At the beginning of September I had the great pleasure and privilege of again being able to contribute a talk about my work to the annual HRINZ conference in Wellington. The theme for the conference this year was ‘Regaining the Trust’, but to regain trust it must once have existed. My experience is that in many cases there never has been any trust to regain. However, the problem is rarely company-wide; rather, there are teams in all companies where there is trust and others where there isn’t. 

During the 1950s and 60s two US Naval surgeons noticed a relationship between the number of things that had happened to people and their tendency to become ill. The relationship is in fact negligible, but based on dubious psychological science these observations were formalised as life-event scales – lists of things that might have happened to you, and the task is to tick all of the ones that have actually happened to you over the past say 6 months. The more ticks the more stressed you’re supposed to be.

We generally attach relaxation to particular times, such as weekends or the summer holiday. If you only relax on these occasions then the rest of the time (in other words, most of your life) you must be tense. Unfortunately relaxing is often confused with being laid back, and that usually implies not working efficiently. So we end up ‘thinking in twos’ – I’m either relaxed or I’m tense. The solution is not to find some mid-point between them but to have a third point, which is best described as being alert.

Participants in the Challenge of Change Resilience training sessions spend time at the beginning generating objectives for the day, and a common theme that emerges from the exercise is about sleep. One of the defining features of stress is disturbed sleep, and people immediately recognise the scenario of struggling to get to sleep, waking at three in the morning and being unable to get back to sleep, and then feeling shattered even if they’ve then slept for 8 hours.

How often are we told we need to prioritise if we’re to be efficient? Learning to prioritise is important, but we need to understand what’s required. Prioritising is usually thought of as deciding what the most important things are, moving them to the top of the ‘to do’ list, but that’s actually the second step. Prioritising is about first deciding what isn’t important. Do you have an in-tray?