Calm down

Simple ways to reduce and better manage your stress.

by Ward Lowe   You know how to reduce your stress: Eat healthier, exercise regularly, take more breaks, get organized, spend more time with your family–these ideas are not rocket science. But how can you incorporate these suggestions into your daily life?

Sweeping changes to your home or work routine probably won’t last, and platitudes like "work smarter not harder" sound great but don’t tell you anything. You need to look in the mirror and determine small ways you can adjust your life that will lessen your stress and help you manage the pressures you can’t get rid of.

Killer stress

Before you dismiss stress-reduction as New Age blather, consider what stress can do to your body. "Stress is a known health-risk factor that plays into–either directly or indirectly–seven of 10 leading causes of death in the world," says Dr. James Campbell Quick, professor of organizational behavior at the University of Texas at Arlington and fellow of the American Psychological Association.

"What stress does to us, simply, is prepare us to fight or to flee," explains Quick. "That’s the core of it. A lot of times, neither response is appropriate." Your blood flow changes, your body releases fuel to deal with the situation, you become more alert, and your immune system shuts down. Quick adds, "These body changes are very functional in stressful times. But when we’re activated for too long, too intensely, or too frequently, that’s when it becomes the health risk."

Although stress can be bad for your health, stressful situations surround you every day. Whether rushing across town late for an appointment, juggling a showing with a PTA meeting, or tactfully convincing your seller to reduce his ridiculous asking price, your life involves tension and worries. How can you make them go away?

Are you listening?

You can’t escape stress, only reduce it and hope to manage the rest. Clients represent perhaps your biggest source of stress, and handling them properly can eliminate many worries.

"When people buy and sell houses, every emotion possible is thrown into it. Lots of issues come up in their lives," says Julie Greenwood, broker/owner of Greenwood-King Properties in Houston. "And the agent has to deal with all of it and somehow be the rock in the situation and try to alleviate much of the client’s stress."

Part of managing your duties as "the rock" means understanding what is most important to your client about a transaction. When showing a listing to your buyer, really focus on him and forget about coming up with counters to his potential objections.

"Most clients just need to be listened to," asserts Tamara Dorris, 12-year real estate veteran and author of Well @ Work: Less Stress More Success. "It will help reduce stress to listen and focus on what a client is saying. … Stress is bad for our physiology and it’s bad for our contracts."

You can’t please every consumer or client, no matter how hard you try. But if you pay attention to what clients say, chances are you’ll please them more often, which means more success and less stress for you.

Make the clock your friend

Listening to your client doesn’t mean blowing off other appointments to spend the afternoon hearing his life story; that would be poor time management. You have closings to attend, listings to show, and 50 other tasks lined up on your schedule.

But good time management means more than keeping your appointments organized in your PDA. It should give your day a purpose and a direction. If you must complete 10 tasks in an afternoon, is it more stressful for you to approach them randomly or with a clear plan?

"Time management gives focus and direction to the stress-generated energy that develops, so it can be channeled in a productive way," says Quick. Without direction, you add anxiety on top of the stress already caused by your busy schedule. And that additional stress, warns Quick, can go off like a hand grenade.

If your schedule is overloaded, even a well-organized calendar won’t help you alleviate stress. Dorris suggests building a buffer between appointments. Each meeting always takes longer than you think it will, and once you get behind you rarely catch up. This technique doesn’t guarantee you’ll never sit in traffic, squeezing the life out of your steering wheel; it merely sets you up for success.

And sometimes, Greenwood adds, you just have to say no. "When you’re working with a customer and you’re established with them, there ought to be some give and take with time schedules." Not every client request needs to be met immediately, although some responsibilities take priority.

"When there are deadlines that have to do with legal things, those things are just nonnegotiable. The agent really does have to put aside whatever he’s doing and take care of them," says Greenwood.

Look at the services you offer your clients and draw a line between those that must happen at certain times, whether scheduled by a client or another party such as a title company, and those that you can attempt to adjust around your schedule. There are always exceptions to your list, but realizing that the world won’t end if you can’t show a listing on Thursday night reduces the pressure on you to grant a client’s every request.

Call time-out

Better managing your time to relieve stress includes scheduling time for you–not you and your spouse, not your son’s soccer game, just you. You dictate when and for how long your appointment is.

"Don’t change your lifestyle and don’t stop closing all those deals, but get up either a half hour earlier or go to bed a half hour later," says Dorriss. "Spend that half hour meditating or reflecting." She knows that to many agents, sitting around for 30 minutes sounds like a colossal waste of time, but contends that it’s tremendously healing.

"Do nothing," she says. "Start with 10 or 15 minutes and work up to a half hour. Get to that relaxed state where you’re sitting up, you’re not asleep but you’re not fully awake. Once you get that and recognize what it does for you and how much energy it gives you, it becomes something you don’t want to give up in the morning."

Quick agrees. "Take a time-out. It doesn’t need to be long. The time-out becomes a counterpoint to the work activity that allows the person to recover energy and reset his mind." He recommends reflecting or, if you have a faith tradition, engaging in prayer.

Make it a part of your daily routine and expand the idea periodically to incorporate work-related reflection. "One executive I knew, rather than worry during the week, when he came to something he needed to worry about would write it down on his ‘worry list,’ " says Quick. "Then he would take an hour every Thursday afternoon to worry. When he went through his worry list, most of the worries resolved themselves before he ever got to Thursday."

Give yourself a complement

Taking time-outs and concentrating on your mental well-being will benefit your stress level. However, Quick recommends going one step further. "People who have more than one stress-coping tool really do better and are healthier than people who only have one," he says.

Physical activity, whether stretching or more vigorous activities, complements time-outs. Since experiencing stress prepares your body for fight or flight, your muscles tense. Stretching while you are at your desk or in the car sitting at a red light creates
flexibility and releases tension.

If you’re athletically inclined, working out regularly can give you the same flexibility and add a cardiovascular benefit. According to Quick, studies show that people with good cardiovascular fitness recover from stressful events much faster than those without such conditioning.

But exercise isn’t the only alternative way to reduce stress. Changing your diet can help as well. Dorriss asserts that Realtors^® are at risk of eating poorly more than most professions.

"You’re on the road all the time, working around the clock, and eating terribly," she says. "Diet contributes very much to levels of stress. So many people can cut their stress levels literally in half by cutting out the caffeine and cutting out the sugar."

If you think you’ve already heard all the diet advice you can stand, this may surprise you: Moderate consumption of alcohol, in most cases, can reduce your stress. Quick reports, "The epidemiologic evidence says that people who are modest consumers of alcohol live longer than teetotalers and–certainly–longer than alcoholics."

He explains that alcohol increases your "good" cholesterol and as a depressant knocks out inhibitions, which enables you to talk a little more freely to those close to you. It lets you get things off your chest easier. This does not mean that if you don’t drink, you should start. It means that if you currently enjoy occasional cocktails, you probably aren’t doing yourself any harm, and there is evidence to suggest that you may be reducing your stress.

It’s up to you

Even if you meditate and exercise daily, moderate your alcohol and caffeine intake, adjust your schedule to include personal time, and listen closely to every word your clients utter, you will still have stress in your life. As Dorriss quips, "You can find stress in the drive-through at McDonald’s."

But all those techniques enable you to better manage your stress and gain some control over how it affects your life. Friends, family, clients, and colleagues can do a lot to lessen your anxiety, but, ultimately, you must want to improve your life.

"We could have an on-site dietician, but that doesn’t mean we’d have a thin office," says Greenwood. "People have to take responsibility for themselves."

Photo © PictureQuest.

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