How Everything DiSC® Helps with Stress
How Managers Can Help Employees Navigate Stress
Everything DiSC® has helped millions of people understand themselves better by identifying underlying motivations and preferences.
When you complete a DiSC assessment, however, the questions you are answering don’t just identify your preferences. They also identify some of your psychological needs. When our psychological needs aren’t being met, we feel stress.
In a 2021 NIH Study, researchers found that higher levels of workplace stress correlated with lower overall productivity. DISC can help someone identify why specific changes are causing them to feel anxious. With this knowledge, they can better understand what actions they should take to manage it.
Additionally, managers can leverage this knowledge to support their employees.
Often, managers recognize when productivity drops. Using insights from DiSC, they can introduce the topic of stress to either help provide workplace solutions to ease employee stress or help employees become more aware of how their stress impacts their work.
In this article, we will review how you can leverage DISC to uncover and manage stress.
It’s important to remember that human beings are complex. DiSC can’t tell you everything you might want to know about yourself or someone else’s response to stress, but it can help start the conversation.
How to Navigate Stress With DISC
When navigating stress with others or alone, you must know your or the other person’s DiSC Style.
We suggest using Everything DiSC on Catalyst to discover your DiSC Profile. You can also easily find a colleague’s DiSC Style by navigating to the ‘Your Colleagues‘ section.
Below is an example of what this looks like in real life between my own DISC Profile and one of my direct reports, Tim Schwanz.
If I notice that Tim’s work hasn’t produced the same results as he has in prior months, I can look deeper into Tim’s Everything DiSC Profile to see if I can better understand what might be going on.
When I navigate further into Tim’s profile from our profile comparison page, I can find the section that speaks directly about what may cause Tim stress.
Here, I find that Tim may feel stress due to:
- working in a stagnant, low-energy environment
- doing routine, uninspired work
- being isolated or in an unsocial environment
It’s important to state that Tim permitted me to share his profile for this article, and there are no performance issues (you rock, Tim!). However, as I read his DiSC stressors, I recognize that some of the projects I’ve assigned Tim require him to work with data without being able to interact with others on our team, which could cause him stress.
I doubt I will be the only manager who quickly identifies this type of insight. When coaching managers, you can ask them to think about the following questions to dig deeper into their direct report’s style to uncover other areas of stress:
- What do people with this DiSC style fear?
- How do they react under pressure?
- What behaviors have you seen them rely on under stress?
Identify which questions will kickstart this type of conversation and schedule the meeting. These discussions can be eye-opening as long as the manager is willing to listen and allow the time for the direct report to have the space for self-discovery. The unfortunate part about stress is that we often don’t recognize its root. A great listener can help someone find clarity about pretty much anything by simply being a good listener. There’s nothing else to it.
We frequently like to say that DiSC is not something you do TO people but instead WITH people. Managers should encourage their direct reports to confirm or refute any associations they see about what might be causing stress.
Next, we will look at how you can leverage DiSC insights to understand the causes of conflict which are often tied to stress.
Prevent Stress Turning Into Destructive Conflict with DiSC
So, what’s going on when we’re in a conflict situation?
Often, we may feel challenged, frustrated, overwhelmed, or even fearful. When we are not equipped to handle the conflicts that arise in our lives productively, it can cause quite a bit of stress.
Below is a simplified timeline of what occurs when we are in conflict, starting with stress.
In this timeline, when we feel an emotion like stress, our brain offers an immediate thought. We will call these thoughts automatic thoughts because that is how they occur.
Automatic thoughts are an evolutionary survival mechanism. They helped us escape from large animals by quickly recognizing danger. They allowed us to dive away from something that was about to fall on top of us. Today, however, our brains are still trying to offer us these rapid solutions during stressful situations. Our brains can’t distinguish between the stress of a social problem and the stress of a life-or-death situation.
Fortunately, researchers, therapists, and mental health counselors have found a way to help us train ourselves to bypass these automatic responses. The Everything DiSC Productive Conflict report calls this process reframing. In Psychology, it’s called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Reframing, or CBT, is a straightforward and effective process.
Below is a modified model of what I showed above, but with how reframing works:
During conflict or any stressful situation, if we take a moment to pause and examine our automatic thoughts, we can ask ourselves: “Is this thought really true?” or, “Am I overreacting?”
Let’s take a look at how this process of reframing might look:
Example 1
- Automatic thought: They have no idea what they’re talking about.
- Reframed thought: They’re coming at this from a completely different angle than me.
Example 2
- Automatic though: If they push back, I’ll push back harder.
- Reframed thought: Maybe they don’t realize how aggressive they sound.
In the first example, notice how the individual pushed to reevaluate whether their initial automatic thought was genuine and test their assumptions about the other person in the situation.
In the second example, the individual stepped back to give the other person the benefit of the doubt rather than overreact and escalate the situation.
We gain control over a situation when we take a brief moment to pause rather than letting our automatic thoughts take control.
Everything DiSC Productive Conflict offers a way to examine how we naturally react during conflict situations. The corresponding training program encourages us to discuss our automatic thoughts during a conflict, which can lead to destructive responses such as stonewalling, belittling, or withdrawing.
Leverage DiSC® To Improve Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence helps us adapt on a much larger scale by adjusting our behavior patterns to meet the changing emotional and interpersonal needs around us.
The Everything DiSC Agile EQ training program takes a fresh new look at developing emotional intelligence through the lens of DiSC behavioral styles.
We often refer to someone’s DiSC style as their comfort zone or “home base.” For instance, everyone is capable of being enthusiastic and outgoing. However, it will require much more energy for a C-style individual who must stretch outside their comfort zone. For an i-style individual, being outgoing is the norm.
Everything DiSC Agile EQ helps us identify our EQ strengths and develop additional mindsets. Agility comes when we can easily navigate all of these different mindsets to best meet the needs around us as we navigate difficult times together.
Let’s consider the Agile EQ mindset during times of stress.
Someone with the D-Style might often rely on a Self-Assured mindset. Asserting opinions and taking charge of situations come naturally to them. Suppose a coworker, family member, or friend comes to them feeling stressed or anxious. In that case, they might enter this self-assured mindset and attempt to take charge of the situation by offering solutions or asserting their ideas about what this person should do to mitigate their stress. But is this the best mindset? In times of stress, people often seek validation of their feelings. They need empathy.
Everyone can change their response to any situation, but not everyone has learned how to do it. Stretching outside our behavioral comfort zone is difficult and requires much practice.
This is where the Agile EQ framework and training can help. An Agile EQ workshop focuses on assisting learners to go through a three-step process to become more emotionally agile:
- Learn: participants complete an Agile EQ Assessment and understand
1) Learn
Participants complete the Agile EQ assessment or have the content added directly to their Catalyst account (no assessment needed with this option). They receive a detailed report about their emotional mindset preferences.
2) Stretch
Part of a learner's Agile EQ report is a meter of the difficulty of using the other Agile EQ Mindsets. This section helps a learner understand the importance of when to use a different mindset and how hard (or easy) it will be for them to use it.
3) Develop
The final part of a learner's Agile EQ report provides detailed instructions for how they can improve the other mindsets that might not come as naturally to them. Within this section are different activities they can choose based on difficulty that range from easy to hard. This section can be used within group or peer coaching capacities.
We all go through times of stress and anxiety. As we consider the challenges of working with other humans, we hope you reflect on this affirmation that was offered by the folks at The World Cafe:
Have a question or need support? Contact Us!
Our team supports organizations both large and small on how they can leverage these tools to accomplish organizational goals. Let us know what you are looking to accomplish today!