Long term work stress is associated with a wide range of health issues, including digestive disorders, cardiovascular disease, mental health problems and chronic headaches. It also has negative effects on productivity, creativity, and employee engagement.

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) has been shown to help employees develop stress resilience – an enhanced ability to coper with stress, by reducing attachment to stressful emotions and drivers. This is well out of the framework of coaching, requiring intervention by a trained counselor or psychotherapist, but coaches can help clients build stress resilience before it becomes a clinical issue.

The key is to enable the client to develop greater psychological flexibility, by changing the way they respond to potential stressors. At root, it’s about making the space and time to choose how we respond in terms of behaviour and decision-making. The default mechanism in stress is to let our immediate thoughts and emotions take over. With psychological flexibility, we can instead help them to focus on broader, deeper and longer-term values and goals that relate to these.

Techniques for Developing Psychological Flexibility

When faced with, for example, a panic deadline, we can choose to step back and ask ourselves:

  • How important is this in terms of what we are trying to achieve overal?
  • What would be a “good enough” response to this?
  • Who can I cal upon for help?
  • How can I manage other people’s expectations?

Another standard technique is to ask the client to estimate the level of anxiety or stress they have about an issue. (Back to the old 1-10 scale again!) The questions that accompany this may include:

  • What would be a manageable and reasonable level of stress for this?
  • What would you have to do to reduce stress to this level?

Keys to Helping Clients Build Stress Resilience

Overal, the keys to helping here lie in helping the client to:

  • Recognise the existence and impact of stress
  • Recognise that they can choose how they respond to it
  • Changing their responses
  • Manage the environment to reduce the stressors.

© David Clutterbuck, 2015