Stress Management

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As you grow at your position, your responsibilities increase in multiples of your salary increment which definitely brings lots of stress in your personal and professional life. As such, there is no formula to get rid of your stress and you will find fat books and training programs to teach you how to manage stress, but I believe an open communication is the biggest weapon, which can help you up to some extent to relieve yourself from big stress.

Let's identify root cause of the stress

You are a software professional, you should know how to debug a problem. Similar way, stress is a problem for you and you have to debug it, You should find out why it's coming to you and what root causes are. Let's take few examples, which may be the cause of stress in your day-2-day life:

• Workload is too much and you are not able to handle it properly.

• You had been assigned to a module, which is not ready though deadline has arrived.

• So far you really do not know what exactly you have to do and how exactly you have to do?

• You had developed a code, which got deleted by mistake or not working at final moment.

• You are leader of the team, but team is not doing so great and ultimately delivery is getting delayed.

• Though you have enough time to deliver, but meanwhile, you planned for a travel as well which may cause delay in your delivery.

Communication, Communication.....& Just Communication

For you none of them should be a problem if you take them in professional way. Let's pick up any of the above-mentioned points, for example, first point where you feel overloaded and not able to finish your task within office hours.

Simply set up a small meeting with your manager and put the facts in front of him, mentioning your current assignments, bottlenecks and reasons why you feel you are overloaded. You can request him to share one more resource with you or to give you more time. I'm sure your manager will listen on this and will help you if he needs a good delivery from you. You need to plan how you are going to convince your manager about it and make him realize that what you are saying is correct.

Similar way any of the mentioned issues can be resolved with proper communication with your manager and if it's not working with manager, then many organizations give you chance to talk to your higher management and take your issues to them. So in case your problem does not get resolved, you take it to higher level, but you need to be careful because it can be a little sensitive as none of the managers would like you to bypass him and talk to his boss directly. But yes it could be your last try if nothing is working.

One more important issue is poor prioritization of the work. If you can discuss priority of the work with your manager then you can handle scheduling all the tasks one after another. You can give some extra time after office hours or during weekend to relieve yourself.

Personal vs Professional

Try to identify whether you are not able to work properly because you have some personal issues and they are impacting your professional life. In such case, your family is the best one, who can help you in resolving your personal issues. You can share your personal issues with your close friends or family, spouse, etc. and get them fixed as soon as possible. If it is growing very serious, then it's better to talk to your manager and explain him the situation and try to get few days off and then fix your personal issues and come back to catch up with your work.

Stress could be momentarily

Aha, it's part of everybody's life and you should not get stressed due to little over-load, little delayed delivery or some minor issues happening around you. Let's make them part of your day-2-day life and keep moving on. So, let's do a little more extra overtime to finish your delivery, take little help from your friends, be ready to listen few comments from your manager.

Make sure you are not repeating problems, and problems are also not repeating with you, and if this is the case, then it’s time to take action and find out its solution.

Few more quick remedies

Try to use any of the following if they relieve you from stress:

• Some exercise

• Little or more yoga, meditation

• Morning walk

• Evening movie

• Pass some time with your friends, family, spouse, kids.

• Avoid sitting for long time and have a coffee break at work, read magazine, newpapers, internet browsing, using stress-removal toys.

Bottom line is that you should not keep quiet and keep creating a volcano, which will erupt someday later and produce lots of damages. Be communicative, be transparent and be honest. Keep in mind, if you are under stress, then your productivity will reduce unexpectedly, so try to keep yourself healthy, happy and active.....