Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash
This is a particularly busy time of year for everyone. With that comes the pressures and stresses of meeting deadlines. It’s for another blog whether the arbitrary line of Christmas is too heavily administered as a hard stop for people but there’s no debating whether it’s there.
Discussing this with a colleague this week he told me about a similar discussion he’d recently had where he was told that ‘this is what change feels like’. I know for me that a lot of my stresses this year have been around new challenges. It stands to reason that if you’ve never done something before, or if you’re going through a period of change, that it is more challenging, and therefore more stressful.
This is normal. So, if you feel like you’re really up against it at the moment, ask how much of those stressors are new things, or things associated with change. It’s likely that a number will be. I see this as a positive.
If you can recognise these sources of stress, then you can also acknowledge that by their nature, they can’t be novel forever.
So, do your best to acknowledge, and weather the storm. You’ll get through it and will have built resilience and capacity as a result!
T.Brownlee@bham.ac.uk