Question

You must come up with a fresh episode every week to continue broadcasting. Not only that, your program has been loved for long time. That means people have high expectations and you need to satisfy them. I’m curious how you can overcome such a big burden every week, and how you manage your stress? Can you please share your own stress management tips?

Answer

In the beginning, I used to exercise. But I have no time for exercise nowadays.

Some people tell me that my workload should be reduced since I now have more staff under me. But I became busier as more staff came to work. I was given the new task of managing people.

This is a kind of job in which we need to work together as a team, so it is important not to hurt each other’s feelings.

It wasn’t so easy giving good explanations about the need for doing a certain task and persuading them to do it.

Of course, I often got stress. But in the meantime, I came up with a new habit. I became forgetful. I easily forget things. This might be how I deal with my stress.

Especially after big issues hit me, people around me are more concerned and ask me, “Are you really okay?”

But they are not big deals to me.

I don’t need to consume my energy in things that have already happened.

What’s next on my agenda is quite obvious so I need to sort it out quickly and move on to the next.

As I experienced many of the big issues, they rather helped me to have peace of mind.

We do preparations for recordings. Often times, the actual products do not show how much we had to prepare for them. I say to my staff, “We did our best so it’s not our fault.”

Then, people working together become more helpful.

If we really did our best without regrets, we could accept the outcomes, no matter how those outcomes came out because that’s the most and best we could come up with.

An episode is aired, and then we prepare for the next one. If we found something to improve, we could work on that and move on to the next project.

I used the term ‘forgetful’ but I mean I try to quickly forget about what has already happened and that becomes a driving force to move on and move forward to the next job.

Source: Contents Korea, Speech by Director Kim Tae-Ho