Helping Stressed Out Workers Flashcards
What are recommended CBT steps a manager could take to help an employee?
- Practice empathy. Empathy is not about offering sympathy but rather about being committed to fully understanding someone’s experience.
- Cognitive Reframing - There are three key steps to this process.
A. Identify the unhelpful thoughts.
B. Evaluate the thoughts looking for evidence that corroborates or challenges them. Help the employee by refuting negative thoughts.
C. Foster an alternative and more realistic perspective - Behavioral Activation, a tool that spurs change by increasing opportunities to experience joy. This involves deliberately engaging in pleasurable, productive, or social behaviors, all with the aim of activating a positive emotional state.
What is FOPO and how can you mitigate it?
Fear of Other People’s Opinions
A performance-based identity means we define ourselves by how well we do something relative to others.
No matter how well we perform by objective measures, our identity must be buttressed by continual external validation and hinges on the praise and opinions of others to fuel it. Developmental scientist and USC associate research professor Ben Houltberg, who has extensively studied the motivations behind the pursuit of excellence, says a performance-based identity is characterized by three negative expressions: a contingent self-worth, a looming fear of failure, and perfectionism.
A healthier alternative is to cultivate a purpose-based identity. Purpose is an internally derived, generalized intention that has intrinsic value for you but is also bigger than you. It has a forward-looking orientation. Purpose becomes the filter through which we arrive at decisions, establish priorities, and make choices. Instead of asking ourselves “Am Iliked?” or “Do people think highly of my work?” our reference point becomes “Am I being true to my purpose?”
Try a exercise with your teams to define the team’s purpose.
At first, you’ll probably hear purpose being defined in terms of metrics, sales, revenue, praise from the CEO, or other external, performance-based validation.
Guide the discussion to focus instead on finding the key value that links you all. That may be ensuring that everyone feels safe and heard, or it may be group accountability or a shared desire to provide excellent service to the rest of the organization.
Once you’ve established your team’s purpose, each time your employees experience FOPO, they will have a method for combating it. They can stop the repetitive, ruminative FOPO loop (What will they think of me?) and replace it with a measured response focused on the team’s purpose.
See also “The first rule of Mastery: Stop worrying about what other people think” by Michael Gervais
