Insights into Stress and Resilience
Joanne Hobbins reflects on how Insights Discovery has helped her manage her own stress, build resilience, and be more understanding of how stress affects the people around her.
Proof-reading a document for centred graphics, spelling mistakes and grammar has been known to cause me stress. To my colleague, having to submit a document which may have uncentred graphics, contains spelling mistakes and grammatical errors is of comparable stress.
Of course we are all different (I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again), no-one better, no-one worse, just different.
Understanding what causes us stress contributes to us being able to manage it. Moreover, being aware of how stress manifests itself in us is helpful to self-regulate when we spot the warning signs, but also how we appear to others, if they start to respond to us not as we would expect.
I get stressed out by detail, but also by being confined, by inflexibility, and personal rejection. I tend to show stress by being “flappy” and argumentative. One way to alleviate the stress is to give me space, freedom to manoeuvre. There is more to it than that of course, but these are consistent with my Discovery Insights profile of having a preference for Sunshine Yellow energy.
Fiery Reds tend to be stressed out by lack of control, Earth Greens by loss of connection, Cool Blues by loss of competence, and my Sunshine Yellow can be categorised as a loss of choice. We are a mix of all colour energies, but our preferences will no doubt reflect our behaviour.
So once again, I am drawn to understanding the Insights profile of myself and my colleagues, so I can manage my own stress, and spot warning signs in those around me – and perhaps not take it personally when my colleague (with a Fiery Red preference) appears aggressive and irritable. I should instead consider that they are feeling stressed.
One way to manage stress is to build resilience. And again, Insights Discovery paves the way to understand how we all do that differently too. Resilience is not something we have, or we don’t have - we learn it.
We learn it through self-awareness, self-reflection and adaptation. So to help build your resilience, why not learn more about yourself through Insights Discovery, and pave the way to help manage yourself, and support those around you.
We offer Insights Discovery at all levels, from an introductory overview, all the way up to a fully-integrated element of a corporate leadership programme. Find out more here.