Managing Self : Balancing Performance Vs Stress

Often, or most of the times I faced issues in maintaining decent balance between performance Vs stress both at workplace and also at home.

I compiled the most probable reasons I came across because of which the stress levels will keep piling up and one will feel difficult to maintain balance with performance.

• Undefended boundaries

If you fail to establish solid boundaries defining what you are willing and not willing to do, the people around you will take whatever you have to give. The more you give, the less they will respect you and the more they will ask of you. Eventually you will feel angry and resentful that you’re being nibbled to death, but you will have no one to blame but yourself. If you cannot establish boundaries for yourself, you cannot expect others to do it for you.

• Brittleness

Often the result is overcommitment to failing courses of action. You make a call prematurely and then feel unable to back away from it without losing credibility. The longer you wait, the harder it is to admit you were wrong, and the more calamitous the consequences. Or perhaps you decide that your way of accomplishing a particular goal is the only way. As a result, your rigidity disempowers people who have equally valid ideas about how to achieve the same goal.

• Isolation

To be effective, you must be connected to the people who make action happen.It’s surprisingly easy to end up isolated, and isolation can creep up on you. It happens because you don’t take the time to make the right connections, perhaps by relying overmuch on a few people or on official information. It also happens if you unintentionally discourage people from sharing critical information with you. Perhaps they fear your reaction to bad news, or they see you as having been captured by competing interests. Whatever the reason, isolation breeds uninformed decision making, which damages your credibility and further reinforces your isolation.

• Work avoidance

Consciously or unconsciously, you may choose to delay by burying yourself in other work or fool yourself into believing that the time isn’t ripe to make the call. The tendency to avoid taking the bull by the horns, which results in tough problems becoming even tougher.

All these syndromes can add up to your stress levels.

Research says that not all stress is bad. In fact, there is a well-documented relationship between stress and performance known as the Yerkes-Dodson curve.

PS: Whether stress is self-generated or externally imposed, you need some stress to be productive. Without it, not much happens—you just stay in bed munching chocolates 😉

At the end of the day you just need to strike the structured way of identifying the things we can achieve/not able to achieve, accept it upfront and eliminate the actions which you think will make you burnout.