Pressure at work is rising and rising!

I hear this sentence more and more often: “Pressure at work is rising and rising!”

When asked “What is the cause of that pressure?”, I usually immediately receive the answer “Increasing demands of management!” However, to my second question “Who is putting pressure on the management?”, I often do not receive any answer.

I have had the privilege of working with many companies in the region in the past ten years in order to solve various problems and improve business results and I have realised that there is a whole chain of pressure.

Agents are pressured by lower management, they are pressured by senior management, senior management is under pressure from the founders, and the founders are pressured by market conditions and competition. It is a whole chain of “pressures”.

I have also learned an important lesson:

It is not about what is happening to us from the outside, but about our inner reaction to it.

In other words, it is not the person putting pressure on us that causes stress, but our reaction to that person’s behaviour.

There is one mental law, called the law of control, which says that a person feels happy, satisfied, at peace with himself in relation to the fact how much he believes that he controls his life. If a person has a high level of control, faith in himself, he reacts less to “external pressures”.

For example: If someone at work threatens us with dismissal, and we are aware of our true business value and know that we have top skills and results, which other companies know about, then there is no need to feel threatened because we will probably find another job quickly.

However, if someone threatens us with dismissal, and we are not sure that we will be able to find a job soon, because what we do can be done by other people for the same or less money, then fear grows within us and a stress reaction arises. Unfortunately, with fear we show other people that they can have control over us and thus strengthen their position in that situation.

Taking into account the above, I give 3 important recommendations:

Set personal goals – write down what your next career step will be, or if you want to maintain your current position, write down all the changes that can happen in your industry and how they can affect you. Make a precise plan of what activities you will use to achieve your goal. If you need help, look for someone who has successfully completed that journey and talk to them.

Work every day to increase your value – develop the knowledge and skills with which you will achieve your goal, with which you will be irreplaceable at work or which you will need on the next ladder of your career. After the list, make a plan of work on them. Imitate the best and learn from them. Read books, listen to audio and video materials, spend time with people more successful than you.

Learn the communication skills for dealing with people – almost everything in life comes down to the skill of communication. People are divided into reactive and proactive. Reactive people only react to people’s attitudes, proactive people change people’s attitudes. On the border between reactivity to proactivity, fear and stress leave you alone because in this way you take control of yourself.

The text was taken from  www.blic.rs