SuperManager: How to Reduce Stress and Still Care

Ever noticed a correlation between how much you care about your job and how much stress you feel?  Well there are ways to really care about doing a good job, without all the unnecessary stress.
Listen in as our un-stressed SuperManager panel discusses how and why:

Samantha C. Naes - CN Video Production
Victoria Wors - Wors Consulting
Joel Emery - Ignite Strategies
Kim Baker - Vivid Performance Group
Maggie Peterson - C6 Solutions, LLC

Transcript

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Christine Lawrence:   0:00
You're listening to Super Manager.  The podcast for people who manage people and business.  With ideas, trends and expert interviews to help you be a SuperManager.  

Samantha Naes:   0:13
So this week we're gonna be talking about "Can you reduce your levels of stress and still really care about what you're doing at work?"  And I have got my very non stressed out super friends with me. We have

Vicky Wors:   0:24
Vicky Wors, wars consulting. Human resources support for small to medium sized businesses.

Joel Emery:   0:31
Joel Emery, Ignite Strategies. I serve as a sales systems architect for small and midsize businesses.

Kim Baker:   0:36
Kim Baker, with The Performance Group.  Organizations hires us to help them align and synergize their human capital, culture, and organizational agility.

Maggie Peterson:   0:43
And Maggie Peterson with C6 Solutions. I work with human resource organizations on copy and content marketing,

Samantha Naes:   0:49
and I'm Samantha Naes with CN Video. We do corporate video production.  

Samantha Naes:   0:54
I used to work in this office that was so stressful it was a bank and it was going through a buyout. And just the whole office environment was extremely high stress. And I remember driving into work in the mornings having a pep talk with myself, actually giving myself the old, "No matter what happens, just focus on getting your work done. Don't let the politics don't get tangled up in it. Just focus on the work and get it done. Everything will be okay."  And then having a talk with myself on the way home, just in tears, going, Why did I let it get to me? Why couldn't I just... And I remember thinking, you know, life would be so much easier if I just didn't give a crap about my job. If I just didn't care about what I was doing, I could go in, and no matter how people behaved, and no matter what happened, I could just work along happily. No problems. But when you really care about what you do and it means something to you, it's easy to get tangled up in all of the stress. So the question is, do you have to not care?

Vicky Wors:   1:47
Understand what is stress? Stress is generally brought on by being in a situation that you are ill prepared to handle, or it's just too overwhelming what's going on, and it's either you're in a job you don't like, you're in a job you do like but It's like drinking from a fire hose and you can't You can't get control of your situation. So de-stressing, speaking to your manager saying, Look, this is the situation. I'm not saying I can't do the work. I certainly can do the work and the manager needs to see the situation for what it is that there's too much on one individual. You're getting ready to lose somebody, that's really good, because stress is one of the major drivers for people to leave work.  

Samantha Naes:   2:48
I think some people are also just prone to causing high stress,  

Kim Baker:   2:53
well, causing high stress or feeling it  

Samantha Naes:   2:56
feeling it . Yeah, you're right. I meant like, causing it for themselves. But yeah, feeling it

Joel Emery:   3:01
some people are good at causing it

Vicky Wors:   3:05
drama queens. Okay,  

Kim Baker:   3:07
So this concept of psychological capital is exactly what you're referring to. And this has come out of the positive psychology. So in organization we understand what green capital is. We understand human capital. It's the aggregate of all the competencies in the organization. Social capital, political capital, with his concept of psychological capital looks at there's acronym. It's hero, right? So H is for hope. E is for efficacy, R is for resilience and O is for optimism. And so people who are high in psychological capital, whether the stress better, I'm part of it. Underneath this is we look at the five factor personality. There's some elements of that, so you're absolutely right. Some of us are more resilient. Things just don't seem to bother us. The same stressor on you may not bother you, and I wilt right. But the beautiful thing is is that we can do things to help people. We can assess their psychological capital and then, based upon where they're struggling, we can help them. And it's very contextual. You could be in an environment that's really easy and have low psychological capital. And you'll do fine but put you in a really demanding, stressful environment, and you don't so absolutely right. It's it's linked.

Maggie Peterson:   4:19
I was gonna say, I think another way of seeing that may be saying it is. Do you know where your own mental and emotional balance is? Because if you know that it's starting to tip one way, can you do something to find that center balance again before it tips too far in the wrong direction?  

Samantha Naes:   4:36
When you give me an example,  

Maggie Peterson:   4:38
when you're in that job and you're starting to work too many hours, do you realize that and find a hobby that gets you out of the office so it gets your mind off something else and you can recharge And it recent is your balance versus you're thinking about that work. You know, you're working too many hours, but you don't think you can leave because you've got all this work done. So you just got to keep trying. You're not re centering your balance at that point. So finding that how about finding something to give you a balance back? I think is important

Vicky Wors:   5:05
But that's important. That is important. And you hit on a real key there. We can control our stressors by pulling away and doing something we enjoy doing. You've heard of people say I'm so stressed out. I'm going for a run.

Samantha Naes:   5:21
Yeah,  

Vicky Wors:   5:21
I'm so stressed out  

Samantha Naes:   5:22
or walk, I walk.

Vicky Wors:   5:25
Or I need to exercise, get this stress off, or I need to listen to music and need to go draw

:   5:24
  

Maggie Peterson:   5:31
there are people that find peace in their religion. Whatever,

Vicky Wors:   5:34
the meditation,  

Maggie Peterson:   5:36
higher spiritual balance. 

Vicky Wors:   5:38
So those are kind of self loving things to do when your your stress levels are so high doesn't mean something goes away, but it least gets you away to de stress.

Samantha Naes:   5:52
I think the problem is, though, that a lot of people in order to cope with it and I have seen it in so many people is that you just don't care anymore. You get to a point where you say, if I care about doing a good job, if I care about doing things right... We had a podcast discussion a couple of weeks ago with Jerry. It was on gender bias and he was talking about his daughter and how stressed out she gets it worked because she takes things seriously, must do things right and she's got a couple of co workers that air goof offs and don't really care. And it was causing her a lot of stress, and I think the problem is that some people do when they're starting to feel the stress. Their solution is to just not care as much about what they're doing to just not let it get to them as much.

Kim Baker:   6:34
So I'll speak to the pathology of stress.  

Samantha Naes:   6:36
Okay,

Kim Baker:   6:37
So one of the tools that I use in personality work is we look at the kind of bright side of personality, the every day, day in and day out. We can also look at what we call the dark side of personality. And so when we're stressed or were complacent, what comes out right and we look at it from a no risk to a high risk. So just because you're under tremendous stress doesn't mean that you actually have a high risk for some of these behaviors. One of the behaviors is diligence. So some of us and I happen to be one of these. This where I have the high risk is that when I get really stressed and there's a lot of important work to do, I will become very diligent about it. I will. Those Ts, they aren't crossed, their double crossed. Those eyes aren't dotted. Their tripled dotted right because  

Samantha Naes:   7:21
It makes you feel more in control  

Kim Baker:   7:22
It's my control. I don't have any other high risk behaviors for stress. But that one, I see two myself and that knowledge was very freeing. But another one is dutiful. Then we have bold and imaginitive and by the way, these aligned with the D. S M, which is very interesting. So you start to see in organizations where there's a high degree of stress. We start to see very pathological behavior come forward. People who kind of this narcissism may start to show up almost schizophrenic type behavior. It's not truly schizophrenic, but from the outside looking in, it does.  So stress can lead to very pathologically unhealthy environments. I was working an organization that was bought by private equity. You saw the behavior over course of three months and six months that dismantling and just the stress behaviors. People were behaving in ways they never behaved before. You're absolutely right. Different people act in different ways, and some people they weather better than others. And it's a direct linkage to personality types.

Samantha Naes:   8:19
So if someone thinks that disengaging is the solution. Clearly, that's not a good solution. How do you find a better solution other than disengaging? 

Kim Baker:   8:29
First of all, how  are you defining or identifying if they're disengaging?  The word not getting done, it all.  not getting done in a quality manner, that's where the manager comes in or the team. If you're working in a self directed team, that's where the team lead or somebody has to come in and give the feedback. That's where the annual performance review is dead.   we should be doing these quarterly. But always continuous feedback shouldn't be a surprise to me that I'm learning that I'm not meeting the needs of the organization or my team members. Right? And the other thing is that we have to do is we have to to teach managers and peers how to give better feedback in a way that's very healthy in a way that targets behaviors isn't personal, is tangible, observable that somebody getting the feedback could do something with. We're not comfortable giving feedback as a business community. Most of us are not comfortable doing it. And don't do it well.  

Joel Emery:   9:24
So I've always viewed stress as mainly being a manifestation of our lizard brain. Something occurs, and it makes it seem to go into fight, flight or freeze one of three of

Kim Baker:   9:34
the amygdala hijack. We call that if you're stuck there,

Joel Emery:   9:36
so too much stress happens that kicks in. Everybody responds differently to it. They have their own way of going about it and the coping mechanisms. The people I've always known who have said they deal the best with stress, and I perceive is doing the best with stress are the ones who really can follow what's called the serenity prayer. But more or less they, they're able to acknowledge, Okay, I have no control over this. There's nothing I can do about it. So I'm going to consciously choose to let it go, and some people are better that than others. And there's things that we can all do to practice that. But it requires a degree of pulling out of the emotional situation, looking at it from an observer perspective and making an intentional choice. Now that takes practice. It's easier said than done, but it takes practice. It takes self awareness, emotional intelligence, all of these things. When I've hired people before, I've always told them I expect people on my team to keep three things in balance. That is your work life, your family life and some form of spiritual life. And by spiritual it might be going to church. It might be playing guitar might be sitting on top of a mountain. There's any number of things that fall into that spiritual category, but it's something that provides you some personal fulfillment and what I've always seen is when I have an employed where one of these three core components of a stool gets out of whack, they start falling over, and the way they take it out on the other people around them is frequently brutal. It's not pleasant. This goes back to 15 or so years. We had an employee that was our number one revenue producer, a company. But they were spending no time with your family. All of their time was in the office. That was it. That's all they had going on. It was creating all sorts of castigating problems across everybody, and what we did is part of their annual compensation package. Is we sent them and their family on a week long Disney cruise!  Now, this was before phones and mobile office stuff. But you will leave and you will go with your family on a Disney cruise and gosh, darn it, you will have fun,

Samantha Naes:   11:33
though that's actually very interesting. I'm listening to what you're saying, and I think it's like a light bulb went on because I'm thinking back to me in my car, driving home, gripping the steering wheel crying, and it occurs to me that I didn't have to not care about my job to feel better. I just had to not care about the bullshit to feel better. There was some fulfillment that was missing in my personal life that was keeping me from being able to just blow off the bullshit and still care about the job. That's an interesting revelation.

Joel Emery:   12:00
One thing I have observed,  

Samantha Naes:   12:01
thank you.  

Joel Emery:   12:02
I don't have anybody has if there's any kind of research on this, but people who are in environments where there's lots of things that they can't control, like their long term projects. There's lots of people involved. They also seem to really like cooking, and they fall into cooking

Kim Baker:   12:17
Interesting

Joel Emery:   12:17
And my theory.  

Samantha Naes:   12:19
I got into that recently

Joel Emery:   12:20
I've never seen the data research. This is who would actually research this, I'm sure there's a grant somewhere.  But my theory about this. Is that  

Samantha Naes:   12:29
Put that on your to do list.

Joel Emery:   12:31
Yeah.  Cooking is an activity that somebody can individually plan, execute, deliver and evaluate in a finite, reasonable amount of time.  

Samantha Naes:   12:42
And taste yeah,

Joel Emery:   12:43
that you're not dependent on a lot of other people. If I go in the kitchen to cook dinner, if something goes wrong, it's just me. It's not that person in the cubicle next to me who didn't do their part of the job. And now I'm angry.  It's just me, I forgot to buy the salt.  Whatever the case may be. But people who are in those sort of positions of all the uncontrollable big picture responsibilities frequently also really enjoyed cook. There's a release they get out of it. I think there's a control to it.

Samantha Naes:   13:10
No, that's interesting. When I'm stressed, I feel like cooking. I cook a meal. It makes me feel better.

Joel Emery:   13:16
I've noticed that pattern with people in the sort of  [inaudible chatter]

:   0:00


Samantha Naes:   13:19
I think Joel has found the solution. Instead of not caring about your job. Just take a cook, a meal to meal. You'll feel a lot better.  No that's that's great. That's been very insightful.  

Samantha Naes:   13:35
We also had, ah, some input from a couple people on the Web. We had Delton, who said, You have to care more about what you can control versus what you can't. That's an immediate stress reducer, and we talked a little bit about that, and then we also had Rebecca. I guess she works in a theater says that the theater doesn't matter how much stress I have on any given day, because the next show will have a completely different patrons in different situation.

Joel Emery:   13:57
And she also continue that conversation with me off line. But what's interesting, both of those people are our education. Delta is a band director, and my question for him was, How do you deal with stress In that environment, you have students, you have performances, you have expectations, pressure, parents, administration. And that was his answer. Rebecca. She was actually my ninth grade English teacher, and she

Samantha Naes:   14:18
and she made it through that.

Joel Emery:   14:19
She did she somehow survived and talks to me. If I were her, I wouldn't. She was comparing the difference between education working in the theater. She has a retirement job working in the House and a large theater in Houston, Texas. She says that all the difference is the manager having her back. when there's a problem the manager has her back as opposed to in the school is stressful because this school, the administration never had her back. She felt like that makes the all the difference for her on that stress level.

Samantha Naes:   14:45
She also went on in the post to say As long as I could focus on the safety and happiness of my patrons, I could blow off the other stuff. So that's interesting

Kim Baker:   14:53
with my coaching clients. It's really common that something that's stressing them is our topic, and we talk about control and influence. What can you control versus influence? It seems like for us humans, it's really hard for us sometimes to figure that out, right? Your action, your reaction, your attitude. That's really what you can control. That's it. You're action, your reaction and your attitude, everything else is influence. And is it a strong influence a week influence? So being able to think that through has been helpful in reducing stress. But the thing that I really focus in on with them as well is what are you afraid off? What are you afraid of? Okay, name it. And now what's your plan? Because what happens is if they develop a plan of action. If this horrible thing happens, the fear doesn't control them because I got a plan of action

Vicky Wors:   15:42
It's done.  

Kim Baker:   15:43
Sometimes they need to spend a couple weeks working on the plan, really thinking through it would be a viable plan, right? So that they feel confident that Okay, if this happens, I got a plan.  But it takes the power away because that fear Yeah, maybe they don't want it to happen. But the fear that it will take them down or the fear of the unknown is gone because they have a plan and that reduces stress.

Maggie Peterson:   16:03
Sometimes I think you talk with people about what is their biggest fear. As soon as they start talking about it and they start talking about what are the consequences if that really comes to be, they realize it wouldn't be that bad. It wouldn't be survivable.  

Samantha Naes:   16:16
The TV show This is us. You watch that show  

Kim Baker:   16:20
Off and on.

Samantha Naes:   16:20
the couple, the guy is played by the man from ST Louis Brown, Stirling, Stirling Brown.  his character and their wife. Whenever they're getting stressed out about something, they play worst case scenario.  Where they sit down to go, OK, what is your worst case scenario? And they'll give some ridiculous fear that they have.  And they'll go back and forth and then they just kind of go, Okay, I feel better and it's done. It sounds like that's kind of similar to what you're talking about is really addressing, and I think sometimes it least in their example in here we're talking about therapy from a television show. At least in their example, just hearing it out loud helps to alleviate the fear because, like if you're thinking it in your head, it might really affect you. But then once you say it and you realize, well, that's not really what's likely to happen here, you can calm down a little bit.  

Kim Baker:   17:05
Yeah,  

Maggie Peterson:   17:06
here's the challenge. If we can sit here and think about all the things that do work, how do we share it with others so that they could take advantage of it?

Vicky Wors:   17:14
Tell them to listen to th is podcast!

Samantha Naes:   17:15
Oh, there you go. I have a little bit of a horror story.  I knew a friend of mine that worked in a very highly technical, highly skilled job and was so stressed out that he actually left the job with no real plans, just kind of in the hopes of finding something else. And I think when I spoke with them and I said, Well, what are you going to do? He said, I don't know, work in a gas station, something where I don't have to worry. I mean, this person essentially gave up their career to do a nothing job because he just felt like he couldn't handle the stress

Joel Emery:   17:51
It's a  quality of life decision.

Kim Baker:   0:00
yeah

Christine Lawrence:   17:52
Thanks for listening to Super Manager by CN Video Production. Visit our website at cn-video.com for additional episodes and lots of Super Manager Resources or give us a call at 314 VIDEO ME.