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Reduce Stress – What are your unwritten rules and how do they influence your reactions

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Consider a situation where you get upset, frustrated or angry. Now think of some-one you know who you have witnessed facing the same situation who is undisturbed by it. It could be bad driving, queue jumping, bad customer service or even being passed over for a promotion. This blog will help you think about how you can reduce stress by investigating your reactions in these siutaitons.

Some people seem to sail through life without getting emotionally affected by the everyday actions of others they encounter, while others even though as affected and as skilled to deal with situation are significantly more impacted.

Our attitude to things and expectations in terms of what is right, has significant impact on the extent to which these things affect us. Taking the example of queue jumping you can have a wide range of opinions about queues including

-          Everyone should wait their turn – no exceptions

-          Everyone should wait their turn – but not everyone does, although it generally works out evenly

-          The person who gets to the front first is first

-          A queue is good, but if you can find a back way in even better

Then consider how your reaction to some-one queue jumping could be drastically altered by the opinion you hold on this.

For some a good way to reduce day to day stress is to examine their rules and modify these to support lower levels of negative or high stress reactions. So a useful activity can be to rewrite your rule to

-          Everyone should wait their turn – but not everyone does, but to avoid getting stressed I’ll accept/challenge it and not get annoyed by the outcome.

These small steps of making decisions to accept or influence everyday frustrations  rather than passively observing and become emotionally affected by them can be good way to reduce stress in your life.

The challenge comes when the rules are more deeply programmed and less obviously apparent in their influence of reactions. Our next set of blogs will investigate our values and the impact the have on our reactions and behaviours.

If you would like to discuss how coaching may help you to better understand and influence your behaviour, contact Paula Duncan on 07572 480 829.

 

 

Making a Pay Raise Request – STMSpecialists.com

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Our world seems to be full of the woes of businesses closing or operating under hard times. It erodes our belief that there is any chance of promotion or for to make a successful pay raise request, as our business can’t afford it.

It stands to reason that not only does the economic environment make it hard to get paid what we believe we are worth. Our belief it probably won’t happen, has a huge effect on our approach. 

In influencing others your belief that your point is legitimate has a huge impact on the conviction you convey and therefore the likelihood of your success.  It is hard to make a successful pay raise request. So how do you get people to take you seriously? Read more »

Leadership Development – Managing Emotions at work- stay smart under pressure

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Our last Leadership development blog explored the evolutionary and biological basis for our ‘panic’ or ‘regrettable’ actions when in a crisis. This blogs looks at how you can begin to recognise, and then ultimately how you can manage, this pattern of behaviours to allow us to manage our emotions at work to remain effective under pressure. Read more »

Biggest Job Interview Mistakes

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In this competitive job market you don’t want to be your own worst enemy. Here are the most common job interview mistakes candidates are making and how you can avoid them.

  • Over explaining why you lost your last job. It’s okay to mention that in your last position and why you left or if you were made redundant, but then move on to what you can do for this employer.
  • Conveying that you’re not over it. During job interviews, some people can appear wounded, angry or sad about their previous job role. Whilst these are normal emotions after a redundancy, they don’t belong in a job interview. Read more »

Hit a Business Crisis? Do You Act Competently or Try to Survive?

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As part of our Leadership Development Series, this post considers the basis of our actions
under pressure, investigating how our survival instincts impact our actions and reduce our ability to navigate problems in a logical and constructive way.

We have all been in work situations where the pressure of the circumstances or attitudes of others makes the hairs on the back of our neck stand on end. Often we find ourselves
slipping into the comfortable space of giving into our emotional reactions and losing sense of reason. The next time we are thinking clearly we are on the other side of the experience trying to unpick the situation, with little clear recollection of what happened and why. Typical high pressure situations you might recognise include: Read more »

STMS Specialists – Leadership Development Series

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As coaches and development practitioners we promote the idea of self management and conscious action (i.e. choosing a course of action or behaviour rather than just instinctively reacting on all occasions). The sheer number of models of leadership generated and promoted within the business world demonstrates the value that is placed on this idea.

As experienced managers in our own right we may recognise the models and theories, yet we routinely look back at work situations, especially when things haven’t turned out as well as we intended, and can point out things we could have done differently. We often reflect on how much more effective we could be if it did not take a respective view to gain clarity on a situation.

Read more »