Increase Your Capacity to Adapt to Stress

When I opted-in to this crazy life of entrepreneurship and leaned into my vision of creating something extraordinary to equip front-line leaders with the skills, tools, and resources needed to coach I guaranteed myself one thing even if I was not aware of it at the time… a never-ending supply of stress. In any role, it is important to learn to increase your capacity to adapt to stress instead of avoiding stress.

Just like your world as a coaching leader, life as a business owner is full of inconveniences.

I learned quickly that a major key to success is not figuring out how to manage stress but rather it is finding a way to increase my capacity to adapt to stress.

Life, adversity, challenges, and circumstances do not wait for what we consider the perfect time to show up in our life.

So, what are we going to do with this and how are we going to help create order out of the chaos?

Shift from Not Now to Right Now

There are some things that I do when I am working through a challenging and stressful situation.

Things like working out, journaling, meditating, reading, and talking to my personal board of directors.

What I want to share with you today though is how to find success as a coaching leader with your team members during a challenging situation where the timing is way off and you find yourself saying, “Not Now.”

• Right Now– Deal with reality in real-time and be brutally honest in your assessment of the situation. The sooner you address what is happening and why it is happening the sooner you can move forward. Understand that there may or may not be more to the situation than meets the eye so without falling into the rabbit hole of paralysis by analysis peel away at the layers and see what you discover. Figure out what the situation is calling for!
• Fierce Dialogue– Have difficult conversations with all the necessary stakeholders and get the right people involved in the solution as soon as you possibly can. There is no sugar-coating adversity but there is a way to effectively communicate. Be the face and voice your team needs to see and hear by displaying positive and confident body language and facial expressions, asking questions, listening to understand, avoiding being condescending and accusatory, eliminating finger-pointing immediately, and being consistent with the message your team needs.
• Happening For Us and Not to Us– Know that some good is going to come out of this if handled appropriately. If nothing else you will strengthen your resiliency, sharpen your leadership skills, increase the trust and cohesiveness of your team, and be more prepared and aware of the potential of these situations in the future. You will be better for having grown through this.
• Execute– Do what you say you are going to do when you say you are going to do it, and do so with conviction. There is nothing convenient about leadership and that is what you signed up for so move away from the “not now” response and do what needs to be done.
• Reflect– When it is all said and done pull out the lessons of what worked and didn’t work in your response. And, do not forget to thank everyone involved for their role in making the magic happen and finding the solution. Success is hard and people like to know that they played a role in the outcome and that they are appreciated.

This was originally published as a weekly newsletter from Ed Molitor, with The Molitor Group. If you’d like to receive the weekly newsletter, follow this link to subscribe.