5 better ways to cope with workplace stress than breaking your computer

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If you have a job, chances are high that you don’t like it. In fact, according to a 2012 survey conducted in the US by Right Management, approximately 66% of participants admitted they are either “somewhat dissatisfied” or “completely unsatisfied” with their current work situation. That’s a lot of unhappy employees.
Whether you’re dealing with difficult personalities, unfulfilling job responsibilities, low pay, or just plain malaise, you may find it nearly impossible to keep heading into the office, day after day. While it’s tempting to go looking for other prospects, that’s not always possible in a shaky economy. In this article we gathered some tips on how to cope with a job that you can’t leave … yet.

Let’s get physical
It’s been well established by the medical community that physical exercise lowers stress levels. Exercise releases endorphins, that feel-good hormone that provides a sense of exhilaration while you’re getting your sweat on.
If you’re stressed at your job and have been avoiding an exercise regime, make it an important part of your day. It doesn’t take much: just 30 minutes of physical activity is not only good for your body, but your mood, as well. For one week, try devoting your lunch break to taking a walk. Evaluate how you feel afterward. You can always eat your lunch at your desk when you get back.

Don’t procrastinate dealing with problems
When conflicts arise, it’s human nature to avoid them like crazy. However, that only prolongs the agony while bad feelings simmer, creating a toxic work environment for everyone involved. Identify potential issues immediately, deal with them head on, and resolve small problems before they balloon into massive disasters.

What’s the worst that could happen?
Bob Parsons, CEO of GoDaddy.com, is not a big fan of living with indefinable consequences. In his ’16 Rules for Survival’ on Lifehack.org, businessman Bob Parsons suggests approaching potentially frightening and stressful situations by asking, “What’s the worst possible outcome?”
Ask yourself the same question when you’re riddled with anxiety over giving a big presentation, facing unreasonable colleagues or bosses or asking for a raise. The truth is, none of these situations will kill you. Regardless of the outcome, you will walk away from them. You might feel chagrined and hopefully a little wiser from the experience, but you will live to tell the tale. Stay focused on the big picture, and keep a healthy perspective.

Try these great persuasion techniques

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No matter whether it’s your business or private success it is essential to develop your power of persuasion. Effective leadership often requires such direct methods to influence those we lead.
Persuasion is defined as: the act or process of causing someone to do something through reasoning or argument. But how do you set about persuading someone?
Arguing if you are right, listening as if you are wrong!
Stanford University Professor Bob Sutton argues that leaders should adopt this approach to influencing:
Argue as if you are right, listen as if you are wrong.
The two sides of this approach mirror the notion of advocacy and inquiry. Advocacy is making your thinking process visible.
“Here is my view and this is how I arrived at the view”
In relation to developing your inter-personal skills, advocacy is about:

•  Making your point, taking a position in an attempt to influence others.

• Supporting your viewpoint with how you came to that view, whilst remaining open to alternative views.

On the other hand, inquiry means asking others to make their thinking process visible.
“How does it sound to you? What makes sense to you and what doesn’t?”

Learn what behavioural finance is all about

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Finance and investment management are not like physics. In finance, there are very few systematic “laws of nature” to be observed. We instead observe the effects of compounded human behaviour on asset prices in an open environment where exogenous shocks take place on a continuous basis.
Standard finance theory tackles this complexity through some rather extreme shortcuts. These include, for example, the assumption that the dynamics of asset prices are random and that the distribution of possible outcomes follows a Gaussian law. Further embedded within standard finance is the concept of “Homo economicus” being the idea that humans make perfectly rational economic decisions at all times. These shortcuts make it much easier to build elegant theories, but, after all in practice, the assumptions did not hold true.
Behavioural finance puts a human face on the financial markets
So what is the alternative? Behavioural finance may be part of the solution, with its emphasis on the numerous biases and heuristics (i.e. deviations from rationality) attached to the otherwise exemplary rational “Homo economicus” individual assumed in standard finance. Anomalies have been accumulating that are difficult to explain in terms of the standard rational paradigm, many of which interestingly are consistent with recent findings from psychology.
Behavioural finance makes this connection, applying insights from psychology to financial economics. It puts a human face on the financial markets, recognising that market participants are subject to biases that have predictable effects on prices. It, thus, provides a powerful new tool for understanding financial markets and one that complements, rather than replaces, the standard rational paradigm.

How entrepreneurial are you? Take the test!

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 Many people believe that because they have decided to start their own business, this makes them an entrepreneur. If that were the case, why is it that they do not behave entrepreneurially in their own life or when working for others? In this article the business consultant, writer and motivational speaker Roger Cowdrey has put together some tests to find out how entrepreneurial you really are. Interested? Then go for it!

How to consider whether you are entrepreneurial
I have worked with countless embryo businesses, and, all too often, people have decided to start up a new venture because of redundancy or lack of employment opportunities in their field of expertise. This rarely demonstrates a true entrepreneurial desire but rather a ‘last ditch’ alternative to unemployment.
One way to consider whether you are entrepreneurial in your approach to life is to look at your behaviour at home or in employment. For example, try writing down all of the new ideas or processes that you have suggested and/or implemented in the workplace. Did this give you a buzz or did you resist the concept of change?
When I give lectures or work with entrepreneurs I often give some puzzles to illustrate my points regarding entrepreneurship. I do not refer to these examples as tests but rather as a stimulus to get people to want to look harder at how to become truly entrepreneurial. What follows are three examples of the sort of things that I use. I would suggest trying to tackle these before moving on to the answers that follow.

Your body language’s impact on your success

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 Body language is one of the most important parts of communication. In fact, we devote more than 90 percent of our attention to interpreting one another in terms of body language and voice. Only once we have done that do we listen effectively to what the speaker says.
What do we observe?

• 55 percent: Body language
• 38 percent: The voice
• 7 percent: The message

That is why it matters how you handle your behavior, your body language, and your attitude in public.
The more you understand yourself and your attitude, the greater opportunity you have to optimize your attractive, positive signals. If your body language is open and pleasant when you meet people, you increase your charisma and thereby the chance of a positive outcome.
If instead you are nervous or uncomfortable about stepping into a gathering where you don’t know anyone, your natural posture will be closed, and you will hug the walls and make yourself invisible.
Your eyes wander or are lowered and withdrawn. In that way, you protect yourself and tell those around you “I don’t feel comfortable in this situation”.

What do Apple, Coca Cola and IKEA have in common?

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Only a few of the leading organizations around the world achieved what is called world class excellence. Examples include Apple, Amazon.com, IKEA or Coca Cola. By definition world class excellence is the highest business performance at a global level that stood the test of time, and just those who perform at the top 5% box from a global perspective are regarded as the world class companies. Why don’t we have a look what it takes to attain this so called world class excellence?
Operational Excellence
All world class organizations demonstrate their excellence through exceptionally high standard in operational performances. Operations function in an organization is responsible for fulfilling customer requests through procurement, production and delivery of products and services. It is therefore central to the organization because it produces goods and services that define its reason for existence. The level of performance depends on many factors including quality, speed, dependability, flexibility and cost.
Strategic Fit
In any world class organizations, or those on the journey to achieve it, there must be the right strategies at play.
Right strategies are those intermediate the firm with the industrial environment; fit the organization’s capabilities to the stakeholder’s objectives; and matches the internal resources to the market opportunities. Such “fitness” of strategic positioning of a firm is the indispensible ingredient of any successful stories.

Capability to Adapt

Organizations that meet the challenges with the right responses are regarded as success. But when faced with new challenges, all too often, the old successful pattern of response no longer work. The continuing success calls for new and innovative responses that can effectively meet the new challenges — that equate adaptation. Capability to adapt should be part of an organization’s ‘DNA’ that needs to be designed and hard-wired into the business structure and processes

Unique Voice

The Unique Voice means the unique organizational voice. It represents something unique that the organization created and practices in achieving its business success. Unique Voice is as a combined representation of any unique business policy, process and operation that fit particularly well to the organization’s specific circumstance and delivers the winning performance as the result. Research shows that all world class organizations became so by having something unique, something that they do differently from their competitors and as a result they bring about market success. The world is littered with evidences of such uniqueness such as in IKEA.
IKEA is a world leading furnishing company. Its unique voice is a bundle of signature practices that creates the value by enabling customer’s own value creating activities. It offers a brand new division of labor. If the customer agrees to take on certain key tasks traditionally done by manufacturers and retailers – assembly of products and their delivery to customer’s home, then IKEA promise to deliver well-designed products at substantially lower price.

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Good vs. bad bosses:

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No manager was born in his/her role as a leading character in a company. Many of them started as employees with fewer responsibilities. Therefore it is important for them to remember where they started and what they expected from their own managers. So, let us have a look at what exactly employees want from their work experiences.

Old vs. new perspective

The prevalent thinking about rewarding employees up until about 25 years ago was to motivate them using the tools at the bottom levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. These are physiological needs including basic needs such as food or shelter and security needs such as job security. The thinking was that as long as the employee was paid adequately, had decent benefits and reasonable job security, then that would be enough. That mode of motivating is no longer suitable. Today’s employees want far more out of their work and from their leaders.

Employers want leadership attention

A McKinsey Quarterly survey in June 2009, found the following results. “The respondents view three noncash motivators – praise from immediate managers, leadership attention (for example, one-on-one conversations), and a chance to lead projects or task forces – as no less or even more effective motivators than the three highest-rated financial incentives: cash bonuses, increased base pay, and stock or stock options.”

This may come as a surprise to some managers, but not to the leaders. Leaders already know this and have been using these tools as motivators for years. This type of leadership style requires excellent communication and interpersonal skills. The smart and effective leader is honing those skills constantly.

Trust
Trust is an important component of leadership and the workplace environment. More is being written about establishing relationships of trust in the workplace. Here are some ideas based on the work of Cloke & Goldsmith (2005):