A strong reason for being stressed at work is the conflict that some work creates with your personal values.
In my time, I joined a police force, and paperwork was there, but kept to a practical minimum. Then the CPS took over, and the amount of paper required for a simple case went up from one page to six or more. When I finally left in 2019, Lee Child would have had trouble writing novels as big as the CPS wanted for the simplest assault.
So my value of ‘arresting bad guys’ was compromised by ‘writing a lot of things about bad guys’. If I wasn’t out and about catching villains, I got bored/stressed.
And bad guys included drug users. So when the police started giving them needles (what, potential dangers to searching officers, I hear you think) my values were again conflicted.
And if I’d been tasked with ‘allowing’ terrorist sympathisers to march on the Cenotaph while patriots were to be arrested for defending it – I honestly think I’d have walked off plot and resigned.
Things changed, but my values didn’t change with them.
You may suggest that I should have adapted – but that’s not really how values and integrity work.
Integrity means you believe in something enough to stand for it. Values are different for everyone, and two people may interpret the same values ‘word’ differently, but they are important to you, to me, to everyone. Granted, you may have to suppress your beliefs for perfectly good reason, but suppressing them and acting in conflict with them are two different beasts.
When you feel stressed, consider this question:
What is it about this stressful situation that is in conflict with what I believe?
You may find the answer and act in such a way as to walk away from it, challenge it, or grudgingly comply.
But there is a second question you could ask.
What about this situation could I interpret as being totally in keeping with my values?
And here is the paperwork argument. An excellent piece of form filling could be the difference between a potential offender getting off scott-free, or charges being brought and even a guilty plea being offered.
In which case, the value ‘arrest (and prosecute) bad guys’ is met through that annoying activity.
What do you find you have to do that conflicts with what you really want to be doing, and how can you deal with that conflict?
It might just mean reinterpretation of the activity in the context of what you really believe in.
And if the genuine answer is, “It never will”, start looking for a way to escape ever having to do it again.
For more, buy the Book.
Police Time Management 