The ability to perform well under pressure on the job is one of the most appreciated by employers. As pressure grows, people get flustered and start to make mistakes. Besides, they can work themselves up thinking about things that can get out of hand. Meanwhile, it is not so difficult to remain calm and collected when the situation grows stressful – it’s a matter of changing your mindset. Just how you can remain unruffled as tension grows, you can learn from the information below.
Stay calm
Train yourself to preserve calm manners at any turn of events – it won’t be easy at first, but such skills get easier with practice. A quiet attitude shows everyone that you can take things as they come and go on with your work, nevertheless, having excellent opportunities to accomplish it in time and without flaws. Fake it till you make it.
Sleep well and enough
Suppose you sleep soundly and sufficiently every night. In that case, it brings you a lot of health benefits, among which you can count a more retentive memory, better concentration, higher energy, and lower vulnerability to stress.
List your fears – and possible solutions
Run through your fears and concerns, and arrange them into a list (better a written one). Please think of the ways to overcome these issues, thereby making yourself ready to handle them as they arise. What’s more, as you analyze your concerns and break them down, you get a better understanding of their stressful factors and grow more confident in yourself as you see how to counteract them.
Practice well before you plunge
Worries and being prepared never go together well; as your preparation increases, worry diminishes. Although you may not be perfect yet, you will undoubtedly feel as confident as never before. This is a valid reason to go on practicing mindfully!
To master the ability properly, you don’t clock in hours of practice only. Simultaneously it would be best to work with your weak points, trying to understand them and debilitate their influence.
Identify your crunch periods and get ready for them
Starting on your job in the morning, you can, to some extent, foretell when your “crunch times” will occur. The term means periods when the work is at its most intense and you can feel overwhelmed. Once you have predicted these periods, get ready to see if you can outsource any tasks and tackle something with your colleagues beforehand. These techniques will require some fine handling but will prove themselves extremely helpful.
Don’t allow to distract yourself from being focused on work
It’s best to make up your mind that whatever happens during the day, it is no good reason to get distracted from finishing what you have to do.
See you don’t think too much about it
Your practices, concentration and consideration might lead to a lot of thinking which, in the end, can hamper and postpone the implementation of the task at a point. If you feel overridden by an endless train of thoughts, wipe your mind clear and go ahead. Athletes know this state when one is highly concentrated and relaxed at the same time; it is an efficacious condition.
When under pressure, regard it as a challenge that causes no worries
Generally, people are inclined to view pressure as threatening, and the feeling of being endangered gets them down, marring their performance. Threat robs people of confidence, invites misgivings, and wreaks havoc with one’s judgment and concentration. People start to react impulsively without due consideration.
On the other hand, regarding a pressure situation as a challenge, you are initially fired up to brace yourself and give it your best. Thinking in terms of challenge can be installed into your regular attitude, so that each task is viewed as the chance to make your each project better than the previous one!
Don’t go for a lot of caffeine
We all resort to coffee for some extra stimulation, but while some of it can go a long way, too much of the good old stimulant can work the wrong way. After a certain borderline, coffee may cause stress, so see to it that you take it moderately and with due pauses. The same goes to another strong stimulant – chocolate.
Break projects down
When you are asked to deal with something overtly demanding and intimidating, don’t react too quickly. Break the fearsome project down into stages that can be easily accomplished and controlled. It will help you set goals and keep track of the headway. If you grasped the usefulness of the technique once, you would be ready to employ it again and again.
Forget the outcome, mind the task
This skill is known as “tunnel vision,” when you focus only on what you are doing right now – and consequently are dealing with the steps directly related to the current stage.
Take a break
As pressure grows on us, the first natural reaction would be to step on the gas and drudge away until things blow over. This technique can do the trick – but for how long? Sometimes it will make a better strategy to build in some slack, take a breather and restore your energy by walking about, meditating, or just staying still. This may help you bear the brunt of the burden.
Practice mindfulness
Mindfulness is going to be your best supporter throughout, enhancing your abilities to be (and stay) flexible, focused, collected, and imaginative. You will need but a few minutes every day to stay still, calm and aware of everything around you to blunt the impact of misgivings and fears.
Put an end to procrastinating
In many cases, pressure results from a previous failure to set the right priority. You had a big workload, procrastinated to prioritize it in good time, and backfired your bad time management. Don’t indulge in procrastinating. It’s a habit you don’t need.
Begin with understanding what exactly it is so unpleasant that you try to wriggle out of doing it. Then just make yourself do it. Once you have realized that you got the better of procrastination, it will give you even greater strength to get on with your task.
Prioritize
Working against time, you really cannot do without prioritizing. List your tasks, get yourself clear about the deadlines for each, browse and arrange them according to The Eisenhower Model, weighing each task or project to see how you can categorize them in accordance with the four easy steps the model suggests:
1. urgent and important;
2. important but not urgent;
3. urgent but not important;
4. neither urgent nor important.
Now that you have arranged your tasks in order, it is clear where to start – and which tasks can be postponed until more leisurely days. You have a valid schedule that virtually guarantees you success.
Build a strategy for swift prioritization
So you have a long list of tasks at hand; consider each one. Which ones imply a step forward for the company and which – for yourself? Which, when done, will clear the way to deal with the rest easier? Which could easily be put off for a while or even deemed unnecessary? When you have your priorities fixed, you may discover that some tasks don’t fall in with your schedule. Can they be delegated away? It will improve your own performance and the company’s if you are adept in prioritization!
