We’ve all experienced stress at one time or another, but do you know what stress actually is?
Stress is your body’s reaction to any demand or change in your environment that requires you to respond or adjust. Stress-provoking changes are often negative (such as a job loss or death in the family) but can also be positive (such as a promotion or a baby being born). Whatever the reason for stress, your body reacts to it with mental, emotional, and physical responses.
Here are a few more things you should know about stress, how it affects your health, and how to keep it under control.
Not All Stress Is Bad
We often think of stress in a negative way, but it’s not inherently bad. Stress is actually part of the body’s built-in fight or flight response, which causes physiological changes (quickening pulse and breath, tensing muscles, increased oxygen supply to the brain, and so on) that prepare your body to face a challenge. In emergencies, this stress response could help you survive.
Stress can also help encourage you to achieve something: It might prompt you to prepare for an upcoming job interview or trip.
Stress becomes problematic when it turns chronic. The source of your stress may be constant, or you may continue to feel stressed even when the stressful situation has passed. Routine or constant stress is especially hard to notice, as your body gets no signal to resume normal functioning and a strained state becomes your new normal.
Whatever the cause of your chronic stress, the same physiological responses that help during fight or flight situations will start to affect your health negatively. Different people experience stress in different ways, but side effects often include:
Headaches
Upset stomach
High blood pressure
Chest pain
Sexual dysfunction
Skin conditions
Sleeplessness
Depression
Panic attacks
Anxiety and worry
Weight loss or gain
And while you may think that stress doesn’t affect you, stress is actually highly prevalent:
Between 75% and 90% of all doctor’s visits are related to stress-induced complaints.
43% of adults experience adverse health effects because of stress.
According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), stress is a hazard in the workplace and costs American industry over $300 billion every year.
Of course, one of the best ways to feel less stressed is to call in some help.
Pepper’s Personal Assistants can help when you’re overwhelmed with a messy house, family visiting, the upcoming school year, an approaching trip, or all of the above. In addition to handling chores, household management, and errands, we can organize, plan trips and events, and get your house ready for guests. Stressful situations are our specialty.
Contact us today for a complimentary consultation!
A personal assistant can take your life from unorganized and overwhelming to structured and manageable. However, this change won’t happen overnight: You’ll first have to invest in communication to show your personal assistant how they can best help you.
In the beginning, this may mean spending 80% of your time communicating in order to get 20% of your time back. The more you communicate, the sooner you’ll be spending just 20% of your time communicating to get 80% of your time back.
The investment is well worth the initial time commitment: Open communication helps build an environment of trust, one in which your personal assistant can feel confident enough to take ownership of your household tasks, and you can feel confident in their ability to do so. You’ll enjoy peace of mind knowing that your to-dos are getting done without having to oversee them.
But as straightforward and beneficial as this environment of open communication may sound, many people still fail to provide the feedback that’s necessary to achieve it.
To promote successful relationships between our clients and personal assistants, Pepper’s Personal Assistants recommends the approach of Radical Candor™.
Radical Candor™
Radical Candor™ is a new management philosophy that involves caring personally while challenging directly and providing guidance that is kind, clear, specific, and sincere.
This approach can be challenging for a couple reasons. First, we often assume that feelings have no place in a professional environment. But building a strong relationship with someone requires caring personally about them. Both of you should feel safe and comfortable enough to show vulnerability, such as admitting when you’re having a bad day.
And second, the saying “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” has probably been ingrained in your mind since you were old enough to talk. But successful client-personal assistant relationships require providing feedback, and providing feedback requires challenging directly. Rather than coming across as a criticism, challenging directly shows your personal assistant that you care about them and their success in their role.
Remember that your personal assistant wants to make your life easier, so if they aren’t, they want to know. Realizing that the feedback you give your personal assistant allows them to improve their work — and thus gain more satisfaction from it — allows you to reframe your feedback as a gift.
What does Radical Candor™ look like? If you want your personal assistant to complete a task differently or in a specific way, let them know right away. At the same time, your personal assistant should be open with you if they are uncomfortable performing a certain task or uncertain about how something should be done.
Radical Candor™ may be hard to put into practice at first, but understanding what is not Radical Candor™ helps:
Obnoxious Aggression™: When you challenge someone directly without showing that you care about them personally, you exhibit Obnoxious Aggression™. Often referred to as front stabbing or brutal honesty, Obnoxious Aggression™ may be a valid criticism but isn’t delivered kindly.
Ruinous Empathy™: When you care personally but don’t challenge directly because you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, you exhibit Ruinous Empathy™. You may feel like you’re being nice, but your lack of specific feedback isn’t helpful in the long term.
Manipulative Insincerity™: When you neither challenge directly nor care personally, you exhibit Manipulative Insincerity™. Manipulative Insincerity™ is often called passive-aggressive behavior or backstabbing, and could manifest in the form of insincere praise or flattering someone to their face but criticising them behind their back.
Let this framework guide you as you interact with your personal assistant, but remember that everyone exhibits the above behaviors at one time or another. They aren’t personality types — just a compass to help guide you toward Radical Candor™.
Final Tips and Takeaways
To embrace Radical Candor™, we encourage our clients to offer their personal assistants feedback on a regular basis by scheduling a standing weekly meeting, either in person or via phone. Clients should also send notes in Slack as soon as an issue arises. Think of feedback as a tool that will help grow your relationship with your personal assistant and build trust.
Of course, we always appreciate positive feedback as well! Letting your personal assistant know what they’re doing well enables them to continue doing it that way in the future.
For more help embracing Radical Candor™ with your personal assistant, contact us. We are dedicated to cultivating client-personal assistant relationships that are both positive and productive.
Summer flies by, and you have to think and act fast in order to make the most of every moment. Unfortunately, time is limited, and planning and organizing your summer can easily get in the way of actually enjoying yourself.
Hiring a personal assistant can help you avoid this dilemma and spend your summer the way you ought to be.
Planning Vacations, Summer Camps, and Other Events
Summer is a time for getting away, exploring, and being active. Of course, most of this requires time-consuming planning.
Whether you’re going on an international vacation or just camping a couple of hours away, your personal assistant can make reservations, purchase tickets, create itineraries and packing lists, and make sure you have everything you need with you. If you need to sign your children up for summer events, such as a summer camp or childcare, your personal assistant can also research your options and organize all the necessary details.
The result is a summer of doing, without having to think too much beforehand.
Time doesn’t stop while you’re away having fun: At home, your flowers still need watered and your dog still needs walked. While you can ask a friend to do this for you, you’ll still have to face coming home to an empty fridge, dusty home, and piles of mail. Your personal assistant can go the extra mile to create a welcoming home for you to return to.
The sun is shining and you’re yearning to feel its warmth; but your chores won’t do themselves, so you’re stuck inside.
As an alternative to this dismal scene, your personal assistant can handle your errands, household management, and chores so that you don’t have to. Imagine coming home from work to a home that’s tidy and organized, and a meal that’s prepped and ready to be cooked. Nothing’s stopping you from soaking up all the sunshine you can get.
If you have kids, you know that summer ends as soon as back-to-school season starts, when you have to start shopping for school supplies and getting organized for the new school year. To make summer stretch just a little bit longer, your personal assistant can handle the necessary preparations for you, such as picking up supplies, scheduling necessary appointments, and even planning and prepping for school lunches.
In honor of Administrative Professionals’ Day, we want to acknowledge all the hard work that administrative professionals, executive assistants, and secretaries do. Your efforts can make the difference between poor- and high-quality work, and between a day where everything goes terribly wrong and one where everything falls into place.
However, administrative professionals’ responsibilities should end with the workday, and sometimes the best thing you can do is recognize when calling in additional help is necessary. Here are three signs that your boss could use a personal assistant at home.
They’re Neglecting Obligations at Home
Sometimes, professional success comes at the cost of one’s home life.
If you notice that your boss seems to be neglecting things at home — whether that includes chores and household management, appointments, or even relationships — it may be a sign that they need extra help. A personal assistant can remove these obligations by taking care of them on a weekly basis.
They Aren’t Taking Proper Care of Themselves
Lack of self-care is a sure sign that someone is overtaxed. If you begin to notice that your boss isn’t getting enough sleep, eating well, exercising, relaxing, or otherwise taking care of themselves, now is the time to speak up.
A personal assistant can help your boss free up time for self-care activities by eliminating time-consuming responsibilities at home. They can even help your boss eat healthier by meal planning, shopping, and prepping.
They’re Stressed About Nonwork-Related Issues
When everything at work is going well and your boss still seems stressed, the stressors responsible likely lie at home. No matter how much you do to make life at the office easier, your boss can still be stressed by outside issues, and they may eventually begin to affect their work performance.
If any of these signs sound familiar, consider suggesting that your boss get a personal assistant. Pepper’s Personal Assistants can help with household management, errands, and chores, lending the same order to their home life that you lend to their work life. In the end, everyone in your office will benefit from a less stressed, more relaxed boss!
When people don’t dedicate any time to taking care of themselves, they often overlook exercise and nutrition. While skipping a workout or opting for takeout to save time is sometimes necessary, making this your norm will take its toll on your physical health. If you fail to take care of your body, you won’t ever feel at your best.
However, your self-care routine doesn’t even have to include a proper diet and exercise in order for it to benefit your physical health (although it should). When you relax, your body triggers the relaxation response, which is essentially the opposite of the fight-or-flight response. This state helps you avoid anxiety and burnout, which is important to prevent chronic stress from damaging your health long-term and decreasing your immunity.
Mental Health
Those who don’t dedicate time to their self-care are more likely to experience low self-esteem, resentment, and unhappiness. And the burnout we mentioned above can have quite an impact on mental health as well.
Practicing self-care has been proven to increase productivity and positive thinking and impart feelings of well-being and calm. Plus, taking care of your body helps you to feel confident and good about yourself.
Ways to Practice Self-Care
Self-care looks different for every individual, but the time you set aside for yourself should include at least some of the following ideas:
When trying to find time to devote to your self-care, focus on two things.
First, prioritize your own well-being. If your priorities always lie elsewhere, you’ll never find the time (or energy) for yourself. Prioritizing yourself may mean accepting the fact that you can’t do everything — at least not on your own.
And second, you have to let others help you. Trying to perfectly juggle your work, home, relationships, and self-care is a recipe for disaster.
Hiring a personal assistant is a great way to free up time for yourself without neglecting any of your other responsibilities. Pepper’s Personal Assistants is here to help with your household management, errands, and chores, so you can spend that time and energy on something more deserving: yourself.
Ready to invest more time in yourself? Get started with a personal assistant today!
A new year means new vacations, and vacations start with making the necessary arrangements. Whether you’re fleeing to a warmer city to break up the remaining winter months, thinking ahead to spring break, or just dreaming up some weekend trips, a personal assistant can help reduce the stress of vacation planning.
Booking Flights and Hotels
Looking for flights and hotels, especially if you’re trying to get a good deal or are tied to specific dates, can be extremely time consuming. Let your personal assistant know when and where you’d like to take your vacation, what accomodations you expect from your flight and hotel, and anything else that’s pertinent. They can present you with several options and make all the arrangements after you’ve chosen which you like best.
Creating an Itinerary
If you’re visiting a new place for the first time, you’ll want to make the most of your stay there and see as much as possible; and even if your trip is a stay-at-the-beach-all-day kind of vacation, having some plans made ahead of time is smart. Your personal assistant can find and book any must-do activities; purchase and print tickets to shows, museums, and the like so you can avoid long lines; and make dinner reservations for you and your fellow travelers.
Creating Packing Lists
Your personal assistant will be aware of where you’re going and what you’re doing, making them the perfect person to create a detailed packing list for your trip. You may prefer to decide which specific items to include to fulfill the list, but they’ll know best if any scheduled activities require specific footwear, for example, or if the weather will be fluctuating during your stay. When you’re frantically packing at the last minute, you’ll appreciate not having to worry about forgetting anything important.
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