Tag Archives: stress

On Getting Better When You’re Too Tired

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I’m tired. Not having properly trained on my road bike for this year, I went out last Sunday with friends and rode 56 miles. It was evident fairly early on that I was lagging behind, although in my defence I was following a friend who’d just completed a two-day, 60/40 mile ride up the Marmotte in the Alps. In fairness, then, he was much better prepared for the day than me.

But that was four days ago, and I’m still tired. So what, I hear you ask?

Being tired is no excuse for being lazy. It is tempting to give a task less than you would if you were feeling hale and hearty, but doing that serves no-one. As I sat at my desk preparing to write this blog I was soooo tempted to put it off until I felt better or, failing that, to just look up an old entry and regurgitate that, instead. But you’d have not learned anything new – well, when I say ‘learned’ and ‘new’, perhaps I’m looking more towards providing a new perspective on old learning.

And I wouldn’t have ‘got better’ in the competency sense. Added to that, perhaps my conscience would have screamed at me.

Being tired is only an excuse – nay, reason – for taking longer to do a job. The reality of personal development is that people do get tired, they do lose their sense of motivation, they are affected by moods and circumstances. Neither of which excuse largesse, but they will certainly affect performance.

But how big an effect those influences have on performance, is up to the performer.

Making the proactive choice to put in the effort required to do the better job is key. Deciding to perform at the required level – even at the highest possible level – is the first step to overcoming the drag created by fatigue. It might not be the only step, I admit. If the task to be done is a physical task, then the effect of fatigue will be more obvious and impactive than if the task to be done requires a mental approach more than a muscular one.

But if you’re thinking “I don’t really want to do this,” then the answer is to decide that you will, and to decide that you will do it to the best of your ability even if it takes a little longer than it usually does.

And if you’re experience is the same as the one I’ve just had in writing this blog after thinking about whether or not I can be bothered to do it at all, you may well find that it didn’t take as much time or effort as your brain initially calculated it would.

Because 10 minutes ago I was too tired. Now, my work here is done. Including a review and an edit and posting onto this website. Ten minutes from ‘Not Today’ until ‘Done’.

Do you have days/jobs like that? Days when you just can’t get started because you are tired? Make the decision that YOU are in charge, not your emotions.

And as a bonus, here’s another tip for when you have started but are flagging. It’s one I used when I was trying to keep up with the King of the Mountains.

SEAL Team trainers have discovered that when a candidate has ‘had enough’, the successful candidates can still find another 40% – forty   percent – energy left, if they just dig deep and find it. On my bike, really feeling the fatigue from about 35 miles in and knowing I had 20+ left to go, I just reminded myself that if I wanted it, the energy was there. I knew I’d feel it later, but my body would recover to a better base level afterwards. (Hopefully, soon!)

Maybe that’s the ultimate reward. The reward for applying the First Resolution.

The harder you try to overcome not feeling your best, the better your best becomes.

Emotional Control – and Two Fights.

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Years ago during my policing career, two colleagues arrested a criminal who had a reputation for violence. On arrival at the Custody Unit car park, and just outside the Unit entrance doors, the officers alighted and invited the detainee to get out of the car. (It was before the use of vans was routine.) He declined their invitation.

Using ‘minimum force’ I used a technique I had learned in training, I put the blunt end of a pen against his earlobe and putting the two between my fingers, squeezed. He got out, at which point my two colleagues pinned him against the wall and tried to cover all his limbs and torso at the same time. I observed two things – one, he was trapped, and two, he wasn’t actually resisting any more.

“Flipping heck Dave, help us!” yelled one of my mates.

“He’s not resisting anymore.” I calmly responded. And he wasn’t. he meekly accepted his fate once the two sweating coppers eased off and the rest of the process went easily.

For 24 hours the two colleagues thought ill of me. The following day, they apologised. The emotion of the moment had taken over.

Another day, same unit. A well known and truly violent prisoner, with a history for acting up in the Unit, was asked to remove his clothes for forensic examination. Predictably, off he went. Yelling, demanding, threatening. It was going to take the world to get his kit off.

“Oy, ******,” I shouted. “WHAT?” he replied.

“Has behaving like that ever actually worked for you?” I asked.

A moment passed and he started undressing.

I’m no saint. I lost my temper now and then. Which doesn’t make today’s lesson less impactive, it merely reinforces it.

When emotions are high, when stresses are present, when losing your temper and abandoning all emotional control is ooohhhh so easy,

Don’t.

There are two reasons for this. First of all, it makes you feel good afterwards. Your keeping control is emotionally satisfying.

But second, it means you keep control and are able to deal with the event better. While I’m not proposing you will ever need this advice, my experience has always been than in a fight it’s the one who loses control that loses. I was attacked many times during my career but I always (somehow!) managed to keep my cool – even when a criminal bit into my leg and I let him stay there because it meant he wasn’t running off – and I literally tied them up in an effective controlling hold because they had lost control and I hadn’t.

You may not be involved in fisticuffs, but the same advice applies to those verbal confrontations we all, occasionally, find ourselves starting or trying to finish. Maintaining emotional control is key to resolution, and it is a truly empowering characteristic that those who wish to be principled leaders should seek to adopt.

All it takes is a moment to decide – who’s in charge here? Me or my emotions.

Choose ‘me’.

NOW is the time to prevent the post COVID explosion of stress.

03 Friday Apr 2020

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David Allen of Getting Things Done fame, wrote:

“Many organisations are exhorting their people to be ‘customer driven’ and to ‘go the extra mile’ to add a competitive advantage of extraordinary service that will win more business. But they may not be addressing the ability to handle that business. …… When your front line feels overwhelmed, watch out for resistance to new customers and opportunities.”

That, leaders in the public sector, is how your staff feel every day. Every time you say yes to a government diktat, or to a local authority project, or to a promotion-seeking evidence gatherer, you add to your staff’s stress. Every time you ‘listen’ to your staff and take no notes and do nothing, you’re adding more. And when you take on more and more new work in the knowledge that it’s not you but your front line that has to do it, and you do that without ridding them of the other work, you add stress.

No matter how productive your staff, you cannot just keep loading them with more without then having to wonder why they’ve gone sick for 6 months. And why they sue you for constructive dismissal.

Wake up!

Now would be a great time to look at all that stuff that is building up because of what’s happening, and respectfully, considerately, courageously but resolutely decide what to leave behind when it’s all over.

And where necessary, tell those who want that cr4p that they can’t have it unless they cough up money and resources for the catch up process.

Otherwise the cost of what you think you’ll be doing is going to be a lot more than you can afford.

Loss of morale (minimum), loss of staff (probably) and in extreme circumstances, loss of life. Some people can’t cope.

You’ve all heralded the new world of Mental Health in the Workplace.

Actively choosing what is TRULY important (as opposed to every different department demanding ‘their’ figures and forms be submitted by the end of any working day).

Train your staff in time management methodology,  and divest them – and you – of the Quadrant 3 and Quadrant 4 ‘nice’ stuff that is burning up their potential productivity. THAT is the way to keep staff and create the results that matter.

So put your money where your mouth is. Decide what isn’t going to be done when this is all over. And stand by your decisions.

 

Time Management = Emotional Control = Stress Management.

13 Monday Jan 2020

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The first paragraph of TimePower by Charles R. Hobbs (Harper and Row, 1987) reads thus:

“How often do you have the kind of day when you feel like you hold the world on a string? It’s the kind of feeling you would probably like to enjoy more often. The moment when you feel this way is the moment when you are most in control of the events in your life: most in control of what you are doing, most in control of your relationships with others. As your ability to control events increases, those exalted moments become more frequent.”

The counter philosophy to that paragraph must therefore be that you are most stressed when the opposite is true – when you feel least in control or, worse, when you feel completely out of control in terms of the events in your life and your relationship with others.

Note the use of the word ‘feel’ in both of these paragraphs. I spotted it for the first time when I read the paragraph last night. Then I realised:

To be content with your control of your time and relationships, you don’t necessarily have to be in control.

You just need to feel that you’re control.

Quite profound.

I had a supervisor, once. We called him a shit magnet. (Sorry.) When he came into work, it was as if all the robbers, rapists and murderers had been waiting for him before acting. Oh, and all the wanted persons in Wales got arrested, too. All at the same time, but hundreds of miles apart.

He never skipped a beat. He would quietly look at what was happening around him, decide what needed to be done, and then quietly delegate or act with an appropriate level of urgency. For those around him, his calm was catching. And part of his process was to think with a pen and a book in his hands.

Despite the fact that there was no way he could be in complete control of what was going on, he took enough action to feel as if he had it all managed. Maybe more than enough. But he felt in control, and his calm attitude and approach manifested itself in the rest of his team feeling as though they were in control, too. We didn’t feel stressed, either.

The only truly effective way to ‘feel’ this way is to have a complete, systematic approach to ‘stuff’ that means you can prioritise what needs to be done, dump what need not be done, and fit anything else around those decisions.

What this lesson says to me is that, to a certain extent, time management as most people would understand the term is a key technique for emotional- and stress-management. One which few counsellors, coaches and managers seem to realise, promote and/or teach.

Traumatic incidents aside, stress is frequently the result of a build-up if unaddressed issues. It’s not the pile of paper that needs dealing with – it’s the way you feel about that. It’s not that appointment you won’t manage to keep, or which you aren’t prepared for – it’s the way you feel about being late or unprepared. It’s not that conversation you need to have but the way you feel about what happens if it doesn’t go well when you finally manage to have it.

And all of those feelings can be controlled by taking the ‘time management’ actions people like Hobbs, Covey and Smith promote. Deciding what needs to be done, making a plan that helps you act on that decision, and then executing that plan. Once you have that level of appropriate control, your feelings about those events change for the positive.

Go learn time management.

The Wisdom That Saved Me.

09 Thursday Jan 2020

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This will be an absolute, unashamed plug. But it has an X-Factor style back story about me.

In the early 1990s I read a book. I have, admittedly, read some more since then. In the mid-1990s, I threw what those in my former profession called a ‘double-six’, which is an inexplicable euphemism for losing it emotionally and doing something that exhibits the point at which a straw broke your camel’s back. In my case, and I really didn’t see it coming, I broke down in tears in front of one of the best, most understanding supervisors I ever had the honour to serve. I suspect he was as surprised as I was. Evidently, a build up of stress factors over a period of time just hit me and I suffered an emotional collapse.

Traditionally, when this happens to coppers they have 6 months off, see the doctor for some pills, and later debate with their friends who has the highest dosage of said pills. Which is not a judgment on whether or not they were suffering from stress, because they invariably were. It is just a statement based on my experience of my colleagues’ response to it. Absence, medication, discussion. Standard procedure.

In my case I left work at the start of the shift during which it happened, had the following shift off, then after a three day weekend was back for my morning shift on the Monday. Two workdays lost, a weekend off as per the rota, and back.

One might suggest I wasn’t really stressed. Well, I don’t cry easily. I am/was a macho, rooftop-chasin’, car-chasin’, door-kickin’ kind of guy. So tears at lunchtime suggest a breakdown.

What ‘sorted’ my depression for me was not drugs. It was application of what I’d learned in the aforementioned book. It espoused taking control of events by using the gap between stimulus and response to decide, consciously, deliberately, in a considered way what, exactly, to do about the event. I took my family to dinner, decided what changes I felt I needed the job to make in my regard and, with that clarity, sought and got it.

Never lost it again. I’ve suffered some severe cr4p since then but it’s never brought me to tears or caused a lay-off.

On the 9th of March 2020, the 30th Anniversary Edition of that book will be released. It’s been updated, and if the font size remains the same there’ll be an extra 120 pages of ‘stuff’ in it. I’m already pumped and waiting to buy it.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey (1932-2012), amended by his son Sean.

If you want an intelligent, profound and systematic take on effective living that doesn’t dictate what you should do but focuses on how it is you who decides what and how you need to do things, this is it.

I’ve read tons of stuff. Anthony Robbins, Ziglar, Tracy, Sinek, and others. They all provide great advice on how to get what you want.

But every time I think about ‘life’ and consider ‘doing’ what these writers promote, I find that I always come back to the wisdom – and the book – that Stephen Covey gave me. And if the book blurb is true, 50,000,000 suspect the same.

Go on. Treat yourself. Buy a book that I can assure you from experience, really is life-changing.

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Yep. Shook his hand……

100-Day Challenge, Day 44. And about a ‘Cure’ for Stress.

13 Sunday Aug 2017

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This week I have been mostly exercising every two days, eating sensibly and producing like a dervish. I discovered that ‘being on holidays’ equates to ’90-120 minutes a day dealing with voluntary tasks’, in that two days of this week felt like I was one of those CEOs who claims to get a million emails a day. Every single one I dealt with generated two more, I swear. Hence this input on Stress.

Stress is self-imposed. (Cue anger.) Okay, let me temper that a bit.

On Monday I went to Cardiff Yes Group, a post-Tony Robbins event ‘alumni’ event where personal development lecturers keep the audience ‘on track’ with their commitments. All are welcome, and there are UK-wide events available.

The speaker suggested that (one of) the reasons for stress arise from overwhelm and an inability to cope with change and pressure because life/we/bosses etc haven’t allowed time for our neurology to get respite from the constant changes of direction (e.g. from interruptions like constant demands for attention from emails). That inability to cope can be genuine and physical, or it can be a perception. By that, I mean that the stress is all too real to the sufferer but if they weren’t so pressured they’d realise they could control it, if they only knew how.

In other words, the stressed individual says, “I have 101 things to do and I just can’t see a way to do it.” The individual with a control strategy says, “I have 101 things to do today and 8 hours in which to do them. Do-able.” That is 480 minutes – about 4.5 minutes a ‘thing’, and for every ‘thing’ that takes a minute, that rate expands.

Time management might seem like a management cliché but in my opinion, from years of applying it, time management properly taught, accepted, encouraged and applied is an absolute – yes, absolute – cure for stress.

Please understand, I am not talking about stress resulting from trauma, accident, disaster, relationship failures and so on. That’s different, even if some relevant TM training can help. I am talking about task overwhelm in work and in the home.

Charles R Hobbs, in his epic book ‘Timepower’, suggests that high self-esteem is served by the ability to be in control of events. I am fairly confident when I suggest that those with genuinely high levels of justifiable self-esteem (as opposed to ego) rarely suffer from work-related stress. And that is because they are, or they feel they are in complete control of what’s ‘appenin’, OR they know that they can take control – even of the unexpected. They have techniques and approaches that enable that control.

In the mid-1990s I had what I call ‘an episode’ where this 6’ tall, macho, fightin’, drivin’, chasin’, action-man copper left a boss’s office in tears and went home before his shift was due to start. (Short version, I think it was slow burn.) Fortunately, I had been reading The 7 Habits and books like Timepower for years. I went home, took the wife and kids out for a family meal, and took stock. I recognised that what was happening was a stress build-up.

Then I took control and decided what I was going to do about the situation. I was back at work within 48 hours asking for what I needed to regain control. And got it. Never happened again.

We all know of people who do the tears thing and aren’t seen for months. They lost control and didn’t or couldn’t get it back, and that was because they didn’t know that there was an alternative to pills.

Values-based time management – might not be penicillin but by all that’s holy it’s a damn good treatment for what ails a lot of people.

Try it out. My book or theirs, you decide. It’s you who controls your decisions if you want to.

 

You are NOT obliged to be stressed unless you wish to do so……

26 Sunday Feb 2017

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Let’s start with a quick agenda.

  1. Stress is self-induced. To a degree.
  2. Stress is a chosen response to stimuli.
  3. Work creates stress.
  4. We chose our work.
  5. Therefore, WE have to change to reduce stress.

The YB12 ‘Best Year Ever’ process includes, as do many training programmes of its ilk, input on overcoming stress. Like Canfield, Covey and others, we suggest that stress is often the result of our response to an event. The psychologist Dr Robert Resnick created the formula E+R=O, where E is the Event; R is our Response to the Event; and O is the Outcome. The premise is that events tend to be outside our control, while responses are wholly within our control. Maths students already see how the only way to change O, given that E is a constant, is to change the value of R.

People who suffer from stress have not, either deliberately or passively, taken control of R. There may be perfectly good reasons why that is, but there it is. It could be fear of an imagined result (as all results are imagined until manifest); or it could be a response to a real threat (although the assumption that the threat will come to pass or only have one outcome is within our power). Either we take control of it, or it takes control of us. We can decide how we face it, even if we cannot alter the course of the event. We decide, deliberately or by accident, to be stressed – or not.

Traditionally, work is the primary cause of stress, usually for the reasons given above. An unwanted consequence of ‘work’ causes tension, and we buckle at the thought of the negative consequence if we fail, don’t do enough, the results aren’t favourable, and so on. It can also be the sheer drudgery or perceived pointlessness of the work, or the repetitiveness of it.

Work, as a rule, is something we have chosen to do. We work bloody hard at getting a job, jumping through hoops in order to be posted to a role we want.

The point I am (finally) getting to is this: as we chose our work, and as we can choose our response to the ‘stresses’ (small ‘s’) of that work, we needn’t be stressed IF we look at our tasks in one of two ways. They are:

  1. Love your work.
  2. If you can’t love your work – love HOW you work.

I can best illustrate this concept by illustration. I was once tasked with some real drudgery in a role I HADN’T chosen, but one which it was felt I was magnificently competent to do. (My own fault.) I hated it for a number of reasons, which space won’t allow me to state.

But one way of overcoming the stress that resulted (and I was on the verge of collapse at one stage, I assure you – even I was surprised) was to challenge my productivity. I like measuring my productivity, so instead of ‘I have to do all this stuff’ I decided to think, ‘How much of this stuff can I do in a day?’

In the end, my record was 1,000 ‘tasks’. I admit I don’t ever want to do that again – I was knackered – but how ‘stressed’ was I when I told everyone what a lot of work I had achieved that day? Not at all. I had won, the tasks hadn’t.*

Look at the job you worked hard to obtain, but which now irks you. What about that work could you take control of so that YOU ran IT, instead of the other way around?

Do that.

 

*For more on that story, buy my book Effective Time and Life Management, available in Kindle or Paperback form from Amazon at that link.

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“It’s all too much!” Often, only if you LET that happen.

24 Sunday Jan 2016

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Everything develops – even stress.

I have undergone input on overcoming stress from the best, but all too often the writers and trainers focus on stress being caused by AN event – a family argument, potential redundancy at work, a split with a spouse, and so on. But I have always been aware of the ‘true’ story, which is that stress is rarely the consequence of any singular event.

It is all too frequently the result of a whole series of events, occasionally but not always contemporaneous (at once), the combined effect of which is the sudden or even gently insidious onset of some kind of breakdown. And the worst part of this is that the lack of a significant event, or the inability to recognise the drip-drip-drip build-up of smaller stresses, had two effects.

First, the sufferer cannot deal effectively with the stress because s/he cannot clearly see the cause. As we are ‘stimulus-response’ creatures we expect to look at our symptoms and see a clear cause for our emotions, and when it isn’t clear we get all confused, and arguably even more stressed. Unlike a pain we can localise and treat, built-up stress has no scar, wound or ache we can point at and go ‘Aha!’ with.

The second effect is that those around us are also unable to see the ‘significant effect’ and therefore question why it is we are demonstrating the symptoms of stress-related physical or mental distress. I remember a colleague ‘going sick’ with ‘stress’ and those around me could not understand why he was so stressed as (in their eyes) he didn’t do any work and had nothing to be stressed about. I politely pointed out that just because someone is on sick leave from work it doesn’t necessarily follow that work was the cause. In the case in point it was probably more related to domestic issues related to civil legal challenges he was encountering with a questionably motivated local authority.

What is the cure to such stress? I am no psychologist or psychiatrist but one thing leaps out at me from cases like these, based wholly on my own experience of ‘built-up’ stress.

Take control. Recognise what you can do about your circumstances, and take charge of starting the things that need to be started, and stopping those that should be stopped. Let go of the things about which you can do nothing – accept them and move forward. Part of doing this is to identify what the problem is, but not necessarily the cause. Sometimes knowing what the problem is, is enough – the cause gets taken care of ‘by default’ when the problem is addressed. Not always, but more often than you realise.

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The YB12 – Best Year Ever Program includes input on overcoming stress. Go to the Have Your Best Year Ever page for more information, or go to www.yb12coach.com