Career Coach: How To Turn Stress Into Resiliency

According to conventional wisdom, events cause stress. Someone drops a load of work on you, you experience stress. Your company reorganizes, you experience stress. The assumption here is that stress is caused by what happens in the world. But, what if this assumption is wrong? What if the true cause of our stress is not the events themselves, but rather our own inability to meet our needs in the face of these events?

For example, you find out your boss is ill and you have to deliver the presentation to the senior team in her place in an hour. You feel a jolt of fear. Is the stress a result of the call to present or are you stressed because you aren't feeling prepared for this?

Do you see how the assumption that events cause stress is flawed, and that stress instead comes from your struggle to meet a need? The difference is that if you believe your stress is being caused by what’s happening in the world, you’ll tend to complain and point fingers. But if you believe you’re stressed because you’re struggling to meet a need, you’ll skip the drama and focus instead on how you are going to meet it. 

Think about it. Our happiness, health, and productivity are all being undermined by our tendency to misdiagnose the cause of our stress. What can we do to turn things around? Based on the exciting work of Charles Jones and the technique of Adaptive Inquiry, we can...

1. Examine our own mental habits to identify situations we tend to misdiagnose as stressful and notice the challenging emotions such as anger, frustration, anxiety, worry, resentment, and fear that arise from them.

2. Then, retrain ourselves to accurately diagnose the need behind our emotion going forward. For instance, the need behind anger is to assert our rights, behind resentment is to air our grievance, and the need behind frustration is achievement.

3. Then shift the focus of our attention to strategies that can help us meet our needs. This might involve a change in our beliefs, behavior or our environment.

Let's take the example of the sudden presentation. Your boss put her faith in you to cover for her when she was ill. The stress isn't really about the presentation, but your concern about being fully prepared.  You catch yourself with this realization and shift your attention to the hour for preparation. When you grab a colleague to act as audience for a few run-throughs using the slide deck in the vacant conference room down the hall, you build your confidence with the material. The stress resolves in favor of a growing readiness to step in front of the leadership team. 

In coming blogs, I will address some of these challenging emotions in a way that will enable you to find your resilience through a more powerful and adaptive response to stress. 

–Andrea Zintz, Career Coach