With entire organizations and powerful shareholders constantly counting on you to make lucrative decisions, the appearance of stress wastes no time making a permanent home in your mind and body.
Stress, while an inevitable part of life, jumps from acting as a harmless energy burst to an extraordinary toxic hinderance within a matter of minutes. Add on a higher level role with even more people counting on you, and this pressure multiplies by the second. Although not a cause for alarm at first, incorrectly handled stress begins to affect your decision making abilities, and ongoing mishandling of it can cause significant effects by weakening your immune system, causing high blood pressure, fatigue, depression, anxiety and even heart disease.
However, there is advantage to handling stress.
Working with many CEO’s from a vast array of organizations, it became evident that stress-when taught how to be properly managed-actually serves as a vital tool to keeping a competitive edge.
Here, we are going to share 3 Important Tips to Manage your Stress
#1. Quit Saying Stress is Killing you: The moment you begin uttering phrases under your breath regarding your negative idea surrounding stress, you’ve already set a pessimistic tone, shifting any additional elements from opportunity to burden. Individuals serving as CEO in every industry regularly experience some form of stress, it’s a part of life, however, it’s how you handle these certain challenges that separates you from the rest. For example, instead of perceiving this feeling as an unrelenting weight on your shoulders, view it as a strategic device to further improve the way you work and your decision making abilities. Instead of shrugging your shoulders and entering a negative frame of mind, use this pressure in a valuable way to push through doors and create more opportunity. By making minor adjustments to improve your relationship with stress, you’ve not only gained a competitive edge over others, but you’ve learned to manage it within your own mind and body.
#2. Be Present: To reach your current high level position, you didn’t settle for ordinary, you worked around the clock to meet demand and be there in full. Today, although you feel more validation, you still find yourself just as busy-if not busier. Regardless of how early you get to the office, your full calendar has you running from appointment to meeting while managing everything in between. With the stress that comes with this daunting list of tasks, you find yourself trying to juggle three separate tasks at once while making decisions only one-third of the way present. While this may seem to work out favorably for awhile, the probabilities of a making a favorable decision-while retaining only some key factors-significantly decrease. Learning to shut off your devices will help you to continue showing up 100% of the way, all while prioritizing tasks from “urgent” to “this can wait.”
#3. Make time for you: While this may seem the most obvious item to include within a routine involving high stressed individuals-it is the most overlooked. As a CEO, there’s a fair chance that you pride yourself in your decision making abilities, leadership, and mental endurance. However, we all need breaks. Working as a nonstop CEO it is certainly challenging to find the right time to hit pause and refresh, which is where you will find it highly advantageous to physically set reminders every 90 minutes. It only takes a few moments to focus on yourself while taking action to reduce the stress that surrounds you. Take this time to stand up out of your desk, walk around, perform some stretches, even just closing your eyes and taking deep breaths helps refresh your mind so you return with a clear head and calmer demeanor. Setting this time aside may seem challenging at first, however, once you begin to experience the noticeable benefits, it will naturally become a part of your routine.
As a high valued CEO, you deal with many stressful situations on a daily basis, taking responsibility for directing the company’s overall growth, and currently navigating the business through the COVID 19 pandemic. While stress is a non-negotiable part of life, there is the opportunity to strategically handle it. By improving your relationship with stress, prioritizing you time/tasks, and committing to your “Me” time, you’ll utilize what others perceive as strain into your own unique advantage.
If you are a CEO having difficulties keeping up with the stress and responsibilities that come with the job and COVID-19, please reach out to us. Our team at MCDA CCG, INC., understand the complex and unique emotions you are constantly feeling day in and day out, and can offer in depth support in any area you need. Contact us today and we’ll help you manage your stress so you can focus on building your business.