How To Successfully Manage Good & Bad Stress
Written by Roxana Radulescu, Leadership & Team Coach
Roxana is the founder of All Personal, a Canadian award-winning leadership and team coaching & training company helping corporate team leaders and start-up co-founders boost leadership skills to become dream ‘bosses’ and build dream teams.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve noticed an increase in levels of stress in many of the team leaders I coach. These levels have increased on top of already high levels of stress.
Now, I am blessed to work with some incredible humans. They are thoughtful, smart, self-aware, compassionate, caring, resilient. They genuinely care about their teams and the results they achieve together. They struggle – both with their levels of stress, and those of their team members.
Often, the conversation revolves around moments of reflection and self-awareness – which, not surprisingly, happen more often during their vacation time.
I usually ask what insights they gained during their time off. Lately, this is what I've been hearing:
"I realized I needed more sleep. Way more than I’ve been getting."
"I need to go out with my friends more often."
"I need to stop making my schedule based on other people’s schedule."
"I realized I might not need that much social connection, but others in my team might need more."
"I keep thinking about all the uncertainty at work and that stresses me out way too much. I need to do something about it."
Self-awareness is great because it can create excitement about that need for change. Also, it can create... paradoxically, more stress.
The stress that I need to stop, I need to change, I need to improve, I need to! There’s a certain amount of urgency to it. Now that I have all these new thoughts, I keep thinking about them constantly too!
Stress can be exciting and it can be depleting which affects our performance – in different ways, of course.
Image by Global Village Academy North
With exciting stress, called eustress. I will be motivated, energetic, engaged, eager to start doing something. The definition of it is, 'a positive form of stress that can motivate and energize you. It typically arises from challenges that you feel equipped to handle. It's the kind of stress that gets us in flow, or 'in the zone'.
Then, there is bad stress, called distress. It's the kind that makes us feel exhausted, demotivated, overwhelmed. Its definition is, 'negative stress that can be harmful to your health if it persists over time.'
These are perhaps the main differences:
Good stress is short-term and energizing.
Bad stress tends to be long-term and depleting.
One exercise I go through with my coaching clients, to help recognize the types of stress and think about how to manage them is, to download the stressors.
Create a stressors map. You can use post-it notes so you can move them around, and have fun with it. Use markers, drawings, whatever helps you create a visual of all those thoughts and sensations that make you feel stressed.
Once you've downloaded them, reshuffle and categorize them into good or bad stressors.
This also helps you re-prioritize or re-categorize the stressors:
What are the ones that you can or need to do something about or with?
What are the ones that you can't or won't be able to do anything about?
Are there any that you might eliminate altogether in some cases?
What the map does is it helps you face your stressors straight on? They’re no longer freely wondering in your head, taking too much space and energy away from you! You’re looking them in the eye and deciding:
Are you helpful or harmful?
Shall I control, influence or simply erase you? (and here feel free to add that famous Arnold Schwarzenegger line from the movie Eraser – 'You've just been erased.')
Lead different. Face your stressors - they might surprise you!
If you want to dive deeper in this topic, you may also want to watch and read:
Free Masterclass for People Who Lead People and Teams – previously recorded, with free exercises and hand-outs
Book a complimentary 30-minute call, ask your questions and discuss ways to manage your stressors better.
Roxana Radulescu, Leadership & Team Coach
Roxana is the founder of All Personal, a Canadian award-winning leadership and team coaching & training company. Unlike other people leadership programs that focus on top executives, All Personal also works with mid-senior corporate leaders and start-up co-founders – and their teams! Roxana is a TEDx speaker, a certified Professional Coach – ACC with the International Coaching Federation, EIA with the European Mentoring & Coaching Council (EMCC), and Team Coach – ITCA with EMCC, Scaled OKRs coach and a certified GCologist®. She holds a diploma in Learning & Development and Human Resources practice from the Chartered Institute for Personnel & Development in the UK.
