping you feel good inside when you are under stress.  But far too few do anything about making that stress end.  Eventually, you become a pawn to your stress.

This article probably strikes you as counter-intuitive.  Increasing workplace stress when you are in a stressful situation seems harmful, not helpful. But when you have a comprehensive stress management system that focuses on turning stressful situation into opportunities for growth, you will actually seek out stressful situations.  In this way, you will maximize your personal effectiveness, the perception of you as an effective team developer, and a leader.

An example of the type of comprehensive stress management system discussed in this article is STRESS JUDO COACHING.

Stress Relieving Methods: Time Management

In this economy, the pressure is on for you to be productive. To do more with less.  And to do it in less time.  Be more efficient.  Usually under rapidly changing, almost chaotic, conditions.   This adds to the stress you are already feeling at work of just trying to get on with your career.  And all of this involves being able to master your use of time as one of your stress relieving methods.

Time management is really a bad term, since almost everyone can manage time.  You can estimate how long it will take to get to and from the restaurant, and decide if you have enough time for lunch.  You can look into the future and decide whether to take one week or two off for a vacation.  And you already know how to prioritize, which is what most time management systems are really teaching.  If you didn’t know how to prioritize, you would starve to death because you wouldn’t decide that eating now is more important than watching the TV.

Time management is ultimately about dealing with the stress of interruptions.  Here are 5 tips on how to deal with stress at work by effective time management:

1. Learn to say “not yet.”  The current trend is to tell you to “learn to say no.”  But very often, “no” is not appropriate.  “Not yet” or “not right now” leads to a discussion of just how important this particular interruption really is.  And deferring it to a better time may actually be more productive.
2. Learn to say “not me.”  Corporate cultures discourage doing anything that lets someone else take the glory.  But they discourage even more the “crash and burn”: that results from taking on too much.  If you cannot handle any more tasks, learn to discuss who else might be able to do it, if it has to be done now.
3. Learn to say “not enough.”  A lot of stress is caused by poorly defined or undefined projects.  Your boss has an idea and tells you to implement it.  Learn to tell him or her that it needs more definition to be effective.  And if you can’t define it right now, or aren’t the right person to define it, see #1 and #2 above!
4. Learn to say “not here.”  Many times, what you are asked to do should be asked somewhere else.  Like the co-worker who wants to talk about tomorrow’s meeting in your office.  Talk about it at the meeting.  Or the co-worker who wants to review a memo at lunch.  Talk about it in the office.
5. Learn to say “Na-na-nooo-nooo, stick your head in ….”  What??!! What the heck does this mean?  It means learn to have a sense of humor.  Some interruptions cans only be dealt with in a humorous way.  Not a sarcastic or condescending way.  But if you can use a classic punch line or a quote from a great comedy to respond to an interruption, go for it.

Change involves stress, even changing your methods to cope with stress!  But staying with the methods you are using now most likely isn’t working.  If you don’t know how to deal with stress at work, then doing more of the same will only lead to more frustration. And more stress.

One of the best stress relieving methods is to try to simply remove the stress.  If interruptions are causing stress, then use one of these methods to eliminate the interruption.  This is a principle of judo: redirect the force of your opponent’s attack, rather than meet it head on.  By eliminating or redirecting the stress, you are not removing the stress of this moment.  You are also removing the stress of future moments, since by definition the stress won’t be there.  Probably the best stress relieving tip there is.

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