Helping people with tension

< Tension

Introduction
On this page you can find some tips on how to help people with tension. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/pauladavis/2021/07/28/simone-biles-mental-health--the-pressure-to-be-perfect

How are you doing?

 * Aks people: 'How are you doing?'

Replace judgment with humble curiosity

 * Mental health can be confusing and misunderstood to people who have not experienced it or who just don’t know much about it.
 * Rather than assume you know what someone else is experiencing, use these sentence starters to invite a deeper conversation (and empathy):
 * I’m curious about…
 * Tell me more/say more about that…
 * Help me understand…
 * Walk me through that…
 * I’m wondering…

Play a mental game
Perfectionists tend to overthink – everything. I tend to overthink lying in bed at night trying to fall asleep. One of my favorite strategies to break the mental looping is to play a mental game that a drill sergeant taught me. He called it the alphabet game. Start with the letter A and create a sentence where every word starts with the letter A: “All apples are awesome.” Then go to letter B: “Big bananas buy boats.” Then proceed through the alphabet. I usually find that by letter H, I, or J, my brain has become so focused on creating silly sentences that the mental looping has stopped, and I can more easily fall asleep.

Recognize your icebergs/rules
When I work with individuals and teams, there is consistently one thing I discover that impedes their ability to manage stress and drives perfection – icebergs. I first learned about the concept of icebergs at the University of Pennsylvania during my training to teach resilience strategies to soldiers in the US Army. Icebergs are your core values and beliefs about the way you think the world should operate.

Take a moment to visualize an iceberg – there is a small piece that is visible above the water line, but the biggest part remains hidden under the water. Your core values and beliefs often operate outside of your conscious awareness (“hidden under the water”) as you go about your day, but they can be triggered in certain circumstances. I call icebergs your rules.

Here are some examples of iceberg beliefs or rules:


 * “I need to always be in charge or things will go wrong”
 * “I must have all the answers”
 * “If I can’t do something perfectly, then I shouldn’t do it at all”
 * “If you want it done right, you’ve got to do it yourself”
 * “Failure is a sign of weakness”
 * “Strong people don’t ask for help”
 * It’s important for you to surface your rules so you can evaluate them. Once you surface the belief, you can evaluate it by asking these questions:

Is this rule helping or harming? Is it getting me closer to, or further away from the goals I want to achieve? Is it too inflexible? How did the rule develop? Is it a core family value? Did your choice of career influence the rule? Is it linked to a societal expectation? What alternative rule might be more helpful? Resilience isn’t about toughness – at all. It’s not about persevering at all costs. It’s about recharging and prioritizing your mental well-being. It’s about persevering with a purpose and recognizing when you need to pivot or take a step back. I think the bigger question that organizations (athletic and otherwise) need to ask is why is it acceptable for people to operate in an environment where they feel pushed to their breaking point and beyond? This morning Biles announced that she had also withdrawn from the individual all-around competition. Her actions send a powerful message – your mental health and well-being come first, even on the world’s biggest stage.