Handling Pressure

[Music] we at Sage presence do a lot of work with business professionals under pressure and most commonly the kind of pressure that we help folks with is the performance pressure of needing to be able to present confidently and effectively with your team especially when it’s a sales presentation but there are multiple kinds of pressure multiple sources of pressure that business professionals especially leaders experience and I want to talk about that bigger broader concept when you feel pressure it’s going to be because there are multiple competing interests pulling you in more than one direction it’s relatively easy to make a decision when one single action satisfies all the interested parts around a particular uh issue when one action helps a party and hurts another party that creates pressure so what you need to do is figure it out you need to be able to get clear on who wants what and who benefits from what what I recommend doing is writing it out or sitting down with a trusted individual and talking it out and getting clear on who all the interested parties are it’s extremely common with our clients that they are working with a number of organizations inside of a project so maybe our client is a construction company and they’re working closely with Architects and engineers and subcontractors and each of these entities have their own interests their own agendas their own goals and different things will impact them differently and of course the owner in charge of the project is going to have their interest in their agenda so when you as a leader feel pressure when you are not sure how to proceed I would recommend sitting down writing down or speaking with a trusted individual who all the interested parties are and what they want and how different actions that you take or that the project team takes and figure out how those actions will impact each of the interested parties I guarantee you this process will at the very least reduce the pressure because you’re getting it out of of your brain and you’re getting it on paper or you’re getting it out in the air in conversation with this trusted partner you’re reducing the pressure for yourself because you’re thinking it through and you’re understanding what everybody wants and you’re starting to process what the priorities can be who is most important to satisfy who’s going to be willing to compromise what compromise could look like that could potentially satisfy everyone the goal here is to end up with a plan that you can confidently communicate to all the related parties and you can communicate them with confidence because you have thought it out you don’t need to figure it out instantly in the moment without any processing take the time that you need and get to a place where you can communicate this stuff with confidence the pressure of competing interests is bad enough you don’t need to make the pressure worse by forcing yourself to come to a conclusion prematurely you can take the time that you need to figure it out [Music]