What’s the difference between your business and team surviving and thriving? What if I said it is a straightforward tool that can make all the difference for your team.
Life can be stressful enough with work, finances, and relationships, triggering a hijacking of our minds and bodies. Throw a pandemic on top, and it is no wonder we are seeing higher levels of anxiety, depression and loss of productivity in the workplace.
The overwhelm of stress can slowly creep up on you and impact many areas of your life, from your sleep, pain, energy levels, mood, and especially our communication and relationship. Most of us don’t learn the tools to manage stress in our youth or even in our adult work lives. We are often mirroring others and constantly living in survival mode.
But if the pandemic has taught us anything, we need to rethink how we live our lives, communicate and our health.
As a physiotherapist, I saw first-hand the impact stress has on the human body and how most people get stuck in fight, flight and freeze mode. There had to be a better way to transport our body and mind into a thriving state.
The answer became crystal clear over the past years of research and clinical practice. And it is the most simple thing that you do 20,000 times a day.
How you breathe.
If you are reading this, I know you are breathing, but it’s how you breathe that is important! It is the muscles you use, the rhythm and rate with every breath and the connection between your mindset and body reaction
The reality is your breathing and stress response can be triggered multiple times in a week, day and even an hour. If we don’t learn how to unwind the stress reaction and reset, our body will eventually tell us it’s not happy!
What causes our stress response to be activated is if we feel safe or threatened in our workplaces, that can happen in multiple ways, disrupting connection and productivity.
So, how do you disrupt, embrace and tame the stress reaction? In my Thrive – Feel The Fear workshops, I share my 3 top tips to help you Reframe, Release and Reset stress with the team.
1. Reframe Stress
Research into a stress mindset has shown what you think about stress will impact if you see it as a threat or a challenge. Small interventions, like my Thrive workshop, reframe stress and provide psychological tools to help transform survival mode into post-traumatic growth.
2. Release Stress
Stress isn’t just a psychological experience. It is a mind, body and emotional experience. To unwind from being hijacked by stress, you need to release the energy created by being stressed. That can be done in many ways and is about finding the tool for you. Whether it is going for a run, singing, yoga, boxing or tai chi, it is about shifting the energy from your body.
3. Reset Stress
You could work on muscle relaxation and mindset shifts all day, but nothing will shift you into a calm state if you don’t learn to reset your breath. Breathing isn’t a one-size-fits-all model, and many tools can help you find calm depending on the situation. If I had to give you one tool to help you in stress, it is to learn to deflate your chest. You can do that by taking a long exhale out of your mouth. There are many other great tools to help you find calm, like nasal breathing and guided meditation, but simple things like lengthening your exhale can help you rewire your breathing and stress reaction.
To control stress, build successful teams and boost connections, we need to arm workplaces with these invisible stress-busting tool boxes.
Each team and person is unique in what tool works for them, and the best way to see what works is to test them out in real-time. It is why I have partnered up with the thriving team at AJ Hackett Bungy and offer my Thrive training with real-time good stress experience with a bungy.
Every team deserves to learn this. Imagine how you could transform your productivity and shift the team dynamic by learning how to Thrive?
