Wanna keep your cool under pressure? Read on for stress-busting tips!

This week I read an article on LinkedIn from a highly experienced communications professional. She was talking about the only time she felt her work was noticed was when people picked up mistakes.

She would regularly deliver high quality work that hit the mark with no feedback, but if material went out with typos or a small error, she would hear about it!

It brought on the nerves for me straight away and was a visceral reminder of the feeling you get when something slips under your radar before your work is published and stakeholders are not backwards in telling you about it.

In my experience, these errors don’t happen because of sloppiness or laziness, they are a by-product of the fast-paced environment communications professionals often find ourselves in.

It’s not uncommon to be up against a deadline, waiting patiently for approvers to tick off your work and then needing to rapidly incorporate their feedback in time for a journalist’s deadline or a regular newsletter’s send time.

Expectations on the quality of our work is high which can certainly create pressure. Here are some suggestions for how you can keep calm in these situations and deliver quality work.

Get clear on your priorities - focus on what’s most important. Create a list of everything you need to do and prioritise from most to least important. This will show you what needs your attention immediately and what can wait until after the storm has settled. If you’re not sure, have your best guess and test this with your manager.

Lean on processes and checklists - When you’re working at pace it can be easy to forget key steps or miss small mistakes. If you have a regular process to lean on it will help you pick up on things you might otherwise miss.

When it’s not a crazy time, create a checklist of everything you need to do before you publish a social post/distribute a newsletter/send a response to a journalist. When you are up against a deadline, you can calmly run through it to ensure you don’t miss any key steps. I recommend that one of your steps is getting a colleague to proofread your work!!

Accept that mistakes will happen - As hard as you try, mistakes will happen from time to time. It’s important that you try to avoid them, but when they do occur don’t dwell. Acknowledge that they have happened and then focus on how you can keep things moving forward.