Tips on how to bounce back after a highly stressful event

14th June 2010 -- We can only imagine what Robert Green has had going through his mind after letting that goal in. Goalkeeping is his job, and he made a mistake at work. Luckily most of our workplaces don’t have thousands of vuvazelas blaring out and the eyes of millions of people in the stadium and around the world, looking on.

The Health and Safety Executive estimates the cost to society of work-related stress to be around £4 billion each year. 13.5 million working days were lost to stress in 2007/08.

There’s no turning back the clock, but what can Green do after such a highly stressful workplace event? How can his boss (Fabio) and co-workers (Gerrard, Rooney, Terry..) help him?

We spoke to stress management consultant Jenny Edwards, a director of the International Stress Management Association, and co-ordinator of National Stress Awareness Day, to find out.

High profile error

“Anything that’s high profile like this is really in the extraordinary circumstances remit because much of it is unpredictable and you can’t plan for every eventuality,” Edwards says, “And if you look at stress in its widest content, one of the HSE [Health and safety Executive] risk factors is ‘control’, but there are elements of that position [England goalkeeper] that you can’t control. By definition it’s going to be a stressful place to be.”

Edwards says the team would have help in coping with stress - and failures.

“They probably do train themselves pretty well to be resilient to cope with these errors because they’re almost an inbuilt cost or part of the job. You have to know you are going to let some goals in. Some of them will be dramatic and totally unpreventable and some of them will be a bit of a faux pas or near miss.”

Team responsibility

She says no one should be singled out, as the end result wasn’t just in one players hands - or in this case - not in his hands.

“Errors are made by all of the players lots of times. Three strikers missed an open goal but no one has harped on about their misses, but if they’d got their goals, the miss that Robert Green had made would have been marginalised.

“You have to look at the whole picture - and that’s the same in any workplace - rather than focusing on one incident that may be disproportionate. It’s the same scenario when a penalty is missed and they ‘sky’ it, yet nine times out of 10 they would score a good penalty. Under certain amounts of pressure some people will miss penalties. That’s the nature of the game.”

Edwards says it isn’t just star players who have a lot riding on their every move. “It’s like if you work in a power station, you’re working with enormous potential for disaster, but you’re trained to manage it and the risk factors are not as intense, because it is what you are trained for.

“I think their training and their ability to be resilient and pick themselves up is part and parcel of the job role they take on board, whether that’s as a goalkeeper or any other area of a workplace where they are in the firing line when things go wrong.”