The Warning Signs
Spiralling Down Into Serious Work-related Stress and Anxiety
Work-related stress creeps up on us. By ignoring the earliest warning signs we begin to spiral down into serious stress and anxiety until eventually we are unable to go to work. Our Training teaches you to spot the earliest warning signs and take action to stop the escalation of such a personally destructive and incapacitating condition.
Fear
Many of us worry, become stressed and anxious and fear going to work. It may be due to the people we work with, or the environment itself. Or it may be because of our own thoughts, what is happening in our own minds; what we think about ourselves, what we fear others think about us. We bring our fears from the past, from childhood, from what we believed about ourselves, and the experiences that frightened us, or terrified us, and we bring them to the present to the workplace. In this new world of Covid there is much fear, and fear in a workplace creates more fear.
Assertiveness
For many learning to say 'No' is very difficult, especially when we like to please, or like to be liked, or we believe our needs, our voice, our opinion is unimportant or not valued, or because we fear the consequences; being criticised, judged, losing our job. There are many reasons. So we take on more and more work, and it becomes out of control and the stress, anxiety and fear gets worse.
Catching Up
As a coping strategy we might begin to stay later at work, or take work home with us, or 'pop in' over the weekend to catch up or get ahead, so we're not relaxing and we're missing what our family and friends are doing. This becomes the norm and we forget what life was like before the stress. However, this coping strategy doesn't help for long and as the stress, anxiety and fear worsens we look for other ways to manage the thoughts, feelings and physical symptoms.
The Mind
As we worry and think of the 'what ifs', our imagination begins to create worse case scenarios; that our colleagues are talking about us, no one trusts us, our manager is going to call us into the office; we're going to be disciplined, sacked, lose our jobs, lose our homes. And because the work-related stress and anxiety is out of control we believe our fears.
Confidence and
Self Esteem
As we spiral down into work-related stress and anxiety there is a stripping away of our confidence and self esteem. As we witness ourselves; unable to focus, unable to retain information, becoming more and more forgetful, unable to do the things we could previously do easily, replaying conversations, questioning our actions, becoming paranoid, criticising and judging ourselves more and more, avoiding seeing friends, becoming distant from our partner, using or taking or doing anything which takes away the feelings, feeling more fearful or terrified, becoming a different person, disliking ourselves for what we have become, the confidence and self esteem disappears. Then it becomes dangerous.
Is this familiar to you? The Conscious Competence Training and Coaching Programme gives you the tools to stop work-related stress in its tracks at the very first warning sign, so you can to stop such an experience.