Name: How I handle stress at work (as a software engineer)
Uploaded: 2020-03-27T19:10:36.000Z
Duration: 10 min 40 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hey Tak late here and welcome back to coffee time.

Future simple

Lead has some viewers right in asking about how to deal with a high pressure situation.

And if you think about that, this is a class of problems that is actually very common and can be reduced to any question that people read in asking about how they deal with difficult situations at work, how they deal with any difficult situation, in fact.

And there are a few simple tips I have for you here as an ex Google tack lied somebody who has been able to navigate all of these different types of situations and problems dealing with extremely high stress pressurizing scenarios.

And, you know, one time I was doing this scuba diving trip and it was in this high pressure environment and the only that mentally, it was also difficult because my tank was screwed on loosely.

There was water seeping into my ventilator, one bad breath, and that could have been the end of me.

I was throwing up at the time, and plus my tank was a loose.

So these are extremely high pressure environment.

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The first thing I want you guys to realize here is that this is your time to shine.

When you are in tough scenarios and often times, you need to realize that these tough scenarios thes high pressure environments are artificially built.

There is actually no penalty for failure most of the time.

Sometimes somebody some manager up above just imposing some deadline and just wants to challenge people, create an environment where people are feeling challenged, push the team a little bit harder.

And this is where you can show what you're made of.

And many problems can be seen as opportunities like this.

Whether you're taking a high pressure test, you're in the middle of an interview or you are taking on a project in a job that is high pressure, high stress.

All of these are problems, and they can be opportunities provided that you can find the way to navigate through it and succeed.

So I will recommend you kind of be glad that you are in such a highly visible area where all eyes are on you.

It is far better than being in situation where nobody cares about what you're doing.

Nobody even knows who you are and that were to recommend that it is at times like this, when it is your time to work hard.

There are times to relax, and there are times to work hard.

They come in waves phases when it comes time to work hard when it comes time to show what you're made of.

That's when maybe you should not be taking too many breaks when you should be putting in all that, you've got put in some overtime.

You don't have to do that all the time, But when all eyes are on you and when you've got that opportunity, that's when you make the most of it.

My second tip is to remember that all of this is child's play, right?

You know, one of the most stressful environments for me was when I was running my own startup.

I had I quit my job and the servers were under extreme load.

The database server was crashing and I had no one to help me out here.

I didn't know who could help, and everything was on me to get this going and then you that if I could get this project just running smoothly, it would be a huge opportunity for me financially and in terms of career industry wise.

And this was something that I really wanted to see done.

I had difficulty sleeping because the servers would be crashing at night.

I would sometimes just get on the long airplane red, and that was a way for me to at least just shut off from the Internet and actually gets unrest.

It was a way to force myself to disconnect from the Internet, so I wouldn't be checking the servers all the time because the servers were just always on fire.

At the time, I had no clue what I was really doing, and after that experience, it was such an intense amount of stress.

Whenever I have any other stressful experience, some experience under high pressure, I just remember that time and I think, Yeah, this is child's play.

I've had other experiences that were far more stressful, far more intense and where there was much more on the line.

You know, the scuba diving adventure story that I mentioned was also another extremely high pressure event with real risks on the line.

And I'm sure off you guys, everyone has had high pressure events in their life.

I recommend that you go back and think about some of those things, and then we take a look at some of the challenges in front of yourself.

You may come to realize, Yeah, this stuff you should be able to handle.

Another hurdle to get through one of Michael's has actually been to learn how through the work well under stress.

When you look at certain people in careers, right, like first aid responders, they're trained to deal with extremely high stress scenarios where everybody else is panicking, maybe in shock, frozen in fear, they have no clue what to do.

That's where certain people heroes, you may say, are trained to deal with scenarios like this.

This is something that I think that any of us can really just try to get more used to learn to deal with high pressure, high stress scenarios recognized as such, and then observe yourself and tried to figure out how you can navigate that scenario more carefully and learn it.

I had recently been reading about the way Google saw for reliability Engineers work, and their primary job is actually to get paged when servers crash.

Their whole job is dealing with high pressure scenarios, and they have a whole handbook about how the deal with this I'll send the link in the description below if you're interested.

But one thing that they do is they stopped the bleeding right away.

They don't try to necessarily fix this scenario.

They just tried to get servers back online, first buy themselves some time, and then from there they tried to diagnose and fix the errors.

Because there's no guarantee how long fixing some of this stuff is.

There's an entire process, step by step, about how to deal with high pressure emergency scenarios.

This is something that can be made into a process in the way I find that when I'm in the high stress scenario Sometimes it has to do more with the number of things that are swirling in my head is not necessarily a single thing.

It may be many different tasks, and it's just a jumble.

So that's my third trip with just to just write things down, plan out the things that you need to do.

Take a piece of paper and a pen and just jot down everything you need to do.

And when you can see the whole list of things, you need to do what they depend on, how you can categorize it that can help you better start your ideas and thoughts, and then it doesn't look so scary to you anymore.

Creating a step by step plan helps you break the problem down into one thing at a time, and they each chunk becomes something manageable.

And then you can even allow other people to help you out with some of this stuff and explain the challenges to other people.

Now the fourth tip I have here is to just step back and take a time out.

There was this time when I was about to board a plane to Europe, and it was going to be this great adventure.

The airplane was all set until I realized I did not have my passport.

I had lost it, and that was at the airport with all my bags packed, and that was extremely high stress for me because I had also at the time rented out my apartment, so I had no place to live, and the first thing I did in that scenario was I just took a time out and just think about the problem.

I thought it out carefully, and what I did instead was using my driver's license.

I was in New York at the time, and then I just stayed with my parents re book, the hotels, re book the flight, and then I was all set to go again.