Is stress holding you back in your career? Many people are so stressed out that they don’t have time to think about changing jobs or training for a new career.

Since stress is inevitable in life, it is important to find ways to minimize stressful incidents and decrease negative reactions to the stresses you simply can’t avoid.

Here are some of the things that can be done by just remembering, in other words, making them part of your daily routine, like brushing your teeth .

Managing time

Time management skills can allow you more time with your family and friends and possibly increase your performance and productivity. This will help reduce your stress.

To improve your time management skills:

• Save time by focusing and concentrating on the task at hand. This may take practice, but the more you do it, the better you’ll get.

• Delegate wherever you can, allowing yourself to concentrate on only the
  most important tasks.
• Record how you spend your time on various tasks, and be sure to include family and leisure time. This will help you to identify time-wasting activities.
• Prioritize your time by giving each task a rating based on its importance and urgency. Use the majority of your time to those activities which have the highest score.
• Manage your commitments by not over- or under-committing.
  Don’t agree to take on projects or activities that are not important to you. In other words, learn to say no.
• Deal with procrastination by using a day planner, breaking large projects into smaller ones, and setting short-term deadlines. This will make tasks much more manageable, reducing your feelings of being overwhelmed.

Create effective coping strategies

If stress is a major issue for you, it is important that you identify your coping strategies. One way to do this is by recording each stressful event, your reaction, and how you cope, in a stress journal – which is just a fancy name for a notebook Once you become aware of your habitual patterns, you can find ways in which to change reactive behaviour which leads to even more stress.

You can also turn your stress management programme into a strategy for developing a new career, if that’s your goal. By looking at the things which cause you stress, you can choose which tasks you want to eliminate from your life ie things you don’t want in your new career and you can identify others which you enjoy, but could modify to make them less stressful.

Remember also that time management and using effective coping strategies when under pressure are very valuable transferable skills. So if you work on them now, not only will you reduce stress, you’ll also have some good examples of these skills to put in your application or discuss at your next interview.

Part 2 coming soon

Quick and Easy Stress Management Programme Part 2