Cut Stress

Reduce Flashpoints

Calmness Training

Cognitive Efficiency

 
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Direct Stress Reduction 

Available in person or remotely for distributed workforces

Where stress has built up there will often be conflict, overwhelm, raised voices, more mistakes, and disagreements on how to do things. Management will spend time fire fighting and trying to deal with interpersonal conflict and disputes.

This immediate stress reduction training is recommended to dial down agitation and stress, allowing for a more successful implementation of a low stress work environment.

When people are under stress it is harder to make change or get a workplace back on track. This makes it difficult to develop motivation, productivity, and deliver value.

Initially, we strongly recommend moving people from a stressed state to a calmer and more useful mental state to reduce overwhelm, resulting in greater cognitive efficiency.

The training utilises evidence based methods to cut stress. It is delivered in a style that is easy for stressed attendees to benefit from immediately and to better control their stress by

Objectives

A stressed environment often sees people being irritable and snappy. Teamwork declines and people become less creative and productive. Motivation drops and it takes longer to achieve tasks. Deadlines slip more frequently.

Any effort at change in a high stress environment usually fails, as a stress reduction plan is usually initiated with an already overwhelmed workforce without recognising the need to reduce the existing overwhelm first. Until the overwhelm and stress are reduced, people don’t have the capacity available to make the changes needed.

Rather than risk adding an extra layer of stress by introducing changes to the existing way of doing things, our main objective is to reduce stress first through direct stress reduction techniques which your staff can continue to implement after the training. This reduces overwhelm and makes it easier to successfully address the underlying causes of stress in the environment.

Training

In chronic stress the areas of the brain used for seeing danger, assessing risk, and anticipating pain are more active. This results in seeing problems more easily, it forces us into short-term thinking, increased aggression, anger, and pessimism.

This survival reaction to stress is useful in a life or death situation but does not serve us well in a work environment where they simply hold us back. This training uses psychological skills and techniques to reduce the level of activation in the areas of the brain which create and maintain stress. As a result activity is boosted in the forward looking and solution orientation areas of the brain. Implementing this directly cuts stress and improves cognitive ability for participants.

As well as directly addressing stress during the training, these skills are easy to continue to use independently afterwards.

Programme Leader

This training is led by John Prendergast MA, an expert in stress and wellbeing who has extensive training and experience in mental health and wellness. His delivery style is practical and makes the learning easy to implement and is ideal even in workplaces where tensions may already be high. (Read more about John here)

Relevant Research

A single day training in stress awareness and reduction continued to show a reduction in emotional exhaustion and burnout a month after the intervention. 92% of participants reported finding elements of the training useful and continuing to implement them after the training.

 “The Impact of a Stress Management Intervention on Medical Residents’ Stress and Burnout.” (Ghannam et al, 2019), International Journal of Stress Management, 27(1), 65–73.

Stress Reduction Training of just one full and one half day resulted in significant overall reductions in psychological strain, emotional exhaustion and depersonalization.

“Work-related self-efficacy as a moderator of the impact of a worksite stress management training intervention: Intrinsic work motivation as a higher order condition of effect.” Lloyd et al, 2017), Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 22(1), 115–127.

Simple interventions resulted in lower levels of occupational stress and burnout symptoms.

“More than a simple pastime? The potential of physical activity to moderate the relationship between occupational stress and burnout symptoms.” (Gerber et al, 2020), International Journal of Stress Management, 27(1), 53–64.

Solution-focused cognitive– behavioral (SFCB) coaching can enhance performance, reduce stress, and help build resilience.

“Solution-focused cognitive–behavioral coaching for sustainable high performance and circumventing stress, fatigue, and burnout.” (Grant, A, 2017), Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 69(2), 98–111.

Unfinished tasks go hand in hand with rumination and job-related stress and reduces efficiency.  It appears that managing tasks to allow completion of one before the next opens gives potential to get significantly more accomplished.

“Finding peace of mind when there still is so much left undone—A diary study on how job stress, competence need satisfaction, and proactive work behavior contribute to work-related rumination during the weekend.” (Weigelt et al, 2019) Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 24(3), 373–386.

Stress signs such as increased incivility among workers and rumination on negative workplace experiences impact sleep.

“The role of rumination and recovery experiences.” Demsky et al, 2019), Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 24(2), 228–240

Ambiguity of one’s role, and feeling that one’s role must be compromised in work contribute to stress.

“Differential effects of workplace stressors on innovation: An integrated perspective of cybernetics and coping.” (Fay et al, 2019) International Journal of Stress Management, 26(1), 11–24

If the environment is getting harder to manage, is provoking more stress, deadlines are being missed and employees are demotivated, this is your 1st port of call.

Get in touch today to arrange your direct stress reduction day.

Email: info@johnprendergast.ie          Tel: +353 (0)85 13 13 700