Stress Management Coaching
Is stress getting in the way of your success?
When you’re aiming high, and working really hard to achieve the success you want, that often comes with a high degree of stress. But it doesn’t have to.
Stress is often seen as the flip side of success, the price we have to pay for being ambitious, wanting to achieve great things, daring to believe we can run a successful business. They’re like partners in crime where you can’t have one without the other – Success and Stress: they go together like fish and chips, night and day, right?
Wrong.
Stress is a huge obstacle to achieving high performance. It stops you thinking clearly. It lowers your IQ by around 20 points. Decision making becomes difficult – particularly if that needs you to think beyond the immediate impact. It affects your ability to focus, and to remember things.
And that’s just the impact on your business or your career. The impact on you, the person, can be just as debilitating:
Sleepless nights that leave you exhausted and reliant on coffee (or worse) to get going each day.
The tension headaches and body aches and pains that won’t go away.
Anxiety and the tummy trouble or lack of appetite that may go with it.
Tearfulness as a daily standard.
If you recognise this description, I won’t have to tell you what a difference reducing your stress and being able to manage stressful situations better in future will make – how much happier and calmer you’ll be and how great it will feel to be back in control, less anxious and able to maximise your career and life opportunities from here on in.
Stress management was my original coaching specialism (before I even knew neurodivergence was a thing), and so I work with both neurodivergent and neurotypical people to help them manage and reduce their work-related stress. The things that make our fight or flight response kick in may vary, and that may lead to different strategies for reducing the triggers – we work together in a highly personalised way to ensure you get the reduction in stress you need, and I always take a trauma-informed approach to ensure you are kept safe.
How I can help you through stress coaching
Whatever the circumstances, whether a new issue or a long term problem, I can help you successfully kick the stress you’re experiencing into touch. I will work with you on any work related stress and its impact on your work life balance, and help you identify and make the changes that are within your control to make, that will help you become calmer, more in control, and happier again. I can’t promise you will live a completely stress-free life, but through stress coaching I can promise to help you:
- Better understand what is causing your stress, unearthing and tackling the root causes – not just the symptoms
- Make and implement decisions or action plans that will remove or reduce the impact of the stressors in your life
- Learn techniques to manage and reduce stress both in the long term and “in the moment” to improve your performance at times of high pressure
- Develop strategies to help you relax, set boundaries and allow you to enjoy yourself more
- Make changes to the unhelpful habits, behaviours, thinking patterns or beliefs that are responsible for enabling your stress– so that it no longer has the ability to survive
- Develop the resilience, self-belief and strategies to cope more easily with stressful situations, so you’re able to remain in control and manage your response better
- Increase your optimism and ability to stay positive
Stress and anxiety generally happen when something that happens to you meets with an emotional response from you that, when combined, leaves you feeling like you can’t cope.
All kinds of things can trigger a period of stress – here’s just a few stressors that recent coaching clients of mine have experienced:
- An overwhelming workload or a bigger pile of responsibilities than they feel able to cope with
- Feeling the weight of financial pressure
- Persistent pressure to succeed and achieve, particularly when you feel you may not have what it takes to do so
- Fear – often the fear of failing, of being rejected, or making the wrong decision or of not being good enough
- Not having effective strategies to manage aspects of your work that you find difficult, and therefore become anxiety-inducing
- Feeling shame or disappointment about a career, business or work-related decision that hasn’t turned out well
- Receiving a poor performance review at work or negative feedback from a colleague or customer, or losing a big piece of business
- Anxiety about having to do something in your business or role that you hate or have no confidence to do
- Being made redundant
- A general feeling of feeling unfulfilled or drifting without a sense of direction for the future.
- The so-called “Impostor Syndrome” – a feeling that you are about to be found out for not being any good at what you do, despite plenty of evidence of success that contradicts that feeling
Your stress coaching will be unique to you, and isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. While we will almost always work together to better understand the stress response, how it impacts on your physiologically and learn useful techniques to help minimise this, we will also focus on the specific things that trigger a stress response for you, to find bespoke strategies that enable you to either change your situation or become more resilient in those situations that trigger your stress.
