1. How I cope with stress - I believe you can cope too

2. Has anyone here ever been stressed at work?
Or stressed at home?
Probably all of us at some time or another
Stress isn’t generally considered healthy - I don’t think that it does us much good, and I don’t think stressed people make our work places happy ones
So lets think about it and how to cope with or get rid of stress

3. So what is stress?
There are lots of definitions but the one I like is:
“Stress is having responsibility for things we have no control over”

4. It is stressful to be responsible for someone you cant control, or being responsible for meeting a target or a deadline that you don’t control
Some examples
Think of children (as wonderful as they are)
Parents have responsibility for children but have little or no control on what they do. Think of a stressed parent you know, or you may have a stressed parent, or perhaps you yourself are a stressed parent?

5. You may have been stressed driving – all the red lights or all the other drivers not up to your safe standards or an accident stopping traffic
You may have been stressed at work being responsible for someone else’s mistakes and despite your best efforts they let the team down
You may have had a boss that stresses you
You may be a contractor and someone doesn’t pay you while you still have to pay your suppliers and banks that need to be paid
You may have been stressed by someone in your sporting team

6. I think from our definition you have three choices, you can either:
So how do we cope with it?
I think from our definition you have three choices, you can either:
Stay stressed,
take control of what is stressing you, or
give up responsibility for the cause of the stress

7. Although staying stressed is an option its probably not a good one, so lets look firstly at taking control
The key I think is to put the responsibility and the control together
To take control of what is stressing you it needs to be clear what the problem is and who owns the problem, and the person in control should have responsibility

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For example you may have a boss that does not give you a decision. Although I think managers need to make decisions that are best for the business, some people want the control without the responsibility, don’t make decisions stressing the people they manage.
Ever been in a situation where you wanted to know from your boss an outcome – eg if you should do A or B?”
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9. You could stay waiting on your boss for an answer to do A or B
You could stay waiting on your boss for an answer to do A or B. If you need this answer to make something happen and he is not giving you one you would probably stay stressed.
One possible solution is you could say to the boss you are going to do A until your boss tells you to do otherwise (alternatively you can say I am going to do B until you tell me to do otherwise). I call this a default solution.
That way your boss is has to make a decision to tell you to do A or B or loose control with a decision being made if he still doesn’t do his job – and he then has responsibility for it – because by not giving you an answer you stay with the default solution and you get one and are less stressed

10. So what about giving up responsibility?
Take the parenting example
You may be asking a child to clean his room and he refuses
The problem here is that you own the choice – you own the room being cleaning job so you own the responsibility and not the child
An alternative is you could give the child the responsibility – give him the choice to clean his room and a pair of consequences
You could say if you clean your room we will go to the park, and if you don’t you have to stay at home – he then takes responsibility for the decision and destresses the parent

11. In summary to help cope with stress we can put control and responsibility together
Either taking control if you are responsible or giving up responsibility to whoever is in control
Think about how you can be less stressed at work and have a safe day