Use of visualization in mitigating professional stresses of middle-ranking managers

The problem of mitigating stress in the companies gains more relevance, since the amount of complex, problematic situations, changes in external environment significantly increases and impacts performance of the employees and competitiveness of the company. Middle-ranking managers experience severe stress. The complexity of mitigating stress is substantiated by the need for individual approach, which is would change the overall attitude towards a stressful situation. It is also a resource-consuming process from the perspective of time and finances. The optimal method in this regards is the visualization technique, which allows each participant to work through “their personal stress” even in a group format. Examination of visualization as a form of working with the cognitive construct “stress” has proven its effectiveness: the respondents began experiencing less stress, and thus les frustration, anxiety, aggressiveness, and more mental activation, interest, and comfort. The overall attitude towards stress has also changed: it ceased to cause fear, anxiety and negative emotions. It has also become easier for the respondents to handle stress that cannot be omitted. Visualization of the cognitive construct “stress” allowed inscribing in into the internal worldview as a safer one. All of the above resulted in improvement of the work performance, optimization of relations between management and employees. The novelty consists in proving the efficiency of visualization technique for working through negative cognitive constructs in the context of personnel training.