This course is intended for people whose organizations have just gone through a merger or acquisition, or where there has been a significant downsizing or dramatic reorganization, and who need an opportunity to address what those traumatic changes have had on them so that they can integrate them and deal with them effectively. This is an excellent course also for people employed in high-pressure jobs with long hours, frequent travel, demanding priorities, where the job incumbent feels periodically overwhelmed. This not a touchy-feely course. It teaches practical behavioral techniques for reducing stress and responding to it differently and effectively.

Complete Course Description

PURPOSE OF THE WORKSHOP: This workshop is designed to teach participants how to recognize the sources of stress in contemporary life, to learn the skills which allow them to respond better to those pressure points, and to construct a style of living and working which becomes increasingly stress-resistant.

The course is intended to help people deal with stress in these four ways:

  • We teach them what stress and stressful events really are.


  • We help them identify, with precision the stress-producing events that are common in most organizations.


  • We show them a variety of ways they can reduce those pressure points or eliminate them entirely.


  • We teach them how to create the high performance/low stress lifestyle most people find ultimately satisfying.
Content of the Workshop: Because the word “Stress” is so broadly applied and differently used in our society, we begin the workshop by defining carefully what it is. We spend some time developing these and related concepts:
  • Stress is an inherent and important part of living.


  • It is both a physical and psychological experience.


  • It comes about as the result of finding something potentially threatening in one’s environment. In this sense, Stress tends to be experienced negatively.


  • It can, however, also be experienced very positively, as it is whenever we are excited, exhilarated, or challenged by life.


  • It exhibits itself in the responses we make (some of them genetically inherited, many of them learned) when we try to reassert control over our lives.


  • It is these responses and the effect they have on us, much more than the triggering events that we list as “stressors”, that produce our life state when we assert that we are feeling stressed.
With all that as a baseline, we then cover these topics and issues in detail:
  • Recognizing the types, sources, and forms stress takes in contemporary life.


  • Analyzing one’s stress producers, and seeing how they compare with those of others in our society who do similar work.


  • Understanding the stress that comes from Change in rapidly changing companies; learning how people in those companies successfully adapt to the pace and speed of change.


  • Understanding our high personal needs for control, and the ways we collude in producing the levels of stress we wish to avoid.


  • Understanding our habits of perfectionism, and our periodic and subsequent feelings of not measuring up.


  • Analyzing our penchant for not setting reasonable limits in life.


  • Examining our beliefs and value systems that are sometimes out of whack with reality.


  • Managing the changes we experience, rather than feeling helplessly trapped by them.


  • Forming realistic and essentially positive views of our prospects.


  • Developing a bias toward action when we feel worried or anxious; taking responsibility for our problems.


  • Developing a deliberate, unhurried style of efficiency.


  • Letting go of things that aren’t working for us, no matter how much that violates our pet life theories.


  • Correcting our beliefs and re-directing our efforts when they are out of sync with our realities; learning how irrational beliefs frequently blow up small problems into major crises.


  • Finding our Stress Comfort Zone: defining the level of stress that matches what we can handle.


  • Developing coping mechanisms when our lives drift outside that comfort zone.


  • Examining a variety of contemporary stress reducers (such as exercise, meditation, progressive muscle relaxation, and the like) to determine their relative effectiveness for each participant.


  • Finding time for play and healthy diversion; making sure we don’t turn play and relaxation into more work.


  • Managing our best resources, especially time and money.


  • Learning how to be an on-the-spot problem solver.


  • Developing a long term plan for gradually evolving a stress-resistant and deeply satisfying life.
Methodology of the Workshop: Participants privately complete several questionnaires to identify their own stress producers and to analyze their response patterns when they work under pressure. We then teach concepts and techniques for each of the major stress issues identified above in very short lectures. Participants then get a chance to discuss and apply relevant skills in a variety of group or individual exercises. There are multiple opportunities to gather information and experiences from the instructor and from other participants, and to test out a variety of alternative coping mechanisms. The workshop is highly involving and participatory, and concludes with a final session in which participants devise their own formula for achieving peak performance under pressure.

Who and How Many Should Attend: Anyone who does managerial, professional, or technical work in fast-paced, contemporary organizations, who is frequently asked to do more with less, who operates in a deadline-driven world, who feels that the consequences of potential failure or lateness are substantial, who is motivated by a need to achieve and succeed, and who is at least occasionally debilitated by pressure will unquestionably benefit from this course.

Eighteen to twenty-four participants is the right class size.

Length of the Workshop: This workshop is one full day in length. We have lengthened it on occasion for some clients to accommodate their special learning objectives. We encourage inquiries about how and under what circumstances this was done and what outcomes that produced.

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