How Do You Handle Stress?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Career Development  

I think that I am reasonably self-aware. I am honest with myself about my strengths and weaknesses, and I recognize when stresses are building up to the point where I need a break. And I make sure that I take that break.

But, like anyone else, I can only be self-aware around situations and circumstances that I am somewhat familiar with. I can never be sure how I will react if I experience something far beyond what I am used to.

Until this year, most of the stress that I had experienced had been related to various project work. Usually that was stress that built up slowly as a project began to experience difficulties that got worse instead of better. This allowed me to prepare for the impact of that stress, to manage my environment and to ensure that I was planning de-stressors to help me to maintain balance.

There were occasional out-of-the-blue stressful situations that happened, but these were generally few and far between (and weren’t too serious}. When they occurred, I handled them fairly well—maintaining perspective and recognizing when I needed to disconnect and mentally reset so that I could better support my teams, and contribute to resolving the situation.

But I had sometimes wondered how I would deal with something more significant, a genuine crisis that had the potential to derail me more significantly and for a longer period. Did I know …

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