4 Steps Towards a Less Stressful Training Day

Stress limits you and stands in the way of success. When you are stressed, you do not think clearly and behave in ways that do not represent you as a person. Stress paralyzes you, makes you less productive, and affects your relationships with teammates and colleagues.

At FrontCore we know that the everyday life of someone who works with training is often filled with stress. Irrespective of whether you work on the administrative side of the training business or you are a training instructor, or even do both at the same time; you probably have more than enough to do!

How can you lessen stress in an everyday life where there is always a lot to do? In this blog post you will find 4 steps for achieving a less stressful course day!

4 steps to achieve a less stressful course day

1.  Create good eating and sleep habits

Sure, you’ve probably heard it before; proper food and adequate sleep are essential to the body’s stress regulation. Still, it is often exactly these things that stressed people do not make time for. In a stressful training day, it is easy to buy fast and unhealthy food and stay up in the evenings to work. This results in a vicious circle of stress, insomnia and low energy.

Turn the trend around! Just as bad habits can easily become a routine, good habits can also become a routine! By turning your eating habits around, you get more energy and increased concentration, thus you will work more efficiently. Therefore, you also do not have to stay up till late in the evening to work and you get enough sleep to feel refreshed and continue the good routine the next day.

PS: Proper food doesn’t have to be time consuming! Here you have some tips for quick and healthy everyday food! The chicken pot with vegetables is highly recommended!

2. Empty your mind and write things down on paper

How often do you think, “What should I remember?” This is a very common thought, and when you get enough of these thoughts, it’s no wonder you get stressed. Too many things to keep in mind often result in a thought chaos that is rarely a good thing.

By writing things down instead, you not only get your mind cleared, but you also get a much better overview, which makes it easier to relax.

There are many ways you can do this. Some people prefer to use the note app on their mobile phone, while others write things right into their calendar. In FrontCore, we are very pleased with the use of checklists. You can read about why we like checklists so much here.

3. Move

Like point 1, working out is something very many skip when everyday life is perceived as stressful. The fact is that exercise is one of the trickiest things you can do, even when the time doesn’t really reach. Did you know that physical exercise can cleanse the body of stress hormones? When the muscles in the body are put to use, the blood is cleansed for substances that are triggered in the body when we are stressed.

Physical activity does not mean two hours of vigorous strength training in the gym. Taking a walk or a 45-minute jog also helps lower the stress level. Everything is better than nothing!

4. Eliminate unnecessary time-thieves

One of the main reasons that many people experience stress at work is that the tasks are so many and/or time-consuming that there simply is not enough time in the working day to finish them. Either you end up with a nagging conscience over the things you don’t complete, or you have to work far beyond your capacity. Here are two things you can do to avoid this:

Automate routine tasks

Wouldn’t it be nice to avoid spending time on these tasks so that you could devote your attention to something a little more exciting?

Although routine tasks are often experienced as simple tasks, in many cases they are very time-consuming. They also require that you constantly walk around and remember them. Routine tasks can thus be a contributor to stress.

By automating tasks you do often, you can free up large amounts of time. Many tasks can easily be automated. An example of this is e-mails. Many training providers send out fixed e-mail messages both in advance and after the completion of courses. There is a lot of time and energy to save on email automation.

There are a number of different programs that allow you to automate mailings. MailChimp and HubSpot are amongst the best known. But none of them specialize in mailing for courses.

In FrontCore, we have created a routine module for this purpose. The routine module is part of our training management solution . Here you can easily set up automatic mailings for selected participants and/or instructors. Whether you want to make an email to attendees, to all participants who are on the waiting list or to the instructor or customer contact for one specific traning– We got you!

In the routine module you can set up the mailings for hours, days, months and years in advance and after the course. You can also attach files, which is very convenient if you want to send the training program or course certificate completely by itself. After setting up a routine in the routine module, this will ensure that the routine runs completely by itself, until the point at which you decide to end it.

Cut out programs that aren’t communicating with each other

This point is especially important for those who spend a lot of time on training administration. Many people who work with training management spend a lot of time doing extra work because they use different types of incompatible software.

Often different programs are used for managing participants, for billing, for e-mail broadcasts, for designing courses and competence certificates, for obtaining entries, for checklists and for analysis. When these programs do not speak together, a lot of time is wasted on data transfer and navigation between the various programs.

Try to find software that has many of the features you need and/or that can communicate with other softwares through, for example, APIs. This will save you a lot of time, and it will also be easier to lower your shoulders and relax.

Start stressing down today

What are you waiting for? With just 4 easy steps, you can make your day-to-day work easier. Take the first step towards a less stressful everyday life today!Please leave a comment in the comment section if you have any good tips for other training providers on how to make their training day more stress-free.