Do you need to tame the stress in your life? What if I told you that it is pretty straight forward? Learning to first recognise, and implement the tools and techniques that work most effectively for you when it comes to managing your emotional wellbeing will help your whole team enjoy their work without becoming overwhelmed, and achieve more balance
Chaos reigns for everyone when our emotional wellbeing spins out of control. Especially when we’re faced with a seemingly untameable workload, making sure emotional wellbeing is at the top of your team’s priority list can seem like nothing more than a pipe dream.
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Track Your Stressors – Remember, I am human too!
We are all beautifully human, with different abilities and capacity to work through stress. Working with service users shows us there is no set rule for how a person develops and recovers, so why should your individual ability to manage your stressors be any different?
Identifying which situations in your workplace most impact on your stress levels will help you navigate any pressure on your emotional wellbeing.
Identify those triggers as early as possible, before they come to play a part in your day to day life for the biggest impact. As well as monitoring your stress triggers, keep track of any fluctuations within your emotional wellbeing so that you can make the fine adjustments you need, reducing the expectations and scheduling more time on a task. In some cases you can postpone or even crop a task to a minimal level instead of burning out.
Establish Emotional Wellbeing Boundaries
It’s okay to say no. In fact, saying no is sometimes crucial for your emotional wellbeing; in the words of Steve Jobs, ‘it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.’
We have been trained over and over by teachers, parents, and wider power brokers that we must not do anything or say anything that may inconvenience the rest of the world. To inconvenience anyone else, even at the expense of your own mental health and emotional wellbeing, is to be greedy, selfish, disrespectful the perfect route to being told to get back in your box. However, establishing clear cut, manageable boundaries that leave you room to get everything you need finished in your own time will have the most positive impact in the long run, reducing future conflict between your team members, and helping you to put your wellbeing first.
Talk to Someone
We need human interaction to survive. Offloading with a colleague before you leave the office for the day helps your workplace stresses stay at your workplace, instead of permeating your home life too. Accepting support from your colleagues, your friends and family helps you tackle any challenges to your emotional wellbeing safe in the knowledge that you have a support network to fall back on, reducing the feeling that you’re in it alone.
Back in 1985, US households reported how many confidantes they had to talk to. The average was 3; by 2004 that figure had fallen to 0. Before you can offload, maybe you need to build the connections and invest in quality relationships for those moments when we need to talk to someone,.
The road to burnout is littered with self-doubt, loneliness and feelings of imposter syndrome. Sharing the way you’re feeling with someone you trust helps stop your wellbeing from spiralling, so you can manage the stresses you face in a much more productive and positive manner.
You don’t have to work on your emotional wellbeing all by yourself. We have identified a few hundred different things you can do and have been cascading that across the country for a few years now. Here at Betterminds, our range of bespoke training courses are designed to equip your team with the skills you need to recognise the impact of stress, and put a stop to your stressors before they turn into something more serious. Take a look at our range of courses to help your team bounce back.