Humans are biologically built to react to pressure – our bodies react to this stress by releasing hormones designed to get our hearts racing.

This makes it hard to remain calm.

Although not necessarily the solution, the following approaches help:

Detach yourself

When faced with stress, try and remove yourself so it’s not so personal to you (difficult I know!)

Imagine the situation as being an outside observer and ask yourself what you would do from that situation.

This approach is designed to make your judgements more objective and removed from the stress.

Breathe

A difficult situation can make you anxious, triggering the fight or flight response to the problem.

Avoid acting on instinct.  Take a breath and following the breathe, recalibrate, deliver, approach I have previously covered.

Breathing more slowly will bring your action to rest, counter-acting the physiological changes going through your body.

Plan the ideal end result

When facing a high stress situation like a negotiation you should think through what you intended ideal end result is.

Having a clear end goal will help you work towards getting the best deal for you and stop you floundering when challenged by an individual more prepared in the negotiation.

Accept failure

When you fear failure, this can add much unneeded stress.

If you learn to accept failure and be okay when it happens, you will be able to deal with it better and appreciate it for the lessons it teaches you.

Getting too worked up about failure can make matters worse and can create a self-fulfilling prophecy when it consumes our thoughts too much.

Be decisive

When you make a decision make sure to act on it.

Your choices may impacted others, but you can’t allow stress anxiety, imagining how they will react to impact your feelings, or worse flip-flop on your choices.

Most of the time when we are decisive, our perceived objections are imagined, infact most people will appreciate your ability to make a decision and stick to it.

Tricks to stay calm in a stressful situation

I hope you liked some of these “tricks” if you have any other good tips, then please do comment below.

<<NEXT POST 3 Tips to Develop your Resilience to Pressure>>


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