Liane Davey's Blog, page 2

Why Your Team Loves Drama

Does your team love a little drama? Do you? Whether you do or you don’t, it’s worth understanding why we’re seeing so much petty, personal, and pernicious behavior lately. Workplace drama is not a new phenomenon, but it feels all the more costly in today’s work world, where the expectations are high and energy is running low. Let’s consider why your team might love drama so much.

What Counts as Drama

Cy Wakeman is the expert I think of first when I think of workplace drama. Wakeman has been studying and advising on the topic for years. Her definition of drama includes “anything that creates… emotional waste, mentally wasteful thought processes, or unproductive behaviors that keep leaders or their teams from delivering the highest level of results.”

Based on that definition, drama includes gossiping, blaming, defending, meddling, complaining, and anything else Wakeman refers to as “arguing with reality.” She tallies those behaviors up to include 2.5 hours a day per person. Zoinks!

Why is Drama Rewarding?

If we’re spending even a quarter of that much time on drama, it must be giving us something in return. But what??

Drama is Stimulating

Here, we’re dealing with a sad reality: drama is often more interesting than your work tasks. As social creatures, we humans love to get a juicy piece of information about someone else that helps us assess their standing in the group. This kind of information is stimulating, salient, and satisfying—even if we don’t like to admit it. Gossip activates our dopaminergic system and gives a little shot of energy in what otherwise might be a monotonous day.

Given that drama is scratching an itch for stimulation, one way to curtail it is to rekindle the excitement around your work. Talk about what you’re trying to accomplish, share your successes, and bring in the voice of the customer. Having something challenging and worthwhile to work on won’t eliminate drama, but it should relegate it to fewer hours in the week.

Drama Gets Attention

Because drama is stimulating, it’s a great way to attract attention from colleagues. For various reasons, some of us will try to get time in the spotlight even if it’s for less-than-admirable reasons. Your colleagues might be playing the victim in hopes you’ll defend them, or complaining about a teammate in hopes you’ll side with them. Mostly, they just want you to notice them. Alternatively, they might be showing you that they aren’t being acknowledged for their contributions or feeling lonely and isolated. Regardless of whether the motive is pure or not, doling out drama is an effective way of attracting eyeballs.

For those who use drama to attract attention, the alternative is to ask questions that allow the person to share and be rewarded for constructive, useful, and realistic ideas and contributions rather than destructive, demoralizing, or distracting ones. Ask them to share what they’re excited about or what they’re looking forward to, and lavish a little love on them for sharing some good news for a change.

Shared Grievance Creates Bonds

Another reason your team might love to dish a little drama is that it strengthens the social bonds among you. Conspiring and commiserating can increase the sense of intimacy among you and, in the process, bolster trust. The more you share private information or say things you wouldn’t want others to hear, the more vulnerable you become to one another. The more vulnerable, the higher the trust.

To dampen the drama, form bonds based on other factors. One of the simplest forms of that is highlighting positive things you all have in common. Another approach is to call out people’s complementary skills and ideas and how they add up to a strong team.

Drama Obscures Harder Problems

You know what else drama is great for: creating smoke and mirrors to distract from more vexing, uncomfortable, and important problems. If your colleague is busy talking about how other people haven’t done what they should do, why the timelines are completely unreasonable, or how the boss is just out to get them, it means they don’t have to think about what it would take for them to live up to their accountabilities.

If you’re ready to cut through the fog and get to the issues your organization needs you to solve, you’ll have to acknowledge their emotional reactions and then help them process them into something more useful. What would it take to move that forward? How might you get the other department to do their part? How else might you interpret the boss’s comments? Invalidating people’s emotional reactions can amplify them, but dragging the drama into the daylight can encourage others to move through it, rather than hanging out there.

Another Way to Get Sucked into Drama

And one more thought. Sometimes it’s not that drama is rewarding, it’s just that it spreads whether you want it to or not. I’ve written extensively on emotional contagion and the unconscious passing of one person’s emotional state to those around them. If you’re surrounded by colleagues who love to gossip, complain, or promote conspiracy theories about one another, you might be inadvertently sucked into the vortex.

Before you get frustrated with all the drama on your team. And before you dive headfirst into dishing the dirt, consider what purpose the drama is serving for you and for others, and see if you can meet the need more positively and constructively.

Additional Resources

Are you lending support to a teammate or just enabling gossip?

Productive Versus Unproductive Conflict Resolution

From HBR: How to Tell the Difference Between Venting and Gossip

The post Why Your Team Loves Drama appeared first on Liane Davey.

What To Do When Your Work Isn’t a Priority for Others

This is the final post in a series on better prioritization. We’ve already covered how to get to one priority, how to prioritize when everything is urgent, and how to coach someone to better prioritization. Today, the most stressful situation of all: what do you do when you need something from someone, but your work isn’t a priority for them?

What Not to Do

Before we get into some strategies that might work to move your priorities up someone else’s list, let’s talk about a few that won’t. Don’t:

Continually talk about your priority and emphasize how important it is to you.Offload your stress and anxiety about the consequences of not accomplishing your task on them (or blame them for your predicament)Go around the person or over their head to complain that they aren’t cooperatingCriticize or denigrate the person for their inappropriate priorities and not “getting it”

Essentially, the wrong moves are all the things you feel like doing or saying because “ARE YOU SERIOUS, THIS IS SO IMPORTANT AND I’M TOAST IF YOU DON’T HELP ME!!”

I get it.

Instead, try to find a little calm and forethought, which will greatly increase your chances of getting them to budge.

How To Move Your Priority Up Their List

If your stressed-out brain is sending you all the wrong signals, what are your options for getting your frontal lobe in the game and addressing your colleague more constructively?

State What You Need Clearly and Calmly

What: Start with a simple, clear, objective statement of what you’re looking for. Don’t muddy the waters by getting into the why or the how at this stage, just the facts, ma’am.

“I need you to provide a report on all the leads we’re chasing at General Motors at the moment, including the size of the deal, the timing, and the likelihood we’ll win it.”

Why: After you are clear on what you need, move to why. Describe what’s at stake so the person can gauge how important and urgent your request is.

“I need this report because the head of Europe is walking into a meeting with the EU next week, and there is a possibility of a sizable deal. He wants to know everything else that’s in play so he can factor it into the negotiations.”

When: Explain the urgency and own it if some of that urgency is due to a mistake on your part. A little vulnerability could go a long way here. We’ve all been in a pickle and needed someone to do us a solid to get us out.

“I’m sorry this is coming to you with only two days’ notice. I hit a few dead ends before learning you were the right person to talk to. I’m sorry about that.”

Try to keep the what, the why, and the when as succinct as possible. Adding more words can make you look desperate and like you haven’t collected your thoughts in advance.

Ask Where Your Priority Fits Among Theirs

Next, get them talking. Ask what else is on their plate and where your priority fits among the things they’re already dealing with.

“Could you share where this is landing in your priority list, so I have a sense of where we’re at?”

This is helpful because it will give you the map of other things you need to displace if you’re going to accelerate your priority. More importantly, it will show the other person that you get it and understand they weren’t sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for you and your urgent task to drop out of the sky.

Understand What it Would Take for Them to Deliver

Another worthwhile avenue is to probe to understand what it would take for them to deliver what you need. You might think it’s a quick 30-minute toss-off when in reality, it’s multiple hours of work. Alternatively, they might need another person or some other resource to do what you need. Again, you’re empathizing, learning, and setting yourself up to strategize different options.

“I’m not very knowledgeable about your process. Can you give me a sense of what’s involved in pulling this report together?”

Negotiate on Scope and Timing

As you listen and learn more about what’s required to deliver your request, you might learn that there are easier and harder parts, or faster and slower parts. You might be able to sub-divide your request so that they can help you with a smaller component. Or you could get the most urgent piece quickly, but wait for something you don’t need immediately.

“It sounds like the projects going through Detroit are relatively easy to find, but anything happening within the branch plants is harder. Would it be possible for you to get just the Head Office proposals together by end of the day Thursday?”

Source Additional Resources

Your sleuthing might also reveal that other people or other resources might make all the difference. If so, you might be able to access those resources or ask your manager to do so. Those resources might be to help the person do your task or, alternatively, to help move something else off their plate so they can prioritize your activity without letting any of their own balls drop.

“What if I were to find someone who could take your monthly report prep off your hands so you don’t have to worry about that at the same time as the report for the EU meeting?”

Identify the Escalation Process

If none of those approaches is getting traction and you still believe your task deserves to move up their priority list, you could ask about the appropriate escalation process. Don’t go around the person, but do invite them to join you.

“It sounds like you’ve got other important things on your plate, but I’m not getting any relief from my boss. Would it make sense for us to get in the room with our managers to let them decide how to prioritize these things?”

If It Doesn’t Work

All your calm, curious, collaborative efforts might not be enough to move your priority up their list. Your organization’s goals may be highly siloed and misaligned, and your colleague can’t accommodate your needs without risking their own delivery, evaluation, and reputation.

Alternatively, you might have a false sense of the importance and urgency of your task, and it really doesn’t deserve to be moved up in priority order.

In that case, don’t get mad at the person or blame them. That’s only going to make the process more adversarial next time you have to ask for a favor. Give your stakeholders a heads up about the delay and do your best to be in as good a position as possible when they provide what you need.

Additional Resources

Too Many False Alarms

Prioritize Means Deprioritize

The wonderful Dr. Hayley Lewis with What to Do When Your Boss’s Priorities Aren’t the Same as Yours

The post What To Do When Your Work Isn’t a Priority for Others appeared first on Liane Davey.

How to Coach for Better Prioritization

This month, we’ve been discussing better prioritization. We started by debunking the myth that you can have multiple priorities and established a process for getting to one. Next, we dealt with the challenge of prioritizing when everything is urgent. Today, we’re shifting gears to talk about how to help people who want to get their ducks in a row. Let’s talk about how to coach people to better prioritization.

First, it’s worth highlighting that coaching is a process where you help someone articulate their goals and then use questions, reflection, and reframing to help them identify better ways to accomplish those goals. You’ll notice that coaching is not about instructing, advising, or evaluating, which is probably a more common mode for most managers. (I’ve provided some options for how to use these other development dialogues at the end of this article.)

What might it look like if you wanted to coach someone to be better at prioritization rather than just telling them what to do? How can you help them take accountability for better prioritization rather than imposing it on them?

There’s a process you can follow:

Help Frame the Opportunity

If an employee has come to you asking for help prioritizing, the first step is to find out what they’re trying to accomplish.

Questions to Identify Their Goals

First, do some context setting. Help them figure out where prioritization fits in and why it’s important to them. Their answers will help guide your attention toward the aspects of prioritization that matter most to them.

What are you hoping to accomplish this year?What impact do you want to have on the business?What do you love about your work? What do you wish was different?What would be your goals in improving prioritization?

As they answer, reflect what you’re hearing. “It sounds like you’re after x, y, or z,” or “For you, the most important goal is to do A, and prioritization is important because B.”

Don’t miss the chance to throw in the gem of a question from The Coaching Habit, “Anything else?” before you move to the next step.

Questions to Assess Motivation

Next, help them build the case for change by reflecting on what motivates their choice to work on prioritization. You want them to tap into their own intrinsic motivation rather than embark on a prioritization exercise because someone else told them it was the right thing to do. Help them envision something compelling they’re willing to work hard toward.

What would be the most rewarding parts of being better at setting priorities?What’s at stake if you don’t implement better prioritization strategies?How would you like better prioritization to change your work experience?Where does prioritization fit in with your other development priorities?

These questions might lead you down many avenues. You might learn that prioritization is about improving work-life balance, reducing friction with teammates who have different goals, or managing a neurodiverse or anxious brain.

Again, reflect what you’re hearing and what you’re interpolating and see if it helps the person paint a clear picture of what they’re working toward. “It sounds like the most attractive part of being better at prioritization would be not working so many evenings. Is that the big prize for you?”

Questions to Narrow Focus

Once you help them build the case for why they want to change, you can be extremely helpful by narrowing their focus to manageable first steps. If they rush off trying to become the world’s best prioritizer overnight, they’ll probably become overwhelmed and abandon the process.

(I wish I’d had someone to prioritize my prioritization in 1992 before I went out and spent money I didn’t have on the Cadillac of planning systems–the Franklin leather planner with accessories and inserts… which was WAY too much and quickly abandoned in a drawer.)

Where might you start to introduce some new strategies into your planning?Which technique do you want to try first?If you could improve one aspect of prioritization, which would it be?What timeslot do you want to devote to planning each week?

You can help by reflecting their answers and asking follow-up questions. “How does that starting point align with your goal of reducing evening work?” “What other strategies might impact that more directly?” Or “You’ve listed three ideas, which one makes sense as the starting point that you can build from?”

Ok, job #1 is done. Off they go.

Support Course Correction

Once they’re on their way, your role as a coach shifts. Now, you want to be a mirror to help reflect on what they’re doing, what’s working, and what else they might try.

Find Opportunities to Observe

To be an effective coach, it helps to have opportunities to observe the person in action so you can provide feedback to help them become more aware of the choices they’re making. Pay attention to what they’re asking when you delegate a task, which activities they’re doing first, second, and third, and how focused they are when they’re working on a task.

Share Your Observations

You might suggest a weekly touch point where they show you what’s on their priority list for the week and take you through their thinking of how they arrived at that ranking. This approach is about observing their actions.

Another thing you can observe is their outputs. You might share what you see regarding more timely or higher-quality work. If you can tie your observations to their goals, all the better. If they wanted to work fewer evenings, are you noticing that you’re getting their finished work during office hours more often?

Finally, you can comment on how their new behaviors and outputs are affecting important outcomes for the team. You might share that you’ve heard great feedback from their peers about how they’re getting what they need. Or be candid that their more rigorous prioritization has increased your confidence that they’re accountable.

Repeat

One great round of coaching will not win the person the Nobel Prize for Prioritization. You might still need to do another round on the first action because it didn’t go as planned, or there is still room to optimize. Alternatively, you might be ready to help them think about laddering on a new skill or process.

But coaching is only one development dialogue in your kit. Sometimes, you aren’t in a position to be patient or to let the employee drive. In those situations, you have other options. Here are some examples of other development dialogues you could use to help someone improve their prioritization.

Alternatives to Coaching

Instruction: Allot no more than three hours a week to corporate activities. If someone asks you to do something that would exceed three hours, come talk to me.

Feedback: When you respond to my emails within five minutes, I worry that you’re putting your priorities on the back burner. How can I add something to your radar without it becoming an urgent priority?

Advice: Over the years, I’ve learned that Bob makes everything sound urgent. Let him know you’ve received his request and tell him when you’ll schedule it.

Positive Consequences: You chose to work on the ACME presentation first, and because of that, it got the time and attention it needed to be really strong. I let my boss know it was your good work.

Negative Consequences: You chose to work on the ACME presentation first, which isn’t due until after the Omega proposal. Now we’re behind schedule, and I’m going to have to ask you to stay late to get back on track.

Evaluation: In your work this quarter, you’ve demonstrated that you understand the criteria for assessing the importance and urgency of work and delivered the most critical projects on time. This was especially obvious in how you managed the ACME and Omega projects simultaneously. It’s also worth noting that the things that slipped were things we could easily compensate for and didn’t create any material risks. I’m rating you as exceeds expectations.

As a manager or a coach, you have an excellent opportunity to hone people’s prioritization skills. They’ll thank you for it.

Additional Resources

How to Structure Your Time Better

Why You’re So Busy and How to Ruthlessly Prioritize

From HBR Josh Davis Teach Someone to Prioritize Using Psychological Distance

 

 

 

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What to Do When Everything is Urgent

I once worked with a woman who quit because our boss kept putting stacks of tasks on her desk, all marked urgent. Each time she tried to clarify what she should do first, the boss just shrugged and said it didn’t matter what came first as long as it all got done. I respect her decision to quit, but we aren’t all able to leave a job when the expectations are unreasonable. Let’s talk about the other options you have when everything is urgent.

How to Triage the Urgent

In urgent medical situations, doctors and nurses triage cases to decide which patient to assist first. Emergency departments have non-urgent, semi-urgent, urgent, emergency, and emergent levels to distinguish among cases based on the patient’s pulse, respiratory rate, bleeding, cognitive state, etc. In situations with constrained resources, they also have to factor in the likelihood of the patient surviving or the availability of resources (e.g., blood) needed to determine who gets helped and in what order.

In your corporate job, you’re probably not making as many life-altering decisions, but your prioritization matters, too. Here are some things to consider

How Fast Will a Bigger Problem Emerge?

When you’re figuring out which urgent task to do first, give greater priority to one that’s going to get worse quickly than to one that’s not such a risk to go south precipitously.

Imagine you learn that the briefing pack that went to the CEO contains incorrect information. Sure, that’s bad. But it’s more urgent if the CEO is currently walking into a meeting with an analyst than if she’ll be prepping for analyst calls tomorrow in a couple of hours.

How Severe Will the Consequences Be?

A sooner problem is one thing; a bigger problem is another. Give greater priority to an urgent task that will lead to material risks or issues if you don’t rectify it quickly.

In our misinformed CEO example, there’s a big difference between the briefing containing a mistake in the number of employees or the name of the new product and an error in the financials (you don’t want the SEC to come calling).

Will We Miss the Window?

One thing we often forget is that urgent doesn’t necessarily mean disaster. It’s possible that the urgent task is about capitalizing on an opportunity. If that’s the case, you’re not measuring the downside; you’re assessing the upside. What’s the opportunity cost if we don’t make this happen?

There are infinite examples of this. Some have obvious timing, like submitting a bid in a competitive RFP process. Others are harder to gauge because you don’t know when the window will close, like if you’re trying to hit the market with a new product before your competitors do.

Who Else Could Help?

Sometimes, your triage isn’t about whether the action gets prioritized or not; it’s whether it becomes your priority. You need to differentiate between activities that only you can do and those that others could do just as well (or at least do a passable job to get past the crisis phase).

If the sh!t is hitting the fan because your cloud computing platform is down, you might be the person who knows the code better than anyone. You skip the crisis communication meeting to find the problem. For those who can’t help in the code, calling key customers or working on restoration plans might be the most urgent priority.

Is it Even Worth It?

The hardest decision in triage must be the decision to leave a patient to die because they are too far gone, and any time or resources you spend trying to save them will mean others suffer. What’s the equivalent in your world? Is there an urgent but futile task that will take too much time and effort that could be better invested elsewhere?

Salespeople sometimes have to make this call. They have a big client who’s clearly dissatisfied and threatening to move to another provider. Do they drop all their other prospects to try to make the save? Or has the client already made up their mind, and they’re just using you for leverage on price with the new vendor? Would the time and energy be better spent winning new clients?

Based on these criteria, you can make a judgment about which of your many urgent tasks is going to get your attention first.

How to Make the Save

When faced with multiple urgent matters, there are two bad options. One is to try to work on them all simultaneously, and the other is to work on one for too long while others become more desperate.

Divide Things Into Chunks

To avoid either of those ditch-to-ditch overcorrections, think about your activities in meaningful chunks. If we continue the Emergency Department metaphor, you might stop the bleeding on one task and then switch to doing the same with another. The second chunk might involve finding the underlying problem and performing surgery to correct it.

It’s silly to think that you must completely rehabilitate and discharge one patient before attending to the next.

It’s ok to move between tasks once you’ve completed a chunk, but not until then.

Focus for Efficiency

One of the main problems when you have many urgent things facing you is that you respond to the rising anxiety by trying to do multiple things at once. Multi-tasking doesn’t work; it reduces efficiency, increases errors, and causes more stress in the process. (The irony is that research suggests one of the leading causes of multi-tasking is the anxiety of so many things to get done, while one of the effects of multitasking is heightened anxiety.) So, instead of getting into the anxiety death spiral, it’s better to become ruthlessly focused on your one urgent priority.

In an Emergency department, they pull a blue curtain around the gurney to section the patient and the team off from the rest of the world. You could try a blue curtain (I would love to see that in an office), but a more metaphorical barrier would probably suffice.

Tap Into the Team

One last thought: urgency can create tunnel vision and blind you to the people around you who could be of assistance. Be sure to lift your head occasionally to communicate where you’re at, share your thought process, and get feedback on your choices. You might find people who are able to pitch in or who have ideas for how to cope more efficiently or effectively.

If you’re facing multiple urgent tasks, don’t try to go it alone.

Facing a torrent of urgent tasks can be stressful. You’ll manage that stress more effectively if you have a clear thought process for triaging your priorities and a focused approach to moving through them efficiently.

Additional Resources

How to Handle Competing Priorities

What to Do When Your Boss Won’t Take No for an Answer

From Kevin Eikenberry Manage “Everything is Urgent” Behavior

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Leaders Do Not Understand Prioritization

If you want to see me turn red and blow steam out my ears like a 1970s cartoon character, just sit me in an audience with a group of leaders as their CEO launches their seven priorities for the coming year. To be fair, it doesn’t have to be seven; it could be any number between two and infinity, and it will cause the same reaction. Why? Because leaders don’t understand prioritization. And it’s their employees who suffer for it.

What is a priority?

The word priority comes from the Latin root priori, which means first. A priority is the thing that comes first. The word came into the English language around the 14th century and existed happily for 500 years with no plural form. You could have one thing that came first, not more than one thing. But sometime after the Second World War, the word priorities emerged. And now, it’s rare that I hear anyone describe a single priority; priorities come by the handful. And here’s…

The Problem with Misunderstanding Prioritization

I’m not trying to single-handedly defend a dead language; I understand English is a living language and, therefore, continually evolving. I’ll throw out a vibey new addition to the Oxford dictionary, like doomscrolling, hangry, or mainsplain, as quickly as the next person.

No, this isn’t about Luddite-level adherence to language rules; it’s about helping employees manage their attention so they can be more productive and less stressed. That goal is almost impossible to achieve when their leaders keep diluting everyone’s focus across multiple priorities at once. I wish leaders understood…

The Difference Between Important and Priority

When I listen carefully to what those leaders giving PowerPoint presentations are really saying, it’s that multiple things are important, or even imperative, to the growth and success of the company. That makes perfect sense. So, why don’t they just say, “These are our seven imperatives,” or “These three things will be most important to us this year?”

I would still argue that you need to be disciplined about how many important things you list because attempting to pay some attention to everything means paying close attention to nothing. If I’m facilitating the strategic planning process, it’s no more than five. Five important things. But every employee still needs clarity about…

What Comes First?

One of my client organizations has noticed profit slipping over the past few years. They’re a healthy, growing company, but margins are slowly eroding. Recently, one of their leaders asked for clarification: is our first priority to continue accelerating growth, or is our first priority to clean up our profitability and efficiency and then grow? It’s a great question; a clear answer will help that leader (and all their leaders) make different decisions. Growth and profitability are both important. Which is the priority for this fiscal year?

Let’s take another real client example. A leader is in charge of revenue operations, which includes a wide range of functions that support sales and marketing. Her team plays an essential role in demand generation, but recently, they’ve been asked to dedicate significant time to activities supporting legal compliance for their customer-facing websites. Without demand generation, the sales team won’t have leads to chase, and top-line growth will stall. Without compliance, there’s some chance the organization will face legal or regulatory risk. Which comes first?

I was feeling this quandary myself this week. From Wednesday to Sunday, I had most of my time free from client responsibilities and held for writing. But that didn’t solve the problem of multiple important activities. The manuscript of my new book is due in 24 days. This post is due today. My monthly newsletter was supposed to go out six days ago. There is too much to do. It is all important, but what was the priority?

Partial Answers Help

In each of the examples I’ve given you, the answer is not to reach one single priority and then stop; that wouldn’t be realistic. The idea is to say what’s first, second, and third.

For the firm grappling with growth or profitability, the partial answer is that in any business unit where the profitability has declined to a certain point, cleaning up their efficiency, product mix, and utilization rates comes first. The second priority for those groups is bringing in new work that fits with the improved profitability profile. In other of their businesses, where productivity is already good, the number one priority is adding revenue.

In the revenue operations example, the partial answer is that the first priority is demand generation, and 70% of the team’s time and energy needs to be invested there. At the same time, the legal and compliance team’s priority is to triage the requests of revenue ops based on the level of risk and to give them a list of requirements they will work through in priority order in the remaining 30% of their time.

I did something similar in allocating my week. I decided that writing the book was my number one priority for the week because I needed big chunks of uninterrupted time to get into the right headspace. This blog became priority number two; I’m writing it now because I’m on a five-hour flight with time to be productive. And the newsletter…well, it’s painful to me that it’s not written, but I don’t think there’s anyone out there saying, “Hmm…Where is that Liane Davey newsletter???” (Maybe only in my wildest dreams.) And I can reassure myself that it will still be a valuable tool when it lands in their inboxes a week late.

Always Get to One

Whether you’re a manager or an individual contributor, the secret to improved focus, greater productivity, and reduced stress is to be clear on what comes first at any given time. Make an honest appraisal of all the important things you could be doing and decide which is your number one priority. It’s ok (and probably necessary) to have a second, third, and fourth, but there’s a big difference between that and pretending you can have four firsts.

Additional Resources

How to Handle Competing Priorities

How to Plan Your Day

Flip Your Priorities

 

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How to Avoid Burnout

 

Is your stress level rising to the point you’re worried you might burn out? I’m glad you’re here and looking for help. That’s a great start.

Let’s get serious about how to avoid burnout.

What is Burnout?

First, let’s talk about what burnout is. I’m going to get all nerdy and quote the WHO: It’s the syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It’s when you feel you’re consistently unable to meet the demands of the situation.

Burnout has three components:

first, exhaustion, being physically depleted and without the energy to go on;second, cynicism and depersonalization, when you feel disconnected from your work and your colleagues, and you struggle to care;third, inefficacy: that just means when you feel incompetent and like you can’t do anything right.

We often use the term stress and burnout synonymously, but stress is not the same as burnout. The symptoms of stress are actually the opposite. When we’re feeling stress, we tend to lean in versus burn out.

But stress and burnout are closely related.

When you fail to manage stress over the long term, it puts you at a high risk of burnout, and you would not be alone. Large-scale surveys have shown that many people are at risk. In one study, 62% of people reported high levels of stress, loss of control, and extreme fatigue. Those are the big risk factors for burnout.

How to Fight Stress

If you’re experiencing high levels of stress, take action before it’s too late. How?

Listen to Your Body

One, listen to your body. Pay attention to your stress and trust what your body’s telling you. Stop lying to yourself that it’s fine or I’ll be okay, or I have no choice but to work this hard. Your body is full of warning systems and check-engine lights flashing. If your heart’s often racing, you’re sleep-disrupted or your digestive system is on the fritz, don’t ignore them.

Triage Your Workload

Two, prioritize. Audit your workload and priorities and triage what has to get done versus what would be nice to get done. While you’re at it, identify a few things that don’t need to get done at all. Why was I even doing that in the first place? Do what’s most important first, so when you need to take a break, you’ve already accomplished the most critical things.

Set Your Boundaries

Three, set boundaries. Put strict limits on how much you work. Getting serious about only working 40 hours a week now might protect you from having to drop down to even fewer hours if you do burn out.

Manage Your Stress

Four, manage your stress. You probably know what works to manage your stress. There’s great evidence that physical activity makes a huge difference in stress levels. Research says you get bonus points if your physical activity is near trees. I don’t know if you have trees near you, but if they are there, find them and walk amongst them.

And the only thing better for calming you down is if you can see water. Really, watching water lowers your blood pressure. Wow, your stress-reduction strategy might also include reading or doing a hobby like model ship building, crocheting, or meditation. You know what works for you. You’re probably just not doing enough of it. Start now. It’s important.

Strengthen Your Connections

As I mentioned, a big part of burnout is depersonalization and disconnection from others. You need to work hard to prevent that. If possible, find ways to strengthen the connections with your colleagues. Is there someone you like who you can grab coffee with occasionally? Would arriving a few minutes early to a meeting give you a chance for some casual small talk?

If your team can’t provide that kind of human connection, find it elsewhere. Try asking people what they’re most excited about. You’ll see the chance to talk about their passions gives them a little hit of dopamine, and their good mood is likely to spread to you.

Limit Your Exposure to Stress

Also, limit your exposure to stressful situations. There’s no point putting so much effort into charging your batteries if you’re just going to let other activities deplete them. Open your calendar and decide what’s in there that will do more harm than good. What’s going to be the straw to break the camel’s back this week? How can you delete, delay, or distribute it to someone else? At least scale it back to make it less aversive.

And that might not just be at work. Are there activities or people outside of work you need to limit your exposure to as well? I get it. I remember a particularly stressful time in my life; my kids were teenagers, I had a new book out, and way more demands on my time than normal. I wasn’t coping. I was moody and exhausted. Three months later, COVID came along and sat me down on my butt. I’m not sure I would’ve stopped without it.

Now I know better. I’m proactive about managing the stress because I never want to teeter on the edge of burnout again. I hope you don’t either!

More On This

Use Stress to Your Advantage

Practical Advice About How to Prioritize Your Workload

Are You Taking Steps to Prevent Burnout?

Video: How to Boost Your Energy Levels

The post How to Avoid Burnout appeared first on Liane Davey.

Use Stress to Your Advantage

So far, in this month-long series on stress, we’ve been talking mainly about the negative effects of stress: diluted attention, increased emotionality, and physical and mental health issues associated with burnout. But today, we’re talking about the upside of stress and the secrets to using stress to your advantage.

Distress Versus Eustress

Not all stress is created equal. Actually, that’s probably not true; good and bad stress come from the same basic, primal, preconscious interpretation of threat in your environment, but one leads to an unpleasant, ineffective behavioral response, and the other leads to a positive and constructive one. The unpleasant version is called distress; the useful one is eustress.

The American Psychological Association defines eustress as:

“The positive stress response, involving optimal levels of stimulation: a type of stress that results from challenging but attainable and enjoyable or worthwhile tasks (e.g., participating in an athletic event, giving a speech). It has a beneficial effect by generating a sense of fulfillment or achievement and facilitating growth, development, mastery, and high levels of performance.”

That’s the kind of stress you’re looking for as a power source for performance. So, how do you turn distress into eustress? How do you get the upside of stress?

How to Use Stress to Your Benefit

There are several ways to use stress to help you in the moment and after.

Use Stress to Energize You

One of the most fundamental purposes of stress is to get you moving to keep you safe. The physiological mechanisms of stress divert blood flow to your muscles and increase your heart rate. Perfect! This is the little jolt you need to get started on something you would otherwise put off. If you’re going to capture that chemical catalyst, you need to:

Notice when your stress response kicks in: pounding heart, flushed face, sweaty palms.Resolve right away to do something to channel that stress into action. Don’t wait; the chemicals coursing through your veins will slowly dissipate, and you’ll have to muster energy through less natural approaches.Take one step that will lead you forward: draw up a plan, reach out to someone, build, write, design, or draft a first pass at something that will address the threat and reduce the stress.

Being energized is great. Now, you need to worry about an unhelpful reaction to a threat, which is to run madly off in all directions. Instead…

Use Stress to Focus You

Another part of the physiological reaction is stress is focus, literally. In stress, your peripheral vision declines while your visual system locks in on the threat—tunnel vision. Again, you don’t need to fight the natural reaction; you can go with it. To benefit from the narrowing of attention in stress, you might:

Close down open windows and tabs until you only have the one you need.Move to a location with fewer distractions and less clutter to free up mental bandwidth.Set a timer for how long you want to stay focused and use do not disturb mode until the end of that period.

Using the energy and focus of your stress response to get through the immediate threat is great. But what caused the stress in the first place? What made you susceptible to having a strong response? To better understand your vulnerability to stress, you need to:

Use Stress to Reflect

It’s good that stressful and emotionally salient experiences are also more memorable. That’s useful because it means we can learn from them afterward. After going through a stressful event, reflect on what made it stressful so you can:

Identify what was happening in the situation that your body interpreted as threatening.Consider whether your interpretations in the moment were accurate or whether you drew conclusions that were out of line with what was happening.Think back on previous stressful episodes to identify patterns that help you understand yourself and your needs more deeply.

Self-awareness is so powerful in helping you manage your stress response, but self-awareness doesn’t do much good unless you:

Use Stress to Motivate Change

Stress that knocks out your rationality and causes an outsized emotional reaction is aversive. Your brain naturally wants to avoid aversive experiences, so you can use that energy to motivate you to make changes so that distress is less likely in the future. Make changes that will shift you toward eustress.

Change how you plan for situations so you’re better prepared for what’s coming at you.Communicate with the manager and colleagues about what you need to work efficiently and effectively.Prepare a series of “if/then” coping strategies you will use the next time a stressful situation arises. “If someone criticizes my work, then I will ask for what a better version would look like.” “If I feel I can’t meet a due date, then I will ask which parts need to be finished first.”

As you shape your environment and your thinking, you can use stress to your advantage by reducing the impact of situations that might have once been highly stressful. Over time, that will allow you to:

Use Stress to Increase Resilience

Just as vaccinations teach our bodies how to be immune to infections, moderately stressful episodes teach our bodies how to be resilient. Today’s stressful scenario becomes tomorrow’s no big deal as you learn how to deal with it. Use stress to boost your resilience.

Gradually increase your exposure to stress.Use periods of rest and reflection to recharge after a stressful situation. Not only does your body need to reset for the physiological changes, but your brain also needs time to consolidate what you have learned.Focus on how you benefited from the stressful situation rather than dwelling on how uncomfortable it was. Cognitive reframing is a great skill to learn that will increase your willingness and ability to confront stressful situations in the future.Conclusion

Stress is a physiological reaction where your brain tells your body that it’s under threat and needs to respond accordingly. There are many ways you can use this response to cope with a stressful situation. After the fact, there’s much to learn from stress that will set you up to be more successful in the future. Here’s to a little stress to keep us moving, growing, and learning. Here’s to using stress to your advantage.

Additional Resources

Bolster your stress reserves

What does your stress look like?

Help! I’m Overwhelmed!

 

The post Use Stress to Your Advantage appeared first on Liane Davey.

Improve Your Emotional Intelligence

 

Need higher EQ? EQ (or emotional intelligence, more formally) is how well you identify, manage, and respond to emotions—both your own and others people’s.

Many people, including Daniel Goleman, the psychologist we most closely associate with EQ, talk about emotional intelligence in four different dimensions. Let’s talk about what you can do to boost your EQ by taking them one at a time.

1. Self-Awareness

The first component of emotional intelligence is self-awareness. To boost your self-awareness, try mirrors, mindfulness, and reflection.

Mirrors? I know it sounds weird, but have you ever caught a glimpse of yourself on a Zoom video or a reflective surface in a meeting and given yourself a start… YIKES! Resting bitch face! Having a small mirror on your computer or near your desk can make you more aware of what you’re transmitting and, in turn, more conscious of what you’re experiencing. That’s what you’re looking for.

Mindfulness is a practice where you learn to tune into the present and become more aware of your world and your reactions to it. This is a great thing to practice because you can get meaningful benefits in less than a minute. There are apps, journals, and even a doo-hickey-bub on your Apple Watch or Fitbit to help with this.

The third thing to try is reflection. Think back on your day, a meeting, or a conversation. What was going on for you? What were you feeling? What story were you telling yourself? The more you reflect, the more self-aware you’ll become, especially of your triggers. That can be super helpful.

2. Self-Regulation

Ok, on to the second component of emotional intelligence: self-regulation.

All of that mindfulnessd and reflection will set you up for more deliberate actions and a better ability to control your responses. When you’re mindful, you get an early tip-off that you’re moving into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode, and the earlier you notice, the more likely you are to regulate that emotion.

Try asking yourself why you’re feeling what you’re feeling, what story are you telling yourself, then see if you can come up with other stories that are equally likely—or just more constructive. That will help you choose the best action rather than a knee-jerk reaction.

3. Social Skills

Component three… upping your social skills!

Your homework is two things. First, work on having a set of amazing questions that you can use to connect with people and understand things from their perspective, “How is this landing for you? What are you most excited about? What’s your superpower?” I love to ask this question because people love that I assume they have superpowers, and they love telling me about theirs!

If you’re going to get great at asking questions, you need to be equally good at taking in the information from their answers. I call that level three listening.

Level 1: Listening carefully to take everything in.

Level 2: Turning off the voice in your head and listening to the other person.

Level 3: Listening, not just to the facts, but also to the feelings and emotions and, more importantly, the values and beliefs. I’ve got a whole post on how to practice your listening. Check it out.

4. Empathy

Great listening leads straight into the final component—empathy!

Ask yourself how others might be experiencing a situation differently from you. What’s at stake for them? What else is going on in their world?

As they interact with you, think about what might be going on that helps explain their behaviour. You’ll get much better at peeking into other people’s worlds as you practice.

One bonus tip: Research shows that reading fiction is also a great way to increase empathy, so maybe find a comfy spot and a good book. That’s my kind of homework!

–

Emotional intelligence gets noticed and valued in organizations. What can you do to invest in your EQ?

More On This

How self-aware are you?

What is Cognitive Flexibility?

When You Think You’re Listening, but You’re Not

Video: Become a Pro at Dealing With Emotions in the Workplace

The post Improve Your Emotional Intelligence appeared first on Liane Davey.

Reducing the Spillover Between Home and Work Stress

Facing significant stress at home or work is problem enough, but when stress crosses from one part of your life to another, it can create a vicious cycle. What can you do to reduce the spillover between home and work stress?

What is Stress Spillover?

Spillover is when your attitudes or moods from one domain disrupt your behavior in another. Spillover can be positive, but because we’re talking about stress management, let’s focus on negative spillover.

Negative spillover, particularly when family stress impacts you at work, has been shown to have adverse effects on performance and physical and mental health.

Problem-focused Coping Strategies

One way to reduce spillover is to address the stress afflicting you right at the source before it can transfer into other parts of your life. The most effective way to do that is to adopt problem-focused coping strategies. Three generic methods include:

Positive reinterpretation

Reframe the stressful event in positive terms. For example, at home, if you’ve had a defiant toddler making you late for work, remind yourself that your child is doing their job in carving space between you and them: healthy toddlers are challenging. At work, you might respond to a rapidly approaching due date by being grateful it’s due on Friday because it will make the weekend more relaxing.

Active Coping

Take steps to remove or avoid the stressor or reduce its effects. If busy evenings at home create friction with your partner, doing meal prep on a weekend is an active coping strategy to reduce the impact of the stressor. At work, active coping could involve enlisting support from a colleague who is more adept at something than you.

Planning

Prepare by thinking about how to cope with the stressor. For example, think through a calm and collected approach for the next time the neighbor lets their dog pee on your lawn. At work, consider how you’ll respond when your chronically procrastinating teammate tells you they don’t have their work done on time (again).

As you take a problem-focused approach to your stress at home or work, you reduce its impact and the likelihood that it will follow you from one part of your day to another.

Boundaries and Transitions

Other strategies to reduce spillover use compartmentalization to keep the stress where it belongs.

Time and Space Boundaries

Increase the boundary between home and work by creating buffer time in between. Taking 15 minutes after leaving one place before arriving at the other can be helpful. If you have a commute, use that time for neutral activities like listening to music or an audiobook. Giving yourself a brief reprieve from worrying about either work or home can decrease the contamination.

If you work from home, you need time and physical space boundaries to symbolically leave one domain and enter another. Where possible, use different physical spaces for other parts of your life. For example, you don’t want the kitchen table to be where you take exasperating Zoom calls and try to have a relaxing dinner with your partner.

Psychological Boundaries

Even if creating time and space boundaries is challenging, you can establish psychological boundaries that remind you that it’s either home time or work time. Take a page from Mr. Rogers and change into your comfy cardigan to say that work is done for the day.

Rituals

I’m also a fan of creating small rituals to exit one identity and enter another. That might be making your first cup of coffee at the office and reading the headlines from the newspaper. Alternatively, it might be coming home and spending a few minutes taking the dog for a walk. You take these things from simple habits to rituals by being mindful and deliberate about the small steps and what they mean to you.

Emotional Regulation

Another critical strategy for reducing the likelihood that stress in one part of your life will infect others is to process your emotional reactions. Hence, you’re more aware of and in control of them.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness and meditation techniques can help you tune in to your body, allowing you to notice when your heart is racing, or your palms are sweating. Just being aware of these processes and naming what’s going on can reduce their impact.

Breathing and Relaxation

Breathing techniques help activate your parasympathetic nervous system and slow your heart rate so you get out of the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn in self-defense mode. You can use box breathing or techniques to extend your exhalation for longer than your inhalation.

Progressive relaxation techniques can also be helpful. Start at your toes and clench as tightly as possible before releasing and relaxing as much as possible. Do that for your calves, then your thighs, and progress until you’ve zeroed in on each part of your body. This is a great one to do in stealth mode if your commute involves a bus, train, or passenger seat of a car.

Focus and Flow

Not all stress management techniques need to go after the stress directly. Another way to reduce the spillover between work and home stresses is to choose another activity that you can lose yourself in.

Engaging Activities

If you’ve had a rough morning at home, try picking your most interesting and engaging task to start your work day. Is there a topic you’re researching that’s fascinating? What about a colleague or customer you can talk to who will immediately transport you into work and out of home mode? Or when you walk in the door at night, what quick activity could you get lost in to close the door on the work day?

Physical Outlets

Finally, physical outlets are an excellent way to release emotions (and all their corresponding hormones and neurotransmitters). After you leave home or work, can you go for a brisk walk, Zumba class, or bike ride before you arrive at the other location? A physical outlet can help you leave your stress behind.

Emotional Coping Strategies

Up to this point, I’ve shared various problem-focused coping strategies. These strategies attempt to reduce the stress you’re experiencing or reduce the transposition of stress from one domain to another.

In addition to problem-focused coping strategies, there are also emotional coping strategies, where you try to regulate (tolerate, reduce, or eliminate) your physiological, cognitive, emotional, or behavioral reaction to a stressful event. This might include venting, denial, or disengagement from the cause of the stress. Research has shown that these methods are ineffective and can even be unhealthy over the long term.

Conclusion

It’s a stressful world. Job stress is increasing, so most knowledge workers feel stressed regularly. Stress at home is also all too common—the U.S. surgeon general even warned that our modern parenting approach is bad for our health. Dealing with stressors in either of these domains is challenging, but when one bleeds into the other, it can become too much. Make sure you’re implementing deliberate strategies to reduce spillover.

Additional Resources

Good and bad stress

Tsunami of stress

Everybody Hurts

 

The post Reducing the Spillover Between Home and Work Stress appeared first on Liane Davey.

Addressing the Root Causes of Work Stress

In my previous post, I shared four examples of how your stress might manifest and provided techniques for reducing the impact of a perceived threat. In this post, we’ll discuss the underlying causes of job stress and what you can do to create a healthier and more manageable environment.

What is Stress?

Stress is the body’s response to real or perceived threats. While it can sometimes be helpful and just the kick in the pants you need, it often does more harm than good.

Unlike generalized stress, job stress is defined only in the negative (seems like a bit of a bias, but I’m not in charge). The CDC defines job stress as “the harmful physical and emotional responses that occur when the requirements of the job do not match the capabilities, resources, or needs of the worker.”

Causes and Mitigating Factors

There are a few common paths to unmanageable job stress. Let’s examine each in turn and discuss what you can do to reduce the threat itself or reduce the impact of stress on you.

I often refer to these approaches as 1) making a dent in the problem and 2) reducing the dent it makes in you.

Unreasonable Expectations

This is when the effort required to complete a task up to the desired standard doesn’t match the time allotted.

Many people adopt the “suck it up, buttercup” approach in these situations and try to muddle through. That’s not a sustainable strategy.

Instead, make a dent in the problem by communicating with your manager all the components of your workload and the time you expect it will take to complete them. Potential remedies include:

Your manager identifies things on your list that don’t need to be there. The effort required falls into line with the time available.Your manager helps you put the tasks in priority order, and you work on one at a time to complete them. This reduces stress because you know you’re aligned and that the most essential things are being completed first.Your manager provides advice, support, or additional resources to help you meet your expectations in less time than you anticipated.

Good managers realize that a mismatch between what you need to do and how much time you have to do it will only make you more stressed and less productive (not to mention compromising your quality, creativity, and mental health). A good manager will willingly help you triage and prioritize to reduce the gap between expectations and capacity.

But maybe you don’t have a good manager.

In that case, you can reduce the dent an unmanageable workload makes in you by resisting the urge to multi-task and finding ways to be as efficient as possible, including:

Be ruthless about working on one thing at a time. Remove all distractions and work in focused bursts to get more done. Multitasking and divided attention is slower and also anxiety provoking. Even with the same long to-do list, you’ll get through the work faster and be less stressed if you do one thing at a time.Seek support from your peers. Tell them what’s on your plate and identify opportunities for them to lend a hand, provide advice, or devise a better strategy for delivering what you need. Knowing your teammates have your back will make your load feel lighter, even if the actual workload hasn’t changed.Take breaks to allow your body and mind to reset. Match your breaks to whatever energizes you: take a brisk walk or workout, spend 15 minutes chatting with friends, stop and get yourself organized, or reconnect to the purpose of your work. People experience being overwhelmed differently. Here’s some advice on an individualized approach that might work for you.

Unfortunately, when you perceive your workload as a threat, your body and mind go into a mode that is seldom helpful for productivity. To stay above the fray, take one or more of those actions to alleviate the cause of the stress or short-circuit your stress response.

Insufficient or Poorly Matched Skills

Although some job stress is due to unmanageable workloads, your stress might be less about how much you have to do and more about what you need to do. If you don’t feel you have the skills to be successful, it can make you feel very vulnerable.

Make a dent in the problem by upgrading your skills or accessing them elsewhere, such as:

Ask for additional formal training or seek out resources from your network or publicly available sources.Ask to shadow someone who has already mastered the task you’re responsible forRequest that your manager redistribute some components of the task to someone more capable or better suited.

It would be wonderful if all managers ensured employees were positioned to succeed before assigning them a task, but we still have lots of “throw ‘em in the deep end and see if they sink or swim” folks out there. If you’re getting no sympathy for the poor match between your skills and your role, you need to protect yourself in other ways.

Reduce the dent a skill gap makes in you by:

Communicating to those around you that you’re worried rather than trying to fake it ‘til you make it (which is more likely to wind up as ‘fake it ‘til you break it’).Note what’s going well and what you’re learning so you can focus on the distance you’ve come rather than how far you still have to go: Progress rather than perfection.Find moments of levity and celebrate your noble failures. You can even create a punch card and give yourself a stamp when you make a mistake. Every 10 earns you an ice cream or a free commiseration session with a friend.Poor Treatment

Your job stress might not be about the work at all. In fact, that might be the best part of the job. Instead, your stress might come from nasty, abusive, disrespectful, or unfriendly treatment from your boss or coworkers. Yuck.

To make a dent in the problem, try one of the following:

Provide feedback to your colleagues about how their behavior is impacting you. Be sure to make the feedback objective so you don’t trigger backlash.Request what you need from your colleagues to be at your best. Be clear about your boundaries and what helps you to be a good collaborator.Seek out advice and support from people outside your team, such as a manager in a different department or someone in HR. Get their perspective on whether your reactions are justified, and if so, ask for strategies that might alleviate some of the problematic behavior.

It would be wonderful if your colleagues took your feedback and requests seriously and turned a new leaf, but that’s not going to happen every time. If you find your colleagues toxic, abrasive, or distant, you need an alternative approach.

Reduce the dent that poor treatment makes in you by:

Paying deliberate attention to the positive or neutral interactions you have. Unfortunately, once you conclude that your colleagues are treating you poorly, your confirmation bias will kick in, and you’ll only see the negative. Rebalance that by noting what’s good (or at least not horrible).Find other sources of support during your day. Touch base with friends or supportive colleagues to remind you you’re valued. Look for other people sitting alone in the cafeteria and pull up a seat.Prioritize supportive relationships and fun connections outside of work so the isolation of being on a bad team doesn’t zap your energy and turn you off people in general. Plus, those friends might be the bridge to a new job on the team you deserve.Job Insecurity

I would be remiss to exclude a significant source of job stress for many people: the fear of being terminated or laid off.

You might not be able to control the fate of your organization (or the global economy), but you can reduce the dent job insecurity makes in you if you:

Focus on delivering the most important outcomes the organization needs. You’d be surprised how many people I find gossiping about potential job losses for half an hour at the coffee pot while others are making themselves indispensable.Invest in and tend to your network constantly, not just when you feel insecure. Use LinkedIn actively by connecting with people you know or with whom you might have things in common. Get on their radar slowly and genuinely by commenting on their posts or sharing information or articles that might be relevant to them.Respond constructively to stress by channeling some of your spending into a savings account that will provide breathing room if you end up unemployed.Perfectionism or Imposter Phenomenon

One final thought: some job stress isn’t job stress; it’s you stress. By that, I mean that no one is imposing an unmanageable workload or throwing you in the deep end. Instead, you’re telling yourself a story that makes you feel threatened. I like to refer to this with the expression from horror movies, “The call is coming from inside the house.”

To reduce the impact of these problems, try the following:

Invest extra time in getting aligned with your manager on what they expect. Don’t just ask about what good looks like; inquire about what “too good” would look like. Once you know what’s fit for purpose, you can reframe that you’re getting further from the standard if you keep working toward perfection.Seek perspective from colleagues and friends about the quality of your work.Take time to coach and counsel friends who are also stressed and feeling out of their depth. Research shows that encouraging someone else to be kind to themselves will make you kinder to yourself (win-win for the win!).

Job stress is a vicious cycle where unreasonable expectations, poor treatment, or unhealthy narratives cause you to fret and, in the process, become less efficient and less effective. Then you worry and stress not just about the original problem but also about the compounding effects of your stress-addled brain getting further behind, more inept, less collaborative, more expendable, and so on.

Pull yourself out of the stress doom loop first by honestly attempting to improve the situation. If that fails, protect yourself with techniques to manage the stress, even if you can’t eliminate it.

Additional Resources

What does your stress look like?

10 Helpful Things To Do When You’re Overwhelmed

8 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed by Your Workload

 

The post Addressing the Root Causes of Work Stress appeared first on Liane Davey.