ARSENAL stress resilience assessment

Stress and the leader’s brain

It can sometimes seem as if stress is a synonym for life: the morning commute, a boss piling on one more deadline, a suddenly sick kid. It is easy to go from calm to overwhelmed, that slightly breathless state that makes it hard to think and function clearly, and raises the odds of snapping at whoever happens to be nearby.

Positive stress triggers motivation and the desire to accomplish goals. Chronic negative stress does the opposite. It impairs cognitive performance, raises cortisol, blood sugar and blood pressure, weakens the immune system and affects memory. Leaders under that kind of load lose the ability to make quick, effective decisions.

Stress and decision-making

Leaders make decisions all day, every day. Too much stress cuts off access to the two things good decisions depend on, emotional intelligence and cognitive ability. When stress goes up, the ability to use them goes down, and poor decisions cost jobs and profit and, eventually, the leader’s own position.

ARSENAL is designed to interrupt that downward spiral. It helps leaders use emotional intelligence and cognitive ability in tandem, so the quality of their thinking holds when the pressure is highest.

The seven practices

ARSENAL is a valid and reliable instrument that measures overall stress as well as how you are doing in each of the seven best practices for health and performance:

• Awareness: noticing your stress signals early, before they run the day.
• Rest: sleep and genuine recovery, not just time away from the desk.
• Support: the people you can lean on, and whether you actually do.
• Exercise: regular movement as a physiological reset.
• Nutrition: what you fuel a demanding day with.
• Attitude: the outlook you bring to setbacks and uncertainty.
• Learning: staying curious and growing, which protects against rigidity under pressure.

Practiced together, and widened by mindfulness and meditation, the seven practices are the foundation of stress resilience. The assessment plus follow-up work acts as a resilience building block: a kind of stress immunity you build deliberately.

What it helps you do

• Reduce stress and stay calmer, with more control over your emotional responses.
• Improve performance and increase your ability to tolerate stress.
• Make better decisions under pressure.
• Build work-life balance and stress resilience.
• Improve overall health.

What you receive

• An online assessment that takes minutes to complete.
• A spider graph showing your results in relation to each other, with bar graphs that drill into each area.
• Numerical results that pinpoint your score on each practice on a 1 to 10 scale, with a narrative explanation.
• A systems approach to building and maintaining stress resilience, with practical tips for immediate improvement.
• A personal development plan with step-by-step instructions, reviewed in the debrief.