Pressure/Stress Coaching

PRESSURE AND STRESS COACHING for ALL executives

Ideal for executives who need to successfully handle (even seek and enjoy!) unrelenting pressure, manage a unending stream of challenging tasks, meet tight project deadlines, deal with many difficult people, take on greater responsibilities, or deal with any manner of other demanding issues – confidently, unflustered and in control; any one of which may create or contribute to intolerable and unacceptable levels of stress, performance anxiety, or worse, precipitate panic attacks or burn-out.

Using a mix of deep mind/body balance development methods, this work seeks to create and develop eustress. The optimal level of parasympathetic (peak performance state – alert mind and calm muscle balanced body) stimulation, as opposed to the more common sympathetic (fight or flight) or nervous system response. This leads to immediate and automatic access to effective high-performance ‘meditative’ calming, centering and grounding states, under any circumstances. This work underpins developing the advanced work needed to access ‘being-in-the–zone’, ‘being-in-the-groove’, ‘peak-performance’ and ‘flow’ states, for those who want to develop this capability.

Case Study Example

Client: Management Development Manager. £7B plc financial services firm

Issue/s: Boosting Self-Confidence, Handling Criticism & Tension to Calmness +74% Improvement

People get precisely what they pay attention to. – and when a problem, they often try hard to understand causes and symptoms believing this to be the route to success. Wrong! The harder most people try, the deeper the emotional trap, unwittingly (neurologically) reinforcing the problem. This work was totally focused on outcomes (what you want!), solutions and results.

• Low self-confidence – Jane had a tendency to linguistically beat herself up with lots of negative self-talk. This spiralled into inferior self-belief, low self-esteem and lingering self-doubt. When this happens she sometimes began acting, in a ‘not very friendly’ manner, which she wanted to change. This work focused on using an advanced protocol that bolsters self-confidence (doing), which is about how you feel about abilities, experience, pride or skill at doing things. That differs from self-esteem (being), which is a mental appraisal of self-worth or how people rate themselves as a person, which we also enhanced. We also successfully reshaped her unfriendliness (and how to effectively change ‘procrastination under pressure’ to ‘motivation under pressure’), using a proven technique that ‘installs’ new ways of doing things, because if you don’t have a cognitive strategy for doing something you won’t ever be able to do it.
• Finds it difficult to handle criticism and be assertive – Jane had low resilience when someone reported back that they were unhappy with her suggestions and recommendations. She felt a strong sense of upset, feeling bad and personal failure. She also wanted to deal successfully with some prickly people and bring them on board? We found it useful to remove some bad memories using a simple ‘mental scramble’ pattern. We then ‘installed’ a pattern that enabled Jane to depersonalise and receive feedback effectively, thus enabling her to respond successfully to criticism without feeling hurt or judged. This was followed up with work on an effective assertiveness pattern (speaking up kindly and respectfully) that enabled Jane to be a more successful communicator and relate better to people at work.
• Body tenseness – Jane said she gets stressed, nervous, anxious and on-edge on a lot of occasions. This makes it difficult for her to instil a sense of calmness, control and confidence in others. This work sought to build a deeper sense of calmness, centredness, groundedness and relaxation, especially under pressure. Since this will have a profound impact on her own resourcefulness and interactions with others. We worked with a range of specific state/emotional/feelings/mood management approaches which has enabled her to gain rapid automatic access to these states, as and when she needs them.

We also did some work around developing an ‘elegant interruption’ pattern and response for meetings. How to tell when someone ‘likes you / doesn’t like you’? Reading body language, developing deeper rapport skills and other methods for developing better professional relationships and networking.

Jane has successfully integrated these new behaviour patterns successfully into her everyday growth in her career, job, relationships and living.

Coaching time: 16 hours (4 sessions of 6 hours).

Results: Overall +74%.

Client self-rating on a scale of 0 to 10.

• Self confidence +70% (5 start to 8/9 end)
• Handling criticism / assertiveness +45% (5/6 start to 7/9 end)
• Calmness and control +88% (4 start to 7/8 end)

Please contact us directly for more details and information.