What Sports Professionals Can Teach Us about Managing Stress
According to a recent Towers Watson Staying@Work Survey, stress is the number one workforce risk issue. As cited in the survey conducted by TEKsystems, some of the key reasons for stress are keeping pace with changing technology, a large workload, and pressure to turn potential into performance.
Although most IT professionals are not trained in handling stress at work, turning our attention to sports professionals might give us some insight into how to deal with stressful situations. A few tips are listed below.
Stay in the present. Keeping pace with technology is stressful because people let the frequent changes in technology overwhelm them due to pressures such as relearning and handling complexity. Golf champion Rory McIlroy says, "...to stay relaxed and at your best, your brain can only concentrate on one thing or your performance level will drop.”
Concurring with Rory's views, the former billiards champion Geet Sethi says in his book Success vs Joy, "Concentration is simply the intellect supervising the mind to remain in the present."
The core idea suggested here is that to manage stress related to complexity, the choice is between allowing yourself to feel overwhelmed by complexity or simply concentrating on dealing with things at hand, one step at a time, without letting your mind wander.
Stress can be good too. Stress due to a large workload can be challenging because work may interfere with family time. Discounting genuine cases, most workload problems are often deep-rooted time management or communication problems.
In his book Think Like a Champion, Rudi V. Webster says:
Pressure is self-induced force that is generated in the mind in a response to situations you face, remember or imagine. If that force gets out of hand it can cause problems and interfere with your performance, but in the correct proportions it will bring the best out of you.
Without some pressure to perform, most humans may cease to contribute, especially in the corporate world. It is easy to imagine that the successful sports professionals know how to use the pressure from added responsibilities to their advantage and perform better.
Manage performance anxiety. Performance anxiety can also be due to performing tasks that are important but not part of the usual routine—such as addressing a large gathering, speaking with an executive, or even meeting the demands of the employee evaluation system.
In his book The Inner Game of Tennis, W. Timothy Gallwey presents an interesting perspective,
If we take a moment and listen to what is really going on in our minds, we will discover that there is a constant dialogue going on. There seems to be one voice doing all the commanding and criticizing (Self-1) and some other part being quiet and doing the actions (Self-2).
In the IT profession, the role of two selves may not be very obvious at first, but a healthy relationship between the two selves usually governs the output. The idea is to understand the role each self plays and to not let one dominate or mistrust the other.
What are your stress management strategies?
