Workplace Stress: Manage Your Mind and Boost Your Agency

Focusing on mindset, strengths, and intentional actions is a consistent way to manage stress in stressful work situations. This episode provides tips to navigate challenges with resilience and clarity. Also discussed: 

• How to understand and leverage your sense of agency to guide your actions and leadership.
• Why cultivating resilience helps you focus and manage stress.
• Tips to practice self-awareness; when and how to advocate for your needs in challenging situations.
• Practical tools to calm your mind so you can deliberate and make decisions.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:46

Hey, this is the Career Refresh and I am your host, jill Griffin. Thanks for being here. You know I often find that there are themes that pop up, whether it's in my private work with clients or whether I'm talking to professionals in various industries. It seems like all of a sudden there are themes and I would say the theme that I've been hearing lately. There's a few and I'm going to talk about them over the next couple of weeks.

Speaker 1: 1:11

But agency, or sense of agency. There's also a lot around learned helplessness or sort of fighting for your limitations, but that's a different episode. Today we're talking about that agency and how, when you learn how to manage your mind and practice managing your mind in very stressful situations, you really boost your own sense of agency. So sense of agency refers to an individual's capacity to feel in control of their actions, the resilience to navigate challenges and consequences, or it could also be looked upon as the ability to decide for oneself, to make a decision from a place of centeredness. Having agency will be your guide, your intuition as a leader in an organization. It will aid you in guiding others and building a career and a life that works for you means you gotta cut through that noise, the nonsense, the BS, and learn to start flexing that muscle of agency. It starts with learning how to focus your mind.

Speaker 1: 2:27

I talk a lot about professional brand, and agency, I find is the red thread that runs through your professional brand. It's about knowing your strengths, your skills, your values, your personal point of view. Those are the beliefs, your thoughts, and then you're practicing that, because once you know all of that, then you're able to have that ability to feel in control of your thoughts and your actions and then to navigate the challenges that are in front of you. So when you're thinking about a stimulus or something external whether it's a situation, a circumstance, something you've read, watched or a live experience that you're part of you want to get a little bit quiet and think about how does your body respond to the various scenarios around you, with all the information that's around you or, as I like to say, the data that's around you. Being thoughtful, being intentional with your actions, how does your body respond and what do you do when you find yourself in a situation that you would not have chosen, when it's an experience that you're like I am never going to choose this experience again or one that's maybe even a little psychologically uncomfortable. So, editor's note, here again, I'm not talking about putting yourself in danger. That is not what this podcast is about. That is for something that you can do in therapy with your therapist. This is about the everyday death by a thousand paper cuts, the everyday sort of feeling a little bit unsafe or a little bit unsure about a particular situation within your work or workplace. You manage your mind so that you can tap into your agency and advocate for yourself in a way that you can be heard and not spiral or downshift into anger or passive aggressiveness or hostility, because, trust me, no one can hear you through your anger.

Speaker 1: 4:27

Recently I attended a three-day conference and on the final night the final dinner was going to be off-premise outside the hotel where the convention was in the city that we were staying in, but definitely an off-premise adventure and the event organizer kept talking about how amazing this dinner was going to be and that we'd be so surprised and that it would be the experience of a lifetime. Now I'm used to event organizers drifting towards hyperbole, so I figured you know what it'll probably be a beautiful environment, excellent food, maybe some live entertainment in some way. When I asked the staff questions about the dinner they said it's top secret. They couldn't tell me anything. And I thought secret. They couldn't tell me anything and I thought, well, they could be trusted, right. But I was mixed. There was something nagging. My instinct was telling me something was off and I realized that I didn't trust them. Now, I don't mean that they would do anything intentionally to cause harm they are not. You know, planning an event that they want to, you know, bring people, bring people into a situation of harm, but I think not taking into consideration that they have 50 individuals with 50 different personal needs and requirements and accommodations, and they wanted to create a secret event. That's a bit of juggling and I was starting to feel this anxiety in my chest and I couldn't really think clearly or articulate my unease for myself or the organizer. And here's why Because I had filled out the conference intake form noting not only my dietary restrictions, which I'd done previously at this conference, but they also asked if I had any special needs and I informed them that, even though they already had it previously on record that I had an NVD, a non-visible disability, or an invisible disability, or a non-apparent disability all those phrases are correct.

Speaker 1: 6:29

You pick your choice, dealer's choice, that I was a traumatic brain injury survivor and that things like sudden movement, lighting, architectural environment, structures could be triggers for my symptoms, and I believed that they took that into consideration when they made the plan. So it turns out it was a dinner in the dark, a dinner where you are completely blindfolded from the moment you hit the sprinter van oh, and also they take away your mobile devices and any of your devices. So, from an Americans with Disabilities Act point of view, not informing us what they were doing is a pretty big accommodation and accessibility red flag. Now, this episode is not about the joys of NVD or what I have, which is superior canal dissonance syndrome, or you know how I can only stand up straight because I always have a focal point. But I will tell you as a sidebar for anyone curious out there ice skaters call it spotting yogis call it the dristy point, but I am always positioning my body, my head, my eyes on things that are stationary to keep me in balance. That's just who I am today and that's why a dining in the dark event is so troubling for me, because my dizziness doesn't go away when the stressor has been removed. My dizziness takes its damn sweet time to move through my body and it can be weeks before I'm back to my set point. You're starting to get the picture here.

Speaker 1: 8:08

So the idea of how to get through discomfort by managing your mind and body when you're in a situation you didn't choose, you never asked for and we can say okay, jill, you signed up for the event. Okay, fine, but go with me. We also know that from evolutionary biology that you cannot be in the stress of a situation and strategize what to do next. You run from the lion. You don't think about how you're going to negotiate to ensure the next time you come past the lion we're all ensuring safety for all. That's not what you're doing in the moment. So let's put aside any of the judgments or biases we have on, like how I got there. Let's just put it aside for a second and let's agree that you did the best you did.

Speaker 1: 9:01

When you're in a situation like this, your mindset is ready, you are prepared, you have the skills for the situation and you find yourself in a oh my God, I would never choose this again. Things like you've been tapped to lead a team project and at some point you're learning all the details, managing all the competing personalities, the disgruntled client, the burnt out staff, the new interns, yourself being uncomfortable leading a project where you have no data. How do you manage your mind and your agency? No data. How do you manage your mind and your agency If you're volunteering for a local charity event and something that you're really, really aligned to, an organization that has an amazing reputation? Yet, once inside, you quickly find out that it is a toxic soup and they've signed you up for next month's volunteer event too. How does removing yourself and supporting your well-being align to your professional brand?

Speaker 1: 10:00

Here's another one that I hear about a lot. You're traveling with colleagues and you're away for a few days and one of your colleagues is impossibly angry and passive-aggressive and you find yourself that you're often checking your watch but noticing that you still have a good 16 hours or so before you can escape to the safety of your hotel room. Do you pop off or do you teach yourself how to breathe through it? I was. This is actually a really funny story. So when I was at the advertising agency, my team was on a new business pitch and something was going down in San Francisco where hotel rooms were booked to capacity. There was no room at the end. Right, there was no vacancy anywhere in San Francisco the week that we were there, so you know, flights delayed, check into the hotel. It's after 9 PM and I check in and the hotel doesn't have my room anymore. They've given it away and San Francisco, like I said, is sold out. So the hotel tells me that they could put me in a ballroom.

Speaker 1: 11:01

Now I will say again, I was younger in my career and I was sort of thinking like I wonder what that means. So the hotel wheels a cot I mean like an army surplus era cot into a ballroom, one that was scheduled for maintenance, and I spent the night there with other people, none of whom I knew, in a dorm room like setting, and they put security to watch us all night to make sure no one did anything to each other. And I was trying to remember the name of the hotel and at some point I will remember, but I don't remember the hotel as I'm recording this episode. So this was like being at camp. You could smell the scent of sweat, the echo of bodily noises as we packed ourselves into, like this grim reality threadbare carpet, stale air, forgotten, neglected hotel relics, like a random podium here or there, a chandelier in the corner, I was like is this what business travel is going to be like?

Speaker 1: 12:16

So we're going to get into the mental shifts in a second, but first it's okay to be disappointed. It's okay to be pissed off or feel discounted, annoyed, frustrated or disrespected. Or, in my case, there was this swirl of adrenaline and like real-life survival skills that I might need to stay in a ballroom with random people overnight and actually get to sleep. And you don't have to gaslight yourself or allow yourself you know this idea that it's all okay. Right, in the initial stages you want to give yourself a few moments of contemplation and you can be in the negative sensation. Like I said, it's hard to be in the negative sensation of the experience and also be in the strategic solution, because it's two different parts of your brain that's at work here. Right, you need the process, the negative sensation, in order for you to kickstart the next part of your cognitive thinking.

Speaker 1: 13:16

So, for the night in the ballroom again, amazing, I tapped into breathing, I tapped into meditation. I knew that if I kept focusing on, I'm never going to sleep. Then I'm going to blow the pitch. This is not going to work for me. If I jumped on that train. I knew that wasn't going to work and, yeah, I didn't get much sleep that night, but I was able to get myself into a place of meditation and I use a couple of mantras, which I'll mention, that got me into a place of acceptance. And yes, I was tired the next day. No, we didn't win the pitch, but it wasn't because of our ideas. They said it was because of contract negotiations. It certainly wasn't because we were tired or I was tired because I spent the night in a ballroom.

Speaker 1: 14:06

I consider myself an extroverted introvert. I do get energy from being around brilliant people at a conference, brilliant content, but when I'm at a conference and I'm around so many people, I find that at a certain point I want to be with a smaller group of people. I always say I'd rather be the bartender than be at the bar. I like to have one-on-one conversations versus many conversations, or in a dialogue, in a group situation meaning presenting to hundreds of people and running a workshop totally different, but as an ongoing thing. Few of us really hear each other if we're all talking in a group and people tend to talk over each other or get bits of information and there's all confusion. You know, I used to sing in a popular gospel choir in New York City and my director taught me that if there is an empty seat in the first few rows, you shouldn't look at that empty seat because it steals your energy. You don't want to strain yourself to be heard. So if you're in a group activity, talk to someone one-on-one, but don't sprinkle your energy across the whole group. And that's what I'm really saying here. Right, it's like the first thing you need to do is get a sense of the situation you're in and understand that if you're in a ballroom with all these people, talking to everyone or trying to rally everyone on to your point of view isn't going to be helpful. Focusing on one person and having one conversation is something that is more helpful.

Speaker 1: 15:34

So, if you think about going back to my dinner in the dark situation, there were three people that I was aware of that had disabilities. That was going to make this experience very challenging, and the other 50 or so people were less than thrilled. They didn't want to eat with their fingers. Plus, we didn't have an opportunity to wash our hands. So it's not food that would have been culturally consumed with your fingers, they just wanted to create a more sensory experience. One lady actually chipped her tooth because she couldn't predict how far away the glass was from her and it was like a depth perception thing without being able to see. She didn't know the glass to mouth ratio right, and everyone at my table was complaining and they were getting more and more frothy as they were being ignored.

Speaker 1: 16:25

I, because of my training and also like going back to the ballroom, I go inward I got exceptionally quiet. More than once someone asked me if I was still there and I said yeah, and they're like well, why aren't you talking? And I said because I was focusing, I was saving my energy, I was putting up my invisible armor protecting that soft underbelly. Thinking again about my choir master who said don't put your energy in places where it's just going to get sucked out in a vacuum. Put your energy in places where you know it can be received and heard. I mentally left the table.

Speaker 1: 17:01

At that point. I started to drift away and listen to other conversations and check in with the other conversations in the room around me and, trust me, no one was enjoying this experience at all and everyone was talking about where they were going to go to dinner next, because this wasn't a meal. This wasn't enjoyable. People were talking about how they were going to tell off the event organizer. Trust me, the event organizers very quickly knew that this was a disaster. Personally, I probably would have told everybody to take off their masks and throw on the lights and change the vibe right then. But whatever, not in charge and they didn't do that. But this room was now suddenly the experience and the reaction of 50 dissatisfied people who are all successful, you know, successful in business and in their career. So people are advocating for themselves and they're doing it in ways that I wouldn't necessarily recommend because they were coming at it through such a lens of emotion. I'll say it's probably the longest 90 minutes of my life, or at least the longest 90 minutes in recent memory.

Speaker 1: 18:03

The event eventually ended and my focus again was not to dig in, to swirl or to pile on or to gossip or do any of those actions. My intention immediately was to get back to daylight and to my hotel room. So once I got into the lobby of the restaurant, I asked the event organizer to get me an Uber. I was very dizzy. I was holding onto a wall and starting to feel like the thought of getting back into the sprinter van with other people who were already all in a lather was not the best for my wellbeing. So I didn't ask her to pay for the Uber she did. She escorted me to the car. I told her I would need help on the other end and that she would need to go ahead and call the hotel to make sure there was someone to help me on the other end.

Speaker 1: 18:47

Again, I didn't ask her to do these things. I told her what I needed. I wasn't in anger. I wasn't passive, aggressive. I wasn't a dick. I was very clear. I was very professional. But I was very direct, and this is where my professional brand is shining through.

Speaker 1: 19:04

So while I waited, I heard how she was responding to the others who were complaining and reacting in anger. She couldn't hear them through their anger. You are not going to get very far. Now is not the time to ask for refunds or to shame her or the team or to find a way to get back at them right. Making her wrong isn't going to get you what you want Getting back to psychological safety, to a place where you are on out of the firing line and you are back on solid ground with a balanced mindset that's what it is that you want Then you can negotiate from that place, that centered place, and that's mindset and agency. So when you're thinking about you know, if you haven't had one yet, buckle up, because I'm going to guess, at some point you're going to be in a situation where you're like what is actually happening right now and you need to advocate for yourself.

Speaker 1: 19:59

So first I want you to calm your mind, and there are plenty of tools. Here are a few of my favorites. The first is a poem by Thich Nhat Hanh which is titled I have Arrived, I have arrived, I am home In the here, in the now. I am solid, I am free In the ultimate, I am free In the ultimate, I dwell. Another one that might work for you is what's known as a loving kindness meditation, and that is as simple as may I be filled with loving kindness, may I be well, may I be peaceful and at ease, may I be happy. So, whether it's these or something else that's short but brings you a sense of calm, whether you've committed it to memory or you're reading it from something, it doesn't matter, but having them readily accessible to you is what I have found for both myself and others that when you were in a state where you feel charged or triggered or lack of psychological safety, bringing yourself back into your body by centering is something that can really help for people. You have to try and see what works for you.

Speaker 1: 21:16

Another thing is you could ask your sort of internal GPS and check in with yourself and sort of say something to the extent of you know, let me set aside everything I think I know about this situation for a new way of thinking about this situation and that knowing that more information will be revealed in time. But then again, this is what sort of unhooks our shoulders from our ears. It sort of gives you that relaxation that you can start to say, okay, maybe there's another way of looking at it. I am in this situation in the dark and I'm at a dinner that I no longer want to be at. What is it that I can set aside in this and what I can gain from this? And I think, as someone again who identifies with disability, it just gave me reflection for other people that are having disabilities, whether they are visible or non-apparent. Just thinking about what other people that are having disabilities, whether they're visible or non-apparent, just thinking about what other people go through. And could I pause for a moment and set aside everything I think I know about a situation?

Speaker 1: 22:13

The next one is to actually get out of your mind and get into your senses, and I've talked about this before. I always find this super helpful. It's the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. So, finding five things you could see and in this case, because I was in the dark, I would say see in my mind's eye, so maybe it's five pictures of people I love, right? So five things you could see. Four things you could hear the clinking of the plates, someone drinking next to you, the putting down of utensils right, you get the idea. Three things you could touch your own clothing, the table that you're at, the food that's in front of you. Two things you could smell, right, a little bit easier, because we were in a restaurant. You could smell things, but it might even be the smell of your own breath if you're at right of something that's sort of super simple and right next to you. And then one thing you can taste. And, again, if you're not in a situation that has something that you can tactilely taste, you could always just maybe tap into the taste in your mouth from the toothpaste that you've had or the breath mint that you've had or something like that. Right Again, it gets us out and it helps us calm down.

Speaker 1: 23:27

Also, using a meditation app. There are plenty of free, there are ones that you paid for. I really like the Calm app, but that practice and that flexing of muscle, of practicing meditation and practicing how to manage my mind you know, for years I would do it on the subway and just practice. And then, doing these practices, agency comes in and then you really start to think about well, what is it that I really want here? Right, you want a refund. You want revenge? Yeah, right, maybe not. You know, my dinner companions wanted an apology, they wanted a refund, but what they really wanted in their heart of hearts was to get back to some level of safety. So what was going to create safety for them? Getting a refund in the moment is not going to create safety for them.

Speaker 1: 24:10

How will you show up in the future when you think about well, there's probably going to be another surprise for me. I'm probably going to be in a situation at some point where I am surprised. Will you ask different questions, right? So, really thinking through, how might you approach something like this differently? And listen, when I heard there was a surprise dinner, I stuffed my agency in my pocket. I didn't want to be left out. I didn't want to miss out on whatever the surprise was going to be.

Speaker 1: 24:37

And if you heard me a few moments ago, I left myself out because I couldn't function in the situation. I chose to drop out of the situation. I didn't trust my initial instinct and I went inward, so I wasn't in the situation or the experience anyway. And also, why should I trust an event organizer to remember my special needs, like, yeah, I filled out a form, but nobody's perfect. I should have advocated for myself. And if you're thinking, jill, you filled out a form, you're right, but does being right give me the result that I want? No, because I ended up eating some shitty baby food mush dinner in the dark in a place that I didn't want to be. I take full accountability that I didn't say when I first heard there was going to be a surprise. Hey, I need special accommodations, so maybe I should drop out of this experience. Unless you can tell me what we're doing, you can express yourself without raising your voice or being a dick. Right, it's a cycle the more you strengthen that agency, the more you express your voice, the more natural it comes. Focus on what you want.

Speaker 1: 25:45

Agency is about taking action with clarity and intention. It's not about advocating and popping off on people. Get quiet, put down the phone, stop scrolling, get away from overstimulation and, if possible, move. Can you change your state? So I couldn't change my state of being because I was at a table, locked in and I didn't know what the room looked like and I didn't want to fall. But I changed my state by sort of removing myself mentally from the table and tapping in and listening to other conversations that were going around the room.

Speaker 1: 26:20

If you're standing, can you sit? If you're sitting, can you lay? Can you go outside of your inside? How can you find a way to shift your mindset, to catch yourself and get you out of the reaction? Using mindset and then into agency. As you build this muscle, you will intuitively learn how to get quiet so that you can sort of quickly deliberate and then make a decision as to what you want to do next. Friends, mindset and agency go hand in hand. Practice them both, and I want to know how it's going for you. How are you practicing and flexing your muscle of agency? How are you practicing your mindset? Drop me an email, hit me up on the socials. I want to know. My information is in the show notes. You can check it out there and, until next time, embrace possibility, flex that agency and be intentional. All right, friends, thanks for being here.