Coping strategies for dealing with stress
Stress is part of everyone’s life at some stage or another. I think of dealing with it in three different ways: avoiding it if feasible; reducing it where possible; and finding better, more elegant ways of coping with it.
If you don’t know your favourite and most effective ways of dealing with stress before it happens, you’ll find it difficult to come up with them at short notice; that’s why it’s important to have them prepared in advance. Different situations will call for different responses, so we need to have flexible solutions. Here are some strategies that I find useful:
- Exercising and clean eating
- Avoiding caffeine
- Maintaining strong physiological positions
- Taking slow deep breaths
- Journaling about experiences
- Meeting with friends and family for meals
- Changing the rules for feeling stress (more about this in a later post)
- Trying to come up with creative solutions to fix the problem(s)
- Venting about feelings to a trusted friend/family member
- Asking for help from a colleague or family member
- Dancing, singing and playing music
- Speaking slowly and calmly
What have I left out? What would you add to this list?
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I love the emphasis Brian puts on building relationships and meeting people individually as a way to negotiate and make deals that work for both parties. He highlights how having a people-centric approach is not just a nice way to do business, but also an effective way to create opportunities.
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“As a product manager, you have to be an expert on your users, their problems. You need to be an expert on the business, what matters to the business. And you need to figure out a way to solve their problems in a way that also achieves your business objectives—finding the middle ground of what the business cares about, what the users care about, and aligning a product vision that helps you to sort of check both boxes.”