Reclaiming Clarity and Calm at Work

In today’s fast-paced, high-stakes professional world, stress has become an all-too-familiar companion. Tight deadlines, shifting expectations, blurred boundaries between work and personal life—these are not just workplace inconveniences, but persistent sources of pressure that can undermine your performance, wellbeing, and leadership effectiveness.

As an executive or business leader, your responsibilities often leave little room to pause, reflect, or recover. Yet, without effective strategies to manage stress, it’s easy to find yourself overwhelmed, reactive, and disconnected from your purpose and potential.

This guide is designed to help you regain control—of your time, your energy, and your mindset. You’ll find practical tools and strategies to reduce stress in three key dimensions: your environment, your emotional landscape, and your physical wellbeing. Whether you’re leading a team, driving change, or navigating complex decisions, these approaches will support you in showing up with clarity, resilience, and focus.

Let’s begin by understanding where stress shows up—and how to take targeted, meaningful action to reduce its impact.

Overview – How to manage and reduce stress

Stress management strategies include techniques to deal with external and internal stressors. At work this includes organising tasks in a less stressful way. In addition there are techniques to cope with stress internally and to ensure your body can deal with stress.

Strategies for Managing Stress

Managing external stressors – Organising the work at hand

Managing external stress involves making sure that sources of stress in the environment are eliminated in a timely matter:

• Identify and eliminate conflicts
  • Interpersonal conflicts are a key source of stress and should be addressed and solved as much as possible. Resolving conflicts can enable additional trust, shared visions and goals and improved cooperation.
  • External conflicts comprise topics like specific conflict with another person, reporting to disagreeing superiors or goal conflicts (e.g. maximize sales volume or maximize margin?)
• Clarify roles & responsibilities
  • A lot stress emerges because it is not clear what is being expected of a person. The role may be only loosely defined, no on the job guidance is available or the individual is reporting to different parts of the organisation as part of a complex matrix structure. In such case it will be important to clarify roles and responsibilities.
  • In projects the project structure, timeline and deliverables will need to be agreed and planned.
  • Roles and responsibilities also includes the ability to refuse taking on work, passing it on to the responsible person and delegation.
• Prioritize tasks
  • If roles and responsibilities are clear, the individual will still need to differentiate important from less important (or nice to have or completely redundant) and the urgent from items which can be scheduled Eisenhower Matrix can be employed.
  • The actual work should be organized in to-do-lists (daily, weekly, project related etc. )
• Plan realistically and set realistic goals (external / internal)
  • Often we face unrealistic deadlines, overambitious goals and competition in achieving them.
  • Internally perfectionism in pursuing goals adds to stress
  • Therefore it is important to be realistic in what can be achieved.
• Use time management techniques
  • Scheduling and blocking time for the actual work.
  • To-Do-Lists

Managing stress internally

Managing stress externally involves making sure that sources of stress in the environment are eliminated in a timely matter:

• Identify inner sources of stress
  • The first step in managing stress is identifying the source of stress in your life.
  • If the stress is in the environment move to dealing with it (see above: Managing external stressors).
• Solve internal conflicts
  • Internal conflicts comprise conflicting personal priorities (e.g. spend time at work or time with my children)
• Deal with your emotions, thoughts and feelings
  • Be mindful of your own emotions. Make sure that you are the loving person to yourself and support any anger, sadness, guild, shame etc. you may have. Move towards your emotions and take good care of them.
• Seek support – build safe contacts
  • Not all negative emotions can be dealt with by oneself. Connecting with others can help reduce stress, regulate your mood and give us a fresh perspective.
  • By surrounding ourselves with supportive people, we can create an emotional safety net that helps us to cope better with challenges. At the same time, we can be there for others and support them in difficult times.
  • Therefore, it is important to cultivate relationships with safe people, who can help through difficult times. Make time for family, friends and colleagues who understand your needs.
• Prioritize self-care
  • Taking care of yourself is important for managing stress.
  • Make time for activities you enjoy, such as playing sports, meeting friends, reading, listening to music, or spending time outdoors.

Managing stress by taking care of yourself and your body

• Exercise regularly
  • Exercise is a great way to manage stress – Exercise helps regulate stress by burning off neurotransmitters like cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine, which are linked to stress, fear, and anger.
    • While exercise boosts cortisol in the short term, it also reduces cortisol during the night and thereby improves sleep.
  • Regular exercise can help reduce stress and anxiety, improve your mood, and boost your overall health and well-being.
• Make sure you get enough and sufficiently deep sleep
  • Being well rested enables us to deal effectively with stress during the day. This means that we are better able to solve current problems when we are awake, which in turn reduces stress.
  • Lack of sleep drains our resources and reduces vital down-time for the body.
  • Getting enough sleep is important for managing stress. Lack of sleep can increase stress levels and make it more difficult to cope with stress.
• Eat good food – add supplements if needed
  • Make sure you eat a varied diet which gives you the nutrients you needs
  • In stressful situations you may need to add supplements, to account for increased needs for nutrients, which are depleted by stress. This may include among others, B-Vitamins, Vitamin C, Magnesium, Calcium, Zinc, Potassium and Iron.
• Avoid recreational drugs
  • Avoid recreational drugs such as alcohol, nicotine. All of which may be sources of additional stress to the body.
• Practice relaxation techniques
  • There are several relaxation techniques, such as deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and visualization, that can help reduce stress and promote relaxation.

Stress Management as a Leadership Task

Effectively reducing stress isn’t just an individual challenge—it’s a key leadership task. Leaders have the responsibility to create a framework that reduces stress and enables healthy performance. This includes not only managing their own stress levels, but, above all, structural and cultural measures that affect the entire team.

Leadership can contribute sustainably to stress prevention by leveraging the following key levers:

1. Clear organizational structures and decision-making processes: Security can be created for employees and sub-organizations through clear prioritization of tasks and goals, clear structures, and transparent decision-making processes. This also includes building a strong, trustworthy leadership team.
2. Promote psychological safety: A culture of open discussion and acceptance of mistakes can help employees feel safe and able to ask for help. Regular reflection and deliberate timeouts support learning from decisions made under pressure. Mindfulness and resilience training should only be icing on the cake and not a substitute for true psychological safety.
3. Workload management: The workload for managers and employees should not be permanently “at the limit.” A culture of overtime and weekend work or constant travel stress leads to stress mode, even without additional conflicts or threatening situations. Personal stressors (e.g., children) must also be taken into account and, if necessary, employees protected from voluntarily becoming permanently overloaded. Establishing communication routines instead of constant availability can allow for recovery time.
4. Optimize the speed of change processes: Instead of change for the sake of change, it is often important to establish clear goals and implement change processes with a sense of proportion. Sometimes less is more and leads to more sustainable results.

Effectively reducing stress is a key leadership task.

How Executive Coaching Can Help Leaders Manage Stress

Stress shouldn’t define your leadership, but should fuels your growth. Executive coaching provides a confidential space to pause, reflection, and exploration of the deeper patterns driving your stress. A coach helps you clarify priorities, identify limiting beliefs, and develop tailored strategies to handle pressure with greater resilience.

Coaching helps you focus on what actually works for you – in your specific role, context, and personality.

Through coaching, leaders can foster inner alignment, gain clarity and improve self regulation.

Specifically, Coaching enables you to:

• Reconnect with your purpose and values
• Gain clarity on what’s truly causing stress – beyond surface symptoms.
• Strengthen emotional intelligence and regulate yourself in high-stakes situations.
• Create structures and habits that support sustainable performance.
• Build a more empowered, resourceful mindset.
• Build confidence in navigating uncertainty and making aligned decisions.

Stress may be part of leadership, but being consumed by it doesn’t have to be. With the right tools and support, you can lead with greater calm, clarity, and impact. If you’re ready to explore how executive coaching can support your journey, let’s start a conversation.

While self-guided strategies are essential, many leaders find that real transformation requires the right support. This is where executive coaching becomes a powerful ally.