By building emotional intelligence, it is possible to decide how to deal with stressful scenarios without losing your self-control. Stress is often something driven from outside influences, so the way to deal with it is often through understanding how you react to stress and deciding what you want from the situation.

Here are some ideas on maintaining control and building mental strength under pressure:

1) Be aware of how you are feeling and commit to keeping cool under that pressure. Your emotional brain will run away from itself if you’re not careful, and the amygdala (the part of our brain that helps control temper) could be bypassed if we allow ourselves to ‘lose it’ for any reason.

2) Stop yourself from jumping to conclusions in any situations before you have understood exactly what has occurred.

3) Determine to get to the root cause of any situation before allowing yourself to make conclusions.

4) Remember that most disagreements are caused by a rules breakdown, that is, you may have guidelines and rules as to how things should be done and everyone else’s rules are different to yours. So don’t jump to hasty conclusions before investigating.

5) Bring any stressful situations to the notice of the people involved so everyone has the opportunity to deal with them openly and honestly.

6) Practice stress-management techniques that have worked for you in the past. Things like a quick walk outside, physical workouts and meditation have proved workable solutions to stressful situations, simply because the emotional connection with the scenario has been disassociated, and the solutions from the logical part of the thinking brain are clearer to see.

7) Discuss various ways of dealing with stress with your team members, so everyone can become pro-active in discussing the way forward if these situations ever occur again.

If you are able to maintain a steady response to stress, you give yourself and your team the chance to deal with problems in a way that can be solution-focused and not problematical.

Thanks again

Sean
Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

Follow us here on Twitter

Balancing quality and efficiency isn’t easy these days. Demands from customers and bosses have never been greater and sometimes you feel like throwing your hands in the air and saying “No way!” (or words to that effect!)

What can you do if you know that meeting a specific deadline will result in poor quality or corners being cut?

It might help if you asked the stakeholder “Will you approve the steps needed to meet that delivery date?”

They will probably ask for clarification. This will then allow you to make the point you wanted to make. “Your deadline will not allow me/us/the company to achieve the level of quality you would insist on”.

If they ask what steps you would suggest, tell them that a shorter deadline would force you to deliver reduced quality or quantity, less precision or less formality. Get the stakeholder to recognise these results in advance. Then tell them what will have to happen in order to alleviate these outcomes, like more or better resources or a changed time limit.

If no change can be made, make a note of what happens along the journey, not with a view to casting blame for the poor quality of the job, but to help you reflect on how to handle similar situations in the future.

Also, highlight why this seems to be happening more and more. Is your time management poor, or do you need some project management coaching? Analyse what you can control and what is outside your control before casting blame or criticism in another’s direction.

You may be able to negotiate the deadline in some way. And note that we said ‘negotiate’, not ‘concede’. You have to have something of value that you can offer the other party in order for them to accept the deadline movement. You’re the only person who will be able to answer that in detail, but think about how the change in deadline might affect quality or performance or results.

Commit to achieving those results, and the stakeholder will realise that, if you are supported, the extra time given was worth the wait.

So, learn to determine what can be done, rather than what can’t, and that will help you to ascertain the direction you need to go. Rather than saying “there’s no way”, you may end up saying “there is a way…I just have to find it!”

Thanks again,
Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Manager Training

Click below for a:
Free email course “Improve your Management Skills”