Corona has not necessarily made the day-to-day work of managers in companies any less stressful. Meetings were only possible virtually, and leading your own team was a whole new challenge. Stress management, salutogenesis, mindfulness and resilience are particularly important in these times in order to stay healthy in everyday life.

Kaluza's basic model of stress management distinguishes between three levels of stress:

1. external stressors: external events that trigger stress reactions. These can be physical (e.g. noise), bodily (e.g. pain), social (e.g. conflicts) or work-related (e.g. performance requirements, time pressure). Today, the focus is mostly on social and work-related stressors.

2. personal stress intensifiers: personal attitudes, motives and ways of thinking, as well as drivers that give the stressors a corresponding meaning, and

3. physiological stress response: all physical and psychological responses to confrontation with a stressor. In acute cases, these cause a comprehensive activation and provision of energy, which is used to cope with the stressor. In the long term, chronic stress reactions in the absence of regeneration phases lead to exhaustion and illness, in the worst case to burnout.

The following stress skills are necessary

Successful stress management according to Kaluza

© B. Broekman

Instrumental stress competence

The aim is to organize your everyday life in such a way that stress is prevented from arising in the first place. The aim is to change external pressures and demands at work and at home, to reduce them as far as possible or to eliminate them completely. The following starting points apply:

• Professional skills: Information, further training, collegial exchange.
• Organizational optimization: distribution of tasks, process planning, filing systems.
• Self and time management: optimize work organization, clearly define priorities, realistic time planning.
• Social communication skills: Setting boundaries, saying "no" or "not now" more often, having clarification discussions.
• Seeking support: Build up a network, get help.

Mental stress competence

Self-critically recognize stress-inducing attitudes and evaluations, change them and develop beneficial attitudes and ways of thinking. Starting points for personal stress intensifiers:

• Review perfectionist performance expectations and accept performance limits,
• See difficulties not as a threat but as a challenge,
• Identify less personally with everyday tasks, maintain inner distance,
• maintain an eye for the "essentials",
• become aware of the positive, pleasing and successful things and be grateful,
• let go of unpleasant feelings such as hurt or anger and learn to forgive,
• take yourself less seriously and learn "humility".

Regenerative stress competence

Dampen and reduce physical and mental arousal, ensure regular rest and thus maintain your own resilience in the long term. Starting points for stress response:

• Regular practice of a relaxation technique,
• regular exercise,
• a healthy, varied diet,
• Maintaining social contacts outside of work,
• regular balance through hobbies and leisure activities.

How to manage stress successfully

With the term mindfulness , I would like to introduce a principle that is both an analysis and intervention tool. "What you can't measure, you can't manage!" applies to processes and products, but also to managers when dealing with themselves. Those who focus attentively on themselves can listen to their strengths, their limits and their

needs and recognize the signals that they need to recover. Mindfulness as the key to self-awareness needs to be practised and trained.

Salutogenesis (health development, Latin salus for health, Greek genesis for origin) focuses on the factors and dynamic interactions that lead to the development and maintenance of health. Salutogenesis (Antonovsky) offers a complementary view to pathogenesis (development of diseases). According to this, health is not to be understood as a state, but as a process. Salutogenesis is based on 3 central principles:

Understandability: understanding the interactions between environment, behavior and health

Manageability: having the means to deal with these challenges

Meaningfulness: giving yourself meaning, being committed to your own health.

This closes the circle to mindfulness, because I will only pursue with mindfulness what I attach meaning to. When the manager learns

1. give meaning(significance) to the connections between work behavior, work stress and subsequent stress,
2. understand the relevant medical-physiological correlations(comprehensibility) and
3. to take the necessary steps to limit their own stress levels(manageability), they will incorporate measures and behaviors into their daily work routine that help them to use their own resources sparingly and effectively in the long term, to support themselves mentally and to recognize warning signals at an early stage.

Finally, it should be mentioned that developing mindfulness for one's own behavior and thought processes can be a first step, but effective stress and health management requires mindfulness to be practiced in everyday activities, as this is what nurtures resilience, a person's healthy resistance. Resilience arises from life experiences and subsequent resources that we use on a more or less daily basis, which we develop further and from which we draw strength. The resilience factors include the ability to solve problems, take responsibility, develop an optimistic outlook and the ability to accept the unchangeable without struggling with it. We draw on our resilience when we have to cope with crises or stress: a restructuring in the company or redundancy, taking on a completely new team or having to cope with the unexpected death of a close relative. However, resilience is also strengthened and maintained in the present through successful stress management.

The author

Bernhard Broekman

© B. Broekman

Bernhard Broekman, Dipl.- Psych., is Senior Coach DBVC, Clinical Psychologist BDP, Systemic Organizational Consultant (ISB) and Stress Management Trainer (according to Kaluza), Partner of Leadership-Choices.