Coaching for Stress Management: Enabling You to Make Powerful Changes in Your Life

Coaching can help you achieve a more peaceful life. Still waters may run deep but they don’t have to be choppy.

Coaching is a great way of reducing stress in your business and personal life. The purpose of a coaching session is to help you identify the areas that are causing you stress, and to help you identify ways of resolving the issues before they become stressful in the future. Let’s look at some practical examples of how this might work:

Coaching to reduce stress – Taking a little time

It’s very common for newly promoted managers to feel a little bit out of their depth. It’s not because they aren’t able to decide what to do, but that they put pressure on themselves to be seen to be decisive. This can lead to a state of internal panic, as we deal with our internal voice; “What if I get this wrong? What if I don’t do this quickly enough?” and so on.

A coach can help you identify these points and help you develop an approach to deal with them. Essentially what you need is time. Not much time, but enough time to think things through and move forward with a decision. Your stress can cloud your judgment in these situations. It’s better to give yourself permission to take some time (even 10 seconds can be enough) and then to act.

It’s easy to work with a coach to recognize when these situations are occurring, and to build a trigger that buys you the time to make the right decision. Once you appreciate that no-one is expecting you to be super-human and that they value your judgments, the stress just slides away.

Coaching to reduce stress – Learning to say no

I think we’ve all allowed ourselves to become over-committed at points in our professional lives. When everyone seems to turn to us and ask for “just a little help” or to add another project to our ever growing work load. Learning to say no can be a little scary. We’ve built our reputations on being helpful and caring – so how can we just walk away now?

We have to learn to recognize that our ability to deliver and to really help others is impaired by taking on too much. We’re not really helping anybody if we’re having to rush tasks, and cut corners to deliver. It’s better that people understand we’re human, we want to help but we want to do a great job too.

A coach can assist you to examine your behavior, to set meaningful priorities that enable you to perform at your very best. They can also help you learn to say no, in a way that doesn’t upset people and instead drives their understanding of how valuable you really are.

Coaching to reduce stress – Building confidence

Sometimes we’re stressed simply because we don’t believe in ourselves. A change in management, company, or any other aspect of our lives can have a knock on effect on how we perceive ourselves.

In these instances, it’s not that you’ve really changed – it’s just that you’ve lost sight of who you are for a little bit. A great coach can put this source of stress to bed for you, they can walk you through rediscovering yourself. They can help you remember your strengths and prepare you to believe in yourself again. As soon as you’ve got faith in you, others will follow and as if by magic your stress will disappear.