Responding to Stressful Workday Situations
If we take stock of how we’re thinking throughout the day, we find that we’re just bouncing from thought to thought all day long. And as we’re bouncing from thought to thought, we often don’t realize that many of those thoughts are stressful ones that are triggered by very specific workday situations we encounter.
In this episode I’ll teach you a concept that will help you identify a stressful thought that’s connected to a specific workday situation you encounter, and teach you how to come up with a plan for how to reframe that thought the next time the situation arises.
Episode Transcription
Intro:
If we take stock of how we’re thinking throughout the day, we find that what’s really happening is that we’re just bouncing from thought to thought all day long.
And as we’re bouncing from thought to thought, we often don’t realize that many of those thoughts are stressful ones and that they’re connected to and triggered by very specific workday situations that we encounter.
And because we’re bouncing around from thought to thought all day, our relationship to those thoughts is one of a passive participant - in other words we let our thoughts have an effect on us over and over again, rather than choosing to become an active participant in what we do with them.
So in this episode I want to teach you a concept that will help you identify a stressful thought that’s connected to a specific workday situation you encounter, and teach you how to come up with a plan for how you can become an active participant, and reframe that thought the next time the situation arises. Here we go.
Main:
I want to teach you a technique that’s designed to help you address challenging situations or negative thoughts you might have during your workday, and we call this technique: “When this, then that.”
So if you take a moment to think about how you’re THINKING during a workday, what you’re really doing all day is just bouncing from thought to thought:
A new task comes up that you’ve never done before, you have a thought about it
Someone sends you an email asking you for an update - you have a thought about it.
You get some negative feedback from a client or a boss - you have a thought about it
You’re spending way more time on something you thought would be easy - you have a thought about it.
And if we dig into what those thoughts are that we’re having with each of these situations, what we realize is that many of those initial thoughts are not empowering thoughts for us - the default thought that comes to mind often has something to do with a limiting beliefs that we have about ourselves, they have to do with fear, anxiety, being tired, frustrations, concerns, what we perceive others are thinking about us, our own self-worth, things like that.
And if we’re not careful, we really can move through an entire day bouncing from situation to situation and experiencing these thoughts, and sometimes we don’t even know it because we’ve conditioned ourselves to associate workdays with stress.
Our brain is very used to thinking that workdays equal stress and that stress MUST be part of a workday. And so if that’s our default way of thinking, then when we have a situation pop up that triggers a stressful thought - we just sort of chalk it up to WELL, I’M AT WORK SO THIS IS NORMAL.
But here’s the big secret: we don’t have to settle for that normal. Just because that’s something that’s been conditioned into us and we’ve observed to be quote on quote “normal”, and just because everyone else around us is feeling stressed and talking about how stressed they are, that doesn’t mean that we have to buy into that reality.
This is one of the reasons why working on your workday mindset is such an important thing for you to do, because what we can do is train our brain to have a different response to a situation that would normally trigger us to have a stressful thought.
So I want to show you one way that I’ve managed to deal with stressful thoughts that I encounter in my workday and the technique is what I call “When this, then that.”
So here’s how “When this then that” works: we want to identify a stressful thought that’s connected to a workday situation you encounter, and we want to come up with a plan for how you’re going to reframe that thought the next time the situation arises.
And there are 4 steps in this process that I want you to follow:
Step 1: Identify a recurring stressful workday situation that you experience. So just think about a particular situation that every time it occurs you feel stressed. It could be receiving a certain type of email, interacting with a certain person on your team, that moment when you feel like you’re way behind on a project - any situation that causes that stressful thought.
And just so we have an example we can work with, I’m going to give you an example for me that early on in my career really got me stressed - and it was when I received very poignant, constructive feedback from someone. When someone would tell me that they disagreed with me or they commented on my work or gave me feedback, it felt like a personal attack and I’d get all worked up about it. So let’s use that one as an example.
Step 2: Write out the reactive thought you have that’s the root cause of the stress.
So in my example, the reactive thought I used to have was that “this was an attack on me, it was personal, they don’t think my work is good enough.” And it didn’t matter if I had had a great working relationship with that person, the first thought I would get is that “they don’t think I’m good enough” or “My client is upset with me”, or “this is going to change their viewpoint of me.”
So step number two is to write down what that first thought is.
Step 3: Draw a line through that reactive thought. Just take your pen and draw a line through it. This is in part symbolic, but I also want you to really internalize just letting go of this reactive thought.
And then Step 4: I want you to identify 1-3 things you’re going to do the next time this situation comes up and you catch yourself having this reactive thought. Something that will help you turn that reactive thought into something constructive you can do to process it.
And what we’re trying to do here is come up with a plan that we can set into action when this stressful situation arises. It’s almost like we’re building a little mini roadmap for ourselves in anticipation of this situation so that we can navigate it better each time it pops up. We want to be moving from just passively accepting this stressful situation over and over to us being an active participant in changing it.
And I want you to keep your plan simple, and I want you to think about things that will help you reframe it.
So in my example, I decided that anytime I received some kind of feedback that made me uncomfortable, I was going to:
1. get up from my chair and take a deep breath,
2. Take a two minute break, and
3. Remind myself that the feedback I received is not about me the person, it’s not personal, it’s about my work and every piece of feedback that I get is a golden opportunity to improve and get better.
So when this particular situation arose for me, these are the three things I did to reframe my thoughts around it.
And what this did for me is it helped me acknowledge much faster that I was experiencing a stressful situation and a reactive thought that didn’t really match reality - sort of like uhhhh here’s that feeling again - that one that keeps creeping in - and then I could address it from there.
And I can tell you that over time, the anxiousness I felt around this situation eventually dissipated and this situation is no longer such a strong trigger for me. In the present day I really welcome feedback because then I can turn that into a chance to learn.
So let’s just recap those steps:
Step 1: Identify a recurring stressful thought you experience that’s connected to a workday situation.
Step 2: Write out the reactive thought you have that’s the root cause of the stress.
Step 3: Draw a line through that reactive thought.
Step 4: Identify 1-3 things you’re going to do the next time this situation comes up and you catch yourself having this reactive thought.
Take this for a test run this week and see how it works for you. If you want a simple worksheet you can use to visualize how to do this, we’ve put up a pdf at drewamoroso.com/podcast, and if you click on this episode you can download the pdf and use it as a guide.
I think what you’ll find is that part of the art of managing stressful situations involves your ability to catch yourself when you’re in the throes of feeling that stress, and then repeating a few simple steps to help you actively work through it.
Remember to always focus on ways you can move from being a passive participant to being an active one, that’s where the real change occurs.
Go have a great workday.