Time required
Approximately 30 minutes.
Preparation
Prior to this session, complete the questions below using an example from your own work-life approach.
At least 48 hours before your meeting, ask participants to complete the following:
Consider a challenging work situation you’ve successfully dealt with in the past and reflect on these questions. You’ll be asked to share your answers at our next meeting.
- What made the situation challenging?
- What personal coping strategies did you use to manage stress during this time? For example, going for a walk, talking to someone, deep breathing, stepping away from office space or computer setting, etc.
- What supports did you access or use, either personally or through work?
- What would you do differently if you faced the same situation now?
- What did you learn, or how did you grow, from this experience?
- What advice would you have for someone else going through a similar situation now?
You’re not required to share any personal or health information. Please don’t include any names or identifying information in your answers. The point of this activity is for us to share coping strategies for work situations any of us could face.
Instructions
At the beginning of the meeting, let everyone know they only have to share as much as they’re comfortable with regarding past work-related challenges.
Be the first one to share your example and answers. You can then ask for volunteers to share theirs. You may find it most effective to go through the list of questions with each person rather than jumping from person to person. Get as many people as possible to share within the meeting time frame. If you’re running out of time, skip to the last question about advice for dealing with work-related challenges and stress.
As individuals are speaking, take the opportunity to prompt them to share the coping strategies they used or point them out yourself.
Suggested wording
Work-related challenges are an inevitable part of working life. We’re better able to deal with work stress when we have appropriate personal, professional or social supports around us. To prepare for the meeting today, I asked you to consider a past challenging work situation you dealt with.. I’ll share my example and then each of you can share yours. The questions were:
- What made the situation challenging?
- What personal coping strategies did you use to manage stress during this time? For example, going for a walk, talking to someone, deep breathing, stepping away from office space or computer setting, etc.
- What supports did you access or use, either personally or through work?
- What would you do differently if you faced the same situation now?
- What did you learn, or how did you grow, from this experience?
- What advice would you have for someone else going through a similar situation now?
[When you’re finished your example, ask who’d like to go next. If there are no volunteers, you can simply say that you’ll start with the people on the list and go through one at a time. If you have too many participants to allow everyone to share, skip to the last question about advice for dealing with work-related challenges and stress. When you’re done, you can wrap-up with the following:]
Thank you for sharing your ideas and strategies. The discussion today can help us better deal with future challenges. We know these coping strategies and ideas won’t work for everyone, so I encourage you to think about what would work best for you. The idea is to expect challenges to arise and use what we learn to address them.
Find more activities like this at Team building activities.