 Everyone comes under pressure to perform at work. Hitting deadlines, impressing your boss and peers, ensuring work streams and projects deliver the expected results, learning new processes, changing direction quickly, getting your team to deliver more, the list is very long. How we handle the pressure to perform at work is a big part of our personal success, as well as how much we enjoy being at work. The pressure at work can easily become overwhelming if we let it. I'm sharing four mental actions to reduce the pressure of work and then two prioritisation actions for dealing with pressure at work. Dealing with pressure is a mental state of mind with physical implications. Our bodies respond to pressure with higher heart rates, more adrenaline in our systems and hormones that influence our ability to manage our emotions and memory. Staying calm under pressure reduces the physical responses and helps us keep our focus and avoid the horrible sensations of freezing up or experiencing building panic. My name is Jess Coles. If you're new here, Enhance.training shares people management expertise, resources and courses teaching you how to build higher performing teams. I've included links to additional videos and resources in the description below, as well as a video timestamp, so do take a look at these. And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. Let's start with the four mental actions to reduce the pressure to perform at work. The first mental action to deal with pressure is to reframe challenges and problems as opportunities. When you're thinking of what you face as challenges and problems, our thoughts and emotions are more likely to be negative. You know, I'm not sure if I can solve this problem or I don't know where to start. If we think of what we face as an opportunity to grow, to develop and to explore, you are more likely to have a positive frame of mind and be thinking of how to take action, i.e. what do I need to do to solve this problem? Or I want to find the best place to start. Positivity reduces the pressure you feel. The second mental action to manage pressure is to replace the thought process of I feel nervous when our hearts start beating faster, our breath gets shallower, when we get more tense and when we think about what's coming. Place the I feel nervous with thoughts of I feel excited. Our physical response to excitement and being nervous is pretty much the same. Wouldn't you rather face a problem or challenge with the feeling of excitement rather than nerves? I certainly would and I think it helps keep you calmer, more focused and more able to manage the pressure that you're under. Keep practicing this mental approach and you start labelling the physical reactions to pressure as excitement rather than nerves. The third mental action to handle pressure at work is to break down the bigger problem into lots of little problems. Immensally little problems are not as intimidating, are easier to plan how to tackle and easier to start taking action to solve. Break down the bigger problem into the first few little problems to overcome on the journey to solving the bigger problem. Choose the first little problem and work to solve it. Then move on to the next little problem. It won't be long before you're well on the way to solving the bigger problem. Taking action and getting small successes is a great way to reduce the pressure to perform. The fourth mental action to performing under pressure is to keep yourself mentally positive. You'll remind yourself of how many problems or challenges that you've already overcome recently. You'll picture yourself completing the task or project etc. and getting praise from your manager and admiration from your colleagues. Positive thinking pushes you to think about what you can do and what you can control and how to take action rather than dwelling on what you can't influence which stops action being taken. Practice positive thinking. Your mental approach massively influences how you respond to pressure to perform at work. The more positive your response, the more action-orientated and the more focused on delivering against what is causing the pressure, the quicker you'll reduce the pressure you feel at work. Mentally practice the four actions I've suggested. They have each helped me massively in my career. I now have two prioritising actions for dealing with pressure at work. Firstly, it is human nature to focus on what is urgent at work. We might have colleagues chasing us and we don't want to let them down. Stop. Just give yourself time to think through your list of tasks, activities and projects that you need to complete. Prioritise your list based on importance before you prioritise based on urgency. Spend more time working on the important items compared to the urgent items. Taking this approach does require you to say no more often. This approach will reduce the pressure to perform you feel because the most important tasks nearly always contribute more to the results and to your performance than the urgent only tasks. The second prioritisation action to deal with pressure at work is to focus on one task or activity at a time until you have finished that task. This seems such simple advice. Yet how often in our demanding jobs do we really get one task finished rather than being distracted with the latest urgent request? The more you can focus on one task, the quicker you'll get it completed because you've reduced the time wasted. In refamiliarising yourself with where you were and what you need to do next, that the chopping and changing between tasks creates. Always be really clear in your mind what tasks and activities you do that adds the most value to the team and the business in which you work. In the more time and energy you can devote to these higher value areas the more value you will create and in doing so the less pressure to perform at work you will feel because you'll be delivering more than your peers. Bosses and other stakeholders will trust you more and appreciate what you deliver which in itself reduces the pressure that you're under. Work smarter before working harder. So in summary there are a lot of actions that you can proactively take at work to reduce the pressure on you. The six actions I've been through are the ones that I found particularly useful in my career. Three additional tips that I use regularly include firstly, when you're feeling stressed and under pressure focus on your breathing. Take deep, big, long breaths to reduce the physical effects of pressure on you which in turn helps you mentally. Second, do as much preparation as possible which reduces nerves and that feeling of pressure. This is particularly useful for meetings, presentations and other situations where you are in the spotlight. And third, one I really like is to go for a walk around the block or do some physical activity. Movement helps relieve the physical tension which in turn helps you mentally. It does take time and practice to build your own methods or actions to handle pressure at work. Give yourself the time and do the practice. If for instance the first time you present to 30 people it might feel really daunting and you'll feel the pressure. But after presenting 20 times you won't have nearly the same mental or physical responses and you won't worry about the pressure to perform because you know you've already presented successfully 20 times. Delivering results in my view is the best way to reduce the pressure to perform at work. Use the actions we've gone through the way you approach delivering at work. If you have any questions on the six actions to handle the pressure to perform at work please leave them in the comment section below and I'll get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.