STRESS MANAGEMENT: PROTECTIONS AND CHANGE

What is stress? It's a protective mechanism aimed at alerting you to a threat to your balance, such as a real or perceived mismatch between your resources, skills, abilities, values, and the expectations you perceive from the outside world (family, work, environment).

The purpose of this alert is to encourage you to initiate an adjustment, an adaptive response, which engages your emotions and resources to preserve an internal balance, perhaps different from the previous one. And as with any change, there may be a phase of resistance that consumes a lot of physical and mental energy, which can sometimes lead to burnout when the adjustment seems too significant or even impossible.

So how can we "manage" stress?

The work of coaching will precisely consist of identifying your stress factors in their reality or subjectivity, understanding their origin, and determining those on which you can act, those you can protect yourself from by setting boundaries, identifying your resources, developing them, in order to determine and achieve your "acceptable" level of stress.

For example: Julie is stressed at the thought that her project may not be liked, so she always prepares three different versions, which weighs on her time and organization. She could reduce it to two proposals or even propose the one she believes in the most. During her coaching, she questions the real issue... Is she being asked to rework her proposal? She decides to work on self-confidence, which will ultimately help her develop a more effective attitude for her balance.