Stress Tips: The Season Begins

I want to thank everyone who participated in the Fall 2007 Park City Stress Awareness and Management Presentation from the restaurant and hospitality industry. You demonstrate a healthy desire to take care of yourself, your workplace, and your marketplace, which ultimately leaves a great impression of our destination town on the rest of the world, meaning more money in everybodys pockets, and a better guarantee that they'll come back in the future for more!

During the season, don't forget to check into the blog for tips that can situationally and cyclically keep you fresh, maintain your stress tolerance, preserve and increase stress headroom. I'll suspend research links so that all of you who are busy can just get your job done, and we'll re-start links to research after the season ends, when there's more time for extra-curricular learning!

As we come up to the big upsurge in visitors to town for the Christmas holidays, everybody's amped up and ready to go, and the whole idea of stress in the workplace is probably just a myth right now. Banter, setting up and coaching rigorous standards are rituals of the workplace that get us in the efficient mode for doing our job, and even throw a little high energy our way to kick off our getting amped up.

If you happen to be one of those employees or managers working in a stale workplace, where your experience as the season is coming on is expectation of frustration and being hit by situations you already are fed up with, let me share with you a great trick I shared in this season's presentation. We tend to be reactive and defensive, and this is a proactive re-programming trick. I'll want to offer more details on this practice than I have time for this week, so come back next week to get more particulars.

Use the time from when you get out of your car, walking to work, riding the bus, or any moment to 5 minutes when you have some alone time on the way into work, for this practice. If you can't find 5 minutes of alone time in your day, take a long bathroom break sometime during the day, and practice this visualizing routine. It really works!

We tend to use our fight or flight mode to amp us up, and because we tend to be creatures of habit that fall into using the fight or flight mode to profile our environment, like many type A personalities, to locate obstacles and remove them in order to attain our goal: happiness, satisfaction, flow, non-resistance etc. When things get stale, we can get stuck in this mode, and use whatever free brain time we have to anticipate unpleasant experiences that may be on the way.
Because of the way the brain is wired, this style of profiling the world around us brings up associative memories so we can use that information to keep us on our toes. This automated program of the brain, however, has unintended consequences. When things get stale in the workplace, we can be profiling for the same undesirable circumstances day after day, hour after hour, and it can really drag us down. The memories coming up that we assume are the anticipated future may not really be like what is happening. This kind of mistake is common with fight or flight perceptions for many of us, and changes depending on the intensity of the discomfort arising from an anticipated experience.

So, you're getting out of your car, and walking into work. You can actually take 5-20 minutes a day for 3 weeks and rehearse this at home, over coffee, before you go to bed, whenever it's convenient. Start the practice by visualizing yourself, from the car door to the workplace door, the way you are when you are not profiling for stressors, for obstacles and roadblocks and problems for the day. How did you walk through the door when you were thinking about starting a new job, or the days after you first made good money, or after you first made good connections or had a really successful day?

You know best. Sometimes it's really difficult to break the negative emotion/negative association pattern. Don't try changing it all at once. Recall the last time you had a monumental problem and got through it sucessfully. The feelings were probably similar. It could be a bad day, a day where everything went wrong, a day when surprises and new obstacles kept presenting themselves. I guarantee you have one in your history, one where you may not have enjoyed what was going on at the time. If you stop to look back at it, when the day was done you got your job done, the work was satisfactory or adequate if not exceptional, and you let it go and moved on to the next moment in your life. We'll talk more about this later. Have a great day!