Women in Business: How do you deal with stress?

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

A few days ago, a white van backed into my house, destroying my front fence. I could hear the crash from upstairs. I think this qualifies as a pretty stressful situation, and I may have coped better if I had read the everywoman workbook Tackling Critical Situations. Instead, I just jumped up and down screaming.

The ability to think on your feet and communicate in a reasonable manner with others in a reasonable way is apparently the sign of true leadership. Well, I’m not sure I would have passed with flying colours in my stressful dealings with white van man.

But, as I learned from the workbook, I could turn a critical situation from a negative into a positive. After I’d calmed down, I got white van man’s number and am in the process of sorting out insurance and getting a quote for the fence. So, the upshot of this story is that I might get a brand new fence out of this mishap. Every cloud has a silver lining, as they say. Or as the Chinese say ‘Weiji’ the word for crisis, which means danger and opportunity.

All very well, you might say. But how does this apply to business? The Critical Situations workbook asks some pretty searching questions that can help how I deal with stress at work.  Am I a ‘bury my head in the sand’ kind of person, hoping it will work out eventually?  Hmm, yes I think that definitely ticks a box.

But what about you? Do you ask yourself how do I deal with stress in a constructive way? Have you created a contingency plan? Have you got people you can ask for help and support?  I was saddened but not necessarily surprised to read in the workbook that two-thirds of Britons have fewer than five people they can count on in a crisis.

As the anthropologist Margaret Mead once said: “Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.”

Note to self: must widen my network of friends and business colleagues. And indeed, this may help how I deal with stress if I have sympathetic people to talk to.

In all, the workbook asks some searching questions and has certainly made me think how I conduct myself and how deal with stressful situations. It’s really helped me plan for the future and see how I might do things differently in the future.

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