What’s Your Stress Budget?

In April of 2020 I put together a short workshop to help people manage during what most of us thought was going to be several challenging weeks of a pandemic. We had no idea.

Since then, my Self-Care and Stress Strategies session has been the most in demand and most appreciated of the many tools I offer to charity leaders. It’s not that it contains any particularly groundbreaking insights, but people respond to the practical and realistic ways we can handle our messy reality.

But I think something was missing.

In the session there is a part where we try to reframe stress as not always a negative thing. We understand that it’s a good thing to get a little amped up for big events and special opportunities. The thing we need to watch for is when the stress exceeds our ability to respond and performance sharply declines. That’s when good stress (what psychiatrists call eustress) becomes bad (distress).

If this is true, we can not only see stress as a potentially beneficial thing; we can also see it as resource.

Like money, we can be intentional about how we use our capacity for stress to bring out our best. Used wisely it returns higher capacity and better results. If we spend too much in the wrong places things turn out badly.

Athletes and coaches know this. Training is a form of stress. Using the right type and amount of physical stress in combination with the right amount and type of rest leads to peak performance. We don’t improve without stress, but too much will do harm.

What would happen if we became more intentional about using our capacity for stress to promote growth and peak performance for key events?

How would we plan our weekly, monthly, and annual calendars if we want to use varying levels of stress strategically?

What insights could you gain from having a team conversation about how well you are investing our stress budget to get the results you really want?

I don’t have all the answers on this, but I’m going to incorporate it into that Self-Care and Stress Strategies workshop starting now and see how it helps.

If your team would benefit from a Self-Care and Stress Strategies workshop or another investment in Healthy Leaders and a Healthy Organization let’s talk about how I can help.