Stress Management Resources And Links

This section contains a list of stress management resources and links to support the Happy Manager site. For your ease of use we have categorised these into:

Essential Reading and Further Reading.

Essential Reading

Dale Carnegie's timeless advice is a useful addition to any stress management resources and focuses on how to eliminate debilitating fear and worry from life and to embrace a worry-free future. This is an intensly practical book with lessons and real life stories to support the pragmatic advice. It covers such areas as:

• Eliminate fifty percent of business worries immediately
• Reduce financial worries
• Avoid fatigue -- and keep looking young
• Add one hour a day to your waking life
• Find yourself and be yourself -- remember there is no one else on earth like you!

It is a fascinating read written in the same pacey style as "How to win friends and influence people". It is filled with common sense advice, which all to commonly most of us tend to ignore!

• What you feel, wish and think are in harmony
• You have clear goals requiring appropriate responses
• The activity you are involved in provides immediate feedback (i.e. it is clear how well you are doing the activity)
• Your skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just manageable (high challenge matched with high skills)

For the manager Csikszentmihalyi presents research suggesting three reasons people resent their jobs:

• The job is pointless…it does no good to anyone
• The job is boring and routine and provides no variety or challenge
• Inability to get along with their boss or colleagues, particularly when expectations are too high and contributions are not recognized.

Further Reading

Maslach & Leiter assert that burnout is not a matter of weakness or poor attitude in individual employees. Rather it is a problem of the social environment in the workplace caused by "major mismatches" between the nature of the person doing a job and the nature of the job itself. The greater the mismatch, the greater the potential for burnout.Below are some of the mismatches their research has revealed:

• Overloaded work schedule: Too little time and too few resources to accomplish the job.
• Lack of control: Reducing costs is primary over needs of clients or employees.
• Breakdown of community: Faster paced work destroys the sense of community among coworkers, which further disrupts our job performance.
• Unfair treatment of workers: If evaluations, promotions, and benefits are not applied fairly, the organization cannot be trusted by the employee.
• Conflict of values: Performing tasks we feel are unethical or which go against our personal values undermines our ability to believe in the worth of the work we do.

The book identifies three dimensions of burnout as exhaustion, cynicism, and ineffectiveness and includes useful strategies to address burnout in an organization. This book is a useful contribution to stress management resources.

A second book to address the issue of job burn out, compliments "The Truth about Burn out" in our stress management resources. Over coming job burnout has eight suggested steps to take, andJob burnout is something that doesn't simply go away — especially in a chaotic economy. It is a kind of job depression caused by feelings of powerlessness, the loss of control over one's work. The effect can be devastating. The victim dreads going to work. Productivity falls and life becomes increasingly difficult. Burnout is stressful, but it is not the same as stress.
The book looks at eight strategies to combat burnout:

• Pace yourself- shedding old habits
• Manage stress - performing closer to you peak more of the time.
• Build skills
• Develop social support
• Tailor the job to fit you
• Change jobs,
• Think powerfully
• Develop detatched concern

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