The value that stress management training brings to an organization is directly proportional to the value of the expected return on investment in human capital that organization has made.
This is so because the value of that investment (recruitment, training, development, etc.) will only produce the expected return to the extent that the organization's human resources perform adequately in the face of the challenges that must be overcome and that must ultimately be met. translate into sales volumes, profit margins, market shares, quality of customer service, etc.
And to perform adequately in the face of these challenges, human resources must remain in a position to use all their intellectual, competency and motivational potential within the expected levels of execution.
Training in Stress Management and Professional Performance
And this is where stress management training comes in. One of the clearest consequences of high levels of stress in the members of an organization is the decrease in their professional performance.
This is because stress, literally speaking, makes us more foolish: we think worse, we solve problems and conflicts that we must manage worse, we make more mistakes and it prevents us, in a word, from using our intelligence and our abilities to their maximum expression.
This is a scientifically documented fact in many studies on cognitive performance in the face of stress.
But, apart from the objective decrease in our cognitive performance, there is an additional and complementary aspect that has to do with more purely emotional and motivational elements: High stress directly induces negative emotions and feelings of fear, insecurity, anxiety, anguish, frustration, low self-esteem, jealousy, hatred, aggressiveness...
Add both elements: a brain inhibited at the cortical level (anatomical seat of all higher thought processes: attention, perception, memory, problem solving, decision making, etc.) together with a feeling and state of mind characterized by emotions of fear, insecurity, anguish, frustration, etc.
What we have? We have less, much less, of the potential talent we have invested in.
Training in Stress Management as a Competitive Advantage
It is simply not sensible to expect people to do their best in situations of continued high stress. In situations that are perceived as threatening to our integrity and / or survival, our brains are wired to greatly limit our repertoire of responses, reducing them to basically two: running away or fighting.
Indeed, in the face of a threat coded by our brain in terms of imminent and dangerous, the flight or fight response provides great specificity and predictability of behavior, eliminating and / or suppressing any behavior not expressly directed to avoid or neutralize danger. that this threat represents to us. And that specificity of response is certainly very helpful in providing us with the best chance of surviving a real and imminent threat of life or death. That is why fear and stress are said to have contributed to saving many lives.
On the other hand, our current professional challenges, which many interpret as threatening, do not really pose an imminent and direct threat to our survival. At best, only to our status quo, and not imminently.
Therefore, to meet these challenges, we must be able to continue to think clearly and remain emotionally balanced. It is necessary to be able to improve our products and services, giving them greater added value; it is necessary to re-invent our commercial strategies, diversifying our offer, reaching new markets and multiplying the commercialization channels using the tremendous potential of the network adequately; It is necessary to increase the quality in everything we do in order to advantageously differentiate ourselves from our competition and, for all this, it is necessary for people to continue learning, developing and adapting continuously to the continuous and vertiginous change in which we live.
Training in Stress Management and Change Management
The response to flee or fight is totally poor and useless in the face of these challenges. An organization that does not adequately manage its level of stress in the face of these challenges, will have, in a majority of its members, people who dream of being able to leave the organization or their responsibilities (flee) and people who, tooth and nail, try to fence off their plot of land. power and influence to avoid being overtaken by events (fight).
But the current of events is really marking the way forward, not avoiding or trying to stop.
Training in stress management can enable us precisely to learn to navigate the current so that, once we have reached new shores, we are able to live and work in balance and prosperity with the new environmental conditions.
That is ultimately the capacity for human adaptation.
"If life gives you lemons, make yourself lemonade."
