HOW TO STOP FEELING OVERWHELMED BY WORK

"Stress" is an emotion. "Feeling pressured", "feeling overwhelmed", and "feeling tense" are all emotions too.

Handling a high workload can be a very emotionally charged experience requiring high levels of emotional intelligence and emotional resilience.

Low levels of emotional intelligence can contribute to making workplaces more stressful than they need to be.In contrast, having high emotional intelligence skills can help individuals and groups cope with the pressure and stress of a busy, tense and demanding workplace, the pressure of multiple responsibilities, and the conflicting demands of high workloads.

This article will examine how we can be very busy and handle all our many responsibilities without feeling overwhelmed, and while staying content, productive and emotionally healthy.

HERE ARE SOME EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE TIPS ON HOW TO STOP FEELING OVERWHELMED BY A HIGH WORKLOAD.

1 -  SORT THE DEMANDS INTO AREAS: Stress and feeling overwhelmed can occur when we feel stretched across too many different activities, responsibilities and tasks. By separating the demands into different areas it may reduce the feelings of overwhelm. For example, much of my life has been very full. What I have found really useful in managing this is to allocate the load into different areas that I can manage separately. I find this stops me from getting overwhelmed by how much there is to do, as I can move from one section to another instead of seeing it all in one overwhelming mass.

For example, here are the four sections I moved between at one stage of my life:

• Running a full time business.
• Being a voluntary CEO of a large not-for-profit organisation.
• My family responsibilities.
• Teaching.

When I saw my workload whittled down into these four areas of responsibilities, they didn't overwhelm me. It also kept me focussed and on track. In contrast, if I don't have these groups, I end up looking at one big, incredibly long to-do list and freak out. I still separate my areas. I presently have my four main work areas, and a fifth minor one, written out and stuck on my computer to remind me.

What are the different areas of your life - can you split them up to make it seem more manageable? It is an essential emotional intelligence skill. Separating out demands helps many people to manage their emotions.

2 - DO THE PRIORITIES IN EACH AREA: Once you have your separate areas of work or responsibilities identified, your next step is to be able to identify your priority task in each one and do only the priorities.

Each day I identify the number one priority in each area and do that. I try to do the priorities first before any unimportant nice-to-do things. Although these nice-to-do things can be pleasant they don't help manage my workload. Doing the priorities stops the stress from building up.

I remember the days I used to do the nice, small things first and then feel enormous pressure as I still had the priorities to tend to. Hopefully those days are over and I now have higher levels of emotional intelligence.

Do you attend to your priorities? Are you doing your priorities? Do you even stop to ask yourself what they are? Knowing your priorities is being emotionally intelligent.

3 - CHANGE PRIORITIES AT ANY MOMENT: Be prepared to change priorities at any moment. Be flexible, your priorities are not set in concrete. It is impossible to always know in advance what the priorities are. I therefore decide what they are each day, (or even each hour).

• First I decide which of the four sections is the key priority for that day.
• Then I decide what the priority is in that section.
• Then I do it.

Once done I check out and move on to one of the other three sections. This can be fun - a bit like playing hop-scotch! However, the priorities can change at any moment. For example, you may find one of your children suddenly gets admitted to hospital and all priorities are altered. Or, an urgent request comes from your boss and you switch to that. Or, you find the media ran a negative story on your business that morning. This is how life is.

• Be prepared to change priorities at any moment.
• A willingness to re-evaluate very often is vital.
• Rigidity only builds stress.

How flexible are you? Are you clinging to your plan? Be prepared to change priorities at any moment. This is emotional intelligence in action.

4 - BE ACTIVE IN STAYING HEALTHY: Being healthy is so important in managing a busy life and responsibilities. It is so much harder if you have a headache or flu or backache to avoid becoming stressed. So take care of yourself: your children deserve it, your colleagues need it and you will be happier because of it.

Do what you need to cultivate your health. The busier you are the more important it is that you eat healthy food - no junk - all good food.

The busier you are the more determined you must be to fit in exercise too.

Also the harder you work the more you must clear your mind of the junk and stress.

For example, I make sure that I nearly always put time aside for meditation each day. When I meditate my stress levels diminish and my energy levels rise. I work more productively when I meditate and do it with a greater sense of calm and enjoyment. I have more quality in my life when I meditate. If I don't meditate the stress builds. It is hardly a waste of time then, is it?

Are you determined enough to invest in your own health? Desiring work-life balance requires you to take care of your body, mind and spirit. Are you taking enough care of your health? Emotional intelligence can be applied to all areas of your life. Just because you feel tired and can't be bothered to exercise doesn't mean you don't do it.

5 -  INCLINE TOWARDS POSITIVITY: Incline your mind towards gratitude and positivity. Negative emotions, such as resentment, frustration and anger only add to stress - they do not help reduce it.

Ditch negativity, complaining and anger; they simply increase the stress load. Instead, on a daily basis and in all that you do, train yourself to incline towards positivity and gratitude.

For example, one night I was having to work for the government - not through choice but because the government requires all businesses, big or small, to do lots of administration for tax purposes. It was getting late and I was still slogging through it. Given it was the last day of the tax year it had to be the priority that day.

I heard myself starting to mutter about stupid red tape and complaining about tax policies and how unfair they were on small business. Then I stopped.

Why was I doing that? My complaining was going to make no difference to whether I had to do it or not. The government wasn't going to alter the taxation rules or regulations just because I complained about them. So why get negative? All it was doing was making myself agitated and more stressed. My complaining was hurting me and my Assistant as he was nearby. Do not feed your feelings of being overwhelmed by more negative feelings. It is hardly emotionally intelligent, is it?

I laughed and appreciated that at least my business was still going strong, and I was sitting in front of a lovely log fire on a very cold night.

Even doing the tax can be a lovely thing if you let it and incline towards gratitude.

Do not feed your feelings of being overwhelmed by more negative feelings. It is typical of low emotional intelligence.

Do you incline your mind towards gratitude? It could make it much easier to manage your responsibilities, and it's a beneficial way to develop your emotional intelligence.

Thank you for taking your time to read my work. 

Trust that add value to you.

About the Author:

Emília M. Ludovino, is an international Social & Emotional Intelligence Trainer, Performance Coach, NLP Master Practitioner, Reiki Master/Teacher, founder of the Ki Flow - Emotional Intelligence Training and The Emotional Intelligence Project, social entrepreneur and a life-time practitioner of Mindfulness & Meditation. She holds a LLM Master in International Law from Lisbon’s Law School and a degree in Psychology from School of Applied Psychology, from Lisbon.

BE HAPPY ... you are a special human being

Written by: Emília M. Ludovino, Emotional Intelligence Trainer

Category: Emotional Intelligence, Happiness

Please do a favour to yourself, do a favour to the others, let your Light shine and live your life's purpose - Be Happy and Grateful for being a miracle of nature. 

Being happy is not - having a cloudless storm, roads without accidents, work without fatigue, relationships without disappointments .

Being happy is - finding strength in forgiveness and hope in battle, safety on the stage of fear, love in mismatches .

Being happy is - Not only enhancing the smile but reflect on the sadness. - Not only celebrate success, but learn lessons from their failures. - Not only have joy in applause but finding joy in anonymity .

Being happy is - to recognize that life is worth living life despite all challenges, misunderstandings and periods of crisis .

Being happy is - not an inevitability of fate, but an achievement perhaps a travel within your own being .

Being happy is - to stop being a victim of the problems and become an author of history itself. It is cross deserts outside itself, but being able to find an oasis in the secret of his soul. You thank God every morning for the miracle of life .

Being happy is not - be afraid of your own feelings. It is having the courage to hear " NO.", sometimes you have to get a safety critical, even unfair. Is kissing the children, parents, and enjoy poetic moments with friends, even if they hurt us.

Being happy is - to allow live free, gay and simple the child that lives within each of us. It's not mature enough to say " I was wrong ". It takes courage to say , "Forgive me".  Is having sensitivity to express " I need you ." Have the ability to say "I love you " .

I wish that life has become a hotbed of opportunities for you to be happy. And when you miss the way, start all over again . And discover that ...

Being happy is not having a perfect life. But using tears to irrigate tolerance . Use losses to refine patience. Use failure to carve serenity. Use pain to polish the pleasure .Use the obstacles to open the windows of intelligence .

Never give up on yourself.

Never give up the people you love .

Never give up to be happy, because life is an unforgettable spectacle, and you are a special human being.

Thank You for taking your time to read my blog. 

Please, if the information was useful for you, leave me your feedback on the comments below, and share it with others, as we never know when we are inspiring someone.

Take Care and Have a Blessed Day!

HOW TO SELF-CALM ANXIETY

Your emotional intelligence affects your emotional resilience and how well you manage anxiety. It does not mean you will be free of anxiety.

Anxiety is common to most people and it can be useful. It is not all bad. However, it can be frightening and overwhelming at times. There are three pillars of emotional resilience and all of them are relevant to your ability to manage anxiety, and relevant to your levels of emotional intelligence.

The first pillar is your ability to keep your cool. This is all about how good you are at being able to stay calm and cool in difficult situations and not have emotions such as anxiety, anger or irritation arise. We have discussed ways to keep your cool elsewhere.

The second pillar is the ability to calm down your emotions if they arise. In other words, if you do feel anxious can you use self-calming techniques so that your anxiety reduces quickly? I am not talking about pathological anxiety disorders here, I am talking about the normal types of anxiety that everyone can experience.

However, as someone who has had panic attacks in the past, and cured herself of them, I can tell you that this may also apply to how quickly you can sooth yourself when high anxiety, such as a panic attack, is occurring. This article will focus upon self-calming techniques for anxiety.

The third pillar of emotional resilience and emotional self-management is your ability to create positive emotions, irrespective of how you are feeling. Can you, for example, generate emotions such as joy, delight or serenity on a daily basis. When you can do this you automatically reduce emotions such as anxiety. When you are feeling joy you are not feeling anxious. This is also covered elsewhere in our article "Emotional self-management: Create joy daily".

There are many activities you can engage in when you feel anxious to help you reduce your anxiety so that you feel more settled and peaceful again. The following are just a small sample of those available. There is no one way to settle anxiety, and each person responds differently to anxiety and the techniques available.  Please know I am neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist. If your anxiety is severe or debilitating please seek appropriate professional help

I have, however, used all the following self-calming strategies to reduce my own anxiety and panic attacks and found that they have worked for me. I have also helped others to benefit from them too.

HOW TO AUTOMATICALLY REDUCE ANXIETY:

1 - CATCH IT EARLY: One of the skills of emotional intelligence is the ability to be aware of your emotions, not just when they are so strong that they hit you in the face, but when they are just there as small signs, flickering in the background.

If you can notice the early signs of your anxiety it gives you the choice to reduce it almost immediately before it develops and becomes overwhelming. What is the first sign that tells you your anxiety is starting or about to increase? - I used to find that my belly would have a slight flutter in it as the first sign of my anxiety, it was as if a little worry worm had just started to crawl across it. I came to realise that how I reacted to that initial flutter determined what happened next. What's your first symptom? Can you react calmly to it? 

2 - ACCEPT IT: What do you say to yourself when you first detect a sign of anxiety? How you react to your emotions is another aspect of emotional intelligence and makes a huge difference to your ability to manage them. If you notice an early sign of anxiety you have the option to remain neutral about it, just to accept it, or even to reverse it. I developed the ability to notice my first symptom and to accept it. I'd simply say to myself, "There goes my stomach having a flutter". If you speak like this about it, you are more likely to stay calm than if you say, something like, "Oh no, I'm about to have a panic attack, how will I cope, I might faint, what will people think?". In fact, at first, I did react like this, with panic about the first sign. I learnt it was a sure way to have a panic attack. Over time I learnt to stay relaxed. After all, it was only an emotion - isn't that an important point in emotional intelligence?

3 - SIT AND OBSERVE IT: If you can simply sit out anxiety and watch it arise and fade away you are less likely to make it worse. Become a detached observer, it is simply anxiety building and simply anxiety fading away. When you feel anxiety, and panic about it, and try to run away from it, and hate it, and live in dread of it, and become sure you are going to die from it, you are more likely to make it worse. Panic about panic doubles the panic!

I remember a lady telling me once that she had anxiety really badly and would have panic attacks in the middle of the night and they would fill her with dread. One night she was so sure she was about to die from them that she opened her arms and said "Okay God take me now, I am ready to die, I am in a comfy bed, my husband is next to me and I am nice and warm". Then nothing happened. She was laughing as she told me, she said it was a complete anticlimax. She had surrendered completely to the anxiety, had stopped fighting it - and it went! She had not had panic attacks since, as she no longer feared them. In our emotional intelligence courses I often say, "an emotion is just an emotion, it is what you do with it that counts." You may not have to avoid it, run away from it, or suppress it, in order to manage it. Sometimes you may just need to acknowledge it is there, and even say hello to it. Emotional intelligence is not about avoiding emotions, nor is it about getting lost in them and overwhelmed by them. Okay, I know the idea of being patient while in the grip of anxiety is probably the last thing that you want to do ... but patience is more likely to help you than getting impatient and irritated. One of my favourite sayings is "This too will pass". And it usually does! I love beach so, imagining that anxiety is like waves, just come and go, it helps me a lot.

4 - BE PROFESSOR ANXIETY: Become curious rather than scared by your symptoms. Ask yourself questions about them. I used to have long conversations with myself about my anxiety symptoms and I found that when I did this they just became "symptoms" and not something to be scared of. Once I stopped being scared of anxiety the anxiety lessened.

For example, if you're sweating, become curious about all the water dripping from your body. I know it can sound funny and it used to make me laugh, which of course also helps. The types of questions I asked myself were:

• ·        "So how much water can I leak out - is it one litre or two?"
• ·        "Where does all this water come from?"
• ·        "Do I have a water-well under my arm pit or does it get stored in my foot?"
• ·        "What happens to the water if I don't sweat?"
• ·        "How fast can a heart beat?" and so on.

Become a Professor of Anxiety, give yourself the role, call yourself the famous Dr Anxiety! In his laboratory, Dr Anxiety would notice what is happening and describe it in a measurable, objective way. You can do the same. Asking questions can help you become more detached.

For example, if your heart is pounding, simply say to yourself, "My heart is beating at 150 beats a minute, now I'll just see how soon it increases to 160 beats a minute." I found it fascinating, to do this. When I have more knowledge I feel I have more control. The same may apply to you. Being able to deal with emotionally challenging situations, and being able to watch emotions without becoming entangled with them and making them worse is an valuable skill set of emotional intelligence.

5 - FOCUS ON SOMETHING ELSE: Distracting yourself from an intense focus on anxiety can also help. Instead, bring to mind a contented or beautiful image and concentrate on this. There are many emotional intelligence skills that can help reduce and self-calm anxiety, and I still find this very helpful. I used to bring to mind an image of my meditation teacher. If I couldn't meditate when I was in his class I used to cheat and open my eyes to watch him meditate. He always had a smile on his face and looked so beautifully serene that I found him inspiring. I committed this image to my memory and would recall it if I felt anxious. I found I settled down again very quickly. Believe it or not, it is impossible for the mind to concentrate on more than one thing at a time. It can "kid" you that it is possible as it can jump from one thing to another and back again, very quickly, but it can't hold serenity and anxiety at the same time

By focusing on something serene and calming you may get moments of rest from the anxiety and find it calms down. It is another emotional intelligence skill worth developing. What calming memories or images will work for you?

Thank You for taking your time to read my work, I hope it help you. 

Take Care and HAve a Great Day!

The ROI of Emotional Intelligence - case studies

In December 2002, a new General Manager was brought in to a Sheraton in Orlando, Florida to make some badly needed changes. The hotel, a 302 room/592 bed property had suffered in recent years. PROBLEMS:

• sales were down;
• customer satisfaction ratings were unacceptable;
• employee morale was low, and
• teamwork was poor.

With the help of an Emotional Intelligence consulting firm, an organizational climate assessment was conducted to pinpoint the issues from the employees’ perspectives. The study found 3 major issues: -  - collaboration, - trust, and - employee demotivation. Over the next 10 months, the consultants worked with the: