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

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Organising your working and personal life is not just important these days…it’s vital. You simply cannot manage everything you have to without specific skills, and the most pertinent is how you organise your working day.

One of the biggest challenges managers face is getting jobs done on time. This can lead to poor performance, stagnation, loss of customers and worse. Good organisational skills starts with analysing what jobs need to be done and working to a schedule to complete them.

One of the most effective things you can do is prioritising your priorities. Everything that seems to cross your path doesn’t have to be a priority. Identify what really is vital to be completed today and what isn’t. Set the priorities so that you have a clear view of what needs to be done. Having to deal with overwhelm won’t help you achieve much.

Calculating how much time each piece of work requires takes practice but will be well worth it. If you work better with small chunks of work, then do so. There is no perfect way to approach a big project, but most people seem to feel better if it’s divided up into chunks. Don’t make it appear bigger than it really is. Be aware of how you personally approach tasks, and let them fit into your style, not the other way round.

Learning organisational skills at work is the step towards reaching the pre-determined goal. Mastering organisational skills at work, gives you an opportunity to be more effective and increase your productivity. It gives an edge over the other in your professional life as your manager recognises the potential in you. Organisational skills save you from stress in the workplace and undue pressures of life. Organisational skills are priceless as they show you the value of time and the importance of using it wisely. If you master this specific skill, it will open the way to other areas of development within your company.

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

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

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As a manager you’re going to find that there are times when you feel a lot more stressed than you do at other times. You might even stop and wonder why you feel more stressed than those around you. The truth is that, as managers, we tend to believe we need to be perfect at everything we do. We need to be in control. We want to be right. We want our jobs done perfectly. In short, we put too much pressure on ourselves.

As you approach the New Year, take the following 5 points into consideration and see if you can begin to make tiny changes, one at a time. Eliminating some of the stress you’re putting on yourself might make your job just a bit easier to accomplish!

5. Stop Expecting Perfection

You are not perfect, nor are the people who work for or with you. If you stop expecting perfection you won’t be disappointed when you don’t achieve it and you’ll be better able to take a strong, objective look at the great results you did achieve after working on a project instead of the minute percentage you think you didn’t.

4. Keep Your Opinions to Yourself

Do you have a tendancy towards giving people your unsolicited opinions or advice? Stop. If people want your help they will ask for it. If you’re working with someone who doesn’t know you well, ask them if you can offer your opinion or advice so that they can get ideas from another vantage point. If you stop forcing your ideas on others they’ll be more willing to work with you.

3. Forget the Past

So you’ve made a few mistakes in the past. Stop letting them eat at you, stressing you out even more. Put them aside and move on. You can’t change the past but you can control what you are doing now and in the future.

2. Analyse Less

Sometimes, when we are given new tasks, we feel like we have to learn as much as possible about the background or procedures before we get started. We end up adding stress and wasting time when we realistically could have just jumped right into the project. Try to spend less time analysing projects – just do them instead.

1. Stop Caring about Who Likes You

The truth is very simple. Not everyone you meet in your life is going to like you. Their reasons may or may not be valid. You don’t need to stress yourself out or care about who likes you and who does not. It doesn’t matter and, to be honest, you can work professionally with people who do not like you as long as you are all respectful.

Ready to reduce the stress in your life? Start by taking a look at yourself and your habits. Once you can do that you’ll be half way home and your relationships with your team members will instantly begin to improve!

Thanks again,
Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Leadership

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

Alright – I have one more thing to say about employee burnout and then we’ll put the subject away for a little while. You know the signs of burnout, what causes burnout, and how to remedy the situation.

That’s all well and good but the real question is whether or not you are capable of preventing employee burnout.

One of the best ways to prevent employee burnout is to recognize the signs and stop the employee from heading down that path before he actually reaches the state of burnout. But what does this really entail?

For starters, make sure you have clarified your employee’s job description. In some cases an employee may actually be doing too much because he feels he or she is supposed to be doing tasks that could easily be passed on to someone else. In other cases the job description that has been set forth may have been too lofty and you may need to make some changes internally in order to redistribute the workload.

In some cases burnout is caused by boredom and a lack of work. If this is the case, add additional duties to your employee’s job description. Make sure they’re challenging while remaining within that employee’s skillset. You may just be surprised to find you’ve been underutilizing someone with a special skillset you had yet to discover.

While most managers don’t want to give up good employees, it’s important to take a step back and consider whether or not it may be more beneficial to the employee in question to accept a job transfer. Perhaps a different team, department, or job function would allow him to continue working while giving him the change he needs to stop feeling burnt out. Don’t be offended if an employee does NOT want to transfer, though. This simply means he likes his job (and you) enough to find another alternative.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try try again.” You may have to offer up several solutions before finding one that helps prevent the employee in question from burning out. In some cases you may end up asking your employee to take some time off so that he can relax and regroup. It’s better to have this happen before he’s completely burnt out than to wait until he’s no longer functional or has made himself ill.

Don’t forget that the stress associated with burnout can be very serious. If none of these options work, or if you suspect there is another underlying cause, it may be best for you or your employees to seek the advice of a health care provider. Proper stress management is the key to avoiding burnout altogether.

Thanks again,
Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Training

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

To wrap up this recent series on stress management we’ll pick up where we left off and take a look at how task management impacts the amount of stress you feel at work. We’ve already covered time management and some of the ways you can use it to feel better, so how can you shuffle your actual workload?

Task management means being able to complete projects effectively and efficiently. Someone feeling completely stressed out and overworked may not feel as though those things are possible, but they are.

Start by prioritizing your tasks for the day. Decide which ones are more important and put them at the top of the list. If there is a task you dread, put that at the top of the list as well. It’s better to get it out of the way early than to let it linger over your head all day.

Look at your larger projects and decide whether or not it is possible to break them down into smaller subprojects. Work on one subproject at a time until the entire task is complete.

Here it is again, folks – delegation. You are not responsible for completing every single project you encounter on your own. Use your authority as a manger to delegate some of your responsibilities to the appropriate members of your team. That’s why they were hired, isn’t it?

Properly handling the tasks you must tackle daily will also make a huge difference in the way you are able to handle stress at work. You may want to be a superman but it’s really not necessary!

Thanks again,
Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Training Course

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