Author: PPM Academy

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Digital Transformation

What Does Digital Transformation Really Mean For Your Company?

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In a company environment, digital transformation refers to embracing digital advancements. Embrace them to develop new, or change current, business operations. Digital change can also be used to modify a company’s culture or update customer experiences. Transformation is needed to meet changing business and market conditions. 

What You Need to Know About Digital Change 

Digital change has a different appearance for every business. Digital change is the integration of digital advancements within a company. When companies make this type of shift, it results in essential changes to how a company operates. It also provides value to its customers. 

Cultural changes require companies to continuously challenge the current situation. To implement digital changes, businesses must experiment with different advancements. They must also become comfortable failing. This may mean retiring long-standing processes that helped build your business in favor of implementing new digital practices. 

Why Digital Change is Important 

There are several reasons why companies bring in digital change. The most common reason is to stay in business. At the start of the pandemic, it became critical for a company to adjust to supply chain issues. Market pressures and sudden changes to customer expectations became equally important. 

Making digital changes will ensure that your company is ready for the next disruption. 

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About Digital Framework 

While digital change is unique to each organization, there are a few common factors. Common digital alterations include: 

• Company culture 
• Leadership 
• Customer experience 
• Operational dexterity 
• Workforce empowerment 
• Digital technology assimilation 

Each business has its own path to travel down. However, it may help to consider shared themes when you begin developing your company’s digital change strategy. 

The Role of Culture in Digital Change 

When company leaders start introducing digital change, the process may wind up shifting around workgroups and changing job titles. This is likely to make workers fear that their value at the company and jobs are at risk. 

Starting a transformation begins with empathy. When you feel genuine empathy, you’ll be able to form trust with your workforce. If your entire organization is not onboard with the transformation, it will be tough to succeed. 

What Inspires Digital Change 

A vital element of digital change is technology. However, it’s usually more about getting rid of outdated processes and antiquated technology than about bringing in new advancements.

Key Trends in Digital Change 

Digital change will help your company prepare for major market shifts and customer demands. A key trend will be to bring in processes that allow your company to pivot effectively. These processes should also help you manage change without impacting any of your customers. 

Key trends in digital change may include: 

• Embracing the cloud 
• Focusing on resiliency 
• Bringing in advancements that support sustainability 
• Technology supported automation of your company’s processes 
• A new focus on managing data 
• Continuing with remote work  

Digital Transformation will Help You Stay Competitive 

Digital change will help your company operate more efficiently. It will also help your organization remain competitive. If you need help, contact me at the Productivity Intelligence Institute. 

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Creating High-Performing Teams

Creating High-Performance Innovation Teams At Scale

High Performing Teams
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The modern world is changing at a super-fast rate. Sectors like technology, communications, finance, engineering and entertainment are all seeing shifts on a massive scale. These days, creativity is transforming into the currency of success. This includes creatively putting together teams. Here are a few tips on how to create high-performance innovation teams at scale. 

Creating, Assembling and Scaling Teams 

A major component of creating high performing teams is innovation at scale. Leaders must foster the ability to create new value schemes and establish incremental value that will help their organization. 

You’ll need to create value repeatedly to create it at a scale that’s significant enough to provide support for your organization. 

Consider who you’ll be adding to your organization’s teams, what kind of teams you’ll need to assemble and how to scale them. 

About Developing the Culture of High Performing Teams that Innovate 

To develop high performing teams that innovate, take steps to support a positive culture. Focus on areas like: 

• Dependability 
• Dedication 
• Learning 
• Engagement 

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Dependability 

In business, dependability is often overlooked. Companies that don’t have a strong performance management emphasis find it challenging to create consistently at scale.

Dependability means delivering quality work by the deadline, earmarking pledged resources and supporting your workforce when needed. Trust is an essential element. When it isn’t present, employees lack a shared desire to complete each project’s commitments. 

Dedication 

Dedication is another challenge. Innovation teams often struggle to keep team members. This can happen when you’re first developing a team since people may not want to leave their existing role. 

Learning 

Learning is vital to achieving innovation success. New products and services depend on market feedback to produce improvements. Be sure to challenge and support your innovation teams to perfect their operating practices and bring them together effectively. 

Create a safe environment that allows your team members to challenge and support each other. This is a vital part of learning. 

Engagement 

It’s easy to take engagement as a given, but it’s important for managers to focus on its importance. Make sure that your teams have what they need to engage their clients and your full organization. Innovative teams communicate proactively, and they form a narrative around each project. 

Forming an Innovative Culture 

Your workforce is your most important asset, and they communicate with your second most important assets, which are your clients and partners. Your teams are already on the payroll, so use them effectively. With innovative teams, your company will discover new inspirations, create fresh solutions and increase your profits. 

The best way to do this is to make your team feel empowered. Forming an innovative culture is easier than it might seem. To bring in an innovative culture, welcome change. This will ripple down through your innovative teams. It might take time but be patient. 

Creating High Performing Teams 

Creating high performing teams requires you to support your workforce and establish a safe environment where your people can learn. If you need guidance, contact me at the Productivity Intelligence Institute. 

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Cultural Intelligence

Cultural Intelligence For Leaders 

Leadership
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Why Your Organization’s Leaders Must Have High Cultural Intelligence 

The world is home to thousands of different cultural groups. With the increasing importance of international trade, an entrepreneur is more likely than ever to interact with people from a wide array of cultures. When you communicate with people from different countries, religious groups, and linguistic communities, you want to have a positive experience. Failure to adapt to a multicultural business environment will seriously hamper your organization’s success, so check out these three important ways that leading with high cultural intelligence can improve your organization. 

Stronger Relationships With Clients and Suppliers

People from different parts of the world are going to respond differently to your products, services, and ways of doing business. On a sales trip to Germany, you might benefit from taking a direct approach and getting down to business right away. However, you probably won’t get a good deal if you try this approach when you meet a potential supplier in Argentina for the first time. Instead, you would want to get to know the supplier personally and relax for some time before bringing up anything about a potential business relationship. Refusing to sensitively engage with your customers and suppliers will have dire consequences for your organization, so it’s important to develop good cultural intelligence to avoid wasting time and offending anyone.

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Better Hiring Practices

To bring your company to the top, you need a skilled team of dedicated employees. By adopting more inclusive hiring practices, you’ll be able to reach the broadest pool of talent to find the best professionals in the world. To acquire talent in a particular country or region, you must understand what applicants from that area value in a position and find out where they tend to look for jobs. 

For example, if you want to hire remote workers in India, then you shouldn’t just post positions on American job sites. While offering paid holiday leave for the late-December holiday season might appeal to Western applicants, it won’t be very appealing to a marketing professional in Mumbai who celebrates Diwali with her family in October. To attract the strongest candidates, you must be willing to learn more about potential employees’ cultural norms and values, take a nuanced approach when reviewing applicants, and offer benefits that fit global candidates’ cultural and economic realities.

Greater Workplace Harmony

As an entrepreneur, you benefit when everyone in your company gets along. When your employees come from a wide range of cultural, religious, and national backgrounds, there is some risk of cultural friction. With enough cultural intelligence, you can foresee potential problems and take steps to prevent them before they affect workplace productivity.

Good Intercultural Competence Is Vital in the 21st Century

The importance of international commerce and intercultural cooperation will only grow in the foreseeable future. By adopting strong intercultural competence now, you’ll set your organization up to succeed for decades to come. You need the right skills and knowledge to make your company a global leader in its field, so don’t forget to check out our other useful articles on intercultural competence, entrepreneurship, and agile leadership.

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Cultural Intelligence

Cultural Intelligence For Employees

Cultural intelligence
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Developing Cultural Intelligence for Your Employees

Several factors are making businesses reexamine how they function in the world. An increasingly diverse workforce means that team members will have different backgrounds and points of view. The expanding global marketplace involves more cooperation between multicultural partners. Leaders and their employees can no longer assume that their way is the only way of conducting business.

The Need for Cultural Intelligence in the Global Economy

In the past, understanding culture involved recognizing the difference between cultural practices. Leaders needed to know when to shake hands, offer a gift, or exchange respectful bows. This information was helpful when meetings with global partners were infrequent. Today, a single remote team might have members in several countries gathering for regular virtual meetings. It is not enough to know a few local customs.

Culture and Perception

Emerging neuroscience shows that cultural upbringing affects the way people perceive the world. Different neural networks light up in brain scans of people presented with the same information. Differences at a neurological level will have practical effects when a multicultural team tries to communicate, problem-solve, or work toward a common goal.

What Contributes to a High CI?

Cultural intelligence is the ease with which a person can navigate a multicultural context. Individuals with a high CI find it stimulating to connect with people different from them. They are comfortable allowing others to lead interactions while they deepen their understanding. Increasing CI requires the development of several soft skills.

Self-Knowledge

The first step in understanding other cultures is acknowledging your own. Understanding how your upbringing affects your view of reality will better equip you to work with others. People with a high CI are aware of their personal biases and blind spots.

Curiosity

Developing this intelligence requires nurturing curiosity. Many people deal with cultural differences by labeling them right or wrong. Intelligence requires acknowledging differences without judgment and learning more about them. A coworker’s way of handling a problem may offer insight into your own process.

Listening Skills

Listening is a sign of respect. Historically, leaders in the West learned to put a premium on self-confidence. Developing CI means stepping back and allowing others to lead conversations. Recognizing a colleague’s rhythms and thought patterns provides a stronger foundation for cooperation.

Adaptivity

People who succeed in a multicultural context recognize that their traditional way of seeing or handling things is not universal. They can adapt their style to make it more comfortable for the people around them, especially when cultural differences create a friction point.

Leading by Example

As a leader, the best way to develop CI in your workplace is to grow and demonstrate it yourself. Create space for team members to describe their perceptions. Demonstrate curiosity by asking questions when appropriate. Be open about mistakes you make along the way. Evolving humility and empathy will help you and your employees navigate this new territory.

Working with a Transformative Partner

There are great changes happening in the business world, and everyone needs help now and then. If you would like a partner for entrepreneurial growth, Productivity Intelligence Institute would be happy to work with you. Contact us today to learn more.

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Artificial Intelligence

Will Artificial Intelligence Kill College Writing?

College Writing
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If you’ve read any tech news articles lately, then you’ve probably seen claims that artificial intelligence will make people jobless and transform the world. The discussion about artificial intelligence is especially heated in the world of academia, and some educators believe that students will soon be able to use AI to write their essays and complete their coursework. While this might sound great for students, will AI actually progress to such a point? As an entrepreneur, you probably don’t need a computer program to write your term paper, but you should know how AI will affect your organization’s operations, so check out this quick overview of the state of AI and what it could mean for your business.

How Will AI Affect University Students?

New AI programs are great at writing factual articles about simple topics, but the technology is not quite up to the task of writing opinion pieces or making interesting points about complex subjects. Currently, AI programs work by scanning thousands of texts about a topic, identifying key commonalities between them, and producing content that matches the style and tone of what people have fed into the program. This allows AI to write unique content that a plagiarism detector probably wouldn’t flag, but AI programs can’t actually incorporate any new information or opinions about a topic into their content.

Instead, they essentially repeat what others have already written in a new format. While this degree of functionality might be good enough for an AI program to write a short, basic description of something like a well-documented historical event, it would be insufficient for an academic paper discussing the historicity of different accounts of that event. University papers require complex analysis and a lot of nuances, which AI just cannot currently replicate, so students will be stuck writing their own papers for the foreseeable future.

How Will AI Impact Your Workplace?

Emerging AI technologies have the potential to make your workers’ jobs easier by automating mundane tasks. For example, if your organization operates a storefront and needs a high volume of product descriptions, then you can streamline the process by running the descriptions through the right AI writer. Still, you’ll probably need someone to define the project’s parameters and edit the program’s work once it has finished this relatively basic task. No matter what industry you’re in, you should not expect to ever take the human element out of your operations.

How Should Your Company Adopt New Technologies?

Hearing the immense fanfare about AI in the workplace, you might feel like you need to incorporate AI into your organization as soon as possible. However, it’s important not to be too hasty when adopting new technologies. You don’t want to waste your organization’s precious resources, so you need to identify a strong use case, find a product that fits your specific needs, and only purchase technologies from reputable companies that provide sufficient training and customer support.

People and Technology Work Better Together

New AI technologies are not ready to convincingly write a student’s essay or replace the modern worker. However, good AI programs can greatly augment an employee’s abilities and improve their workplace performance. You always want to stay updated on the ever-changing role of technology in the workplace, so make sure to check out our other guides on AI, workplace efficiency, and entrepreneurship.

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Growth Strategies Uncategorized

How Do Affirmations Work?

Affirmations
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If you’ve read a self-help book, it probably advised you to perform daily affirmations. Most people are familiar with positive affirmations, but if you haven’t used them, doing so may seem awkward. Telling yourself that you are amazing might be weird, but it can help you feel more positive. Affirmations are one of the principles of success. Here’s how they work. 

What are Positive Affirmations? 

Positive affirmations are positive declarations that people use to counteract negative or useless thoughts. Practicing positive affirmations is easy. The only thing that you need to do is select a phrase and repeat it in your head. 

There are many reasons to use positive affirmations. For instance, you can choose one for: 

• Motivation
• Encouraging positive life changes 
• A self-esteem boost 

If your go-to is negative self-talk, reset this subconscious pattern with positive affirmations. 

The Psychology that Supports Positive Affirmations 

One of the main theories that supports positive affirmations is the self-affirmation theory. Researchers have conducted studies testing the theory that humans can maintain their sense of self-integrity using positive self-talk. 

Self-integrity is a person’s apparent ability to manage moral results and respond appropriately when it’s being threatened. 

There are three main pieces that support self-affirmation theory. The first one is that when a person uses self-affirmation, they’ll maintain a comprehensive narrative about themselves. Under this section of the theory, people are moral, flexible and able to adjust to different situations. 

The second piece of the theory is that your ability to maintain your self-identity does not require perfection. Instead, you need to see yourself as competent and satisfactory in the areas of your life that you value. 

The third part of the theory is that people maintain their self-integrity when they act in positive ways. When you’re using a self-affirmation, you aren’t saying a phrase like “I am a good instructor” because you want praise. You’ll be saying it because you desire that type of praise for actions that are in line with one of your personal values. 

Tips for Making Your Positive Affirmations Effective 

Positive affirmations are often effective in the workplace. This is especially true of hybrid workforces. You can use them to help your employees manage their insecurities and negative thought patterns, helping them reach better work results. 

Consider sharing positive workplace culture quotes. Don’t use these quotes at random. Make sure that you know how to use positive workplace culture quotes. The best time to use these kinds of quotes is when you’re setting new work goals. 

Implement positive affirmations at the beginning of each work week. This could help both you and your staff feel more self-assured about the next project. 

While you might not be able to get rid of the Monday blues, positive affirmations are the perfect way to inspire your workforce. Affirmations may even inspire your workers like coffee does. They could energize your staff and help them focus on their week. 

Personalizing Your Personal Affirmations 

Principles of success include embracing personal affirmations. Create a personal affirmation that speaks to your management style. If you need help developing one or guidance on how to use your personal affirmations consistently, contact me at the Productivity Intelligence Institute. 

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Growth Strategies

Goal Setting Can Motivate Performance

Goal Setting
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Setting Goals to Improve Performance

Smart entrepreneurs are always searching for growth strategies that will benefit their businesses. Working toward goals has been popular since Edwin Locke suggested the Goal-Setting Theory of Motivation in the 1960s. Continued research has improved the application of this technique and developed a body of best practices for goal setting in the workplace.

How Goal-Setting Improves Performance

In the brain, working toward goals involves the intersection of motivation and will. A well-structured objective promotes something that would not happen without extra effort.

Attaining a goal stimulates the dopaminergic reward system, giving a sense of pleasure. This reward process is powerful enough that the brain will rewire itself to focus on attaining the goal.

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Choosing the Right Type of Goal

The sense of reward that comes with attaining a goal requires starting with the right objective. Trying to make goals out of routine tasks is rarely successful. Instead, workplace goals should be clear, challenging, and purposeful.

Specific and Clear

It is easier for employees to work toward a successful outcome if they can visualize it. Goals should be concrete and measurable. Specificity allows employees to develop strategies for attaining goals and offers benchmarks to measure progress.

Challenging but Attainable

When you assign a goal, it should reflect your understanding of the capabilities of the employee. A well-designed goal will not be out of reach but should involve some stretching. The challenge of a task is part of what creates interest and focus.

Mission-Oriented and Purposeful

You should be able to relate goals to the overall purpose of your business. Feeling like they are contributing to the business’s success gives them greater ownership over the task. The goal is no longer just about a personal challenge. It also benefits the broader organization.

Supporting Your Team’s Goals

As a manager, you have more to do than designate goals. You will want to keep track of progress and offer support that will lead your team to success.

Set the Stage for Success

Failure is one of the risks of goal-setting. If meeting the goal becomes too complicated or stressful, it can hurt morale. Just as success leads to a sense of reward, failing to meet an objective feels like a penalty.

You want to know your team members have the resources they need for a successful outcome. This preparation may include investing in upgraded software or making training available to improve skills.

Offer Meaningful Feedback

Objectives that deserve to be formal goals will take time to achieve. Offering regular feedback to your staff shows that you are paying attention. It also provides an opportunity to evaluate progress, discover friction points, and make plans to alleviate them.

The Power of Choice

A sense of autonomy is critical in successful goal-setting. Employees are more likely to stay engaged with the challenge if they feel like they could choose to accept it. When a goal becomes another assignment, the staff will treat it as routine work.

A Partner for Entrepreneurial Growth

Productivity Intelligence Institute seeks to help entrepreneurs develop and implement growth strategies for success. If you need help achieving your business goals, contact us today.

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Growth Strategies

Can A Growth Mindset Be Taught

Growth Mindset
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Seven Steps for Promoting a Growth Mindset at Your Business

Many organizations operate from a fixed mindset. They hire employees to fill specific roles with little or no expectation of change. One of the most effective growth strategies involves moving from this static model to embrace a culture centered on progress.

A growth mindset assumes that improvement is always possible with enough effort and practice, a natural fit in the entrepreneurial world. Workplaces that focus on positive evolution will be more creative and productive. However, developing a growth mindset takes intentional action.

1. Embrace Challenges

A growth-centered workplace recognizes that challenges promote engagement. As a leader, you can set goals for individuals and teams that require extra effort. This goal-setting process must be well-planned. You want to set objectives that are hard enough to cause some frustration but not so difficult that they become demoralizing.

The people who find the greatest success in life and those who achieve their dreams certainly have one thing in common. They know how to attract the resources they need to succeed.

2. Encourage Curiosity

As employees grow in their skills and knowledge, they may see new ways to handle old problems or new directions for the organization. Allow this curiosity to inspire creative solutions. You never know where the path might lead.

3. Acknowledge Effort

The growth mindset takes advantage of the neuroplasticity of the brain. Challenging tasks and novel ideas form new neural connections and expansion. When employees struggle to reach their goals, they are expanding their minds. The process becomes as important as the goal in a growth mindset culture.

4. Offer and Accept Feedback

Meaningful feedback is an essential part of developing a growth culture. People with this mindset are not averse to constructive criticism. They know that your observations will help them improve.

As a leader, you must also be willing to accept feedback from your staff. A growth mindset culture breeds creativity, and you may be surprised at the insights your employees bring when they look at the organization from a different point of view.

5. Model Graceful Failure

A real challenge runs the risk of failure. Your staff will look at your example to see if they are truly free to make mistakes as part of the process. If you panic when something goes wrong, it will limit the potential for growth in the organization. Employees should accept failure as an opportunity to evaluate and develop new strategies.

6. Praise the Process

The growth mindset takes a holistic approach to project management. The steps along the way to successful completion are also platforms for learning. When a project is done, the team should examine the entire process to look for friction points and see how they might become more efficient.

7. Celebrate Growth

When you see signs of growth, acknowledge the effort and share the news. Your people should know when a staff member develops a new skill or accomplishes a goal. Creative people in the organization will find new ways to put these abilities to good use.

Your Partner for Entrepreneurial Growth

The growth mindset is one of several growth strategies we promote at the Productivity Intelligence Institute. Our goal is to help entrepreneurs improve their organizations and gain success. If you need help taking your business to the next level, feel free to reach out to us.

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Growth Strategies

What Goal Setting Implies In Strategic Management

Goal Setting
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Goals are one of the most important growth strategies in management. Businesses benefit from setting goals in many different ways. Keep in mind that creating effective goals takes time. Also, setting them is a minimal part of what will need to be done to reach them.

Why Goal Setting is Important

Strategic goal setting gives a business and its workers objectives that bring them together. These goals should inspire workers and keep everyone heading down the right path.

In a business, managers should help employees coordinate their tasks. If employees share goals, it will help you keep several projects moving toward completion. When a business uses goal-setting strategies, it may inspire workers to perform at a higher level. Be sure to set goals that are challenging but not overwhelming.

Growth strategies will help you make sure that your staff completes their work on time. This will ensure that your company:

• Meets its deadlines
• Makes the most of market opportunities
• Provides high-quality customer service

How to Set Goals

To set goals, ask questions like:

• What customer need is the company attempting to meet?
• Why is the company attempting to meet the need?
• How is the company going to meet the need?
• What are the company’s risks, strengths, opportunities, and weaknesses?

Use these questions to develop realistic goals. Goals are more than wishful thinking. They are specific objectives that are realistic, quantifiable, and on a timeline. Think of goals like stair steps that lead to a particular mission. Goals turn into the link that brings your mission to fruition.

Be flexible with your goals to modify them in real time. Goals should not be stagnant. Instead, keep them dynamic and developing.

Types of Strategic Goals

Goal-setting strategies may consist of short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals. You can direct them toward various objectives. For instance, you may need to set a financial goal to reach particular monthly, quarterly, or yearly profits.

You might want to set human resource goals like improving team connections or increasing awareness of team diversity. Public relations goals may be something like increasing brand recognition or improving goodwill in certain communities.

When you set goals, it could help you assess the performance of your staff. Consider developing employee goals that support your company’s objectives. You can then measure the performance of your employees against the individual goals that you’ve established.

How the Brain Reacts to Goal Setting

The section of the human brain that needs optimal processing conditions is the prefrontal cortex. This part of the brain takes care of complex problem-solving. It is also the area that learns. The prefrontal cortex recognizes the value of taking action.

When you set goals, your brain is assessing which ones to prioritize. For instance, you might give a list of tasks to one of your employees, but if one task is for the CEO, then the employee is likely to prioritize that task. You can use this to reach your objectives.

Help with Goal Setting in Strategic Management

Goal setting in strategic management will help you keep your team focused and inspired. If you need help, contact me at the Productivity Intelligence Institute.

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Reduce Stress

How To Reduce Stress Without Medication

Reduce Stress
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Most of us experience anxiety during new or stressful situations. This may include public speaking engagements, during job interviews or when you’re on a first date. This is situational anxiety that fades as soon as you’re out of the situation. If you experience feelings of worry, dread or fear that never leaves you, then you’re likely one of the country’s 40 million adults who have an anxiety disorder. 

The great news is that you don’t have to continue experiencing the feelings of anxiety. The less great news is that your doctor may want to treat your anxiety with medication. If you don’t want to take medication for your anxiety, try one or more of these three ways to reduce stress without medication. 

1. Begin a Regular Exercise Routine 

When you exercise regularly, it can manage anxiety symptoms. In fact, for some people, it could take the place of other types of treatment. Exercise releases endorphins. It also improves your confidence and helps you feel more comfortable in social situations. 

You don’t have to workout every day to experience the anxiety reducing benefits of exercise. However, if you decide to try exercise to treat your anxiety, be sure to workout at least five times a week. 

2. Change Your Diet 

Diet changes may decrease your anxiety. Consider decreasing your intake of caffeine. Avoid ingesting caffeine later in the day or right before going to bed. Caffeine is a stimulator, which means that it speeds up the activity that’s happening in the brain and in the body, causing anxiety. 

Drink less alcohol. People sometimes self-medicate their anxiety by drinking alcohol. Some drinkers confirm that they experience fewer anxiety symptoms by reducing their intake of alcohol. 

Track your diet to determine if your anxiety is higher after you eat particular foods. According to a study performed in 2019, participants who had more sugar and saturated fat in their diet experienced more anxiety.

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3. Practice Deep Breathing 

Breathing exercises are often helpful for anxiety sufferers. They can be especially beneficial if you hyperventilate when you feel anxious. Try exercises like: 

• Square breathing 
• Lengthened breathing 
• One nostril breathing 

For square breathing, exhale. Then, inhale for a count of four. Hold your breath for a count of four and pause for a count of four. Repeat these steps five times. 

Lengthened breathing involves counting your regular breath to see how long it is, and then, lengthening it by breathing in for additional counts. Try lengthened breathing for about 10 minutes. 

With nostril breathing, plug one side of your nose while inhaling, and then, plug that side and exhale out of the other nostril. Continue by breathing in through the nostril that you just exhaled through and exhaling out of the one you plugged first. Repeat these steps five or 10 times. 

Anxiety has a useful purpose for humans, which is to protect us from harm. Since humans are no longer animal prey, we experience anxiety from things like being left out of a friend gathering or failing at a work task. 

Reduce Stress Without Medication 

You may have to experiment with a few different techniques to reduce stress without medication. Exercise, diet changes and focused breathing are a few ways to eliminate stress naturally.