Does this email stress you out?

In my previous newsletter I mentioned that “I’m happy to start the conversation around stress management today.”

Today I would like us to continue the conversation. Where the previous edition looked at managing the stress of your team, today we’re moving inward.

We will deep dive into how you can manage your own stress, and how to avoid the pit: burnout.

This should give you a complete image on how you can use stress as your tool, instead of seeing it as an enemy.

Razmatazz without the matazz

Introduction

Leadership can take a toll on the best of us. I personally struggled with stress the most when my managers were not handling their stress properly. Instead of handling their own emotional intelligence and reactivity to difficult situations, they instead transmitted all their stress to ourselves, the team members. No matter how strategically or how effectively you manage your business, at the end of the day, if you don’t learn to take care of yourself, you could be accelerating the stress levels of yourself and everyone around you.

Business leaders of small businesses or startups often face the difficulty of leadership as they struggle to keep their company profitable and the team motivated. It requires quite a strong mind to juggle multiple demands in a day’s time and pretty soon, before they know it, these leaders work over 50 hours a week to get things rolling. Without stopping and understanding how intense their days are, they may reframe stress filled working hours as the normal.

According to an article on the Business Insider, high levels of stress could cause a negative influence on your leadership and ruin your productivity to an alarming extent. What’s an even more worrying factor is the easy and unnoticed slip into the stress trap as leaders try to resolve day to day issues using their best abilities.

Objectives

Subject

From dealing with complicated projects to managing difficult employees, from seeking new prospects to maintaining current prospects - there are multiple things that can cause unnecessary and unnoticed anxiety and worry.

Burnout isn’t the same thing as stress. While stress can have positive benefits to your team development, not managing it correctly can lead to burnout.

In these cases, you’ve been so worn down by stress that you feel burnt out, literally. While the benefits or detriments of slight stress vary from person to person, burnout is exclusively damaging for anyone.

Like stress, burnout manifests differently depending on the person. Even though we commonly associate burnout with emotional exhaustion, it can actually impact all areas of your life, from mental to physical.

From a facilitator position, you have the benefit and responsibility to remain aware of possible signs of burnout. Differentiating between stress and burnout is quintessential in deciding which approach to take in helping yourself and your team members.

Framework

Burnout can happen to anyone. If you love or tolerate your job, whether you work from the office or work from home, if you work too hard or too long, you can experience burnout.

And burnout doesn't just happen at work; you can get burnout in all areas of life. You are able to take this section of the course and apply it in any area of your life that may lead to you feeling burnt out: family, sports, parenting, or relationships. The goal is to design systems that can be applicable for handling burnout irrelevant of the space or time where it happens.

Here are some personal techniques you can apply as a leader to manage your stress before it is too late:

Final thoughts

The Bouncebackability Factor by Caitlin Donovan mentions that burnout can be the result of both internal and external factors. Internal burnout occurs because of individually owned issues, such as lack of healthy boundaries, negative mindset, perfectionism or past trauma. External burnout is the result of a company's culture and may occur because of heavy workloads, lack of control, lack of recognition, lack of community, perceived unfairness or mismatched values.

In general, each cause leads to a central tipping point: when work-related stress or pressure becomes too much or goes on for too long. This leads to burnout. Our goal is to manage our stress properly so it does not accelerate us reaching the tipping point.

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Quality content

The thorough research from the last years has allowed us to identify the clear signs of burnout. Whether it has been triggered by internal or external factors, some symptoms commonly found in all its forms. Being able to step back and understand when stress has transformed into a damaging state of burnout requires practice and self-introspection. Today’s quality content provides you with a tool to start being more aware of your own wellbeing.

Do you feel burnt out? Are you not sure? Conduct the following assessment to calculate your burnout score:

That’s all for today! See you next week