Making stress your friend!

Stress. It makes your heart pound, your breathing quicken and your forehead sweat. In my coaching and leadership training, stress is always a theme, people seem to become more and more aware of health risks, both physically and mentally. Watch the TED talk, you’ll be surprised!

But while stress has been made into a public health enemy, new research suggests that stress may only be bad for you if you believe that to be the case. Psychologist Kelly McGonigal urges us to see stress as a positive, and introduces us to an unsung mechanism for stress reduction: reaching out to others.

A study did made Kelly rethink her approach to stress. This study tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years, and they started by asking people, “How much stress have you experienced in the last year?” They also asked, “Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?” And then they used public death records to find out who died….. Some bad news first. People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43 percent increased risk of dying. But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health. People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress. Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you. So this study got me wondering:  Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier?  And here the science says yes. When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body’s response to stress. I use this concept a lot in my coaching and leadership sessions, with great success.  Watch the full Ted talk to also get a better understanding of why our believe system is so crucial in not just our perception of stress, also how our body response is to stress.  Happy watching and learning.

Stress is also an important topic in the VUCA webinars

Every month I deliver 1 hour and  free webinar on dealing with the VUCA world and organizations.

It’s become a trendy managerial acronym: VUCA, short for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and a catchall for “Hey, it’s crazy out there!” It’s also misleading: VUCA conflates four distinct types of challenges that demand four distinct types of responses. That makes it difficult to know how to approach a challenging situation and easy to use VUCA as a crutch, a way to throw off the hard work of strategy and planning—after all, you can’t prepare for a VUCA world, right?

Wrong! Check-out the webinars and see, hear and conclude for yourself. We can prepare how we deal with VUCA! And VUCA is here and accelerating! Become more resilient and capable, first by better understanding. 

VUCA environments do usually generate a lot of stress and besides the lessons from Kelly McGonigal, the VUCA sessions also reveal many leadership opportunities and skills to develop, for keeping a balanced approach. 

Events (select upcoming for the next webinars)