Managing wellbeing – dealing with stress

We all lead such busy lives trying to juggle many things at once. It often doesn’t take much to raise those stress levels, especially when trying to meet deadlines at work, or dealing with issues in our personal lives, and we get into a ‘fight or flight’ mindset which rarely ends well as it can lead us to make poor choices. Things like working longer hours, cutting down on sleep to cram more into the day, relying on coffee or other stimulants to keep us going, not eating properly, not exercising – the list goes on. This affects the quality of our work and then we get into a spiral of working even harder to try to fix things.
Maintaining a healthy work/life balance is vital, but we often feel guilty about taking time out for ourselves – we could be working or sorting out that work issue instead.
As testers we need to look after ourselves, and as leaders we need to set a good example to our teams and also lookout for them, recognising when you or they are at risk of burnout.
So how do we balance everything?

I’ll start the talk off with some of the trigger points that cause us stress, and how we can recognise what they are for each of us. I’ll then move on to discussing ways in which we can practice self-care and care for our teams, with practical steps that I have tried which I can recommend to the audience. I’ll wrap up with 3 key practical takeaway messages that the audience can try themselves, and ask them to message me afterwards to let me know how they get on, so that I can gain valuable feedback.