Self-leadership under permanent pressure to perform. Stress competence for researchers

Academic tasks and administration, tutoring and teaching, partner projects… and family first of all! You can feel the stress building up even while reading this. Being asked to do everything at once and straight away is an integral part of daily life in academia. In this challenging context, stress competence is essential to keep a healthy balance and to deal successfully with the multitude of roles and demands.
This workshop offers you the welcome opportunity to calmly reflect about the main sources of pressure and strain that you encounter and to identify strategies to deal with them. You learn about triggers and consequences of stress and how your personal resilience can be strengthened. We focus on three dimensions of stress competence: instrumental (i.e. time-management), mental (i.e. dealing with perfectionism), and regenerative (i.e. leisure time and breaks). The central goal is that you get concrete impulses and tools that support you in keeping a good balance between productivity and self-care.

Contents

• Stressors in academia
• Mechanisms of stress emergence and consequences of stress
• 3 Pillars of stress competence (Mental stress competence, Instrumental stress competence, Regenerative stress competence)
• Personal resources
• Impulses for my personal stress management

Methods

• Input and discussion
• Individual and group work
• Coaching techniques