Is Workplace Stress Frustrating Your Effectiveness?

The hidden key to career success is how you react to workplace stress. Much more than your technical skills, your people skills, or even your suck-up-to-the-boss skills, it is how you manage and deflect stress that determines your success in the company. This is because the company can train anyone to perform technically. They can hire gregarious people and educate them technically. And the boss will always find someone who will suck up. But it is a rare to find someone who can keep his or her head in the middle of chaos, or who doesn’t call in sick every time a crisis deadline looms.
Workplace stress is relentless. It presses on you without relief. It attacks you from all sides, in all situations, at all times. It causes pain. It causes health problems. And ignoring it, or treating it like just-part-of-the-job, means that you will never rise above it. It will frustrate you. And you – the real you, who can do the job and command advancement – will fade from anyone’s notice.
Here are 5 ways that workplace stress frustrates your personal effectiveness at work:
1. You spend so much time dealing with stress that you have less time to do the extras on your job that get you noticed as a go-getter. This is mischaracterized as time management. Real time management is creating those gaps in your day that you fill with what you want to do.
2. You spend so much energy on stress that you don’t have the ability to compete with younger or newer co-workers. Stress is like a hole in the gas tank of your car.
3. You spend so much money dealing with the bad health effects of stress that you cannot afford those social outings that develop teamwork between you and management. Upper management is looking to promote the people they know and trust. Social outings help establish this.
4. You spend so much emotional energy on fighting off stress that your personal attractiveness and appearance look neglected and older. This does not mean “dress to impress.” But it does mean that those bags under your eyes from lack of sleep make you look incompetent.
5. You spend so much social capital complaining to your co-workers about the stress in your life that they cannot view you as their effective leader. People will not follow someone who tells them that he or she cannot get the job done.
It is very easy to go along with everyone else and treat workplace stress as a sort of natural disaster: something you plan for, but cannot prevent. This approach leads to an attitude of complacency and passivity. By attacking stress, you can break out of this mental defeatist attitude and take control of your life in a tangible way.
The way to attack stress is with a comprehensive stress management strategy and system. Stress attacks you externally and internally. It affects and weakens your physical body, your emotional systems, and your will. Having a system built primarily to help one of these, with some add ons for the other types of stress, is the least effective. Stress needs to be met as hard and aggressively as it attacks you. Take control of stress and you take control of your life. Remember: life is what happens to you; living is what you do to life.