In this final step, you will develop strategies to help you reduce and eliminate bad stress from your life.  Stress has many short and long term negative connotations.  It has been shown to affect your mood, looks, intelligence, and immune system.  Stress has a big impact on relationships, wealth and health.  It kills people in many ways!  Mastering it should become (if it isn’t already) a top priority for you.  I propose six strategies for mastering stress.

Stress Mastering Strategies

• Knowledge: Learn as much as possible about yourself and others close to you.
• Awareness:  Become highly aware of your own and others’ personality, strengths, weaknesses, intentions, etc.
• Acceptance: Accept yourself and others as you/they are and focus on positive attributes
• Expectations:  Validate your expectations of yourself and others, as well as those others have of you.
• Proactivity:  Focus on your “Circle of Control” (a term coined by Stephen Covey in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People)
• Meaning: Clarify/validate the meaning of all stimuli.

Is it Worth It?

One final thought about ways and means to master stress.  Sometimes we get all worked up about things that may not be worth the stress they produce.  The following questions can go a long way in helping you and others explore stress worthiness.

• What happens if I do?
• What happens if I do not?
• What will not happen if I do?
• What will not happen if I do not?

As I said at the beginning of the post, IT managers have one of the most stress-full jobs out there!  I truly believe that a lot of the stressors affecting you can be mastered, in some cases, with very little effort.  These aforementioned four steps can be your “launch pad” for stress reduction and mastery.  And in addition to mastering your own, I suggest you can also use them to assist others under you manage, mitigate and eliminate a lot of their stress.  This can ultimately make you and your team more efficient, effective and healthy!

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO