Tips sheet: Handling pressure

Being at the receiving end of pressure, what do we do? Here are some tips which may help:

• Drop perfectionism. Adopt Pareto's 80/20 rule (it takes 20 percent of our time to get something 80% perfect, the other 80% of time is trying to make up the other 20% of quality).

• Ask for clarification before starting. On many occasions the requester of work won't give up the time to clarify the work request in which case it wasn’t important anyway.

• Listen to gut feel. If you feel uneasy then pressure is probably working its way into our system. Take a few minutes to think about what is really bugging you .. it is likely not to be what is in the forefront of your mind, but something else. Then decide what you are going to do about the thing that is bugging you underneath. 

• Confront people. Most of us don’t like doing this because we don’t want to be seen as negative or incapable. But by ‘confront people’ I just mean tell them the truth. ‘I am under too much pressure and I cannot do this at the moment, can we talk about a solution’ will generally get a sympathetic solution rather than an aggressive response.

• Think long term. When under the severest pressure get in the habit of thinking for a few moments ... where do I want to be in 5/10 years time? This helps us to see things in context and decide whether responding to the pressure is really that important.

• Perspective. Do we see pressure as frightening, intimidating, threatening? Or maybe it is just a series of events which will eventually pass and be replaced by other events. Sometimes we build the power of pressure by focussing on the fears we have and making the pressure seem bigger and bigger. Perhaps if we saw it just as ‘another event’ it would diminish in size and life would just go on.