How to Eliminate Stress and Build the Career You Deserve
To further yourself in you career — try this.
What’s one thing that has become much harder over the past 4 months?
Covering up our stress around family and even co-workers.
Believe me, they can see it on video calls, too. The last couple months have been a gauntlet of surviving and advancing while dealing with a tremendous amount of mental and emotional stress.
Our feelings of self-doubt, frustration, not fitting in and general dissatisfaction from the workplace, can be career killers. But now, it’s a whole different kind of stress. Balancing life, job, the threat of it vanishing, all while the world around us changes by the minute.
Look — this isn’t some treatise that you sift through that culminates in me telling you to, “Quit your job.” That’s trite. And it’s often not the best advice.
What I’m saying is, you have to be smart about identifying what’s holding you back, and knowing how to equip yourself to transform your situation. Many of are struggling to find meaning in what we’re doing, because we’re so bogged down with worry about what comes next.
We want a calling, a reason to keep moving forward and growing where we are, or that impulse to move on and carve out our own niche elsewhere, or on our own, will emerge even stronger.
It’s difficult to be your best, think creatively, have a strategic mindset and contribute bold ideas when you’re stressed and full of doubt. A substantial portion of millennials (and many employees for that matter) are living with a lot of workplace anxiety.
“A BDA Morneau Shepell white paper discovered that 30% of working millennials have general anxiety.” Source: Psychology Today
We all have to start somewhere, and sometimes survival and financial means need to be satisfied at the risk of some lesser pleasures. But we should never sacrifice the meaning of our job or the opportunity for advancement in the name of just treading water. “Just getting by” while we’re choking on stress.
Because “just getting by” can snowball into far worse things.
It leads to anxiety and poor “hygeine factors” like dissatisfaction with our supervisors, low pay and nebulous job statuses — you know, where we never quite know where we fit in an organization, and we’re too far down in the hierarchy to even be privy to those whispers, much less conversations.
We’re also overworked and far too often, underpaid for the workload we’re asked to tackle. Take this Work Stress Survey finding and let that sink in for a minute:
“A 2013 finding from the Work Stress Survey showed, “more than eight in 10 employed Americans are stressed out by at least one thing about their jobs. Poor pay and increasing workloads were top sources of concern reported by American workers.” Source: HuffPost
What to Do About It
One thing I believe is this: you forfeit the right to complain if you’re not spending some time understanding yourself. Practicing self-awareness.
Pursuing that thing you truly love, even if it’s on the side. That doesn’t mean your feelings or reasons for being unsatisfied don’t matter. But I can tell you this — I held a full-time professional job throughout most of my career, while I built my entrepreneurial life on the side. And I know many others who are living this life.
I’ve been successful. The time spent writing, coaching others, speaking, and also coaching high school basketball enabled me to become the man I’ve always wanted to be. Maybe you’re already doing this, or observing the lives of many peers, or success stories like Ken Jeong, Andrea Bocelli or Joy Behar. These are all people who started in much different professions than the ones they’re in now.
Joy Behar was still teaching high school English at the age of 40!
Ken Jeong became a medical doctor in his late 20s, practicing medicine, and didn’t appear in his first film until his late 30s!
Andrea Bocelli was a defense attorney who worked into his mid-30s in the legal profession before leaving and letting his beautiful voice take him to the top of the musical world.
When you feel stressed, you have to first look inside of you and think about why this is happening. Identify the things in your environment that are contributing to your feeling of inadequacy, stress or worry. How much of this is self-inflicted, and how much of what you’re experiencing requires you to make a change and move to the outside?
Sometimes leaving a job is the right move, and sometimes the adversity you’re facing in the moment is an immense opportunity to act differently. A lot of the time, your job is not the problem. You must look inward and give yourself some grace. What we’re experiencing right now is a test designed to get us to overcome our emotions — a challenge that will refine and strengthen us.
Pay close attention to the behaviors that are causing you stress, worry and concern. Observe what they are and understand them. Consciously plan your day around minimizing these and facing your fears head-on.
When stress in our external environment is weighing us down, we must look inward and discover ways to persevere. Ask yourself, “am I doing everything I can to live each day to the fullest?” If not, start listing out your goals and looking to your values that will guide you. You’ve got this. Stress is real, but it will never hold you back if you refuse to let it weaken you.
Check out more of my work: http://chrisdconnors.com