Anca: It's Monday and the sales team has its weekly meeting. Anca feels like the meeting room seems to tighten around her. He feels his sweaty palms, a lump in his throat and a lump moving gurgling through his stomach. Even though the air conditioning is on, it cannot cope with the waves of heat that he feels invading his body. The national sales director discusses the quarterly objectives with her and she hears every word like a hammer on an anvil, loud, metallic, shrill. He knows that he made his target this quarter, and last quarter, and the previous one, but despite all that, he doesn't feel safe. For several years now, he feels that the target is more and more difficult to make, not only because of the competition, but because of many unforeseen situations that appear again and again. She feels how anxiety accompanies her every day and does not leave her when she finishes her work schedule.
Mihai: He is just getting dressed to enter the factory, where he deals with work safety processes on the bottling lines of some carbonated drinks. He is nervous, extremely tired and feels that he cannot concentrate. He knows that both business objectives and the health and safety of his colleagues who work on the bottling lines, in the warehouse and in the logistics area depend on his level of concentration. The more strongly he realizes this, the more he feels a greater level of irritation and anxiety. He tries to breathe deeply and calm down, but he doesn't succeed.
The 2 examples can be faithfully found in a Eurofund report. In April 2020, the EU agency for assistance in improving social development policies, conditions and aspects related to work, launched a survey that follows the way in which EU citizens appreciate the living conditions and the quality of life in the complex context generated by the Covid-19 pandemic .
The edition at the end of 2022 also included 10 countries around the EU, and the answers reflect an increasingly complex context in which anxiety and stress become a sad, everyday companion:
- mental well-being has not returned to the level that might have been expected, despite the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions.
- 48% of the respondents struggle to ensure their daily living. Outside the EU, the percentage is even more worrying, at 81%.
- 1/3 consider the payment of monthly bills to be very stressful, especially the payment of utility bills
- 36% from EU citizens still consider access to education and educational programs difficult, while the non-EU percentage is over 70%.
- 62% of the EU respondents and 84% of the non-EU respondents who do not have a job, consider it very difficult for them to continue their studies or access forms of education.
- 23% of EU citizens and 62% of non-EU citizens have jobs that can be carried out remotely and with all this they are required to be present at work.
- An imbalance between personal and professional life is felt by respondents from both areas, but the imbalance is felt more strongly by women. 1/3 of EU citizens work in their free time and more than half of those from non-EU countries.
- Problematically low levels of well-being were reported by all respondents, regardless of their area, all mentioning states of pessimism, low resilience, generalized fatigue and increased health risks.
Such a reality no longer belongs only to a few, who have extremely stressful jobs, but surrounds us and affects us all. Therefore, such a context requires a different solution. One in which organizations and employees join hands for a better long-term relationship.
The way we manage our energy determines our reaction to stress. The way we manage our energy determines our level of resilience. The way we manage our energy determines our awareness of the factors that cause stress.
Although stress management sounds good, it is a short-term solution, and one that often appears too late. What we need is energy management.
One of the programs that we run with the greatest success in organizations of all sizes is "Energy Management", which has 2 major objectives: it increases the level of awareness of each participant regarding "personal stress drivers" and builds know-how - the necessary for the development of resilience, which in return increases the quality of life.
Built on the principle of the 4 energy reservoirs - physical, emotional, mental and spiritual - the program firstly offers a deep understanding of stress, its stages and offers methods to identify the signals that the body and the environment give us to see what stage of stress are we in?
Once the participants gain clarity on their own stress patterns, the program helps them build a personal plan to achieve the desired level of resilience.
The most impressive result is seen a few months after its completion, when all participants confess that they feel increased energy levels both in their personal and professional lives.
Some of the most appreciated elements during the program, which can be implemented both as a singular event and as a learning journey, are the methods of accessing the emotional areas of regeneration and performance and the way of relating to spiritual energy.
This refers to the quality of the purpose we attribute to our actions and how the life we live is or is not in agreement with this purpose and the values associated with it. In the context of this type of energy, the program itself helps participants find a higher purpose in their own work and connect to it to access levels of energy they weren't aware they had.
Learn more about the Energy Management program here.