part0014

When we think of stress, we tend to focus on its negative impacts, but if we had no stress in our lives, we’d likely have very little motivation and satisfaction. The stress we experience is often a result of living full and engaging lives and striving to achieve our goals.

When we can change our perspective, we can see that stress isn’t the enemy; we just need to have the right amount of stress in order to be productive and healthy. As neuroscience has found, “the prefrontal cortex needs just the right level of arousal to make decisions and solve problems well. That level is quite high but not too high. Positive stress helps focus your attention.” 1 In other words, when we have too little stress, we lack energy and purpose; when we have too much, we become overwhelmed and anxious.

This is called eustress or “good stress.” This good stress gets you out of bed in the morning because you have bills to pay, and a boss who will be angry if you don’t show up. It motivates you. We don’t want to eliminate this energizing stress at work because it keeps us engaged, makes us highly productive, and ensures we deliver on our commitments.

While a little bit of stress is good for us, too little or too much stress is bad. Each one of us has a different threshold for stress. Look around the office and you’ll see what I mean. When the photocopier breaks, some people start crying. They have a lower threshold for stress. Judge not. You have no idea why they reacted that way or what happened before that photocopier breakdown.

When we have just enough stress, we’re highly productive. This is the sweet spot called optimum stress that we hope to find for ourselves. I have this great talent for finding that sweet spot for a few months, then taking on just a bit more work, and then a bit more until I’m a frazzled, stressed-out mess. Then I start all over again. Figuring out how to manage our stress so we can live a happy, healthy, productive life is definitely a lifelong journey, especially because our stressors keep changing.

We’ve all experienced this wonderful state of optimum stress: we’re on fire, getting lots done, full of energy, and really enjoying ourselves. The challenge is noticing when our optimum stress becomes less than optimal. Too often, we are operating just at the edge of optimum stress, and when we start to tip over into overload, we ignore the warning signs. Instead of slowing down and managing our stress, we power through.

When I’m operating at optimum stress levels, I’m highly productive. I end each day feeling energized by all that I’ve accomplished and excited about what I’ll be working on the next day.

I’m hoping that someday I’ll be able to report on what it feels like to have too little stress in my life, but so far, I couldn’t tell you. I imagine you’re not in that situation either because most people who buy books on managing their stress tend to be in stress overload.

When I’m operating at stress overload levels, my brain races, I can’t stop thinking about everything I need to get done, it takes me hours to fall asleep, and I wake too early. I often get a sore neck and tight shoulders. I can be short and irritable with my family, and I feel like I’m running through every day but getting nowhere. At the end of the day, I’m drained and dreading the next day, wondering how I’m possibly going to get everything done.

Instead, we need to notice our stress signs and take action to manage our stress the moment we notice it reaching—or passing—the tipping point. Ideally, we want to pull our stress levels back as soon as we notice signs that we are feeling stressed out or anxious. The sooner we deal with our stress, the easier it is to manage. Too often we have the perspective that being highly stressed out is typical. It’s not—it just seems that way because everyone we know is usually super stressed.

Most of us know our individual signs of a rising stress level: a kink in the neck, impatience, irritability, difficulty falling or staying asleep, headaches, or a deep desire to lock yourself in a room with a good book and a box of chocolate (okay, that one may be unique to me).

Make a list and start watching for your stress signs. You can also keep track throughout the day, ranking your stress levels from one to ten and noticing what caused them to change. Chances are that you’re living with many signs of stress overload right now—and now is the time to make a change, before you begin to experience even more physical and mental health impacts of being stressed out.

Unfortunately, many people let their stress pile up until they end up burned out and exhausted. There are negative consequences of ignoring your stress, including major health issues like relationship breakdown, job loss, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. 2

We live in a culture that values powering through and pushing ourselves beyond reasonable limits. We seem to think that working ourselves to the point of severe stress and potential physical and mental health problems shows great dedication and loyalty. That’s old thinking.

What shows great dedication and loyalty, to your employer and to your family and friends, is taking really good care of yourself so you can maintain a highly productive, positive, and engaged presence at home and at work.

Let’s stop powering through and, instead, find ways to recharge and take care of ourselves in order to bring life back to optimum stress levels. As you’ll learn in the next chapter, when we take the time to recharge, we are actually more productive.

Being stressed out doesn’t help us get more work done or be a better employee. Taking time to care for ourselves does. What are the little actions you could take today to reduce your stress and bring it back to optimum stress levels?

It might be as simple as leaving work on time, actually taking a lunch break, asking a friend or family member to help you out in the evenings or on the weekends, or making time to go for a walk during your workday.

Being proactive in managing our stress is the best way to serve our employers, our families, our friends, and ourselves.

Some of you may have heard the analogy that we are all juggling five balls in life. Four of these balls are fragile. They will break if we drop them. Only one of them is rubber. It will bounce. Which ball do you think is rubber?

That sucker will bounce. You can drop work and pick it back up again. Even if you get fired, you can find another job.

This might seem like a strange thing to say in a book focused on work, but one of the most important things we can do to reduce our stress is to put work in perspective with the rest of our lives.

Looking at the big picture of our lives not only reduces our work stress, but it helps us prioritize what matters most to us. My husband often gets stressed about work and he can’t sleep. When he finds his mind buzzing with all of his stressors, he goes and sits in our kids’ room for a few minutes watching them sleep. This simple act grounds him and reminds him of what is most important. With that perspective, his work stressors don’t seem like such a big deal, and he lets them slip out of his mind, which enables him to sleep.

As a wise friend of mine once told me when he was explaining how he prioritized family and work, “There are plenty of jobs, but I only have one family.”

A few years ago, I stopped by to visit some clients that I hadn’t seen in a while. One of the guys had been off for six months because he’d had cancer. He had the poster of the five balls on his office wall, and it struck me more powerfully than it ever had.

He told me he was thrilled to be back at work, but he’d stopped working like a lunatic because he knew that his health, his kids, his relationships, and his life were way too important to sacrifice to his job.

Even though work is the bounciest ball out there, we often treat it as the most important ball. We miss our children’s science fairs, concerts, and soccer games; our friends’ dinner parties and birthdays; our parents’ visits; and a million special moments that we can never get back because our culture values work over everything else.

Many of you, like me, have learned the hard way what’s most important. I was lucky in many ways, because when I was eleven years old, my mother had stage four cancer. This might not sound very lucky, but hear me out. She was given a 10 percent chance of survival. She beat the odds by telling the doctors to double the recommended dose of radiation. She refused to die then, but since that time, I sensed my mother was living on borrowed time. That made me lucky because I took every opportunity to spend time with her; I knew our time was precious. When she got Alzheimer’s nineteen years later, I had no regrets. I’d made my relationship with her a priority throughout my life. We’d lived in different countries and had our own lives, but we spoke every week on the phone, and I visited her in Mexico at least two or three times a year.

My mother visited me in Vancouver every summer and we spent quality time together—we talked and laughed and shared our favorite books and went for slow walks. Whenever she needed me, I was there. Because I suspected and feared that she would not be with us until the ripe old age of eighty-three, as her mother had been. I was right. She was fifty-nine when she died.

We don’t have to wait for big wake-up calls like a personal health crisis or an ailing family member to make a change. We can find perspective in the little moments.

Losing my mother changed me. Our journey through Alzheimer’s changed my perspective on life. One of the main reasons I chose the slightly scary path of consulting (no benefits, no holidays, no sick days, and no certainty of a paycheck) is that it gives me the flexibility to spend more time with my kids. Because no matter how much satisfaction my work gives me, I know it’s not the most important thing I do in the world. The most important task I have in this world is to love my people and to show them that love by spending time with them, by being there when they need me, and by being fully present.

For those of you who tend to torture yourselves with guilt about how much more time you spend at work than with your kids, don’t. Research has shown that when it comes to time with our kids, quality time (being fully present and engaged with them rather than being on our phones or distracted in some other way) is far more important than quantity: “Building relationships, seizing quality moments of connection, not quantity . . . is what emerging research is showing to be most important for both parent and child well-being.” 3

And get this: when we are stressed out, it’s really bad for our kids. The first large-scale longitudinal study of parent time “found one key instance when parent time can be particularly harmful to children. That’s when parents, mothers in particular, are stressed, sleep-deprived, guilty and anxious.” 4

Of course, it’s mothers in particular. Thanks for the added pressure there. Why is it always the mother?! If there was ever a reason to get your stress under control (perhaps by taking a night away from your kids), this is it.

I still remember the first weekend I took away from my kids—my daughter was ten months old; my son was almost three years old. A friend and I booked a weekend at an Airbnb so we could write and have uninterrupted conversations (something that hadn’t happened in almost three years). I left home feeling frazzled, drained, and irritable. I returned home feeling relaxed and happy, and more like myself than I’d felt in months. And something amazing happened. I really, really loved my kids when I got home. I was so happy to be with them. I was the best mom ever, for at least two days. Then, you know, life happened. I can’t recommend a weekend away enough for reminding you how awesome it is to have kids. Or to have parents. Or needy friends. Or a demanding job. Or whatever wonderful but challenging thing you have in your life that both fills you and drains you. Give yourself some time to take care of all the five balls in your life, not just work .

For me, a good life includes work. I love work. I’m not suggesting you give up your job or turn into a total slacker. I’m just suggesting you question where it fits in your list of priorities. I feel so grateful to be able to work, both for the income and for the satisfaction and growth it provides. Work is my happy place, where I feel competent and capable (unlike parenting and writing, where I often feel like I’m stumbling around in the dark, hitting my shins on things, and trying not to swear). When I’m working, I’m giving and growing and learning, and that makes me incredibly happy. Yet, when I look back on those years when my mom was sick, I’m far prouder of the daughter I was to her than I am of the award-winning Mental Illness First Aid program I built.

Work is important and satisfying and rewarding and necessary, but do not fool yourself into believing it deserves all of you. You have to hold back some of yourself for your family, your friends, and yourself. We can’t be with our loved ones in every instance that they need us, but we have to make the effort to be there when it feels important to us.

We can’t do it all, and we have to make choices between the demands of our personal lives and the demands of our work lives. It’s unrealistic to expect that we can choose the demands of our personal lives every time. That’s reality, and there’s no reason to feel guilty about it, unless you know you aren’t living by your own values and doing what feels right for you; in that case, you need to take action and make different choices.

When we look back on our lives, we will value the love we gave and the relationships we had as our greatest treasures and as our greatest contributions to the world. Hopefully, some of those wonderful relationships and some of that sense of contribution will have happened at work, but work has to stop being our top and, often, our only priority. Clarifying our priorities helps us become more effective at work as well. Committing to get home by five to have dinner with our family and knowing we aren’t going to work at night pushes us to work more efficiently during the day. You’ll get plenty of tools to increase your productivity in Chapter Eleven to make sure you can get all your work done and relax in the evenings.

Most of us live with more demands and pressures than ever, and it’s impossible to live up to all the expectations we have of ourselves. So, let’s give up on them. Let’s have an expectation revolution! My goal for this year is to be content. I’m going on an expectation moratorium. This year, I’m planning to just relax and appreciate my life. Sure, I want to do some great work and writing along the way, but I’m tired of all the pressure and expectations I put on myself. It’s freeing to be okay with being a decent parent, a good consultant, a good-enough writer. I’m letting go of striving for excellence and instead enjoying competence. This shift in mindset has significantly reduced my stress.

Maybe you don’t want to throw all your expectations away as I have. Maybe that’s too radical a step. Or maybe you do. At the bare minimum, many of us could benefit from relaxing our expectations of ourselves.

Whatever you choose, if you can find a way to take just a little bit of that self-induced pressure off of yourself, I think you’ll find your stress levels slip down a few notches. Just go with the flow, appreciate and enjoy your work and your life and see what happens .

You’ll still get a lot accomplished, maybe even more than when you were putting all that pressure on yourself. So far, I’ve managed to continue to deliver great work and be more relaxed in the process.

To keep my current stress in perspective, all I need to do is to look back. I’ve had some very stressful times, as I’m sure you have. Sometimes recognizing how manageable and simple your stressors are now, in contrast to what you’ve faced in the past, can help reframe your relationship with your current challenges. It’s also an excellent reminder that you have the resources and resilience to get through difficult times.

My husband also went through a heartbreaking time a few decades ago. He was working as an engineer at a company that designed and installed industrial boilers. He was taking time off to be with his father, who had just had an aneurysm, when his sister suddenly became ill and died within a few weeks. It was his first job after graduating university; he had only been working there a matter of months; and he was working on large proposals with short deadlines. When he spoke to his boss to express his concern about all the time he’d had to take off from work, his boss responded by saying, “It’s only boilers.”

This man had perspective. He knew what was most important in life, and it wasn’t work. It was being with the people you love when they need you. Time is precious, and it becomes more precious in crisis. I’m so grateful that my husband’s boss had the wisdom to offer him this perspective because it gave him the freedom to spend time with his family when they needed him.

When I’m feeling stressed about some of the less important things in life, I remind myself “It’s only boilers.”

Work can cause me a lot of stress when I allow it to, but when I switch my focus to the fact that everyone in my family is healthy and doing well, I remember how minor the work stress is in the grand scheme of things.

In fact, all the stressors I have currently are the result of good things: my husband travels because he has an interesting job that he loves. I’ve always wanted kids, and now I get the gift of their brilliant stubborn little spirits; when I am feeling frustrated, I remind myself of how sad I would be if I didn’t have them in my life. My job is stressful because I’m busy, and I have so many wonderful clients and so much interesting work. I have so many stressors to be grateful for—it’s all about perspective.

Part of why work becomes such a priority for us is that in our culture, our success and status are tied to work. I taught English in South Korea for a year, and I was always surprised by the first questions people would ask me: “How old are you?” and “Are you married?” Those were the questions used in that culture to determine status. Here in North America, we ask: “What do you do for a living?” because we believe that helps us determine another person’s character and status. It doesn’t, any more than age or marriage does. But it illustrates what we value in our culture and how we define ourselves.

Work is a significant and important part of our identities, but it is not who we are. A lifetime ago I was a cashier, a wilderness guide, a receptionist; now I’m a leadership coach and consultant. Maybe in another decade, I’ll be a nanny or a clerk in a bookstore or a bestselling author. Not one of these jobs, or even the collective of them all, defines me. Who we are is far bigger than the work we do. When we remember this, it can help us relax and keep our work in perspective .

Think about the five balls you are juggling: work, friends, health, spirit, family. Work is not who you are. Spirit is who you are. Some people feel uncomfortable with the word spirit . I think of it as the essence of who you are. What makes you happy? What fills you up? For each of us there will be a different answer. For me, a night of dancing makes me happy; for my husband, that would be his worst nightmare.

Do you long to go to yoga, sleep in on a Sunday morning, savor a sweet, milky cup of tea, share a night laughing with friends, do a crossword, disappear into a good book, dance in your living room? That’s clearly my list—what’s yours? Do you want to go for a hike, build a model airplane, go to a chess tournament? What quirky wonderful loves do you have that make you essentially you?

What would happen if you left work just fifteen minutes early or took an actual lunch break and spent a bit of time each day filling up your tank? Research has found that the best way to increase our productivity and decrease our stress is to focus on our happiness—we’ll cover this in more detail in the next chapter.

After you’ve determined what’s most important to you, start creating a life that reflects that. If you love to run and you haven’t run in years, find a way to start running again. Run so much that your kid tells you that your last name should be Runner. Go for it. You’ll be happier, less stressed, and more productive.

Do you ever think back to something that you were losing sleep over a few months or years ago and wonder why it was such a big deal? Do you remember the H1N1 virus from years ago? It was the flu that was going to kill us all. When H1N1 was a threat, I had a job developing educational resources for health-care providers.

I had to cancel my vacation plans to design and deliver province-
wide training on how to prevent the spread of H1N1 in health-care providers. As you can imagine, there was serious pressure and a lot of late nights and working weekends.

Everyone around me was highly stressed, not just by the workload but the worry that the we were all going to be taken out by the deadly flu. It was a super stressful time but now whenever we look back on it, my husband and I laugh about the H1N1 ridiculousness. This illustrates that at some point in the future, a person or situation that, at the time, feels like it might break you will become just a fuzzy memory. Think back to your life five years ago. Can you remember what was stressing you out then?

Sometimes we work ourselves up into such a frenzy that we lose perspective. The little things grow large and terrible in our minds. If we catch ourselves, we can recognize that whatever is stressing us out is really not that big a deal and let it go. That’s how we reduce our stress.

When we have perspective, we can change how we respond to stress. I’m not saying that I don’t ever get stressed out. I do. But when I get a little perspective, it significantly reduces my stress.

Stress is a natural response to challenges; it’s hardwired into us. We are evolutionarily predisposed to perceive and manage threats. This is how we, as a species, have survived. It’s natural that we are still responding in a way that is hardwired into our brains. But it doesn’t help us the way it once did. There are no longer lions chasing us, there’s just the annoying person we have to work with every day. If we have a huge stress response to our annoying coworker, we’re setting ourselves up for unnecessary angst. And for what? That person’s not worth it.

We all have challenges, and we all have stress in our lives. That’s reality. Some of us have way more stress in our lives than others could even imagine and are able to handle it, while others have minimal stress but react strongly to it. Everyone has a different optimum stress level. Instead of judging others for their stress responses, focus on your own stress response and consider ways that you can respond differently.

There will be many life events that are beyond our control and the only power we have in any situation is choosing how we respond to it. We could get sick, people we love might get hurt or die, we might lose jobs and relationships, and, at times, we may even lose our own way. Life can be heartbreaking.

Even if you are going through the most stressful time of your life, remind yourself of all the other stressful times that you have come through and all the resources you have to get you through this time. You’re tough. You’ll make it. During the impossible times, we have to be compassionate with ourselves and prioritize taking care of ourselves, so we can cope with all our stress.

We choose our response to everything. Often, our response to stressors becomes so hardwired that we don’t recognize it as a choice. The beauty of becoming more self-aware is that we can make a different choice about how we respond to our challenges. We can recognize our hardwired stress response, take a few deep breaths and calm down, reminding ourselves that there are no lions chasing us. Or we can throw up our hands, freak out, and run around telling everyone about how terrible things are. Or we can focus on what we can do about the situation, take action, then move on, and let it go. That’s stress-
reducing behavior.

We always have a choice in how we respond, and we’d be wise to use it. Remember that research “found that it wasn’t the number of stressful events but how a person perceived their stress and then reacted to it emotionally that was associated with increased risk for heart disease and death.” 5 Our stress response is killing us. This is why it’s so important that we bypass our hardwired stress response and calm the heck down.

I had a life-changing shift in perspective about how to manage stress when I was eighteen. I was working at a summer camp, leading wilderness camping trips in northern Saskatchewan. This was a long time before cell phones existed. We took groups of kids into the wilderness for three to fourteen days and had no way of communicating with the outside world.

I worked for Gary, a very calm twenty-three-year-old. One day, I was at the base camp in the Qu’Appelle Valley coordinating the local out-trips. At the time, two counsellors and fourteen kids, aged nine to twelve, were out on a three-night canoe trip. The forecast came in for a serious storm: lightning, thunder, torrential winds, and rain; we needed to get the kids off the lake. Luckily, we knew where their campsites were and when they were expected to reach each site. Early that morning when we heard the forecast on the radio, Gary and I set off in the clunky old green camp pickup truck. We drove to the campsite that the campers should have been staying at the night before. There was no sign of the canoes or the kids.

The winds whipped up, and the rain started coming down; lightning struck the lake repeatedly, and my panic levels started rising. We drove along the lake towards the campsite that they should have headed to. No sign of them. I went into full-blown panic. Every what if imaginable came to mind. I have a very vivid imagination and, when I was in my teens, I was prone to drama. I worked myself up into quite a state, imagining attending the funerals of those children, facing their devastated parents.

Gary spoke in a steady voice, “We’ll find them. They’re fine. The counsellors are smart. They got off the lake somewhere. Panicking isn’t going to help. Now let’s think, and let’s find them.” He was right. Stressing out wasn’t helping. Panicking was even worse. His calm manner helped me get grounded and focus.

We talked over the possible options, looked at maps, and then drove slowly along the road, keeping our eyes peeled for the canoes along the shore. I caught a flash of silver as we drove and nearly jumped out of my seat. Gary pulled the truck over to the side of the highway. We crashed our way down through the scrubby bushes to a small, protected area and saw that the boats had pulled into a little stretch of beach. The kids were huddled under a tarp that the counsellors had set up. They were cold and wet, but they were okay. We drove them back to the camp and everything was fine. Absolutely fine .

From that moment forward, I worked to respond differently to stressful situations. Whenever I felt my high-stress response kicking in, I asked myself, “What would Gary do?” I knew that staying calm would result in the best possible outcome. Eventually, I no longer needed to ask myself what Gary would do because responding to stressful situations with a calm manner became my natural response.

This ability to remain calm and think rationally about solutions in times of stress has served me incredibly well over the years. I’ve been able to maintain my calm during terrifying trips to the hospital with various family members as well as the highly stressful work situations that arise when you are a consultant who is called in to deal with difficult workplace dynamics.

We can’t kick into high-stress response every time something difficult or upsetting happens. The physical and mental health impacts of being regularly and highly stressed out are far more dangerous to us than any of the events that we are responding to.

Our high-stress response is also destroying our productivity. Neuroscientist David Rock explains that “the threat response is both mentally taxing and deadly to the productivity of a person—or an organization. Because this response uses up oxygen and glucose from the blood, they are diverted from other parts of the brain, including the working memory function, which processes new information and ideas. This impairs analytic thinking, creative insight, and problem solving; in other words, just when people most need their sophisticated mental capabilities, the brain’s internal resources are taken away from them.” 6

We don’t think as clearly when we are in high-stress mode, so finding our calm in the midst of chaos is the best way to get through whatever is happening. An easy way to calm ourselves down in the moment is to take long, slow, deep breaths.

Take a moment to think about the ways that you respond to stressful events.

Believe it or not, most of the things that happen at work aren’t about you. There are big organizational systems at play that impact many elements of your workplace, but even when they affect you, they are very rarely about you.

I’ve worked with an alarming number of people over my career who think that management sits in a room and thinks up ways to make their lives miserable. They really do believe this. And I’ve worked with their managers, so I know that while they may not always have the best ideas, they aren’t out to get people. I’ve never heard any manager say, “Let’s introduce this scheduling change because that is just going to destroy Brian’s life. He’s never going to see his wife or kids and that’ll make him miserable. It’ll be awesome,” while giggling gleefully and rubbing their hands together.

It just doesn’t work that way. You aren’t the star of anyone’s show but your own. In addition to organizational issues, we often take other people’s behavior—what they say and do—personally. Don’t.

I can’t tell you the number of people I see caught up in the drama of interpersonal conflict at work. They waste countless hours, days, and sometimes even months or years of their lives obsessing about other people and how they are behaving. The great irony is that if they spent half as much time taking personal responsibility by thinking about their own work or how to improve themselves, they would be wildly powerful and productive.

If you find yourself in conflict with a coworker, think carefully and consider if there’s anything you might have done to contribute to the situation or dynamic. Identify what you’ve done (if anything), do something to rectify the situation, then let it go.

If the situation escalates, use the feedback model to tell the person about the action and impact of their behavior, and discuss a way to work it out. A great way to start this conversation is: “I know I might be totally off-base here . . .” or: “I’m really confused about what’s going on, and rather than make up stories in my head, I thought I’d come talk to you.”

I’ve mediated so many workplace conflicts because people were taking things personally. I once worked with a team that was in conflict because one of the team members was quite controlling, and the manager did nothing to prevent it. The controlling coworker, let’s call her Joan, was a perfectionist and did most tasks herself because she believed no one else could possibly do them to the same standard that she did.

How do you think Joan’s coworkers responded? Did they say, “Oh, that’s just Joan, being a perfectionist, nothing to do with me.”? No. They said, “She doesn’t trust me,” and, “She’s holding a grudge from that time three years ago when I screwed up that project,” and, “She thinks my work is inferior,” and, “I think she’s trying to get me fired.” In short, they made up stories—stories in which they were the main character. How many of us do that? We are never the main character in another person’s story; they are.

Don’t get caught up in another person’s drama. It doesn’t serve you, it doesn’t serve them, and it doesn’t serve the work. Recognize that people engage in a lot of unhealthy behaviors, especially when they are unhappy. Most of the time, it’s not about you.

Your job is to figure out how you can work with a difficult person and still be professional and productive. You don’t have to be best friends; you just want to minimize the amount of stress they cause you. Be the bigger person. Use the feedback model, find ways to change your stress response, and don’t get caught up in the drama. You’ll find that when you change the way you engage with the person, the dynamics will shift.

There are often people who are incredibly difficult to work with in our workplaces. If we can switch our perspective and start considering these people our teachers, we’ll react less strongly to them. Sometimes, they have a specific lesson for us. Other times, the lesson is simply to learn not to engage in the drama and difficulty they are creating.

If you can switch your perspective, you’ll often be amazed at all the ways this person is legitimately teaching you to engage differently. It can transform your relationship with them to view them as someone to learn from rather than someone to run from. Instead of cringing when we see them walking towards us, we can smile and think, Here comes my teacher, I wonder what I’ll learn today .

Maybe you’ll learn to take a deep breath and let things roll off you, or maybe you’ll learn to be compassionate or to stand up for yourself. When we can look for the learning in the situation rather than the stress, we’ll find it.

One difficult person I’ve worked with recently has taught me that I need to be very clear and assertive regarding my boundaries. There is always something to be learned from the challenges we experience: it might be how we want to behave, think, or engage differently.

Take a minute to think back on a difficult interaction you’ve had recently and identify what you learned from it. Who are some of your best teachers? What might change in your relationship if you started viewing them as teachers? Often when we shift our perspective, we can engage with them with a more lighthearted and calm perspective.

I had a client who was terrified of conflict while his manager thrived on creating it. He had no idea how to deal with his manager, and he spent every day feeling anxious and upset. His productivity was dropping, his stress was through the roof, and he knew he needed help.

When he told me all the stories about his manager, I laughed and said, “I think you’re getting a PhD in how to deal with conflict.”

He was able to laugh too, and he recognized that it was time he learned these particular skills. “Well, I kind of need it. I let people run all over me, not just at work but at home too.”

That perspective made for a very different approach. By viewing the situation as a learning opportunity, my client was able to learn some tools and find the courage to have the difficult conversations he needed to have with his manager.

It wasn’t easy, but it was a lot easier than spending all day feeling upset and angry at another person who he had no control over. He learned strategies that made him better at handling conflict, not only with his manager but in other work and life situations. He grew, where before he had been withering. After a few months of practicing all his new skills, he reported with delight, “I’m totally comfortable with conflict now. Yesterday my manager pulled some of his BS, and I just calmly looked at him and said, ‘I disagree with you.’ I had no butterflies, I just did it. It didn’t even feel scary. I’m good with conflict in a way I never thought I’d be. I thought I’d go to my grave having spent too much of my life giving up what I wanted so I could avoid conflict. Now I don’t have to!”

I’m not a high-fiver by nature, but we high-fived that day .

Often much of our stress comes not from the event itself but from our feeling that it shouldn’t have happened. We can waste countless hours and precious energy being upset that something has happened, or is happening, rather than accepting reality. It’s reality, it is happening. The more time we spend being upset about reality rather than accepting it, the more pointlessly stressed out we are. It’s time to access our inner Buddhists and surrender to what is.

I often go into workplace situations where people are not happy to see me. I mean really, how many of you are thrilled to do some team building or to be sent to a leadership class? When I accept the reality that people don’t want to be there, I can relax and meet them with acceptance, rather than trying to convince them how worthwhile it will be to spend time with me.

This ability to surrender to the reality of the situation has served me really well, and it’s enabled me to connect with people in a way that I otherwise wouldn’t have. I once went into an organization that had a reputation for having some difficult staff to deliver a five-day leadership program that all the staff had been mandated to attend.

In the introductions, one woman said, “I did this course three years ago, but I must have failed because they sent me back.” Another guy said, “I have twelve projects right now, and I’m behind on all of them. But I’m stuck here for the next five days.” That was the tone of almost all the introductions. People were not happy to be there.

I accepted that reality and surrendered to it. After thirty people had introduced themselves, expressing various levels of dissatisfaction with having to spend five valuable days doing this leadership crap, I responded by saying, “I get it. You don’t want to be here and it’s frustrating, especially when you have so much work to do. But you’re stuck here, so if you’re willing to make the most of the time and give me your full energy and attention, I promise I’ll make it the most valuable class you’ve ever attended.”

At the end of those five days, the entire class gave me a thank-you card. Some of those students still e-mail me. In that situation and many others, I’ve had far more success by accepting reality than fighting against it.

Leanne was a midlevel professional in her early thirties who’d just been fired from her job. Leanne had been in the same role for nearly fifteen years, and, although she’d been having difficulties with her new manager, she was utterly shocked that she’d been fired.

Within two minutes of meeting her for the first time, Leanne was raging, “Do you know I had absolutely no idea it was coming? I mean, I knew my manager didn’t like me, but come on, you don’t just fire someone. They should have offered me coaching or told me what the issues were. I can’t believe they just up and fired me like that.”

“Wow, that sounds tough. So, what’s next?”

“You mean other than suing them?!” she laughed bitterly.

“Well, yes. I was thinking along the lines of your next job or where you’d like to go.”

“I don’t know. Did I tell you my manager had it in for me the minute he started? It was like someone had told him that his mandate was to make my life hell, then fire me. I gave my life to that place; I’ve been there since my twenties. It was one of my first jobs. ”

It had been six weeks since she’d been fired, and she was so not ready to move on.

Finally, after at least ten minutes of listening and validating how upset she was, I said, “I can hear how hard this experience has been for you, but it seems like you might be making it a bit harder on yourself.”

Her head snapped back as if she’d been slapped. “What do you mean?” she asked, her green eyes fierce.

“What would it feel like to accept the reality that you’ve been fired?”

She got really quiet. “I guess it would feel better than being angry all the time.”

“That’s what I mean. It’s important to let yourself feel angry and hurt and have a good cry, but then you have to accept reality. You’re making this experience harder by being angry about what happened, rather than accepting it. They fired you over a month ago. Do you think maybe it’s time to start looking forward instead of backward?”

She glared at me, and I took a sip of my tea and looked calmly back at her. Then she said, “I just need a bit more time to be angry.”

“Absolutely. Your choice. Just recognize that it’s a choice.”

“Give me ten minutes to vent, and then I can start talking about the future.”

I smiled, set a timer on my phone and said, “Go for it, really go for it, and, if possible, dig underneath the anger to see what else you might be feeling.”

Her eyes immediately welled up with tears. “I’m terrified. My severance package will give me about six months to live on, but what if I never find another job? Or one that pays that well. I never went to university, and I know that to get a job like that today, I’d probably need a degree.”

“That sounds really scary,” I said. She started to cry. I handed her a tissue. “What else?”

“I’m worried about what everyone will think of me. I was a really good employee for so long. And now that I’ve been fired, people are going to think I’m an awful employee.”

“I can see why you’d be worried about that.” I nodded.

“And I’m going to miss my friends. I worked with some of those people for almost twenty years. ”

“Oh, that must be so hard,” I said. She really cried then. I handed her more tissue.

We kept going for another six minutes, she talked about everything she felt—she realized she’d been using her anger to hide her fear and her shame and her sadness. Any kind of loss can bring up grief, and our first reaction to grief is often denial. When Leanne allowed herself to feel all her feelings, not just her anger, she could finally move on.

After the ten minutes were up, we took a break and then came back to our conversation. She started off, “They fired me. I’m mad, and I’m sad, and I’m scared, but I’m not going to sue them. Nothing is going to change. I can’t go back and fix things. So, I need to find another job.”

I wanted to do a dance of joy! She’d found a way to stop looking back, primarily by acknowledging and validating all of her feelings. Now, we could look forward. We worked together for a few more sessions, and within three months, she was happily employed somewhere new, making friends and using what she’d learned in her previous job.

I meet too many people who spend their days feeling frustrated because they aren’t accepting reality. Every day they have the same experiences, and instead of accepting that those experiences are their current reality, they rail against them. I’ve been there. I think I spent the first three years of my son’s life not accepting the reality that the kid didn’t sleep through the night. Ever. I just couldn’t accept it.

If your boss is a nightmare and you’ve given them feedback and had a few difficult conversations with no results, you need to accept that they will likely continue to be hard to work for. If the organization you work for is a bureaucratic mess, that is unlikely to change. It’s up to you to accept the reality and then make your choices accordingly.

I’ve worked with coaching clients who have completely shifted their response to a stressor after they’ve accepted it; they’ve gone from righteous rage to laughter, from being super stressed to being able to shrug their shoulders and refuse to get caught up in the drama of the situation .

I’ve said to many of my clients, “It’s clear that you work in a highly dysfunctional workplace. That’s your reality. Now the question is, do you want to stay within that reality, accept it, and find ways to function within the dysfunction? Or, do you want to make a different choice and find a different reality?”

Everyone’s answer is different. Some people choose to accept their current reality and put their energy into operating within those circumstances. Others decide they don’t want to live with their current reality, and they commit to making a change.

We will likely have some form of stress in our lives at any given time, so our best strategy is to keep our stressors in perspective. When we can change our stress response, clarify our priorities, and find ways to learn from our challenges, we can significantly reduce the amount of stress we experience. Identify what optimal stress looks like for you, don’t take things personally, accept reality, and respond accordingly.

If you let go of the things you have absolutely no control over, avoid the workplace drama, and focus on your choices and responses, you’ll be less stressed. Focus on what really matters, take care of yourself, keep your stressors in perspective, and you’ll be Working Well .