This year World Mental Health day focussed on mental health in the workplace. What struck me yesterday after working with two of my clients, was how much other people's behaviour can have an impact on how we are feeling. In fact, the people that we work with can be a very significant source of stress. When relationships breakdown at work the result is often a toxic workplace that effects everybody. When that relationship is with your boss, work can become a place of misery and frustration.
One of the phrases I find myself repeating a lot in my work is the truism that we can't change other people's behaviour, we can only change our own. This is a simple statement, but it is surprisingly hard to accept. Obviously there has been a huge amount of research done into what makes people behave the way they do and how to change this behaviour, for example in order to get them to spend more money. But by and large when we are working alongside other people, we have very little influence over their behaviour. Our inability to change them can really ramp up our stress levels. We can feel angry, resentful, powerless, hurt, ignored or belittled. Our self esteem can take a huge hit, and our confidence in our ability to do our job can be completely undermined.
If we switch the focus to our actions and our responses, we can actually start to make a difference. If we retain a strong sense of worth and if we hold onto our self-belief and self-confidence, it can become much easier to deal with difficult people and unhealthy relationships. Coaching is a great way of gaining a different perspective on a relationship. Talking to someone else is a very effective way of reflecting on your own thoughts, feelings and behaviours and how these are influencing the relationship.
Talking about the situation to someone else is a great first step, but one of the most effective solutions to difficult workplace relationships is great communication. Some of the communication techniques I use with my clients includes the 'positive sandwich' and the use of 'I feel' statements. Another is using ideas from the Transactional Analysis model, where we use the labels of 'child, parent/teacher, respectful adult' to reflect on our interactions.
for example, our boss may be talking to us in an authoritarian way, which pushes us into child mode, so we are reacting they way a child does to a parent who is telling them off. If we can become aware of our reactions, we can start to change, and instead of responding as a hurt or angry child we can react as a respectful adult would. Now our boss is given the choice of carrying on as an authoritarian, which may now become uncomfortable for them in contrast to your respectful adult; or they can choose to meet you at your level, and communication becomes more effective. I have used this model very successfully with young people who struggle in their interactions with teachers. By changing how they respond to teachers from child to respectful adult, they found teachers began to talk differently to them and they were getting into a lot less trouble.
'I feel' statements are also a powerful too, but they can be very tricky to begin with. We are making ourselves vulnerable by exposing our true feelings to others, and it is surprisingly hard to recognise what we are actually feeling. We might think we are feeling angry because our boss undermined us in front of our colleagues. But beneath the anger maybe we are actually feeling hurt. 'I felt hurt when you said that" is a much more effective statement than "you shouldn't have said that" . Our society is not very comfortable with bringing emotions to the workplace, but we are emotional beings and it is completely misguided to think we can somehow not be emotional at work or that we can ignore our emotions. We could no more stop breathing than we could stop feeling. The more emotionally literate we become in our workplaces, the more we are able to communicate effectively with others and the better our working relationships will be.
We may not be able to wave a magic wand and become best friends with all of our colleagues, but we can learn how to manage these relationships so they are no longer having a negative impact on our mental health.
If you would like to learn more about effective communication techniques, just get in touch https://www.livewelllearnwell.co.uk/contact
useful websites
Transactional Analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxn8FxE0sgY
Non-violent communication: https://www.cnvc.org/about/purpose-of-nvc
'I' statements https://www.tonyrobbins.com/blog/words-matter-you-vs-i
useful book
Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
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