Quick pop quiz: In the last 48 hours have you experienced significant levels of frustration, fatigue, muscle tension, irritability, anger, cynicism, negativity or a feeling of being out of control?

All of these are signs of STRESS.

Success in today’s fast-paced and ever-changing environment requires the ability to effectively manage our own stress in the face of an increasing number of stressors.

A stressor is something that causes you to experience a stress response. The stressor is the cause and the stress response is the effect. The stressor that triggers your stress response can be anything from a ringing phone to the driver in front of you changing lanes without indicating. The stressor may not even be something ‘out there’; it can just be a thought inside your own head.

The stess response occurs whenever we cue our mind-body system in one of two ways. Either we send a message to our brain of “Danger!” Or we send a message of “Enough! Overload!”

Either of these two messages cues the brain to send the body into the Fight/Flight response otherwise known as General Arousal Syndrome (GAS). GAS causes blood to be withdrawn from the brain and stomach and sent to your larger muscle groups; it causes adrenalin to be released into your blood making the heart and lungs beat faster, pupil dilation and sweating. In addition; fats, cholesterol and sugar in your blood stream increase, your stomach secretes more acid, your immune system slows down and your thinking shifts to a more black-and-white, survival mode.

In today’s business world we cannot succeed by physically fighting or flight, we therefore need to manage our thinking and behaviours to rise above the stressors.

The first step in stress management is awareness; awareness of the stressors in your work and home life and your usual stress response. Only through awareness and Self Leadership can we gain control and direct our energies towards successful actions. A strong word of caution, denial can be lethal both financially and physically, so take a moment now and think about what pushes your stress buttons?

Stressors include:

• Not enough time
• Not enough clients/business
• Being kept on hold
• Paperwork/bureaucracy
• People not being trustworthy
• Delays
• Interruptions
• Incompetence

Are any of these, stressors buttons for you? Anything  else?

What about internal stressors such as the following thoughts?

• “I’m not good enough”
• “I don’t know enough”
• “I don’t have the right connections”
• “I’m not smart enough”
• “I need to be perfect”

Do you have any of these thoughts or others like them?

When your buttons are pushed, either from and external or internal stressor, what is your response?

• Breathe holding
• Muscle tension, leading to headaches
• Anger, Frustration
• Shouting
• Depression

You have a choice to interrupt the stressor to stress response and break the cause-effect chain. You can manage your mind-body and emotions because it is this ability that determines the difference between success and mediocrity in any endeavor including business and sport.

Consider Tiger Woods as he steadies himself to take a long put at championship point, with thousands of people watching intently. Watching to see him win or lose. Could you handle the pressure? Well probably not, not without the practice and training that Tiger has had. You can however practice and train yourself to handle the pressure in your chosen endeavour.

Sporting greats such as Tiger Woods have a strategy for handling stress; let me share with you a strategy to propel you to success in your business.

Step 1. Know why you are doing what you are doing. We can withstand any what if we have a big enough why. Your ‘whys’ are you values, what’s important to you.

Examples of values are: Making a difference, independence, profit, caring for family, being in control, balance, health, happiness. So what’s important to you?

Step 2. Keep a note in your diary of when you become stressed and what caused it; this will increase your awareness of how you run your mind-body-emotional states.

Step 3. Interrupt the stressor to stress response. There are many stress interrupt patterns and the best is still breathing. When we start to go into a stressful state we tend to breath hold and tense our muscles, by consciously taking a deep breathe and slowly breathing out fully, you break the cycle. Practicing relaxation techniques is also useful to achieve this.

Step 4. Take the sting out of the stressor – burst its bubble.

When you identify a stressor, ask yourself this question “in terms of what I value, is it useful to get stressed about this?”

Comparing the stressor against your values shrinks it down to size. With the stressor now at a manageable proportion you can ask yourself, “What is a more useful behaviour for me to engage in?” For example if your stressor was not enough new clients, rather than engage in stressful worrying, a more useful behaviour would be to engage in marketing activities to secure new clients.

Step 5. See each stressful situation as an opportunity to increase your skills. Successful people have the ‘frame of mind’ that with every challenge is a chance to improve, they don’t beat themselves up, they focus on what learning’s they can take out of a situation.

By using this strategy you will take control of you mind-body state and so start to take control of your results. You may not be aware that all communication is dependent upon the state you are in. Have you ever tried to say, “I love you” when you are angry? The words are changed by the emotional state. We are all very sensitive to non-verbal signals and your emotional state is broadcasting to everyone you are communicating with. So if you are frustrated, angry or stressed this will be transmitted along with whatever you say. Since the quality of our communication has a direct correlation to our results it is important to manage your state of mind for success.

Between 1991 and 1992 Richard Branson was under attack. His Virgin record company was making money but his vision for Virgin Airways was being blocked by underhanded tactics from British Airways and a lack of support from his own bankers. When Branson blew the whistle on BA, the smear campaign saw the British papers with headlines calling him a liar. Branson could have cut his losses and consolidated his business to the profitable record company. His wife, friends and advisors all suggested that course of action but Branson is an optimist and refused to let the stress get to him. Dr Martin Seligman has discovered that the pessimist is at the mercy of reality, whereas the optimist has a massive defense against reality that maintains good cheer in the face of a relentlessly indifferent universe. It is my observation that the optimist by refusing to accept reality creates their own and therefore determines their results. Branson beat BA and went on to become a billionaire.

Will you back yourself and take charge of your success? Will you use your stressors as the fuel to improve your skills and move to the front of your field? Will you practice the skills daily and move from Stress to Success?

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