 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's Red Back Business Skills webinar, Stress Management Strategies for Thriving in a Fast-Based Workplace or World. My name is Vesna. I'm an employee of Red Back Conference, and I'll be a facilitator for today's session. I will now hand it over for our presenter for today, the Managing Director of Great Managers, Sandra Wood. Thank you, Sandra. Thank you, Vesna, and good morning. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the webinar. So we'll just click through that little bit about interacting. Vesna's already done that. And let me tell you about what we're going to be covering in the webinar today. So in this webinar, we're going to work on increasing your resilience so that you can cope well with high levels of ongoing change, sustain good health and energy when under constant pressure, bounce back easily from setbacks, overcome challenges, and do all of this without acting in dysfunctional and harmful ways. You see, our workplaces and lives are moving at a faster pace than ever before, and the stress and fatigue that comes from this fast pace can interfere with your ability to read situations accurately, to solve problems, to be flexible, to control emotions and maintain strong relationships at work and at home. And if you want to succeed at work or in your life, it's important to build your stress tolerance or resilience. Now, resiliency is something you do and can develop more than something you have or don't have. So this webinar is all about building your resilience and your emotional agility so that you can flourish rather than flounder in these fast paced times. In this webinar, you'll learn to harness the power of three strategies that really work that will take your ability to manage stress and thrive to the next level. So I'm going to ask you some questions as we go along today. So, and we're going to do a couple of activities together as well. So I hope you have a pen and paper handy. I'll start by briefly introducing myself. So you know a little bit more about me. For the last 15 years, I've been running my own consulting business. I'm a leadership consultant and I'm known as an expert coach, facilitator, course designer and trainer of leaders. I've trained thousands of leaders and know what works and what doesn't when it comes to personal and professional development. And before I was a consultant, I held senior HR and organizational development roles in management roles in both private sector, public sector and also the not-for-profit sector. And I've got qualifications in adult education, human resources and management. Now these days, I'm actually on a mission to fill the world with great managers. This is my passion and it's my purpose in life. And when I tell people about my mission, I do get a few strange comments. People say things to me like, well, if that's your purpose, you should get a life. But when I explain why I'm on this mission, most people get it. You see, the problem is that more than 70% of employees are not engaged at work. And most say it's because of bad bosses. And a Psychology Today article actually said that 75% of employees say their boss is the most stressful part of their job. Now that's a pretty big statistic. And we spend a lot of time at work and it doesn't have to be this way. So I'd like to find out a little bit more about you now. We're going to start with a poll today. So I want to find out in the past year, have you experienced a little bit of stress? A moderate amount of stress or a lot of stress? I want you to trust your intuition here. Don't overthink it. Just go with the first answer that comes to you. So let's start the poll. Counting down in 3, 2, 1, we'll stop the poll. So look at that. That's interesting, isn't it? There, 51% of you have experienced a lot of stress. 44% a moderate amount of stress and only 4% a little bit of stress. Wow, okay. So that's telling, isn't it? It does tell us a lot about these fast-paced times that we're living in. So let's define stress. We'll start by defining stress. The term stress, as it's currently used, was coined by a guy called Han Selye back in 1936. And he defined it as a non-specific response of the body to any demand for change. Now after he retired, he actually confessed that that term stress was the wrong term. He said that he should have called his research findings the strain syndrome because what most people call stress is really an internal physical feeling of anxiety or strain that they don't like. Stress occurs when you perceive that demands placed on you or chosen by you exceed your ability to cope. And stress is primarily a physical response. When stressed, the body thinks it's under attack and it switches into fight or flight mode, releasing a complex mix of hormones and chemicals to prepare the body for physical action. And this causes a number of reactions from blood being diverted to muscles to shutting down unnecessary bodily functions such as digestion. So it's important to know that the stress response can be caused or triggered by both good and bad experiences. So that's interesting to note as well. Now people who can manage stress well are described as being resilient. They get knocked over, like everyone else, but they bounce back quickly, just like this little cartoon guy we've got tracking here with us on the slides today. So my next question for you is what do you currently believe about stress? What I want you to do now is write down very briefly the first thoughts that come to mind. So when you see that question there, what do you currently believe about stress? This is meant to be a download from your brain to tap into your current thinking and beliefs. So don't censor it, just go with what comes straight away to you. The immediate thoughts there, what we're trying to do is to make your thoughts and beliefs about stress conscious. Okay, everyone got something there? I hope you've got something there you've written down. Now my next question for you is do you believe that stress is harmful? Just put yes or no in the question box for me so I can see what we've got there for that. Right, so majority of you are saying yes. There's a few sometimes and a few no's as well. Okay, that's interesting. Interesting to see. So there's your starting point. What you've written down about your beliefs that's your starting point about your current thinking and then your answer yes or no is where you're at at the moment. So let's put that as your starting point for your beliefs. And now let's see if we can reshape some of your thinking about stress today. So we're going to have a look at what we call some stress myths. Stress is often referred to as bad and we want to debunk some of the stress myths. So our first stress myth is that stress is the same for everyone, which is actually completely wrong. Stress is different for each of us and some of you actually said different. Your response is different depending on the circumstances. So what is stressful for one person? May or may not be stressful for another. Each of us responds to stress in our own way. We have our own pattern around it and we differ in how much strain we can handle. So our second stress myth is that stress is always bad for you. Now according to this view, zero stress makes us happy and healthy and that is actually wrong. Stress is to the human condition, what tension is to the violin string. So too little and the music is dull and raspy. Too much and the music is shrill or the string snaps. So we're a bit like that too. So stress can be the kiss of death or the spice of life. The issue really is how to manage it. Managed stress makes us productive and happy. Mismanaged stress hurts us. Our third stress myth is that stress is everywhere so you can't do anything about it, which is not so. You can plan your life and learn skills so that the stress doesn't overwhelm you. When stress is mismanaged, it's difficult to cope and all your problems seem to be equal and stress does seem to be everywhere. Our fourth stress myth is that no symptoms equals no stress. Now an absence of symptoms doesn't mean the absence of stress. In fact, camouflaging symptoms with medication may deprive you of the signals you need for reducing the strain on your physiological or psychological systems. Now sometimes that's necessary of course but be careful about doing that too quickly. Our fifth stress myth is that only major symptoms of stress require attention, which is not true. This myth assumes that the minor symptoms such as headaches or stomach acid or other health niggles may be safely ignored. Minor symptoms of stress are the early warnings that your life is getting out of hand and that you need to do a better job of managing stress. So stress is not necessarily a bad thing. Without this brilliant ability to feel stress, humankind wouldn't have survived. The challenge is when our body escalates into a state of stress in a relatively minor situation or when it becomes a habitual response. We can become addicted to the stress state and the associated chemistry where life just doesn't feel right without it. So it's important to understand that when we're in the stress state blood flow is only going to the most important muscles needed to fight or flee and our brain front function is minimized. And this can lead to an inability to think straight, a state that is a great hindrance in both our work and our home lives. So if we stay in that state of stress for long periods without learning how to manage it, it can be detrimental to our health and to the results we can achieve. And we can learn how to manage the stress response. So let's have a look now at how you can get better at this and build your resilience. We're going to start with having a look at what some of the experts say. A couple of guys called Jim Ler and Tony Schwartz and they wrote this up in their Harvard Business Review article The Making of a Corporate Athlete. They describe the ability to manage stress and sustain performance over time as the ideal performance state which has physical well-being as its foundation combined with emotional health, mental acuity and at the top a sense of purpose. Our ideal performance state is achieved when all these levels are working together. Now these guys are experts in the human performance space and what they're talking about is building capacity and I sometimes call this running the marathon because leaders and employees working in a fast-paced workplace often feel like marathon runners. The pace is relentless and you just have to keep going. And successful marathon runners know that you have to do the right training and be in the best shape possible to persist over the long run. So in the corporate world, sustained achievement demands physical and emotional strength as well as a sharp intellect. So to bring mind, body and spirit to peak condition, people working in a fast-paced workplace need to learn what world-class athletes already know which is recovering energy is as important as expending it. So that's important to know that recovering energy is as important as expending it. So thinking about what you're doing around that. So being able to sustain high levels of performance requires a holistic or whole person approach. And Ler and Schwartz suggest having rituals at every level of their high performance pyramid. Rituals are carefully defined structured behaviors and these rituals become habits that support you and sustain you. So you need to build rituals for your physical capacity which means eating nourishing whole foods, obviously not junk food. It means drinking adequate water and getting sufficient sleep with a consistent bedtime and wake-up time and exercising at least three times per week. Now these are things we all know, don't we? We all know these. But the reality check here is are we doing them? They're so important when we're working in a fast-paced workplace. And you need to build rituals for your emotional capacity and build your emotional capacity. Emotions are energy. So keeping emotions in a positive register fuels you whereas frustration, impatience, anger, resentment and sadness will drain your precious energy away. Now this is not about ignoring or suppressing these emotions. It's about being able to identify and process your emotions and express them appropriately. This is what emotional intelligence is. And self-awareness and self-management skills help you do this. It's important to have rituals that build your mental capacity. So this is about understanding the way our amazing brain works. And it's about doing simple things like taking a short, very short focus break about every 90 to 120 minutes when you're at work. So to give your brain a bit of rest. It's about practicing skills like mindfulness which is really the ability to focus. And it's about being aware of your thinking patterns because your thinking shapes your behavior. You have to look after that amazing brain of yours. And last but not least, it's about building your spiritual capacity. Now this is often a taboo subject in the corporate world but what Loren Schwartz means by this is simply tapping into the energy that is unleashed when someone is operating from their deepest values or sense of purpose. They've found that this serves as a source of sustenance in the face of adversity or challenge and as a powerful source of motivation, focus, determination and resilience. Now my purpose is to fill the world with great managers as I mentioned earlier and I'm incredibly passionate about this and I can feel the energy that comes from being connected to this purpose of mine. It sustains me in my very fast paced workplace and world. So get in touch with your deepest values and your purpose and link your work to these as much as you can. So the first of our three strategies today is in building your self-awareness. This is really going to help build your resilience. So to increase your ability to manage stress you must start by building your self-awareness skills. This is a skill and self-awareness is the key to change. Self-awareness is the ability to tune in to yourself, to tune in to others and to tune into your environment. It's about being able to read the signs because if you're not aware of something you can't do anything about it. So let's increase your awareness of your current patterns around stress. I've got a few questions for you so get ready to use your notebook to write down your answers. My first question for you is what stresses you? What type of situations trigger you at work or in life? Now just go with the first thing that pops into your mind but be specific. It could be at work or it could be in life. Where do you feel triggered into that stress response? My next question is what sort of feelings do you have in that situation? Can you identify the emotions? What sort of feelings do you have? Write that down. And what type of thoughts come into your head? See if you can track into what sort of thoughts am I thinking when I'm having those feelings and I'm being triggered. Just write those down. You're doing this download of your pattern now. And then the next thing to be aware of is to what extent do you get hooked by the feelings and thoughts? Now, hooked means you pay a lot of attention to them. For example, you might ruminate. You're thinking about them over and over or you're wrestling with them or you're feeling stuck in a pattern or you can't let the thinking go. So just choose one of the following there. Do you get hooked a lot a little bit or not at all? So this is about awareness about your particular pattern. And this might be the first time you've really tuned in to your stress response patterns. We all have patterns around our stress response and it can vary a bit in different situations but it's important for you to know yourself, to tune in to how you respond to stressful situations. Now, some people get irritable or angry immediately. That's their initial response. Some people get anxious. Some people get confused. Some people get quite dramatic. Everything becomes drama. Some people drop into helplessness. And some people actually get energized. So what's your common pattern? It's knowing this and knowing this helps you recognize it and then it enables you to override your automatic pilot responses. A lot of these patterns are built up over a long period of time. So our next strategy in building your resilience is self-management and this is a skill as well. It's often called self-regulation or impulse control. And this is a skill that will help you learn how to face difficulties, even a mountain of them, calmly without falling apart or fearing that you will. So when we're stressed, we can fall apart emotionally in a variety of ways, such as feeling highly anxious or intensely irritable or really worried or flustered or hopeless or overwhelmed or even demoralized or feeling a bit apathetic. We can also fall apart physically in response to stress which means we can have symptoms like we can suffer from insomnia or our heartbeat is rapid or we have breathing problems or digestive upsets or frequent headaches. These can all be stress-induced. And people who haven't learned effective stress management skills often develop stress-related illnesses. In fact, it's now estimated that around 90% of all illnesses have strong stress-related components. Now, all of us have, of course, we have our limits and we must know our limits. However, feeling overwhelmed by stress may encourage you to be passive and while passivity might be the right response to a limited number of problems, action-taking is usually more adaptive and makes us feel better. So your willingness to take action, skillful action, is essential for you to be able to build new patterns around stress. And it doesn't matter what you know about stress, it matters what you do. So in our Great Managers program, we teach a number of self-management techniques, including this technique called S plus T equals R, which is all about getting in touch with your emotions and then being able to get in touch with your thinking and being able to reappraise your thinking. This is an emotional intelligence technique and it's what we call the handbrake technique. It pulls up the very active part of your limbic or emotional brain, and then that part of your brain is called the amygdala, and it allows you to put the brakes on your runaway emotional brain. Another self-management technique in our program is the SCARF model developed by David Rock, which helps us to identify modern-day threats and then how to move out of those defensive or threat responses. And you also learn about managing your state, which is a technique that helps you get resourceful and stay resourceful. So this technique helps us to manage the emotional contagion that we're so susceptible to with other human beings because we infect each other. You might have heard that expression, behavior breeds behavior. So if you're around a whole lot of stressed people at work, you're going to need a technique like this that enables you to take skillful action to protect you and to stop your precious energy draining away. Now unfortunately, we don't have the time for me to go into these techniques in detail today, but it is important to understand that emotions play a big role in stress management, and the more skillful we are at managing emotions, which is self-regulation, the better we'll manage stress. So let's talk about this skill of emotional agility. Now at its core, emotional agility is about knowing yourself and developing a greater level of control over your feelings and reactions. With greater emotional agility, you can maximize your confidence, turn negative emotions into positive thoughts and respond resourcefully in a way that you might not even know that you're capable of right now. Emotional agility is one of the most valuable business and life skills, and you're all capable of improving this skill quite quickly even. It just takes a bit of practice. So how do you do this? So I'm going to reference a couple of people here, Susan David and Christina Congleton in their Harvard Business Review article called Emotional Agility. They describe four steps for building emotional agility. Now people don't stumble because they have undesirable thoughts. We all have them, it's inevitable. They stumble because they get hooked by their thoughts like a fish caught on a line and they buy into their thoughts, treating them like facts, and then over time turning these thoughts, these random thoughts perhaps, into beliefs even. So the first step in building your emotional agility is to recognize your patterns. Notice when you've been hooked by your thoughts and your feelings, and this can be a little bit hard to do initially, but there are some certain tell-tale signs for this. Now one of them is that your thinking becomes quite rigid or repetitive. You feel yourself thinking the same thing over and over or hear yourself saying the same thing over and over. Another is that you feel like you're telling the same story. Like, you know, there's this story, I've heard that story before and it's you that's telling it. It's like you're in that movie Groundhog Day where you're repeating the same pattern over and over. So you have to be aware of these patterns and that you're stuck in one before you can make a change. And the next step in building your emotional agility is actually to label your thoughts and emotions. It's easier to label your emotions first, but this labeling allows you to see your thoughts and feelings for what they actually are, which is transient sources of data that may or may not prove helpful. We're all capable of taking this kind of detached or what I call helicopter view of our inner experiences. And this is what mindfulness is all about. It's about bringing your awareness to the present moment. So you ask yourself, what am I feeling? Then you label it. You actually identify the actual feeling. And then you ask, what am I thinking? And this not only improves your behavior and well-being, but it also promotes beneficial biological changes in the brain at the cellular level. It puts you in charge of your brain. You can also ask the question, how else could I think about this? The next step is to accept your thoughts and feelings. So the opposite of control is acceptance. You don't have to act on every thought or feeling or resign yourself to negativity. Remember, our thoughts and emotions are not facts, they're just data. But you can respond to your experience with curiosity and openness. You can notice your feeling angry or upset and accept that. You can be curious about how that situation came about and how else you could think about the situation. Emotions are signals that something important is at stake and that productive and skillful action is needed. And your fourth step here is to act on your values. When you unhook yourself from difficult thoughts and emotions, you expand your choices. You can activate your free will and decide to act in a way that aligns with your values. It's making a choice about your response and reality checking whether it will serve you or sabotage you in the long term as well as the short term. So it's about are you being the person you want to be or the leader you want to be? So our mind's thought stream just flows endlessly and emotions change like the weather. But your values are consistent and they can be called upon at any time and in any situation. So here's a quick question for you. What are your top one or two values? What's important to you? And if you were in an alignment with your most important one or two values, what behaviors would you be demonstrating when you're stressed or under pressure? So imagine a colleague or a client was describing how you managed a challenging situation. How would you like to be described or known? So here's a real life example of this. Recently I was running a workshop at a client's premises and my normal contact person wasn't in that day. So I needed to be led into the training room and I asked the front desk to call the section that I normally deal with to see if someone else could help me. Now I suggested a few names of people who'd helped me in the past. It did take a little bit of time and eventually another person who I did know I had met this person before arrived to let me into the room. But she was obviously very busy and not happy about the interruption or this request to assist me which was literally a five minute task. It was just a security swipe into a room. She opened the door for me but she did so without any greeting and was really abrupt with me. Now in that moment she had a choice. We all have a choice as long as we have self-awareness and self-management skills. And the choice is in that moment will I be rude or respectful? Which one fits best with my values? And either way your choice has the most impact on you not the other person. So a lot of people struggle to manage their emotions. So let's have a look at an emotional agility technique. So we'll have a look at emotion versus mood and emotions are things that tend to come and go quite quickly. They're also much more likely to be caused by immediate circumstances. Moods are generally emotions that last for an extended period of time say a few hours or days or maybe even longer. Moods can be due to going through a tough time or they can become a pattern. And if they can become a pattern actually if they do become a pattern they can be hard to shift. For example if people get into an anxiety pattern that can be hard to shift. So remember it is a pattern and this is why learning to identify understand and manage emotions skillfully is important. And being able to express emotions skillfully rather than suppressing them can prevent a mood pattern from building. So let's have a look at the types of emotions because there's so much new research now on emotions and emotional intelligence and I've done a lot of research on this topic and I've also done many courses and read lots of books around this. I've learned that emotions tend to fall into two categories. We call them survival emotions in one category and creative emotions in the other. So I'm going to be referencing some work from a guy called Dr. David Hawkins. He wrote a book called Power versus Force and Dr. Joseph Spencer who wrote a book called Changing the Habit of Being Me. And I've developed a model of emotions that can be used in a workplace based on my understanding and interpretation of their work and their emotional scales. So here are the types of emotions that fall into each category. Our survival emotions are fight-flight ones or a threat response if you like and they come with the associated brain chemistry of cortisol and adrenaline. Our creative emotions are more subtle and they're more associated with a reward response or the associated brain chemistry of serotonin and dopamine. Now dopamine is the neurotransmitter associated with motivation. So just in case you're not familiar with threat and reward responses, it's also something we cover in our great managers program and also our stress management program. So the creative emotions are more subtle until they reach the higher emotional states, these ones here like happiness. So they start with things like curiosity or interest and then appreciation or gratitude or courage which is taking action because of optimism or hope or belief there is a better way or kindness or even love which we don't tend to talk about at work much but we do in our personal lives. Enthusiasm or motivation and happiness or joy. Now each one of these emotions has a certain calibration or a level of energy or voltage if you like. Dr. David Hawkins who's a psychiatrist tested all of these emotions on thousands of subjects using kinesiology to come up with his scale. On the survival side over here anger and fear have a reasonably high voltage or calibration whereas shame and guilt are quite low. So shame is calibrating in around 20 on this scale of Dr. Hawkins and so it's very low. It's a low energy emotion and people can get stuck there. So think about a time when you felt shame and just notice the energy of that emotion. Can you feel how low it is? So the learning here is don't shame people. Don't shame yourself or other people. Don't say what sort of idiot are you that sort of thing. That's shaming yourself or shaming other people. It does not enable your brain or theirs to work optimally and it won't get you the outcome that you want. So guilt is another low calibration of emotion here and guilt is associated with blame in a management context. So don't use blame either. Stop blaming other people. Stop blaming your organization. Blame stops your brain from working optimally. It makes you feel stuck and helpless. So it's about moving into this solution focus rather than getting stuck in blame. So the lesson here is that survival emotions cause our energy to drop whereas creative emotions increase our energy. So think about a time when you felt appreciation or had a really good belly laugh. Can you tune into that calibration and the energy of that? Usually it feels very energizing. And David Hawkins says that happiness or true joy calibrates at around 500 on his scale. So without self-awareness and self-management skills we can get stuck on the survival side because unfortunately that is our default as human beings. Our self-protective system in the brain is very active and it's constantly on the lookout for threats and it can trigger these types of emotions very easily. Negative thoughts and negative emotions feed on each other. So our default position is to look for threats or imagine the worst. So in most situations unless you're in real danger you need to work against this human tendency. So you'll perceive how things will go wrong much quicker than you'll imagine how it will go well or what other options that you have. Even when all the evidence suggests that it could go well and based on your past experiences you know that you're good at problem solving. So we don't see our best interests and so we unintentionally we create the opposite of what we really want. We get swept away by survival emotions. Unfortunately our brain has not evolved to make us happy. It has evolved to keep us safe and help us survive. And if you get stuck in these survival emotions over a period of time and they become your mood or default pattern or habit your energy is constantly draining away. Your precious energy. So your emotional intelligence skills of self-awareness and self-management are what you need to move your mood and emotions into a positive register to take skillful deliberate action. So let me explain how you can use this model a bit more. Self-regulation is the key to building positivity. So once you're aware of your emotions and can identify them, so remember that question what am I feeling? This is about labelling. You can then divert your attention deliberately over to the creative side. This is about you moving your brain into this creative and positive register. This is about getting your brain working optimally. And we call this attention deployment. This is about learning to regulate your own emotions, calm your own stress and anxieties and soothe your own mind. Life gives us negativity on its own. It's our job, our responsibility even, particularly if you're a manager or a person of influence in an organisation, to create positivity. It is possible to move your emotions into a positive register. You can do this and it's not hard to do, especially once you've practised it. So curiosity is a great bridge to help you divert your attention. That's why in these self-management techniques that I'm talking about, you ask these questions. This is activating curiosity. What am I feeling? What am I thinking? What's that about? And how else could I think about this? This is called reappraisal and it enables you to master your thinking and activate curiosity and the clever part of your brain rather than having your primitive brain mastering you. So don't use attack thoughts against yourself or others. Put aside these interfering thoughts. And if old sabotaging thinking patterns or emotions kick in, for me what I do is I say to myself, oh cancel that or I even say recalculating because I used to have a GPS in my car that said that and I've borrowed that from my GPS. It actually works. So it's knowing that you can pull up those thoughts in the moment. And I don't berate myself for thinking negative thoughts because that's an attack thought on myself and it makes the situation and my stress worse. I know other people who say things like, whoa, don't go there or drop it. So you're in charge. This is about you being in charge of your brain. The other way you can use this model is deliberately choosing emotions from the creative side every day to build your emotional tone and turn it into your normal state. And there's so many benefits in doing this. So I read an article recently that said one minute of anger weakens your immune system for four or five hours. Whereas one minute of laughter boosts your immune system for 24 hours. I've used this bridge technique a lot with my coaching clients and what I get them to do is to use appreciation or gratitude on a daily basis. So at the end of each day you reflect on what went well today. What did I do well rather than what didn't go well. Start practicing that in your life. So the more time you spend in creative emotions the higher your energy and brain function will be and the better you'll manage stress. The more positive you are the better your results will be. And if you're looking for additional support with this skill Dr. Sarah Edelman's book called Change Your Thinking is a Good One. She's well known for her work here in Australia on this. So this is about how to thrive, how to flourish and build positivity. So the idea is to spend more time in this positive emotional register at least three times more. The more time in what we call above the line emotions those creative emotions and behaviors. Now this three to one ratio is very well researched. It's called the La Sada ratio and it's also written up in Barbara Fredrickson's book called Positivity. It's what makes us flourish as human beings. Now obviously there'll be times in life where things will happen and you'll drop below the line. Something might really upset you or you're under a lot of pressure but the idea is to be able to move ourselves out of that and keep yourself in this three to one ratio. So our third strategy to build your resilience is harnessing the power of relationships. This is about connecting with ourselves and with others to build stress resilience. So to become more resilient we need to strengthen our relationship first with our inner self and build what Al Siebert in his book The Resiliency Advantage calls the three gatekeepers to resiliency. So these are things you can deliberately work on. These are your self confidence, your self esteem and your self concept. And if your three gatekeepers are strong they'll allow you to develop a wide range of skills and habits. But if they're weak or you do not work on developing they'll undermine you and make you feel vulnerable. So self confidence is an action predictor. It's your gatekeeper to effective action. Think of self confidence as your reputation with yourself. People with strong self confidence expect to succeed in new activities and overcome unknown difficulties. So think about this, when given a new assignment at work do you feel confident that you'll learn how to do it well or do you shy away from it? So in today's fast-paced workplaces it's important to know what your strengths and abilities are and what you can do well. You're in your role for a reason. And modesty might be a desirable thing in social situations but it's not helpful in teams when others are relying on you. So self confidence is a positive thing and very different from over confidence or bragging which is actually based on insecurity. So self confidence comes from being good at what you do, from building your skills and from achieving goals that are meaningful for you. It comes from making progress. It comes from leveraging your strengths. So think about what you could do to increase your self confidence. Your next gatekeeper is your self-esteem and this is your emotional opinion about yourself. It's the gatekeeper in control of how you feel about yourself. Now strong, healthy self-esteem serves like a protective, sick, emotional blanket that buffers you from feeling hurt by criticism. And self-esteem actually makes up the gap between the feedback you actually receive in life compared to what is ideal to sustain us psychologically. It is rare for any of us to be getting an ideal amount of feedback in life. So the idea here is to understand that you can deliberately build your self-esteem. So the way you can do that is start to tune into how do you feel when someone gives you a compliment? Do you push it away or do you accept it and let it soak in? And when someone gives you feedback, do you get defensive? So starting to get stronger with your self-esteem can help you in those situations. Your third gatekeeper is your self-concept or this is your identity about yourself. And this is strengthened or weakened by your ideas about yourself. Now many people have a self-identity attached to external factors like their role, their title, their educational level, where they live or even what car they drive. Now if this is the case you're at risk of having a serious identity crisis if any of those external anchors change. So this is about you building your self-concept deliberately. And what successful people, resilient people, do is they define their self-concept for themselves. So it's about having healthy self-esteem, strong self-confidence and a positive self-concept. And you develop these in small steps over a period of time. Okay, so it's about actually deliberately working on those. The other thing you can do to break bad habits is to build resilience, is to break some bad habits, particularly things like perfectionism. Because no project situation or decision is ever perfect and perfectionistic is a habit that will do you in. The other thing you can do is clean up your act. So if you're always running late, set your clocks and watches faster, give yourself some extra time. If your desk is a mess, file away the clutter and just know that this will help you. So plan your day as well, that will help you clean up your act. And learn how to overcome overwhelm. Overwhelm is when you've got too many thoughts going on in your head. So this is about being able to write things down. When you've got too many thoughts in your head, your brain is struggling, just like your computer does when you have too many programs or files open. And flip your negative thinking. If you see the downside of every situation in interaction or the worst in people or make life a drama, you'll find yourself drained of energy. So don't try and control the uncontrollable, it's the next one. So so many people are trying to control things or outside of their control, particularly the behavior of other people. So rather than stressing out over them and getting hooked by them, focus on the things that you can control. So I know we're getting close to the end here, I'll quickly move through these last things. The next thing is your relationship with others. And this is really about capping in to other people and being able to communicate really effectively and really build solid relationships with other people at work. And particularly making your communication friendly and efficient. The other thing is capping into the power of teamwork. This is well known that teams can help us build resilience. So we know that if a team works together, that there's a synergy that comes from that and this really helps with stress management and personal satisfaction as well. So I'm going to take some questions shortly, but I just wanted to quickly summarize what we've covered there. We've covered that self-awareness is your starting point and key to change when it comes to building capacity. And self-management is your power skill when it comes to regulating your emotions and stress management. It's about building emotional agility. And we've also covered very briefly the power of relationships. So it's about applying these three strategies and taking skillful and deliberate action because that's how you thrive at work. Okay, so we're going to be moving to questions shortly, but just to remind you that recovering energy is as important as expending it. So I'd like you to think about what could you do differently to manage stress better and thrive at work? How could you build your resilience? And what one or two things could you take from our short webinar today that will help you build your resilience? I'd really be keen to hear from you about those. If you've got some ideas there, that'd be great if you could write those into the question box. If I get a chance, I'll come back to those as well. And just before we go to questions, I just wanted to have a couple of suggestions for you about what we do and how we could perhaps help you with your stress management. We actually run a one-day training program on this very topic, stress management strategies for thriving in a fast-paced workplace or world. So if you're interested in finding out more about that, you could email us at info at greatmanagers.com. And as Vesna mentioned at the beginning, we have our Great Managers Academy. So any of you leaders or managers on the call today, you might be interested in finding out more about that because we cover these skills in a lot of detail in that program and it's a fabulous program. So let's go to your questions now. Thank you so much, Sandra. That was a really interesting presentation. We did have quite a few questions come through, but we might only have time for a couple. And I'll also be popping up a survey on your screen now as well. So if you could just fill that out, that would be awesome. So the first question was from Brian. This is something that applies, I think, to everyone. How do I not carry the stresses of home life to the workplace so that I can work in peace? So that's a good question, Brian. So that's about creating space either between home and between work or vice versa. I coach a lot of people who ask the same question. How do they stop taking their work stress into home? And this is where having a ritual around that is really important. Something like mindfulness, breathing, mindful breathing. When you get, if you're driving to work or if you're catching public transport, having a little practice using an app on your phone that can drop you into a mindful state even for a couple of minutes can help you switch off from what's happening at either home or vice versa at the end of the day, switching off from work. And a lot of people find that using appreciation is another way of diverting your attention. So you're not ruminating about all the things that went wrong and all the fast pace and the pressure. At home you're actually starting to divert your attention to, well, what do I appreciate about where I live or my family or what do I appreciate about my job even, that sort of thing. What am I looking forward to today? So that attention deployment that I talked about earlier is very important for being able to do that. Thanks, Brian, for your question. Thank you. I might just have time for one more question. And the question was from Ziko. And I'm sorry, I know I've gotten your name wrong before in a webinar as well. So sorry about that pronunciation. And how do I remember the steps for emotional agility in the heat of the moment? Does it just come with practice? It definitely comes with practice. I hope you've written them down for today. And as Vesna said, you will get a copy of the recording. I don't share the slides, guys. I'm sorry about that. There's a lot of work that goes into those, but you'll get the recording. So write those four steps down and remember them and just start practicing them. They won't come from just writing them down, but putting them into practice, particularly being able to identify your feelings and then being able to use your feelings to tap into your thinking and then to reframe your thinking is that's what emotional intelligence is. It's being able to use emotion and logic together and also being able to get in touch with your values so you know that you're living in alignment with your values. Great, thank you. And just a really quick one from Tracy, just for some notes, what does S plus T equals R stand for? Tracy, that stands for situation plus thinking equals the response we have or the result that we get in that situation. It's an emotional intelligence technique that we cover in a lot of detail in the Great Managers program. Great, thank you. And I'm sorry to everyone whose questions we didn't get around to answering today. Just a lot of content to get through. Thank you again, Sandra, for a really interesting presentation. Just a reminder that you'll receive a copy of the recording within 48 hours. Thank you to everyone for joining. Thank you for filling out the survey and I hope everyone has a lovely day.