Manage Stress & Keep Performing, even under Intense Pressure

Leaders today need to be able to sense changes in the business environment, manage stress and respond with actions that are focused, fast and flexible. However, it is extremely challenging to sustain high levels of performance, either personal or organisational, when the pace and disruptiveness of change are relentless.

We are living in a VUCA world and our MasterClass extract below will give you a technique to manage stress and master your physiology to succeed in a rapidly changing world.

 

The VUCA acronym emerged from the military in the 1990s to describe the capability to engage in situations marked by constant change and challenges. VUCA has been adopted by the business world to remind us that we are not able to control the external world, no matter how robust our planning or problem-solving processes are.

The only thing that can be safely predicted is that at some time your organisation will be challenged in ways for which it has no precedent. So, when that wave of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity or Ambiguity comes, what will your organisation do? What will your leaders do to manage stress and succeed?

Manage Stress by Mastering your Physiology

One of the main ways we lose energy is through incoherent or erratic breathing. For example, if someone becomes frustrated or stressed, their breathing tends to become a series of mini breath “holds” or what’s called a “glottic-stop” in your breathing. The same is true of emotions like panic, anxiety or anger. These all involve a different type of disordered breathing.

So What’s Really Going On?

When your breathing is chaotic, what tends to happen is the energy your heart generates is also chaotic. When we perceive a threat, (usually subliminally), we’ll react and instantly create a chaotic, erratic heart-rate variability signal. These chaotic signals influence other body systems and you can start to leak significant amounts of energy. The cortex or clever part of your brain starts to shut down because your body’s thinking that you’re in a threat response and your survival mechanism kicks in. The human brain is constantly getting signals from all the bodily systems, but particularly the heart via the vagus nerve.

And The Result Is?

When we’re under pressure, heart rate variability becomes super chaotic, which causes cortical inhibition, and the frontal lobes of the brain shut down. Dr Allan Watkins calls this a “do-it-yourself lobotomy”. Most of us don’t even realise that we’re doing it. There’s all this electrical energy that is happening in our heart that’s sending all these signals to the brain. It starts with our breathing.

When we control our breathing, and we can do this skillfully, we generate a coherent heart rate variability signal. If we can do that we’ll…

• Waste less energy
• Burn less fuel
• Stop flooding our body with excessive amounts of cortisol or other breakdown hormones

Coherence facilitates access to your cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the clever part of the brain. The three most important aspects of our breath that we can control are rhythm, smoothness, and location of attention.

Breathing to Manage Stress 1- Rhythm

First, we need to control the rhythm of our breathing. There’s a fixed ratio between the in-breath and the out-breath.

For example, you might decide to breathe in for the count of 3 or 4 and out for the count of 3 or 4, or whatever count works for you. Some of you might have learnt this through something like martial arts or yoga practices. All that matters is that whatever ratio you choose, you maintain that consistently.

Breathing to Manage Stress 2- Smoothness

The second step is the smoothness of your breath, which means an even flow or volume of breath going in and out of your lungs per second. Now some people breathe in a staccato fashion, but coherence requires a smooth rhythm.

Breathing to Manage Stress 3- Location of Attention

The third step of coherent breathing is the location of attention. It’s important to focus your attention on the heart area or centre of your chest.
When we’re angry or stressed, our heart rate variability is chaotic and our mind gets scrambled. Focusing on breathing through the centre of the chest helps us to get out of our head and drop into the body. Plus shifting our attention to the area around the heart makes it more likely that we’ll drift into a positive emotional state because the heart is where human beings experience most of their emotions.

The B.R.E.A.T.H.E Technique

I’m going to take you through this skill now. But before we do that, I want you just to check in with how you’re feeling right now. Using your self-awareness, just notice how you’re feeling right now, noticing whether you’ve got any tension in your body anywhere. Just notice how you’re feeling right now and do a little check-in.

This breathing technique requires you to Breathe Rhythmically & Evenly And Through the Heart area Every day.  You might be able to do that very well just by reading those words, memorising them so that each one of those letters stands for something important, and you can breathe rhythmically and evenly through the heart area every day. Get the rhythm right for you. What does that rhythm and smoothness look like? Smooth and even breaths going in through the heart area.

Ok, Keep Going

You’re breathing rhythmically and evenly and through the heart area, and allowing your breathing to get into a rhythm and we’re going to do this for just about a minute. Start that now…

Notice how you’re feeling now after just a minute or so of that breathing. Does your physiology feel different? Do you feel more relaxed by any chance? This was just one minute. Imagine if you did this skill daily for several minutes and then could activate that skill when you feel yourself escalating. When impatience or frustration begins, you breathe rhythmically and evenly and through the heart area, instead.

Now I practised this recently before being on stage in front of 300 business leaders and it really helped to settle me. A great way to practice this is at the end of the day just before you go off to sleep.

This is not a new technique. Most people know about it; they just don’t do it or they don’t understand the power of it or the science behind it.

We don’t have time to run you through the other three VUCA skills, but Great Managers do run half-day workshops where we can take you through a range of the skills in a lot more depth than I can cover here. We also have a workshop suitable for staff to help them stay performing under pressure. Get in touch with us if you’re interested in finding out more about those.

Sandra Wood – Managing Director, Great Managers

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