Staying Calm in Stressful Situations

There is more to this staying calm stuff than you might realize. Research is showing that it may be possible to train yourself (or at least train mice) to remain calm in stressful situations. Yesterday’s blog elicited some feedback which took me to a piece of research published by Psych Central.

“In the new Neuron study, Pollak and Kandel sought to tease out the behavioral and molecular characteristics of learned safety in mice.

“In their experiments, mice were trained to associate safety or fear with specific auditory stimuli (tones). For fear conditioning, the auditory stimulus was paired with a mild shock to the mouse’s foot. For safety conditioning, the auditory stimulus was not followed by a shock.

“The experiments showed that the safety-conditioned mice learned to associate the tone with the absence of danger and displayed less anxiety in the presence of this safety signal.

“Moving to a stress test, Kandel’s team placed the safety-conditioned mice into a pool of water for a swim test. The forced-swim test is commonly used by researchers to measure how antidepressant drugs affect the behavior of mice.

“In this seemingly desperate situation – where the mice have no option to escape from the water — they start to show signs of behavioral despair that are ameliorated by antidepressant medications. We found that the mice trained for safety could overcome their sense of hopelessness in the swim test,” Kandel explained.”

I have been trying to think how this might fit in at work and think that perhaps the use of some object that calms you down might have the same effect. Think of a place that you find very calming, home, the outdoors, wherever it is. Now find some very small object that you associate with that environment. The next time you feel you might be entering a stressful situation at work, hold the object and think of the location from which it comes. I’m going to try this as a technique to see if it actually calms me down.

Calm down

“Anyone can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person at the right time, and for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not within everyone’s power and that is not easy.”

Aristotle

Staying calm in times of high stress is one of those leadership skills that amazes me. Watching someone react to a high pressure situation in a calm and balanced way is truly inspiring. Maybe I’m impressed because I am naturally excited, prone to get agitated and raise my voice in stressful situations. I know it doesn’t work and it’s a bad habit but I still manage to do it.

The problem with getting excited and not staying calm is that it exacerbates an already highly charged and stressful situation. If you’ve ever been in an emergency room as a patient, you’ll notice that unlike on TV, most staff don’t exhibit any stress. They are calm and measured but fast in everything they do. If they can stay calm when life and death is on the line, why shouldn’t business people be able to stay calm when revenue targets are missed, when customer returns increase or when costs rise unexpectedly. After all, it’s not as if anyone is going to die.

Try this at work:

You’ve probably been told to step back from stressful situations, breather deeply and modulate your voice. Easy to say, not that easy to do. Instead, the next time you find yourself in one of those situations, just imagine the worst thing that can happen.

It’s sort of like imagining the audience naked when you have to give a speech or your boss putting on his dress every morning to take away the jitters. In this case, imagine the worst thing that can happen. Could someone die? Will there be a loss of limbs or other essential body parts? If the answer is yes then by all means become excited but otherwise just think about the long run.

Try to imagine a room full of dead people and body parts that will fill up the room when the situation is over. If you actually take two seconds to try to create that image, it will be enough to make you realize that no matter how stressful the situation is, no one is likely to die or become maimed and that you’re better off remaining calm.

 

 

 

5 Workplace fears to overcome

 

You’re probably afraid of something. We all are. The key to success in the working world is to ensure that those fears are not debilitating. I’ve done a quick poll to find out what people are afraid of and in a very unscientific manner come up with the top five.

  1.  Public Speaking
  2. Screwing up
  3. Speaking up
  4. Change
  5. Being yelled at by the boss

It all comes down to fear of being humiliated.

Work is a social place and we all grew up in the schoolyard where humiliation led to being ostracized.

Well it’s time to get over it. The fact is, no one is really watching what you’re doing anyway. Unless you’re already the butt of office jokes, a few slips here and there will go unnoticed.

If you’re the butt of office jokes it’s probably because you’ve failed at making connections with people and they already resent you. Chances are in this case, you are oblivious to the humiliation anyway just as you’re oblivious to others around you.

If you’ve made real connections with people, they will actually feel empathy for you when you screw up.

Now, you might ask, why a picture of Donald Trump. Well its sort of like imagining your boss naked. Nothing is quite so scary as that thought. In this case just think, if The Donald isn’t worried about being humiliated by having the most ridiculous hair in the western world every single day, why are you worried about a little transitory screw up from time to time.

10 Ways that Left-Brain Leadership Torments You

Are you being tormented by your boss? Do you cringe at the thought of going to work in the morning? Perhaps you’ve quit and stayed. If this is the case then there’s a good chance that you’re suffering from left-brain leadership.

Left-brain leaders focus on logical thinking, analysis, and accuracy. Right-brain leaders, on the other hand, focus on aesthetics, feeling, and creativity. Here’s a chart that shows the difference.

 

 

 

 

 

Left-brain leaders tend to be from engineering, computer science, accounting, banking, science and many other hyper-logical disciplines. Right-brain leaders tend to come from sales, marketing, and HR.

If you have a left-brain leader, chances are you’re experiencing one or more of the following behaviours:

  1. Relying only on logic for decisions.
  2. Denying that emotion has any place in business.
  3. Being a perfectionist.
  4. Micromanaging you.
  5. Assigning responsibility without authority.
  6. Being a stickler for process.
  7. Not explaining the context behind decisions.
  8. Expecting you to work faster and faster as volume increases.
  9. Keeping you in the dark because you just don’t need to know.
  10. Berating you or criticizing you, especially in public.

Left-brain leaders really need to learn the emotional side of business. They need to learn how to communicate, how to connect and how to motivate and that logic isn’t always the way to solve a problem.

If you’ve got other examples of how left-brain leaders torment you, I would love to hear them through comments.

 

Self Confidence

“Confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom.”

William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, 1766

You probably don’t even notice it happening. Do you remember the first time you tried to dive off a very high diving board? Do you remember the feeling? The hesitation, the butterflies. Now do you remember the second dive off the same high diving board, the third, the tenth, the 100th? Your changed feelings are the result of building confidence.

One day, you face a new situation, full of dread, nervous anticipation and excitement. The next you are treating the situation as old hat, developing confidence with every step.

Self confidence is one of the keys to successful leadership.

Can you imagine following a nervous leader, one who lacks self confidence? It doesn’t work does it. So, if you want to be a good leader, you need to develop a well justified aura of self confidence. Developing it is all about practice. Doing something time and time again (eventually successfully) will build your self confidence.

 

Try this at work:

Find some small thing in which you feel that you lack self confidence. Don’t make it something huge like speaking to a group of 100 people if that is one of your fears. Make it something small, perhaps like having a conversation with someone who is very senior to you, saying no to an unreasonable request, meeting new people at a networking event, or voicing your opinion at a meeting.

Once you have picked this thing to work on, set yourself an objective of repeating the behaviour ten times. Yes that’s right, ten times.

Let’s say you want to become more self confident about speaking up in a meeting. The next time you go to a meeting, make it an objective to speak up sometime in the meeting to voice your opinion. Write down how you felt before voicing your opinion and how you felt after that. Note also what happenned. Did anyone hit you, yell at you, belittle you or did they just hear your opinion and move on? Now do that nine more times, writing down your feelings and the results of the experiment.

After you have completed the experiment ask your self, do you feel more self confident? Chances are you have developed a useful technique to overcome fears.

Gregg Saretsky – WestJet CEO

Gregg Saretsky gets a lot of press for his efforts to improve the performance of Canadian airline WestJet. What he should also get a lot of press about is his skill as a leader. I really liked a story about Gregg working a flight recently as a cabin attendant. he was obviously experienced in the role and comfortable joking with passengers and staff alike as the flight progressed.

Having worked his whole life in the airline industry, he can empathize with other staff and bring a much more personal touch to the role that someone who would never have worked in the industry. This degree of empathy that experience brings is essential, not only in the good times but particularly in bad ones as well.

An empathetic leader will still have to make the tough calls but employees are much more comforted and thus motivated even in bad times knowing that someone understands what their troubles might be, is sensitive to their needs and has their back.