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Are You Having Trouble Coping with Workplace Stress?
"So did I!"Let me tell you a little story about coping with workplace stress …The summer after I graduated from college, I received an academic scholarship to attend law school. I was burnt out from college (I hadn't been coping with workplace stress!), and unsure if a life practicing law was what I really wanted. What I really wanted to do was take a year or two and go abroad (I majored in foreign languages in college), teaching English or doing whatever I had to do to make ends meet, and figure out what I really wanted to do with myself. However my law school would not keep my scholarship offer open indefinitely. I had to take it or leave it. So I bit the bullet, took my scholarship, and went straight to law school from college. I don’t know if you know this, but law school is a pretty darn stressful place ... Your grade in 90% of the classes you take in law school is entirely based on a single final exam at the end of the semester – one single exam, often several hours in length. That’s it. Those final exam grades are based on strict curve, meaning that you are in direct competition with your classmates for the few “A’s” available in any given class. On top of this you have a cut-throat student body of “Type A” personalities willing to do just about anything to “beat” their classmates. It was in this pressure cooker of an environment where I got some real first-hand education about how, and more importantly how NOT to approach coping with workplace stress. After I survived … *ahem* … I mean, graduated law school I had the "honor" of participating in the most stressful ritual of a young lawyer’s professional life, the Bar Exam. The Bar Exam takes not hours, but days! It tests every area of law that you have ever studied, and it is completely “closed book”. In other words, the only things you can take into the room are your pencils and your brain. The worst part was the pencils … I had not actually “written” a test by hand since high school. I would come out of the exam at the end of each day and my right hand would be a cramped claw! It is long. It is grueling. It is scary … and more than anything, it is stressful. In fact, in many ways it is less a legal test and more of a stress management test. Indeed I remember being surprised by how many excellent legal scholars failed the test, while their less academic but more calm and composed classmates passed. After passing the exam and being admited to the Bar, I chose not to practice law, but to go to work for a major Hollywood Talent Agency. If you don’t know anything about that environment, go rent “Swimming with Sharks” (a great Kevin Spacey movie) or watch an episode of HBO’s “Entourage” – it makes law school look like a monastery! The 70+ hour work weeks, the insane personalities, the ever-shifting business landscape, the screaming, the constant expectations to outperform “yesterday”, the Blackberry surgically attached to your body … it’s all true! I still work in the agency business in Hollywood, and suffice it to say, I have “been there and done that” when it comes to coping with workplace stress. When I talk about HARDCORE Stress Management™ I’m not parroting something I read in a text book somewhere … I’m speaking from experience. And if there is one thing I know from experience, it is that coping with workplace stress by trying to “reduce” stress or working on your “time management” skills is an approach doomed to failure. That approach ignores the basic realities of stress management – that stress is inevitable and that stress management must focus on the body.
If you want to better handle coping with workplace stress, get to work on practicing the techniques in my HARDCORE Stress Management™ program today.
What about Financial Stress?
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