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 welcomed opportunity to calmly reflect about the main sources of pressure and stress that you encounter and to identify strategies to deal with them. You will 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. taking mindful breaks). The main goal of the workshop is to help you develop various strategies and methods that will improve your stress competence by allowing you to maintain a good balance between productivity and self-care. All this will ensure you experience a long-lasting productive output.

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