Top causes of stress in your role leading teams and projects?

Noted and you're welcome Andy. Always happy to see your valuable contributions.

Excellent points, Maria! Thank you! The main researcher I'm interviewing this week is Dr. Derek Roger, but I will guess that he's familiar with Dr. Weisinger's work. I'll ask him! Thank you for sharing your perspectives!

I'm interested in listening to the podcast.

I will appreciate if you'll share here the link, like this, we'll receive the automatically mail with the update, if not in February...maybe we'll forget it.

Also, all the participation in this discussion is amazing!

@Stephane, thank you for sharing that wisdom about fantasizing about possibilities and what if's. That's exactly what the authors are including in their notion of ruminating.

Here's an interesting twist. It's obvious to all of us that the future is a fantasy. We plan and estimate and mitigate risks but we are speculating--hopefully in an informed way--but it's still uncertain. What the authors add is that the past is fantasy as well. They're not trying to invoke some philosophical or metaphysical argument as much as this: we recall the past through our own filters. It's why four stakeholders who attended the same meeting can leave with four different interpretations about what was said and how it was said. They're not denying history as a fact as much as our recollection of history becomes fictionalized over time based on how we process it.

Their point: the past is rich fodder for rumination. Since I speak for a living, I can ruin an evening by replaying something stupid that I said earlier in the day. By the way, that happens regularly! They don't suggest that we should just forget the past. Rather, we reflect (almost in a lessons learned sort of way). What mistakes did we make today or in that meeting? OK, yep.... they were mistakes. Ruminating about them won't change anything. But reflecting on how we may need to do something differently next time (or even ask forgiveness tomorrow if we were out of line with someone today).

I'm a world-class ruminator so I'm sharing this to challenge us all on what I'm challenging myself to do: catch ourselves when we're negatively ruminating on the future (or the past), and to turn it into something more productive and proactive.

My interview with the authors won't be published until February, but I'm looking forward to feedback after these thoughts are shared more clearly by the authors.....

Great points, as always, @Sergio. For the authors I spoke with today, they might use slightly different vocabulary, but agree in principle. The words they might use to agree with you is that there will always be pressure (they define pressure as 'demands to perform'). We might extend that to "There will always be tensions.... tradeoffs.... decisions..... changes.... differing opinions." As you state, trying to avoid those is denying reality. Entropy is real!

Their goal is to provide some constructs to think about how we react to the realities you mention. The program manager who collapses under the swirl of (their words) negative rumination is a program manager will miss opportunities (as you mention: the opportunity for improvements), perhaps get paralyzed in indecision, and ultimately add more stress to their team.