The Leader's 3-2-1: Three Insights, Two Questions, One Statistic.
Topic: Resilience to Stress Series (Part 1) - Staying Grounded
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Resilience to stress is a collection of mindsets and habits that keep you grounded, gritty and growing-- starting with staying grounded.
Part of what makes stress, stress, is that challenges unfold at a pace faster than your perceived ability to cope with them.
To slow the perceived pace of challenges, you must identify and connect with anchors that help you prioritize, say no, set limits and ask for support-- all of which create sense of agency, predictability and control within your environment.
To stay grounded in stressful seasons, create anchors for yourself by identifying and connecting with your vision, values and inner voice in 3-2-1:
Three Insights
Anchor #1: Your Vision
Your vision is the sum of your desired identity and impact. It has grounding power because it can serve as a ranking system for your priorities-- making it easier to know what is most/least important to you, what to say yes/no to, what limits you need and what dreams, goals and expectations are yours to own.
Self-coaching to clarify and connect to vision:
Identity: What are three words or phrases you want others to use to describe you? What legacy do you want to leave behind?
Impact: What difference do you want to make? What goals will put your passions and skills in service?
Implementation: What choices in the ranking of your priorities will most advance the sum of your identity and your impact?
Anchor #2: Your Values
Your values reflect your core beliefs and convictions. There's no effective stress management without making difficult decisions about what's important, setting boundaries and saying no. There isn't always going to be a tangible right or wrong when ranking your priorities and others won't always agree with your choices. Values ground you in the decisions you believe in so much that you're willing to face criticism for them and/or endure feelings of guilt for them.
Self-coaching to clarify and connect to values:
Download: Use this free coaching assignment to identify your top five core values. The assignment includes additional vision work as well!
Post: Place your top five values and your vision statements in a place you can review daily and can provide a visual anchor for difficult decisions.
Anchor #3: Your Inner Voice
Your inner voice is your wisdom from within-- your gut sense of knowing. When calendars fill and life's pace picks up, it’s easy to lose connection to yourself and spiral into even more stress by people-pleasing, approval-seeking and overworking. Your inner voice anchors you to your internal guidance system. It gives wisdom on what boundaries, limits and support you need to stay resilient.
Self-coaching to clarify and connect to inner voice:
Reflection: When are you still? When do you make space for slowness? Your voice needs stillness to rise up, or noise will keep it stuffed down.
Action: Daily, find 10 minute pockets of stillness to connect to yourself. Stillness = no screens, no notifications, no messages, no input.
TWo questions
What do you do to stay grounded? What habits and mindsets keep your feet on the ground? Getting outside, exercise, meditation, journaling, walks-- find accessible, repeatable ways to untether stress from your identity and gain perspective on what matters to you. What do you need to stop doing in order to stay more connected with your vision, values and voice? An over-focus on adding behaviors to your schedule will only burden your stress load further. When implementing new resilience strategies, remember to also subtract mindsets and habits that are weighing you down.
One Statistic
42% "Holding themselves to a high standard, 42% of the C-suite says their greatest source of work-stress is the pressure they put on themselves." -Workforce Institute at UKG
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