Coping with Stress
An in-house workshop

Our attitudes determine whether we’re stressed or not. We either see people and events in terms of challenges and opportunities or as misfortunes and calamities. There is always a choice. Coping With Stress addresses these issues head on. It focuses on the attitudes and skills that create either failure or success. When our attitudes shift, our stress is reduced, our actions change, and a peaceful and energetic vitality naturally emerges.

What is Stress? Simply put, stress results when we are pulled simultaneously in two opposing directions. At those moments the demands on our life exceed our ability to meet them and psychological and physiological feelings of stress are triggered. Stressors can be external, such as a sudden change in company expectations, or they can be the result of internal negative habits like habitual worrying.

Since our body doesn't discriminate between internal and external stressors at the personal level both negatively impact our health. The good news is that stress can be radically reduced. The key is finding balance.

Stress is only harmful when it's unbalanced. After all some kinds of stress are healthy and play a vital role in growth. Babies, for example, need to be challenged by obstacles to learn to walk just as athletes can't reach peak performance without competition. What we commonly think of as "stress" occurs when our personal capacity to adequately handle events erodes thereby creating adverse psychological, physiological and behavioral patterns.

In other words we stop thinking of problems as challenges and start experiencing them as burdens. The key to living a healthy, productive life lies not in being stress-free but rather in understanding and expanding our capacity for handling stress. Once we know our limitations we can apply proven strategies to release excessive stress.

This seminar not only helps employees understand the impact of stress, it teaches many different techniques that help people find balance and harmony in their lives. This occurs as we learn the art of communicating our needs more fully and precisely. It's a simple process but not an easy one because we've all been trained to push on ourselves unwisely and to blame others rather than take responsibility for what shows up around us.

As we learn for new communication skills and receive expert coaching, our stress diminishes.

STRESS FACTS
Stress management training for heart attack patients achieved a 40% reduction in recurrence compared to patients who received only standard care. American Heart Journal One-third of the US population make New Year resolutions to begin stress management programs. Prudential Healthcare Survey More than half of all deaths between the ages of one and 65 result from stressful lifestyles.

US Center for Disease Control Annually, over $800 million dollars are spent on "anti-anxiety" pills. The US accounts for 5% of the world's population and consumes 33% of the pills. Neurogen Researchers of "job control" issues in the workplace, following over 10,000 male and female British government workers, found that those people who had the least amount of job control, either actual or perceived, had higher risk of newly developed heart disease. After 3 years, those who still reported low job control were nearly twice as likely to develop a coronary event than were those who perceived themselves to have job control. (British Medical Journal)

The program is designed flexibly to fit your company’s needs. It can be conducted as hour-long brown bag luncheon seminars or in two or three hour segments. It can be an on-going program or a one time stress reduction booster shot. To discuss details call Mitch at 607.277.0438 or email him at mitch@mitchbobrow.com.

Stress in the Workplace focuses on:

• Setting clear boundaries.
• Adapting to rapidly changing expectations.
• Establishing accountability.
• Providing basic communication tools that cut through stress.
• Working with difficult customers, colleagues, supervisors and employees.
• The requisite lifestyle changes accompanying systematic stress reduction.
• Understanding and utilizing the power of commitment and integrity.

What people are saying
'I am pleased to tell you about the services Mitch Bobrow has been providing for New York State Electric and Gas. For about a year, Mitch has been conducting communication seminars for our company. He has presented more than a dozen seminars, each about six hours long.…We are very satisfied with the seminars Mitch has presented. He has been well received by our employees. He has helped them gain a better understanding of the purpose of their work and how their attitudes and behavior contribute to their sense of self-satisfaction….We feel Mitch Bobrow's communication seminars are beneficial and worth the time and money we have spent on them.'
—Greg Lapham, Supervisor-Human Resources Development, New York State Electric and Gas Corporation

' Mitch Bobrow brought great ideas to our workplace on how to better manage the stress at both the workplace and home. His interactive seminar/discussion groups gave us a different perspective on how to better cope with our sometime stressful lives. We've invited him back for three consecutive years because we've felt his services are so valuable.'
—Mary Root, Office Manager, RETEC Corporation

Mitch Bobrow was hired as a consultant to evaluate and recommend improvement that could be made in the management and direction of our research laboratory. My sense is that both staff satisfaction and productivity have already dramatically increased. Mr. Bobrow has my strongest recommendation.
—David Shalloway, Ph.D. Professor of Molecular Biology, Cornell University

Best selling author of “Love, Medicine and Miracles,” Bernie Siegel, MD, said about Mitch’s book, Views From the Tightrope….“My kind of book. A true story. Read it and learn the truth about life and the wisdom of the ages.”