How much tension do you build up? 5 consequences of too little assertiveness and too much irritation

Emotions and internal tension in your work by setting too few boundaries for yourself and others

Do you recognize this?

Be ready for everyone

Your colleagues can always call on you.
Whether it be to help them with their work or to explain something if they don't understand something. You are always there for everyone.

work stress

But that's how the work piles up. You are busy and you feel that you are suffering from stress. 
You become internally irritated towards your colleagues: "Can't they even solve it themselves for once?" “Why don't they ask someone else to help, why always me?” or “Can't they see I'm busy?” And gradually the tension builds.
Fortunately, the tension regularly subsides in between.
There are temporarily fewer people calling on you, the workload decreases or you have been able to help someone and that gives you a pleasant feeling for a while. However, that feeling fades when something happens again that causes your stress level to skyrocket again.

Emotions at work in a graph

You can visually graph the tension.
At first the tension increases and then decreases a bit. Then your irritation and tension increase even more and decrease again a little bit. But on balance, the line in the chart rises until it is only a rising line and no longer falls in between.

When is the point reached that the line cannot rise any further? When has the limit of your resilience been reached? And how does that manifest itself?

Do you remember that commercial from a well-known soup manufacturer? 
At first the protagonist seems completely balanced, he helps everyone, thinks it is important that others are comfortable in their own skin. But suddenly it's over and to the great surprise of his colleagues, he explodes and shouts very loudly: "Not now!"

Emotions and tension at work build up in yourself

The ad is intended to be funny, but very recognizable to many of my clients.
They want to be liked, they want to help others and therefore do not sufficiently indicate their own wishes and ideas. As a result, they build up tremendous tension and when it becomes unbearable, they start crying, yelling, or blaming the person who is around at the time. That person is very shocked, because he has always been such a nice and helpful colleague and does not understand anything.

The consequences of such an eruption are often significant:

1. You put pressure on the relationship with your conversation partner. Nobody likes to have a screaming colleague in front of them. It doesn't make sense that you are saying that you can no longer do all that work and help everyone.

2. You always want to be liked, but the outburst backfires. Such an outburst also does something to yourself. You feel relieved for a moment, but that is short-lived.

3. It can affect the working atmosphere in the department. Not only will your tension transfer to your colleagues, your colleagues will also start avoiding you. They don't understand how a nice colleague can get out of her pantyhose like that.

4. It can even affect your rating, especially if the outbursts happen more often.

5. After such an outburst you often feel sad, guilty, empty, tired and above all powerless. You know that you have not handled it well and that you should have indicated much earlier that your limit had been reached.

Learn to set boundaries in an assertive way

The solution is to learn to communicate your boundaries in an assertive way, so that you can indicate in a timely manner what your wishes, ideas and interests are.

You give people the opportunity to take you into account and you get more inner peace. and the best part is: people will end up liking you much more!

Success!