Tackling stress for project success

The other day when meeting someone in Cambridge City Centre. I was stressed about being late so I decided to drive in. Mistake number one!

Did not anticipate the amount of traffic in the city at this point of the day. I picked a car park and luckily found a space, which was actually small so I was stressed about hitting my car when parking. Rushed to the coffee shop (cortisol is now WAY higher than it should be!) and arrived with minutes to spare.

When I waited… doubt crept in… had I got the right time? Had I got the right place?… another notch up on the stressometer. 

I texted my friend to see if he was coming and that I'm sitting outside. Oh no, NOW realise there were two coffee shops in Cambridge with this name and I am at one and he’s at the other. Bugger. 

Thankfully, he very sensibly biked that day and was with me in less than 10 mins. Enough time for me to calm down the embarrassment I felt and grab him a coffee. Now I’m back to what I call the sweet spot. The part that you enjoy, where you can take a breath and be in the present. Care enough, but not overwhelmed. 

I was meeting Tristan Bekinschtein, who, as Professor of Consciousness and Cognition at Cambridge University, knows a thing or two about this. Turns out this is a thing in psychology.

In psychological terms, the stress itself is also cognitive input which generates more stress.

The stress points earlier on lead to misjudgement on my part which create further little problems all amplifying my stress level. A negative feedback loop that starts with something relatively trivial but gets a little worse each time. 

So if this can happen in your day to day, how would an interaction like the above impact on the success of your project? In an ideal world, we would have zero stress, but that’s just not realistic. Mergers and carve outs are huge, impactful projects which are bound to come with a certain level of stress and discomfort. So how do we tackle or reduce the day-to-day stresses so they don’t hinder our project success?

Have you ever worried about something so much that you are adding additional and often unnecessary stress to an already stressful situation? Or even making a situation stressful when it wasn’t meant to be?

I'd love to know...