Mastering the “Stress Paradox” – Part II

Step 2:  Identify Your “Vital Few” BAD Stressors

Now that you hopefully have a better understanding of the stress dynamics, we can move to the next step of identifying your “vital few” bad stressors.  In this phase you need to make a list of whom or what makes you most stressed most often.  Once you have developed that list, you can move on to the next step where you will validate each of the stressors.

Step 3:  Validate Each of Your “Vital Few”

In this step you will take each of your stressors on the list develop in the prior step and you will validate each of them.  The idea is to evaluate each stressor to ensure they are worthy of your attention and the negative impact they are currently producing or will produce if not addressed promptly and properly.

Here you will leverage the new awareness you gained earlier about the role of meaning-making on bad stress. The idea is to ensure that the stress you are getting is valid and not “made up” by your mind and thus unnecessary.

Reframing

The best way to get you going is to illustrate the process using an example.  Let’s say that one of your big stressors comes from your Boss asking questions all the time.  In such case, you would have to explore why that causes you stress.  What does it mean to you?  Why do his or her questions bother you so much?  Let me tell you a quick related story.  I am an inquisitive person by nature.  As a CEO, I ask lots of questions to all of my employees.  A few years ago, I had one Director who always reacted very poorly to my questioning.  One day, after I could tell he was very upset about my questioning, I confronted him about it.  I explained to him my rationale for questioning him so much and I shared with him examples of my inquisitiveness in many situations and with others throughout the organization.   I helped him reframe the meaning he was giving my questioning from “I did not trust him or think he was competent” to “I am just a curious and inquisitive person trying to learn and do my job as a CEO” — What a difference that made for him.  In a few minutes, he went from literally hating my questions to loving them.  His responses were no longer short and defensive-sounding.  They became much more substantive and informative.  More importantly, his blood pressure and heart rate dramatically improved!   It was amazing!  That is the power meaning has on us.

So what I suggest you do now is to make sure you explore each of your top stressors to make sure that stress is not coming from your meaning-making process.  If you discover a stressor is coming from this process, you need to work with yourself and others to reframe the meaning(s) assigned and reduce the stress those meanings are producing.

Do You Really “HAVE TO”?

Another area you can use to explore your meaning-making process is what Psychologists call “The Four Modal Operators of Necessity”: You “MUST” — You “SHOULD” — You “HAVE TO” — You “NEED TO”.   These operators have been shown to cause significant unnecessary stress.  These operators function as habitual modes inside us.  They “make” us (and sometimes others) think that we must, have to, need to, or should do something.  That can, in turn, cause undue stress.  Becoming aware of your use of these operators and/or questioning others when they use them can go a long way in mitigating and eliminating unnecessary stress from your life.

Continue to Mastering the “Stress Paradox” – Part 3

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO