Do meetings overwhelm you? Learn how to make work meetings less stressful for yourself. Don’t let anything stop you from having a productive workday.
Stress influences your workday in multiple ways. The overwhelming feeling causes fatigue, distractions, and discomfort. Reducing stress allows you to enhance your work performance and productivity.
Stress stems from an array of different possibilities at work. For many people, the large gathered crowds, formality, and time consumption of work meetings cause lots of discomfort and anxiety. Explore these three tips on how to make work meetings less stressful and increase the success of your workday, no matter what’s on the agenda.
Bring a Comfort Item for Moral Support
When you find yourself thrown into an unsettling environment or situation, reaching for a source of familiar comfort can ground you and calm your nerves. Everyone finds comfort in different ways. For some people, a warm and aromatic tea keeps their anxieties at bay. Fidget toys provide an outlet for restless nerves. Wearing a favorite clothing piece gives people something familiar and stable in an uncontrollable space.
Head into your next meeting with a comfort item of choice to accompany you and keep you grounded and less anxious throughout the session. The more comfortable you are in the meeting, the less stressed you’ll feel.
Avoid Jumping Straight Into the Meeting
Jumping straight into a meeting with little to no time to rest beforehand makes any emotions or stress prior to the session carry through. Although every second counts when it comes to getting things crossed off your checklist, not taking the time to rest builds stress, subsequently affecting your productivity. Avoid jumping straight from one work task or stressful event to another, and give yourself a cool-down period.
There are many benefits of using a private car service to get to your meetings, like giving the wheel to a professional. Letting someone else take care of parking, traffic, and driving gives you time to settle down and relax before the meeting. If you drive to your destination, all the stress from the commute carries into your meeting, but as a passenger, you have time to settle your nerves, prepare, and clear your mind before jumping into business. If you don’t need to travel anywhere, arrive at your meeting five minutes early to give yourself time to settle in, make yourself comfortable, and give yourself a brief moment of nothingness before the session starts.
Plan and Prepare Well in Advance
Uncertainty and lack of control are two of the biggest causes of stress and anxiety. With so many different individuals involved, meetings consist of a lot of uncertainty. Planning and preparing beforehand increases the amount of control you have.
Prepare a meeting agenda for everyone to make sure all meeting participants are well-informed and stay on topic. Plan out a debrief or open forum session at the end of the meeting to make sure you get all the necessities covered while also giving others a chance to bring up other topics on their mind. The more you prep and plan, the less uncertainty and lack of control you have, minimizing your stress.
Use these three tips on how to make work meetings less stressful to run or attend a successful meeting without wearing yourself out. Keeping stress and anxiety to a minimum gives you more time and energy to focus on your productivity and performance.
