Make Emotional Stress Controllable

Many years ago Mike Shipulski were presenting at a conference in Chicago. Shortly after Mike started to write a weekly blog which I have enjoyed reading. Recently, he published the following Bog regarding Emotional Stress.

I am sharing the article because not only do I think it is an excellent reminder but after Mike's article I am going to challenge you to make Emotional Stress controllable, especially if you are in a Leadership position.

Here is Mike's post ....

Things aren't good or bad. We make them that way.

Emotional stress is similar to physical stress. Both are exhausting, depleting, distracting, and physically limiting. But with physical stress, the cause is clear; the cause of emotional stress can be invisible or self induced.

When you go to the gym and lift weights, the physical stress is clear. You can see the dumbbells move up and down; you can see your arms connected to the dumbbells as they move; and you can feel your muscles do their work.  And after the workout, you know why you are tired, and you expect to feel sore the next day.  Action-response. Input-output. Cause-effect.

When you go into the office and do your work, the emotional stress is less clear.  You can see what must be done, but sometimes you are too busy to do it. You want to do it, but you cannot.  And that mismatch between what you want and your inability to get it done creates emotional stress.  You take no action, yet you still experience emotional stress. There is input but no output, yet there is stress.  There is a cause you cannot affect, and you create emotional stress.

With physical stress, you generate stress through movement.  With emotional stress, you can generate stress through a lack of movement or progress.

If you forgot you went to the gym yesterday and woke up this morning tired and with sore muscles, you’d be confused about what was going on in your body.  Why am I sore?  Why am I tired? I don’t get it.  What’s wrong with me?  But, in truth, there would be nothing wrong with you.  There would be a reason for your bodily tiredness and soreness, but the cause would be invisible to you.  Emotional stress is like this.

Many situations can cause you to create emotional stress.  For example, emotional stress can come when things don’t go as planned, when someone treats you poorly, or when the outcome is different than your expectations.  But because your day is busy and you are juggling projects, the cause of your stress can be less than obvious.  You feel more tired than you should, but you don’t know why.  You are irritable, but you don’t understand what’s behind it.  And maybe you ask – What’s wrong with me?  And maybe you’re confused, and you judge yourself negatively.

I think we can reduce our emotional stress if we are more aware of its causes.  What if we saw our workplaces as a gym?  What if we saw our workdays as physical workouts?  We could label our meetings as emotional bench press exercises.  We could declare our conversations are dumbbell curls.  We could see our deep work as an aerobic activity.

Why not give it a try? You may be more relaxed when you get home after your eight-hour “workout.”

Me again ....

The infection rate of Emotional Stress dramatically increases when your processes are unpredictable. I am not wishing upon you to miss your targets or suffer a period of time where you fail to meet your financial targets or you miss the target due to an unforeseen dramatic surprise expense.

Many of us are already manifesting Emotional Stress as the Global economy is getting restructured. Many feel that the Emotional Stress will evaporate once Tariffs are reduced or removed ... forget about it, Tariffs are here to stay. So the challenge to become more Productive becomes the primary objective.

For me personally, I have always been able to mitigate Emotional Stress by deploying and being very active with Daily Management. With Daily Management I experience "No Surprises" ... does that mean i magically always meet goals and targets ... No. But, I do always get advanced warning and usually enough time to avert the full impact. Yes, I love Daily Management not only as a survival tool but it gets me closer to our people. This allows me to offer coaching, mentorship, quick problem solving and most important it build workforce confidence. As a Team we will find a way to win and we usually always do. It does not eliminate my personal Emotional Stress, but it allows it to be shared and then with Team Work we can make the Dream Work !!

Getting organizations to adopt Daily Management is still one of our hardest sells. In many cases the organization is doing well financially (you wish they would have a bad fiscal period so they would recognize the need and importance). Unfortunately good fiscal performance masks inefficiencies and the need to change, imagine if those that are doing well adopted Daily Management where they could be.

In other cases Daily Management gets drowned due to a plethora of metrics they wish the departments to track. My suggestion to you is too keep it simple and laser focused preferably one single number that the entire organization can rally around. Secondary metrics then become helpful to increase the performance of the primary metric.

Emotional Stress is definitely debilitating not only to you, but it spreads from you into your organization where it then debilitates the organization resulting in poor employee moral and less than stellar productivity performance.

However, there is at least one remedy to help mitigate malady ... Daily Management. Our approach to implementation is exhaustive but dang it really works, so give us a call if you are too tired due to Emotional Stress.