Poise is the capacity to remain calm under pressure & keep your composure. Maintaining composure in demanding circumstances is crucial, something so many of us fail to do. It could be time for some self-reflection if you’ve noticed that stressful events cause you to become agitated, frustrated, or anxious. In such cases, you need to follow Ways to Maintain Your Poise.
When we lack composure & poise, we often respond in a way that is disproportionate to the situation. Too much worry or anxiety about potential outcomes might cause unwarranted concerns & doubts about our capabilities and the future.
Overreacting frequently results in a full-fledged panic attack and other unfavorable feelings like irritation, wrath, resentment, or melancholy.
Maintain Your Poise, No Matter What
1. Take Time
When feeling anxious, taking a step back & focusing only on your breathing is one of the useful Ways to Maintain Your Poise.
The brain needs oxygen to process emotions. Because you tend to breathe more quickly & shallowly when you’re stressed, your brain gets less oxygen when you’re in the “fight or flight” state.
You can stop your body’s automatic response to a stressful circumstance by forcing yourself to take a few deep breaths before responding. Inhaling deeply & slowly exhaling anchors you to the present moment and helps you pause your thinking.
Your thoughts become more logical as the brain receives more oxygen. Adrenaline rushing into your veins naturally raises your heart rate, but breathing slows it down. You’ll feel more composed, graceful, & able to slow down as you let your breath.
2. Gather Your Thoughts
You must force yourself to view your situation favorably if you want to develop a sense of self-control. Focus on the solutions rather than the issues.
This enables you to maintain a positive attitude under pressure. Self-talk is a fantastic tool for helping oneself to decompress & resume logical thinking.
The brain reacts to solution-focused thinking right away. Defeat or sorrow are the typical responses to challenges. Remind yourself that there are answers to every problem, & then start imagining what they might be. For the best results, take a moment to write your ideas down.
3. Try To Set An Example
Remembering you always have an audience is one answer to How to Maintain Your Poise whenever you are in a leadership position. As their leader, your team members & other coworkers look to you for a certain amount of honesty and tenacity. You serve as their model.
Train yourself to remember that, in all situations, but especially in high-pressure ones that need resilience, intelligence, & the capacity to maintain poise, you are being observed as an example of how to behave.
Knowing you have an audience helps you to control your erratic emotions & motivates you to exercise self-control under pressure.
4. Try To Imitate Your Idol
If you are having trouble coming up with a solution, think about the mentors you have in your life & generate what you believe they would do or what they would suggest if they were in your situation. Every great leader ought to have been led by a great leader.
By imagining what your role model would do or how they would approach your current difficulty, you will unintentionally start to step outside of your own reactive emotions & into the mind of someone else, where creative ideas will start to emerge.
5. Brainstorm
Be proactive while you’re under pressure. Develop the habit of asking inquiries aloud. Quick ideas start to emerge as you start the natural process of brainstorming as you ask yourself, “What is the best way to fix or overcome this problem?” Brainstorming with your team is much better.
Things start to calm down as you all pool your minds & exchange thoughts, ideas, and solutions since the emphasis has shifted from being caught in the problem to finding ways around or around it.
By removing the strain from your thoughts, brainstorming enables you to be elegant in your attempts to improve things & find Ways to Maintain Your Poise.
6. Visualize The Bigger Picture
The hardest thing to resist when under pressure is to catastrophize your circumstance & see every terrible scenario that may result from a failure at this very moment. Develop the ability to see the current stressful circumstance as a unique or isolated problem.
This will make it easier for you to resist the impulse to imagine possible future events. This aids in keeping your attention on the current problem.
Remember that this problem is not a big concern in the grand scheme of things for your future. It’s just time to reimagine, reorganize, rethink, make adjustments, & start over.
7. Collect Lessons From Past Experience
You may feel apprehensive if you’ve previously failed or have had a lot of failures in the past. It can make you feel even more anxious to be terrified of failing again.
When you’re feeling worried, you may make an effort to recall or draw lessons from your prior experiences. That’s an excellent solution to How to Maintain Your Poise.
Play back your previous accomplishments & disappointments in your thoughts. Imagine both your successes & failures. What was your response? What did you discover?
Playback any embarrassing incidents or circumstances you may have faced in your memory. What have you discovered about them? What can you do to ensure you don’t repeat the same errors?
8. Stay Focused on Your Goals
You risk losing focus if you are very worried & frightened about potential outcomes. A lot of thoughts & feelings are likely to be racing through your head while you’re worried, and they tend to move through your head considerably more quickly.
You may start to feel worried & panicky if you start to worry about how your performance will turn out. This will make you feel more anxious & cause you to lose focus on your objective.
Try to remain focused on your goal in order to retain your composure & prevent your performance from being hampered by your worried thoughts and sensations.
Final Words
You may thrive in both your personal & professional life if you have the capacity to maintain your poise under pressure. If you lack poise, you can find yourself becoming overly stressed or nervous about how something will turn out & lose focus on your objective.
Several Ways to Maintain Your Poise & to prevent your worried thoughts and sensations from detracting from your performance have been discussed here. Remember one thing; you can only worsen a challenging situation by not being able to maintain your poise.
FAQs
Q: I seem to have a panic attack in a challenging situation; what should I do?
A: A professional can help you if you are having frequent episodes of panic attacks.
Q: Are there any books that can help to maintain my poise?
A: Many books are available on that topic. Here are some of them:
- Polish Your Poise with Madame Chic by Jennifer L. Scott.
- Poise: How to Attain It by D. Starke.
- The Confidence Gap: A Guide to Overcoming Fear and Self-Doubt by Russ Harris.
- Bless Your Heart, Tramp: And Other Southern Endearments by Celia Rivenbark.
- Grits (Girls Raised in the South) Guide to Life by Deborah Ford.
- Finding Your Niche & Maintaining Your Pastoral Poise: Thoughts for the New Pastor by Rev. RK Shorter.
Q: Why maintaining poise is necessary?
A: Life often comes with unforeseen challenges, roadblocks & disappointments. To face & conquer them, maintaining poise is necessary.
