The De-Pressurized Employee
It's not like you can puncture a little hole in the leg like a blow-up toy and deflate the stress of an employee whose job-related anxiety has swollen to the size of a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade float, but you like to think you can, in a way. Or, at least that's how seemed for a while when stress management seminars were just the thing you thought they needed. Have these programs fallen out of favor? I haven't heard about them in a while.
No one's offered any to me, or any of my co-workers, anyway, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything since we're just journalists around here--not one of the more cushy professions, and it's a calling or avocation, really, more than a profession, so why would we be stressed out?
So, I was curious as to whether any corporate trainers out there have stress management classes in the works, and if so, what they involve? I guess, while we're on the subject, I should ask a question I probably should have begun with in the first place: What are they, anyway?
What I picture is a psychologist, or trainer with psychological training (on par with Dr. Phil, only better?), first asking participants to offer up work-related situations that stress them out, and then dispensing invaluable coping strategies like prioritizing, speaking up rather than bottling in and lots and lots of deep breaths. I also can picture workers dividing into small groups to chat up the ins and outs of their tension-filled lives and, if the company actually wants to do something about the much ballyhooed stress, I would suppose they'd want to have the Dr. Phil-in-the-corporate u-room take notes so executives can make changes to the way employees are managed.
Is any of that remotely right? If it is right, is it good? I think if I had a mountain of work on my desk waiting to be trekked up, what would be stressful is another appointment (like a stress management seminar?) keeping me from making an initial boot dent up that manilla folder slope. I'd start picturing very stressful photocopy paper avalanches.
I designed a stress management course (2 hrs, instructor-led, classroom) a few years back. Basically, it was an overview of cognitive theory and explained how - no matter how it feels inside - an action and your subsequent reaction to it are not inextricably linked, foregone conclusions that are out of your control.
Instead, our reactions are merely conditioned responses that we have developed and strengthened over the years into deep patterns that feel inextricably linked. Eventually, people begin to believe that the stressors in their lives are far beyond their control, and that they are helpless to stop them. Well, of course they are; but you don't have to *react* to them the same way.
The training focused on techniques for recognizing how those patterns become habits, and how we strengthen those habits by constantly provide more evidence to justify our responses. We then offered some techniques for recognizing and avoiding those patterns.
I really don't know if it worked or not. I know the assessments all came back with positive results, but changing years of behavioral and cognitive patterns strikes me as something that requires a little more than a two-hour course. Which may be why courses like that have become less popular...
Posted by: A.D. Detrick | October 13, 2006 at 01:47 AM