About 10 years ago I was facing some significant commercial challenges with something, but I was
really stressed out by something else that was going on at the same time. I was under a lot
of pressure and I knew that I had to recover a clear head fast, otherwise it was all gonna go
horribly wrong! My name's steve and I coach professional people just like you to make a
peaceful mind your professional superpower, and a good place to start is with my free
simple five-step guide to mastering stress in the moment. So here's the situation:
I'm working professionally in an organization and there's some strained commercial relationships.
It's my job to sort it out. I needed to meet with the service delivery director of a supplier
and the two organizations had got into a disagreement about service performance metrics.
I knew that I needed to have an impeccably clear head to have a productive conversation,
to get clear about potentially complex matters and to not get bamboozled or rolled over in the
conversation. It needed to be a conversation that would be productive, that would strengthen
the relationship between the two organizations, and deal with the points of disagreement in a
productive way, but the thing is on the day that I was meant to have this meeting I had had a phone
call, an issue that had arisen in my personal life. Now I didn't really have the headspace for
that personal conversation with this commercial conversation looming, but at the same time it
was something that concerned me. It worried me and it made me a little bit stressed. In fact,
who am I kidding? It made me a lot stressed so I went into the conversation I was not clear,
I did not have the clarity that I needed to have. I mean it started off okay, we started talking,
I started to present my points, but I didn't have the clarity that I needed. I didn't have
the level-headedness that I needed and the conversation started to get derailed.
I had visions of it all going horribly wrong and it being my fault. I had visions of getting told
off about it, and either having to start again from scratch or having to back away while somebody
else did it. But you know the things that I teach now as a coach are not new to me. I knew a lot of
this then, so even though I got myself into a bit of a kerfuffle, I was able to catch myself and
remember things that I'd learned. I remembered my learning with one of my coaches about groundedness
and equanimity. Now I know that those are words which don't particularly come up a lot, not a lot
of people will experience them, so let me explain what they mean. Groundedness the way I experience
it is about being firm in an understanding of life which is empowering, as opposed to
coming from a shaky understanding of life, or an understanding of life which is grounded in fear,
ego and insecurity. Equanimity is the ability to maintain a peaceful balance of mind and emotion
even when you're under pressure, to keep that clear head. Now sometimes people misunderstand
equanimity as being on an emotional flatline. It really isn't that. I mean even when you
master equanimity you can still experience the joys of life and the sadnesses of life,
it's just that you also have the ability to choose your attitude in any situation
and to create and maintain a clear head space and a clear emotion space. So I caught myself
and I made this decision about how I was going to change my attitude in that moment:
to listen to understand and to be explorative. I also remember that a great way to get a clear head
is to get whatever's going on in your head out of your head and onto paper. I decided to excuse
myself for a moment get my notebook and just write down things that I needed to get out of my head
so I could create that clear headspace. Now from that I was able to go back into the conversation.
My emotions were level, my communication was clearer, and we started to make some headway,
but we did hit a stumbling block, and something started happening which I didn't expect to happen
based on what I'd experienced before, and that is that those thoughts started creeping back into my
head. The things I was concerned about started to creep back into my head and I thought, oh, it's
going wrong again. The conversation started to get confrontational, it started to get defensive,
and I really couldn't understand why I really couldn't understand why getting this thing out
of my head and on the paper hadn't worked. Now I was really starting to feel the pressure in this
conversation! The rapport started to break down. We both started getting a little bit defensive
and again I had visions of this conversation going wrong, and it's not really resolving what
we'd meant to resolve, so at that time I just thought I have to have another break, I have to
get five minutes away from this, so we agreed to a coffee break. I went into the gents and I looked
at myself in the mirror and thought, what's going on here? But then I remembered something else that
I'd temporarily forgotten, and that is in order to successfully get something out of your head
and onto paper, you can't just write it down but you also have to make an agreement with yourself,
an agreement with your unconscious mind if you like, and that's an agreement about what action
you're going to take and when. That's when the nagging can stop. So I hurried back to
my desk and I got my notebook out again. I got to the bit where I'd written down what was on my
mind and I kind of realized that what I needed to do is I needed to phone a specific person
and I knew I was going to be able to phone that specific person once this meeting was over,
maybe about four o'clock in the afternoon, and so I made that decision, I'm gonna phone so and so
at four o'clock and I wrote it down. Now that's what allowed me to put this baggage down.
Now some people would call this mental preparation or mental rehearsal. It's something that sports
people do they will visualize themselves running their race if they're a runner. The
stoics called it premeditation: to premeditate on how you're going to deal with things that
are going to come up. Now I also remembered at the same time that of course that I could use
premeditation not only as a way of dealing with its other thing that I was worrying about, so I
did a bit of mental rehearsal or premeditation on how I'm going to get this conversation back
on track, and how I'm going to deal with other curveballs that might come up, and it worked
wonderfully well. I was able to go back into that conversation. We were able to recover the rapport,
we were able to get the problem back on the table, we were able to have a productive conversation.
Now sometimes our work problems come home with us we need ways to stop thinking about it once we are
home. To deal with that watch this video here. This is steve wishing you health and happiness.