When it comes to de-stressing at the office, relaxation techniques aren’t enough. What really works are activities that build a sense of control and autonomy. Here’s a creative idea for an office-wide activity that will really work to give everyone a little power over their stress.
If you want to know what to do when you’re stressed out, DON’T just cross things off your to-do list faster. Learn about your “locus of control” and how your brain’s focus plays a role in keeping you from being stressed and overwhelmed.
Learn how to use the tricky mental mindset of “minimization” to get your brain back on track after the sting of rejection. Whether in the workplace or in your personal life, rejection doesn’t have to signal a great loss, if you put it in the right perspective.
It’s an office grapevine nightmare: your colleague tells you that So-and-So was talking to Big-Boss and said that you aren’t a “team player.” You know So-and-So is just trying to sabotage you and make you look bad, but you can’t go directly to Big Boss because your colleague doesn’t want to get in trouble for gossiping and doesn’t want to be in the middle. But it BURNS knowing that people are saying negative things about you and spreading lies!
It’s a predicament Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas faced this week.
In Rio, cameras caught Gabby looking less-than-enthusiastic watching her teammates compete in the individual events she didn’t qualify for. All over the world, people made assumptions that her sour face meant she wasn’t happy for her teammates, and the criticism grew. She was critiqued for not putting her hand over her heart during the Star Spangled Banner. The criticism mirrored Douglas’ previous Olympics trip, where some viewers disapproved of the state of her textured hair.
Douglas says she’s used to the critiques, as part of being in the public eye, but it hurts when people jump to negative conclusions and say hurtful things. How is she handling the ugly comments this time around? “It just determines your character,” she responds. “Are you going to stand or are you going to crumble?” What Douglas hasn’t done is try to defend herself to all the “haters.”
To successfully manage people talking negatively about you, take a page from Douglas’ book: respond carefully and judiciously. In the example above, make a positive, non-confrontational statement to the coworker who alerted you to the problem, but don’t say anything more than that. From there, let your actions do the talking for a while. Keep succeeding. Keep being a team player. During this time, do make sure Big Boss is aware of your work – you don’t want to over-compensate and give too much information, but you do want to make sure you weren’t delivering too little information about your workload and completed projects before.
Let your actions do the talking for a while. Keep succeeding.
Finally, to avoid active conflict in the workplace, don’t let Big Boss know that you heard someone talked smack about you, but at your next review, slip in a mention of something that directly refuses whatever the smack-talker said. Show that you’re a team player, or whatever negative thing So-and-So made up about you. Show, don’t tell, that So-and-So wasn’t right, and Big Boss will ultimately believe you instead of them. Act like a champion, like Douglas does, and all will be forgotten.
Confession: I was in this position very recently. A few weeks ago, a blog post of mine went viral overnight, and I was shocked by a handful of the comments. Because it was a short blog post, and because I want my blog posts to be more about you, the readers, than my own life, I hadn’t included every single detail of the story. For some people, the details and outcome of the personal part of the story were more interesting than the moral I was getting to, and they read the blog post thinking I acted like a jerk to my husband. Some people even suggested I was a terrible wife and my husband should divorce me. I’m not going to lie – that hurt.
I followed my own advice, pulled a Gabby Douglas, and responded judiciously to a few of the comments as gracefully as I could. I tried not to get defensive, just letting them know that I appreciated their concern but all was well in my marriage. Within hours after I did that, the furor died down and all has been well.
At your next review, slip in a mention of something that directly refuses whatever the smack-talker said
It’s human nature to want to defend ourselves when people attack us and say negative things. But when it comes to our work, handling ourselves like a champion means we ultimately succeed and come out on top.
-Courtney
A little bit of conflict in the office can be productive – it can lead to idea generation and creative solutions. But when good conflict goes on too long, it can get personal. Here are three warning signs that your office fighting has gone off the rails and gotten personal, and what you can do about it.
The path of entrepreneurship can be lonely and stressful but rewarding, if you know the secrets to success. If you’re an entrepreneur – or considering becoming one – you need to know the secrets of how entrepreneurs handle the stress, the solitary days, and how they can work to ensure that their sacrifices will be worth it.
One major entrepreneur secret is that no man is an island. There are, in fact, four types of people entrepreneurs use to bolster their success. Before you go out and track down all four for yourself, though, it can be important to know that studies show people are several times more likely to be able to predict the causes of their failures than they are the causes of their successes. When you seek advice from others, remember that they cannot guarantee you the same success that they have enjoyed, just by telling you their methods.
So who are the four people you need to find to reach success?
The Role Model
Your role model is at the top of his or her game. You may never even meet them, but you admire what they have achieved. To learn from them, try to deconstruct their career trajectory. Don’t just look at where they are now with envy in your eyes; start doing the things they did when they were at the very bottom.
The Mentor
Your mentor is several stages ahead of you on the success ladder. He or she is someone who should be accessible to you, unlike a role model, who doesn’t necessarily need to be someone with whom you have a relationship. The mentor, while successful, is likely to remember what it was like to be in your shoes, because they weren’t there so long ago themselves. Your mentor may make important introductions for you, coach you, and guide you through difficult moments.
The Peer
Many people striving for success spend their time and energy on the people above them on the ladder of success, not next to them. But ignoring your peers leaves you without a support system of people who know what you are facing. Entrepreneurial success often comes from collaboration and conversation among those doing similar work. So don’t just try to hobnob with the top level. Make sure you cultivate a network of people in a similar position, because they’ll provide you with support on your worst days, and get your creative juices flowing on your best days.
The Protégé
There’s a common saying that you don’t truly understand something until you teach it. For that reason, having a protégé can be critical to an entrepreneur’s success. For an idea to take off, you have to be able to explain it to the masses, so start with your student! Having a protégé can also help secure your startup’s sustainability and future growth, which is often a problem for new organizations.
Entrepreneurs who find great success don’t do it by themselves. Surround yourself with these four people, and you’re more likely to have what it takes to reach the finish line.
-Courtney
It takes guts to be rejected every day. So if you want to hire a great salesperson (or be one!), you need to get good at managing rejection. Really successful salespeople have an internal dialogue that helps keep them positive – find out the three things they say to themselves.
What do you do with that colleague with whom you’re always in conflict? You know – the one who criticizes your ideas, minimizes your accomplishments, and just generally makes your work life hell?
Conflict at work is so frustrating, because it can often block success. And not just YOUR success, but also the success of the whole company!
But there are several techniques you can use to reduce conflict at work, so that even if your combative colleague tries their hardest to get under your skin, you’ll still be able to come out on top.
Realize Not All Conflict is Bad
Some conflict, even though it feels uncomfortable, actually leads to better outcomes. When two or more people disagree, the resulting conversation can actually produce a greater number of ideas than a conversation where everyone reaches consensus quickly.
Realize Not All Conflict is Personal
When you butt heads with someone, it is usually for one of two reasons: you disagree about how something should be done, or you and the other person just don’t get along, and so everything they say or want seems disagreeable. There are huge differences between task-related conflict and people-related conflict, but research shows most people can’t even tell the difference between the two!
Stop Ruminating on the Conflict
Workplace clashes can take up a huge portion of your brain space, as you try to maneuver around your “opponent.” But the more you dwell on the conflict, the more you are inflating it in your mind, making it harder to manage. When you ruminate on conflict, your mind fills with thoughts like “I should have said THAT,” or “If I could just do X, that’ll show him!” Those kinds of thoughts keep the conflict clear and present in your thoughts, increasing your frustration and annoyance.
Workplace conflict can be a natural and healthy outgrowth of hard work. It can even lead to greater success! But it has to be managed appropriately in order to achieve that balance. In my book, The Successful Struggle: Powerful Techniques to Achieve Accelerated Resilience, out later this month, you can learn more about the best strategies to handle both task-related conflict and people-related conflict at your office.
-Courtney
Yale University students this week held a “March of Resilience” in response to recent events dividing the school around racism and inclusion. The participating students, of all races, chanted statements of belonging and unity.
Seeing the title of the march got me thinking: what do resilience and racism have to do with one another? How do they intersect?
Living as a person of color and facing racism is undeniably a struggle. And all struggles require resilience to manage and overcome. While I am a white woman, my own son is a young black man, and I see firsthand the struggle he faces to achieve acceptance (and sometimes even safety) in our society. My son has shown the ultimate resilience in the moments when he has to attend class with his head held high less than five minutes after being handcuffed by police for questioning because he “looked like” a suspect in a campus computer theft.
I wonder, however, if “resilience” is the solution to overcoming racism that we should be focusing on. Resilience is a necessary tool for anyone who is oppressed, but resilience is a one-person job. Resilience is a way to cope after the fact.
So I am grateful that my son is resilient, but I wish he didn’t have to be.
Those who face racism – or oppression of any type – need to be resilient in order to keep moving forward and making change. The experience of racism can in fact even lead to a profound resilience that motivates and inspires transformation. But resilience is not the only solution to racism, particularly not on a large scale. To eradicate racism, we need more than resilience. We need legions of resilient people of all backgrounds marching for change.
-Courtney
No matter what your occupation, work can be stressful. There are deadlines, clients, policies and procedures, management changes, layoffs… there’s always the potential for something stressful and frustrating to sidetrack your productivity.
We’re all stressed at work from time to time! Will it always be that way? Will it get worse? Do we get more stressed at work as we get older?
Studies have shown that as we age, we actually get less stressed out about our work. The older we are, the better our attitudes about our jobs become, at least for most of us. We also are more likely to experience positive thinking on the job, and solve frustrating problems more quickly. Researchers believe that much of this is related to experience. The more experience we have on the job, the more we can put our frustrations into perspective, and the more quickly we can deal with them positively and confidently.
Another reason workers over age 35 appear to have less stress is that we tend to master the concept of work-life balance the older we get. When we’re early in our careers, work-life balance can be a frustrating challenge. We always seem to be getting it wrong, particularly as we add the demands of new parenthood (and its accompanying guilt!) on to the challenges of our jobs. Studies show that as we age, we seem to find it easier to strike the balance that works for us.
Finally, employees who have been on the job longer seem to have more realistic expectations of what their companies will do for them, and what they expect from them in return. As we stay in our jobs longer, we gain a better understanding of the implied contract between our employers and ourselves, whereas younger employees tend to get more frustrated if they believe an unspoken promise is being breached.
Not all career paths, however, get less stressful the older we get. Nurses, in particular, seem to get more stressed the longer they remain in their careers. It seems relevant that nurses also reported feeling less job security as they got older, while many of the other careers, like service sector workers and teachers, reported feeling more secure in their jobs the longer they were there.
In fact, job security is the one area in which young employees beat employees over 35 as it relates to stress. Overall, younger employees in most fields felt very secure in their position, which is one major stressor removed from them. So there are many benefits but one significant drawback when it comes to work stress as we get older.
If you’re under 35, here’s what can you do to be less stressed now:
- Find a work-life balance that works for YOU. There is no universal magic formula for being a good parent and a good employee.
- Learn what coping skills work best for you, so you can overcome stress more quickly.
- Approach your work with realistic expectations about what the company and you “owe” one another.
If you are over 35, here’s what can you do to be less stressed as you age:
- Take as much control as you can over your job security by being a workplace leader and mentor, staying innovative, remaining up-to-date with technology, and continuing to build on your responsibilities.
- At the same time, boost your confidence that you would survive a potential job hunt by getting involved now in professional associations, staying up-to-date on certifications and research in your field, and continually networking, both in-person and online.
Whatever your job and whatever your age, you are likely to experience job stress. But there are ways to manage it, and it seems to get easier the older you get.
-Courtney
