Stress as a Forcefield

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From the course by Rice University

Self Awareness and the Effective Leader

69 ratings

Rice University

Self Awareness and the Effective Leader

69 ratings

Course 1 of 3 in the Specialization Leadership Development for Engineers

Part of being an effective leader is learning how to play to your strengths and overcome characteristics that don't lend to good leadership practices. During the course, you will examine your own strengths and learn ways to use them in a leadership role. Learn to manage stress and solve problems creatively. Throughout the course, you will also build a tool kit of useful techniques that you can begin using right away in your engineering career. This course is designed for engineers who are interested in and have the desire to advance into leadership and management roles. You don't need any leadership experience to do well in this course. We ask you to reflect on your personal experiences pretty often,, so some work experience will help you in that aspect, but we hope that most of what you learn here will be applicable to many areas of your life.

From the lesson

Stress Management

Develop strategies for limiting or leveraging stress to improve your leadership style. The tool of the week teaches you to practice effective techniques for controlling stress.

Observation and Objectives1:37

Motivation to Lead2:08

Stress as a Forcefield3:08

Defense Mechanisms and Responses2:10

Strategies for Managing Stress4:36

Dave's Journal - Philmont Trek1:55

Meet the Instructors

David Van Kleeck
Professor in the Practice of Engineering Leadership
Rice Center for Engineering Leadership

Now let's begin our discussion of stress.

There is a very strong linkage between leadership and stress as you might expect.

The Center for Creative Leadership has indicated that there is a very

strong relationship between stress and leadership, not a surprise in my mind.

When you think about it, leaders are accountable for the behavior of others.

Many times that is outside their range of control.

Not surprising that the behavior of others might influence your stress levels.

Stressful situations, crises, emergencies, can, in fact,

lead to the development of leaders.

We've all heard of the emergent leader who arises out of a crisis.

But stress isn't inherently negative,

all of us use stress to drive us to accomplish certain things.

Later on in this module we'll examine an alternative view on stress.

However, stress can lead to failure if you don't have the proper tools and

techniques to help you cope and deal with stressful situations you may fail.

Now let's consider a model of stress.

Kurt Lewin introduced the concept of the force field as a way of describing stress.

It includes driving forces, restraining forces, and resiliency

as a way of describing the interaction of all the forces related to stress.

I kind of like to capture this theory in the form of a balloon.

When you can think of the pressure on the inside of the balloon as the driving

forces for stress, what might some of those driving forces be?

Think about that.

The outside would be the restraining forces.

The atmospheric pressure pushing back on those driving forces

helps keep them in check and in balance.

The elasticity of the balloon represents resiliency, those skills that you might

have to have to build resiliency in keeping those driving forces in check.

The other part of this model that I like is that as the driving forces

get larger or greater, you can imagine the balloon growing larger and

larger and larger, until the elasticity,

the resiliency in the membrane is no longer sufficient to contain the forces.

What might happen under those circumstances, I think you can imagine.

It also has the benefit of reflecting on ways that we can develop strategies for

reducing stress.

How can we let some of the air out of the balloon [SOUND] So

that that stress is diminished?

We're going to talk about some of those strategies later on in the module.

So with that in mind, let me leave you with this thought.

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