Stress comes in many forms. It’s been isolated as a “killer” and made ubiquitous as “how the brain and body respond to any demand.”
Both are true. And, for CEOs who are responsible for the welfare of a corporation and its employees, the risk of toxic stress is elevated … and constant.
As a leadership coach, my task is to work with men and women who, even in the best-managed companies, must daily navigate a minefield of stress triggers.
Working together, we seek to identify those triggers, interrupt the auto-response that follows, and begin reducing the impact of stress. This process often begins with an Energy Leadership™ Index (ELI) assessment to uncover their thinking and perceptions (aka mindset) that are creating stress for them. Elevating their awareness and understanding, I help them to recognize these stressors and come up with strategies to better manage them, if not eliminate them entirely.
The potential for stress to build to dangerous levels is now irrefutable. Even in Finland, with the world’s highest happiness index, stress is shortening lifespans by nearly three years, according to a study.
Harvard Business School notes that the pandemic has taken the stress of executing the role of CEO to unprecedented and uncharted levels. As we crawl out of the economic crater Covid created, new challenges remain. Managing a largely remote – and unobservable – workforce can be stressful. Many have had to thin their staffs and may need additional downsizing, which this Forbes article points out can leave executives feeling socially isolated in the process.
Take An Executive Stress Test
As a preliminary exercise, you can use this checklist to identify the internal and external factors that can contribute to stress.
Internal contributors are the usual suspects: lack of exercise and bad diet. However, more character-driven, emotion-based traits are also at work: willingness to take on too many tasks, an inability to let go and delegate, zero-sum thinking, too much focus on ‘what’s wrong’ and ‘who [or what] is to blame,’ and so forth are other internal contributors.
External contributors might be as subliminal as your workspace configuration, or as common as a two-hour bumper-to-bumper morning commute, an unnecessarily contentious board member, a new round of government regulations for your industry, or changing public tastes that threaten the longevity of your business model.
Those are stress triggers that, if they can be reduced at all, will take much more work. You can redesign your office, move closer to it to shorten a commute, and work on resolving conflict with a director. The others you need to live with.
Whether internal or external, you can choose how to view and respond to situations rather than react ‘by default’ when triggered.
The Signs Of High-Stress
The warning signs of high stress – trouble sleeping, chronic stomachaches and headaches, difficulty concentrating and prioritizing tasks, and even confusion, dizziness, and forgetfulness – may not be recognized as such. More obviously stress-related symptoms are becoming increasingly short-tempered or reliant on alcohol or other means of escape.
Identifying and addressing stress-triggers are a practical benefit of coaching. The ELI assessment can gauge how a person experiences stimuli under both normal and stressful circumstances and help get to the root of the issue by identifying and shifting inner thoughts, beliefs, and emotions that block a client’s success.
It is critically important to get to the core of these stress triggers and determine what role your thoughts, beliefs and emotions are playing. But there are things to do on your own. Begin mitigating the risks by adopting healthier eating habits and integrating short, regular exercise and calming techniques into your workday. CEOs report a midday break for restorative yoga or even a walk has shown immediate results. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey advises adding out-of-office walks into the workday.
You don’t want to completely eliminate stress any more than you want to throw away a smoke detector. It’s a warning signal, and could be evidence of an organizational problem that needs addressing.
But, with my self mastery approach to coaching, or through some other means, the forward-thinking CEO can get on the path to reducing both the causes and the effects of executive stress.