Let’s manage our stresses – Part 2

Last week, we discussed common causes of job-related stress and we went on to look at some of the key signs and symptoms that you can observe to detect if you or your colleagues are suffering from stress.

Today, we will focus on how you can prevent stress. This should give you a good starter pack for ensuring that you deliver optimally while at the same time remaining healthy and happy.

We have all heard it said that prevention is better than cure. And this is also true when it comes to stress management. We are far better off to prevent or avoid stress occurring than to let it happen and then deal with it reactively.

It is important to prevent the occurrence of stress not just for the sake of your physical and emotional well-being but also to ensure that your personal interactions with others at work and at home is not affected. Have you observed that people who are stressed up tend to exert pressure on others or they relate negatively with others?

So, what can you do to prevent stress from occurring? First, you must accept that it is your personal responsibility to improve your personal well-being. This attitude will make you always mind about things that can cause stress for you.

Of course, this also means that you may help prevent stress in others as you will be an unlikely cause of stress in others. Secondly, you need to learn good communication skills so that you can improve on how you relate with others at work and in all other activities that you are directly involved in.

This means that if, for example, your boss is giving you excessive work which can cause stress, you will be able to use effective communication skills to influence your manager to regulate better the work they are giving you.

Thirdly, it is important to identify factors that can cause stress for you and to then avoid or manage them. This means that you have to improve on personal planning and personal organisational skills.

You need to be able to organise your work in a way that minimises stress for you. For instance, the day you will find yourself with so much work that you cannot cope with, you need to immediately take a bold decision to prioritise and filter your actions.

List all your actions from the most important to the least important ones. Label the actions that you can do without and immediately remove them from the list. Next, label the actions that you can delegate or assign to others or actions that you can request others to help you with.

Immediately assign those actions to other people and get agreement from them that they will deliver the actions on your behalf. Finally, for the remaining actions, schedule them far apart enough to ensure that you do not expose yourself to stress. For the day, only focus on the emergent issues and push the rest to the next day or later days. If many of the actions have conflicting deadlines, go and renegotiate new deadlines for those actions that can delay for a bit.

Remember that ensuring good physical and emotional well-being is key to not just having good health but also a paramount requirement for success. Take responsibility for preventing stress.

Identify and avoid the things that can cause stress for you. Learn to communicate better and organise your work better. If you do this all the time, you will be able to deliver more and better output while living a stress-free life. Good luck!