How to Survive Stress and Thrive

Carleton Chinner is the Managing Director of MagniStrat, a Brisbane, Australia-based project consultancy specializing in program capability maturity improvement. Carleton works on large complex projects and is often called upon to speak about his experiences.

  Career Development   New Practitioners  

Your first deliverable is overdue; the CEO has reassigned the star on your team to a special project, and you don't know when she will be back; the accountant thinks your project should be cancelled; and to top it all off, you still have to sort out that problem with the dog when you get home. Welcome to another day in the life of a project manager.

Projects are a pressure cooker. Cook up a schedule, throw in a limited budget, stir in a few opposing personalities and presto! You have a stressful environment. This can be daunting for the new project manager--and sometimes even for those with more experience.

Know when you are stressed
Stress is a personal thing; what is unendurable to one project manager may be a minor irritation to another. Experienced project managers develop a certain equanimity that leaves them calm and in control, even when the project is going off the rails. This is not some mystical ability, but rather the mark of a person who has learned to manage the stress that comes with the job.

Every project carries a degree of stress. Stress in itself is not a bad thing if the level of stress is not too high--we need a challenge to hold our interest. The right level of challenge is good stress, also called eustress; it energizes us and keeps us motivated.

It is when the level of stress goes over what is tolerable to us that we begin to struggle. …

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