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DO YOUR STRESSORS CAUSE YOU TO TAKE THINGS A LITTLE TOO FAR?
Four Squares
Four Squares
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The workplace stressor concept helped us think about this reading by relating our personal experiences. We have all experienced stress and work life balance conflicts. Trying to manage, work, school, family, and faith can be a lot.
Everyone had a lot of examples. Here are a few.
One of our team members talked about the 1:1's that he has with his manager once a month, and how his manager will go over all of his personal metrics. Our team member expressed that metrics and manager expectations are two things that stress him out.
Another team member talked about mistaken identity at work. He has a coworker who always assumes his responsibilities are different then they really are. He will ask him to do things that he should know he doesn't do.
People are a stressor, and we realized that a lot of our stresses can be traced back to miscommunication, which goes hand in hand with what we talked about in our last artifact.
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One thing we did understand and talked about, is how things are easier said than done. We realized that we have all the tools necessary to manage our stress and well-being, but it's difficult to actually put those tools in play.
Stress is a flight or fight response to a situation. Sometimes we don’t realize that we have the internal, mental, and physical tools to address and release stress.
One of our team members talked about how he recently had car troubles and while he could have been really stressed about the situation, he thought about the tools that he had available to him, and how they could fix things.
We also talked about exercise and how you can release so much stress both mentally and physically. Even by taking walks everyday, it's amazing the difference it can make.
We talked about focusing more on the things you can control. Simple things like cleaning your workspace, and staying out of office drama.
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We think one of the essential principles about this training topic is as soon as you develop an awareness of your stressors, make an assessment of what your stress triggers are and come up with a positive way to address them.
For example, relating things back to the comic above, although it's funny, we often do stress ourselves out so much that we feel hopeless and want to just quit. When this happens, it's hard to achieve anything. If Dilbert could change a couple things to simplify and better organize his work, he would be a lot less stressed, and wouldn't feel the need to take time off. Sometimes you need to take yourself out of a situation and look at the positives and figure out what you can eliminate to relieve stressors.
Sometimes we are too involved with everything going on around us, and we take ownership of situations that don't even involve us, and in the end, we cause our own stress. Sometimes we are our own worst enemy.
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When we read about workplace wtressors, it really struck a chord with us because we realized that we all participate in behaviors that elevate our stress and most the time we don’t even realize it. Usually we stress more about stress than the actual stressor. The reading talked about how the more stressors you have in your life the less effective you'll be.
There will always be things that cause us stress so we need to learn how we can control and channel our stress. If we don’t it can shut us down, physically, mentally, and emotionally. The reading went over different stressors in life that both seem small and large but can be debilitating. Things such as getting let go, experiencing a death in the family, or even getting a speeding ticket.
Each stressor will get to us more and more. When we are overwhelmed, we are easily triggered, become less effective, and respond to the stressors in destructive ways.
Reflection
Reflection
We had some really great conversations around this topic. Mostly because everyone can relate to stress. It was interesting to hear everyones examples of what causes them stress, however, what was really great, was learning how different people cope with stress. Like we mentioned above, we are our own worst enemy when it comes to stress, we tend to overcomplicate things, under communicate, and like the comic above, want to give up when stress is so high. Stress is inevitable and if not dealt with correctly it can lead to really negative outcomes.
Teamwork
Teamwork
Like we did the last time around, we sent out emails before letting everyone know the agenda for the meeting. We have a set day and time when we meet, which has helped, because then people know days in advance and can try to plan accordingly. Not everyone is able to make it each time, so we send out a summary after our meeting to make sure that whoever wasn't there isn't lost the next time around.
One of our team members brought up a great point that meeting in person has really helped us have better conversations. We've become more comfortable with one another, and in result, we have been able to have deeper discussions. Meeting face-to-face definitely has its benefits and has helped us work better together.
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