BEAUTY KLINIC

One of the consistent findings in organizational research is good leaders need to be self-aware. Getting to understand yourself can be a stressful experience. Many people think that psychologists constantly psychoanalyse those around them. This can be painful at parties when people become suspicious of you.

In therapeutic setting, helping patients become self-aware can create stress for them. How many of us really understand our own values, motivations, and drives? When I coach chief executive officers, one of the first things I do to increase their effectiveness in the organization is to help them become self-aware. I work on the assumption that self-awareness increases the capacity to confront, manage and relieve stress. This is particularly important in relationships where one or both parties have limited self-awareness and are unable to negotiate a meaningful communication space.

The concept is referred to in the literature is emotional intelligence and credit goes largely to Daniel Goleman for his work in this area. I believe that your work life and your personal relationships are made more effective through a high degree of emotional intelligence. Leaders with high self intelligence earn more money, have high producing and profitable departments and organizations, and are more successful overall. So my simple argument is become more self-aware and you increase your effectiveness and, probably, your capacity to manage and relieve stress.

A simple definition of emotional intelligence is one’s capacity to understand oneself and others and to be able to adapt to the emotional demands and interactions of the day.

Oddly enough, the feelings of the people around you affect your own emotional state. The brain’s limbic system is the area where we can examine moods and emotions. People react to each other’s emotions and in meetings, for example, it takes two hours for everyone to share the common mood of the meeting. There is constant interchange of emotionality in the workplace.

A fascinating piece of research suggests the following. Put two people together in a room and monitor their heart rate and blood pressure and you will find within 5 to 10 minutes they are almost identical. And they don’t even need to talk to each other. Just sitting together creates a shared physiological reaction.

If we do share common emotionality, it is obvious that we are constantly affecting the ones around us. If we are stressed, our partners at work colleagues are stressed as well. You need to know how you are feeling and how this impacts others. How others feel, especially if they are angry or discontented, affects us too. None of these bad feelings are healthy or productive. They add to the tension and stress we feel in the workplace.

What is the alternative? If you are happy, self-aware, stress free, and have a positive self-esteem you are likely to be happy in your relationships and happy in the workplace. You will probably be very effective in developing and enjoying healthy relationships. You’ll know how to manage and relieve stress and your life will be blessed.

I hope this brief introduction to emotional intelligence gives you some understanding of how important the concept is in your daily life. There are five parts of emotional intelligence and we measure: understanding ourselves, understanding others, being adaptable, general mood, and stress management. There are often great variations in an individual’s profile on these five dimensions. Some people can be high on interpersonal understanding and have very limited self-awareness. Of course it makes life much more interesting for the purpose of this article, the most important issue is how well people manage stress through self-awareness.

In a local Alaskan paper today the heading is Back at work, Palin vents a bit over campaign criticism. In the post-campaign analyses, there is little doubt that Sarah Palin will command attention for some time. This will add to her personal stress.

November 4 Election Day was a big day for Sarah Palin and just before this time I wrote an article about how she would handle stress if she became Vice-President. I reported on the research of Cary Cooper on stress management and politicians. Within six months politicians were reporting elevated levels of stress.

Stress symptoms included loss of confidence, sleeping problems, drinking and eating too much, feeling constantly under strain and showing increasing lack of motivation.

As we all know, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are president elect and VP elect. So Sarah doesn′t have to cope with national level stress. However she does have to deal with her gubernatorial pressures returning as governor of Alaska. It must be a difficult task to adapt to the small state issues after such a heady campaign.

Sarah impressed many people with her energy and enthusiasm as a campaigner. Part of her role was to be a critic of the Democrats, a role that might create additional stress for her in trying to win back a non-partisan form of government in Alaska.

She has to confront many unresolved issues in Alaska on her return. Today’s newspaper highlights the different legal interpretations of the Troopergate issue. Other issues raised in her campaign absence, for example, ethics issues, private websites, her husband’s role in government, and travel expenses for her children will be explored in the media.

It was inevitable that Sarah Palin would attract significant post-campaign criticism. She has had to defend the comments of unknown staffers that she didn′t know Africa was a continent. She rejected the notion that she went on a crazy spending spree on Republican money. She′ll have to defend many such criticisms in the weeks ahead.

It will be interesting to see who tries to scapegoat Sarah Palin in the weeks to come. There has to be continuing interest in her because of the constant calls for Sarah as president in 2012. A strong sense of purpose and clear values, together with obvious family support, will be her best defense against critical onslaughts. She is going to need a great deal of assistance to manage and reduce the inevitable stress on her return to Alaska.

If I asked you to list and rank order the 5 events that cause you the most stress and then to tell me how you relieve stress what would you say? I know what I would say. My wife and friends and I have just returned from a holiday in south-east Alaska. In Juneau, Alaska’s tiny capital, there is a cable car that goes from the center of the town up to the top of Mt Roberts. My wife loves these experiences - I detest them. I didn’t realize I had acrophobia - extreme fear of heights - until I was driving up to a small village in India called Nainital. This pretty little British hill station lies at 6000 feet in the Himalayas. The trip nearly paralysed me. The experience also humbled me as I learned what it is like to have screamingly high levels of stress, anxiety and fear.

Different experiences trigger different levels of stress for people. Some people get a rush out of extreme sports while others are terrified at the thought of doing such dangerous things. For me, it is heights like to think of a way of reducing the stress. My best stress relief strategy is to make sure that I don’t engage in these experiences.

What makes you stressed and worried? Spiders, snakes, people, tests, and public speaking are very common stressors. Look at what I’m going to say and work out which ones are problems for you. What is it that makes you feel terrified and stressed? Sometimes it’s people, sometimes it’s places sometimes it’s insects or spiders. Examine the list below to see which ones cause you great distress.

In the workplace we have these triggers: organizational changes, unfair or excessive workloads, too much unpaid overtime, stressful demands and expectations, duties that do not match individual’s job specification, work that is boring and is not motivating, no (or limited) autonomy over the work situation, job insecurity and threatened redundancy, inadequate training for the demands of the position, inadequate, inappropriate or excessive supervision, a work environment that does not meet occupational health and safety standards, inadequate resources to do the job. Others include inappropriate social culture in the workplace, for example, racist, harassing, discriminatory, poor relationships with colleagues or bosses, and dramatic events in the workplace, for example, death, severe injury, hold-ups. What a list. It is a wonder that so many of us enjoy our workplaces a well as we do.

I grew up on a farm so I am not particularly concerned about snakes but many people have deep fears about these creatures. Consider your own list of personal fears. Sometimes they are social fears like attending a party when you don’t feel confident or appearing dumb or uninformed. Body shape and being overweight can destroy people′s self-esteem and cause social stress.

Being a family can be a stressful event. If you are a parent, saving up to college, paying your kids dental bills, determining when they should be able to date, unwanted pregnancies - the list goes on. You might be worried about your own relationships and this causes you constant stress. Families do create stress but they also provide stress relief.

What we have to do is to work out how to deal with these stressors in order to reduce or relive the stress and tension. I propose a model I call BE CALM. The acronym has two purposes: to remind you to be calm in the face of a stressful event or a difficult and person; and the six letters represent logical strategies for dealing with complex situations. The model is B for Build, E for Examine, C for confront, A for Accept, L for Let go (forgive, forget) and M for Move on with your life. I don’t have space to explain this model but when one works through this carefully over any stressful event, a plan of action can be mapped out that will mean that we can manage and relieve stress effectively.

My wife and I have been involved in teaching student was reading disabilities. We wanted to know students who had reading disabilities had high levels of stress. We chose a group of nine-year-old students and measured their stress using a self-report system. Luckily, the student with reading disabilities showed no elevated stress. This meant that we didn’t have to worry about introducing stress relief programs.

I’m often asked when people want stress relief therapy to tell them how to measure their stress levels. It is quite easy to measure stress levels. A psychologist can quickly determine whether you are stressed, depressed, or anxious. Most of the systems involve you telling the psychologist has stressed you are. With careful reflection, most people can report reliably their levels of stress, depression, and anxiety.

Apart from self-report, you can also measure stress through an analysis of a urine specimen. Blood analysis continues as levels of cortisol which is a market for stress levels. Cortisol increases as your stress increases. As well as cortisol changes, there are other physical changes as well. Flushing, skin blotching, increases in heart rate and blood pressure are other signs of high levels of stress. Some people experience what is called an aura and they might also have headaches and migraines.

If you want to find out about your stress levels you can use online testing. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that these tests are reliable. I use a structured self-report system to measure my patients′ stress. I need to be able to keep track of stress changes with my patients so measure them several times over several months. To know if my stress relief therapy is effective I need frequent measures.

When some people are stressed, they report that they can’t sleep, have wild mood swings, feel physically ill, upset, worried and distracted. If you looked carefully at their emotional and physical reactions you can see they fit into four different patterns. These are physiological and physical responses, cognitive or thinking changes, interpersonal variations, and emotional responses.

You need to know how stressed you are. If you have some idea of your stress levels, you can respond better to stress relief programs. I always says that stress is a silent killer and that is the enemy in terms of our feelings of security and emotional comfort. No one needs the emotional challenges of high stress, burnout, and constant feelings of being stressed out. There is very little of value to an individual who experiences high levels of stress. For a stress relief program to be effective, the patient needs to be able to know and understand their stress levels. I have 15 strategies for stress relief. For me, the stress relief challenge is to set the best strategy to the individual patient. I do not want my patients to have miserable, stressed lives.

When we are stressed, our relationships suffer. The danger of relationship breakdowns is that we lose the capacity to seek social support from our loved ones, one of the most effective stress relief interventions. Talking with others and sharing feelings is great for stress relief. Social support equals free therapy. Sharing worries and concerns reduces the stress. Some people are so worried that social support does not provide stress relief. One good example is mortgage stress and impending foreclosures. Professional help is essential in these cases.

There is a lot written about stress but I hope that my particular view about stress relief and stress management is helpful. I really want to be able to help people manage their stress. If you can engage in effective stress relief programs, even if you run them yourself, you will have a happier and more successful life.

Before I proceed to tell you how to deal with stress, I want to give you some idea of how people respond to stress. Then I want to introduce you to the idea of negative self-talk - one of the great enemies of stress reduction techniques. My first example is Jane who is failing to cope at work.

Jane is 42 years of age; she has had no previous problems, no previous stress attacks, and no mental health episodes. Lately, she has been very distressed at work and has fears that everyone thinks she’s incompetent. She has become over-sensitive to her leader’s feedback and to the looks of her colleagues. You could say that she is slightly paranoid. The outcome of all of this is that she has become socially phobic. She finds it very difficult to go to parties with her husband. She tends to hide in another room so that she doesn’t have to socialize with people.

Jane’s problem is that she is experiencing work stress. She feels constantly worn down and tired. Physically she feels nauseous and sick. Emotionally she feels depressed and terrified of making mistakes and she reports feeling unable to cope with work demands.

Jane is not performing well at work. She can’t manage the stress and her system is overloaded. You feel the same way sometimes too? Can you understand her level of stress? Have life’s events overtaken you? Are you constantly tired and mildly depressed? Do people ask what is wrong with you? Are you tired of life? Are you coping well? Has all of this made it much less effective at work?

If you answered yes you are suffering serious work stress. This is not surprising with the pressure we have at work. Some people think this is a reasonable outcome of a busy work life. After 9/11 research showed a great increase in heart disease. Strokes, cardiac disease and high blood pressure increased. When people were emotionally ill, they were physically ill. Work productivity suffers when people are emotionally unwell.

We need to know what causes this workplace stress. What are the factors that create problems for research work? There are many of them as you will soon see.

These include excessive workplace demands. Poor management and poor communication in the workplace cause stress. Oddly enough, poor relationships at home can cause workplace stress as much as interpersonal conflict with colleagues.

What is the best way to cope in the workplace? In large measure its up to you. You can change jobs but this is not very effective. One clever way to solve the problem of your boss is to list his or her name with a headhunter in the hope that someone else will employ your boss. From my experience the major problem with stress at work is poor role specification. Different perspectives on your work responsibilities will cause stress. The question remains how to solve this problem appropriately.

One way to control workplace stress is to recognize the role of negative thinking. There is an old saying that you are what you think so you have to consider your negative thoughts. If you are stressed you can deal with the problem if you try. You must realize that you have to confront negative self talk. How we feel is shaped by how we think. Self talk occupies much of our day.

What I am going to say sounds simple but it is true. We are our own worst enemy because we constantly criticize ourselves. The ratio of negative to positive thought is 10 to 1. Our constant self-criticism causes stress. Our situation can be made worse if our friends and loved ones criticize us. To start to manage workplace stress and personal stress we need to begin by eliminating negative self talk and increasing positive self regard.