Stressful Times

While doing some reading for one of my classes, I came across the following summary of a study on workplace stress and aggression:

• 65% of workers said that stress caused physical and physiological difficulties
• 25% view their jobs as the number one stressor in their lives
• 14% reported that they had felt like striking a coworker in the past year, but didn’t (that’s all?)
• 25% felt like screaming or shouting because of job stress
• 10% are concerned about an individual at work they fear could become violent
• 9% are aware of an assault or violent act in their workplace, and 18% had experienced some sort of threat or verbal intimidation in the past year

Generally speaking, we are growing more stressed with each generation.  Why?  Well, first we have to define stress.  The textbook I am using defines stress as “the excitement, feeling of anxiety, and/or physical tension that occurs when demands placed on an individual are thought to exceed the person’s ability to cope.”  Technically this is distress or negative stress. 

There is such a thing as positive stress and that is the stress that pushes us to perform at optimum levels.  Here’s my take.  One reason so many people feel distress is because they introduce demands in their lives that are not in alignment with their talents and passions while neglecting the opportunities they are uniquely gifted to pursue.

Think about the things that are causing negative stress in your life.  Are these the things that you are really excited about or annoying responsibilities that “have to be done?”  Do they fully employ your talents and skills or do they require you to forsake your gifts in order to do something that makes you feel inadequate?

There are many stress reduction techniques (prayer, meditation, yoga, exercise, etc.) and they have been proven to help people reduce their stress level.  Those are fine, but what if, instead of trying to cope with some of the major stressors in your life, you made some real changes and started pursuing the things in life that are really important to you?  There will still be stress, but there will be much less distress.

 

Let Freedom Ring

 

My apologies to Martina McBride – this week’s will be a very short post because we were traveling over the 4^th of July and I forgot to write anything in advance.  Not only will it be short, but it will be poorly thought out and grammatically incorrect.

 

I recently received an email from one of my English students in Belarus.  He was ecstatic about the fact that he got sponsored to come to the US as an exchange student.  He needs to get a job and he knows about our financial crisis, the horrendous job market, and the possibility of being ostracized as a foreigner, but having the opportunity to come to America is the fulfillment of one of his greatest dreams.

 

Meanwhile, we sit around not even recognizing the opulence of our lifestyle and complain about the things that we are unwilling to take a stand to change. We are still a democracy and many brave men and women put their lives on the line to ensure our freedom.  I sometimes think that the sentiment of some Americans is to passive-aggressively wish that we were a dictatorship so that they could complain about the government without carrying the burden taking action when things don’t go according to plan.  That’s how a democracy works – we get to enjoy freedom, but we are ultimately responsible for change.

 

In my opinion, one of the most anti-American things we can do is not take a stand for the things we believe in.  Wherever you see a need for change, get involved.  Go to meetings, write letters to Congress, and educate yourself on the issues at hand.  Too frequently, we sit around and do nothing because we feel that we are too small to make a difference.  If you ever feel that way, remember this:  it is not the power of our adversaries, but the power that we give them that ultimately defeats us.

 

Lions on the Prowl

In the past few weeks there have been multiple reports of lion sightings in my county.  That’s Hall County, Georgia – we did not move to Zambia.  Although numerous people have reported spotting some sort of large cat to the authorities, there has been no confirmation that an actual lion is on the prowl in northern Georgia.  

 

 

The alleged lion has been blamed for getting into trash (ever hear of raccoons?), killing a horse, and contributing to the financial crisis.  Some of the witnesses swear that what they saw was an African lion.  My guess is that at most it may be a mountain lion or more probably a large Chow with a creative haircut.

 

Here’s the point I want to make:  the local paper has published numerous articles about the lion sightings and lots of people are talking about it, but we’re ignoring some of the real problems and very real terrors that surround us.  In the state of Georgia alone, it is estimated that between 200 and 300 children are trafficked each month!

 

 

At a conference few weeks ago, I listened to Francis Chan speak a little bit about this problem.  Before his talk, his little girl played the piano and sang a song.  He then went on to talk about the success of his latest book Crazy Love.  Despite the huge success of this book, he won’t make a dime from it because he has signed over the royalties to an organization that helps fight human trafficking.

 

 

Francis said that he has gotten a lot of advice from people telling him that he should keep some of the profits in an emergency fund. His response was that the money was going towards an emergency.  Our society is so self-centered, we only consider an atrocity like the trafficking of girls as young as 10 years old an emergency if it happens to someone we know.  What if his little girl who just played the piano was one of the 200 to 300 children trafficked this month?  He would do whatever was necessary to get her back to safety and you would do the same if this happened to someone close to you.

 

 

Sara and I are thinking about getting involved with a group called Street GRACE.  It is “a non-denominational alliance of churches dedicated to supporting, enlarging, and allying with those individuals and organizations working toward eliminating the commercial sexual exploitation of children.”  You can go to their website here.

 

 

I think we need to start paying attention to the real dangers facing us instead of speculating about the monsters under our bed.

 

Don’t Sweat the Funyuns

It’s another bad day on Wall Street. As of the time of this posting, the Dow is down about 237 points to 6,826. Today’s bad news is that AIG (you know, the company we bailed out so that employees could go on a luxury retreat) posted a $61.7 billion loss for the 4th quarter of 2008. Now they’re getting another $30 billion of federal aid our tax dollars. Expect more bad news for the next few months – we’re not out of this yet.

Despite the losses that we have all suffered, we should keep things in perspective. I know that what used to be my “portfolio” now more closely resembles a Post-It note and people are panicking about their losses, but give some thought to what we have gained in our lives. In our peculiar thought process, we humans tend to focus more on the pain loss than the joy of gain.

If I were to ask how much your 401(k) lost last year, most of you could probably give a pretty accurate dollar amount or percentage. Now if I were to ask how much your investments increased in the year prior to the financial crisis, you likely have no idea. That’s just how we tend to think.

Here is another example to consider. Imagine you are walking down a sidewalk and find a $5 bill. You feel pretty good for a minute or two, but soon forget about it. As you’re walking down the sidewalk, you come across a vending machine and have a sudden craving for some Funyuns. You put in a crisp one dollar bill and punch “G-4”. The dispenser screw begins to turn and then the unthinkable happens… the machine stops and your Funyuns remain precariously perched on their rack. In your anger and disappointment, you shake the machine but to no avail. Your anticipation for those deep fried onion flavored corn snacks turns to utter defeat when you realize that the bag will not drop.

Even though that bag of Funyuns probably only cost 50 cents, the disappointment you feel for that loss is greater than the joy you received from finding 10 times that amount on the sidewalk. There are $5 bills to be found all over the place. It would probably do us all some good if we started being thankful for them and stopped obsessing over our teetering Funyuns.

 

Branding Gone Wild

 

I recently read an article in Best Life magazine that discussed the pervasiveness of marketing to children. Boy was it scary! The article stated that toddlers as young as 2 years old will ask for a particular brand of food or toy based on the advertisements they see while watching cartoons. Think about that. We’re teaching our children consumerism before they are even out of diapers! It’s no wonder that our society is so consumer-centric. We are bombarded with branding before we can say the alphabet. In the past 25 years, marketing to children has grown from $100 million a year in holiday ads to $17 billion in a year round quest to fill our children’s minds with licensed characters and branding.

As a kid, I was a big Star Wars fan (ok, I still am). This was one of the first large-scale attempts to combine on-screen entertainment with merchandising. I spent countless hours recreating scenes from the movies with my action figures… thank goodness George Lucas didn’t have access to computer animation in 1977.

Now the whole idea of branding has gone to the extreme. It no longer consists of just movies and action figures, but now includes clothing, toothbrushes, Band-Aids, web sites, DVDs, furniture, video games, Happy Meals, etc. Kids can even go on ToucanSam.com where they can play games and watch cartoon clips while being immersed in the sugar-laden branding of Fruit Loops. Think about that dangerous loop. Kids see an ad on TV, go online and play games, and see more ads online, some of which direct them back to television. This is a complete immersion in marketing and consumerism.

Think about the implications this has on our kids. Just the other night, my three year old daughter got upset because we left her Dora the Explorer toothpaste at Grandma’s house. She was forced to use her Thomas the Train toothpaste, which apparently is all of the sudden inferior. This seems harmless enough now, but she is only three! Fifteen years from now, she may be throwing a tantrum because she had to settle for a Chevy when she had her marketing induced mind set on a BMW. Who am I kidding? Chevy won’t be around in 15 years, but that’s a different story. And if you think you can avoid this trouble by limiting non-branded items, think again. Just try to make a trip to Wal-Mart or Target to buy household items for your kids without licensed images pasted all over them and you will quickly find that your options are limited.

When I was a kid, I wanted a Millennium Falcon because it was in the movie and Han Solo was pretty cool. Now, kids want I-Phones without even understanding what an I-Phone is. Does a ten year old really need to have streaming stock quotes? Of course not; they just want something cool that other kids will envy.

Now I hope that if your 10 year-old asks for an I-Phone, you shoot that request down promptly. But think about the example you set. Did you really need that 128,000 Btu grill with booster rockets and GPS or would something a little more reasonable suffice?

 

Black Friday

By now you have probably heard about the employee that was trampled to death in a New York Wal-Mart on “Black Friday”.  The 34 year old seasonal worker was killed by a stampede of frantic shoppers eager to find a bargain, some of which had been camped out since 9 pm on Thanksgiving night.  In the aftermath of this event, shoppers and the local police are pointing fingers at Wal-Mart claiming that the store “could have and should have better prepared for the large crowds” and a New York Councilman announced plans to enact legislation that will require retailers to provide greater security during major sales.

 

What happened to personal accountability?  As far as I know, no one has been charged with any crime and the people responsible for this tragedy will have to live with the knowledge that they took another human life so they could save a few dollars on a present that will probably be forgotten by next year.  Do we really need security personnel to tell us that it is not ok walk over a human being?  I’ve got news for those people claiming that security was inadequate – Black Friday was not limited to this single store.  Retailers all over the United States held similar sales and they were able to do so without trampling a person to death.

 

From people borrowing more than they could afford and CEOs taking private jets to Washington looking for handouts to shoppers acting like sharks in feeding frenzy, this is just the latest news item to underscore something that is becoming more apparent:  we are a society of blame.  Listen to politicians, corporate leaders, your neighbor, or yourself and you will usually hear about what someone else should have done or how the government should provide more “regulation”.  That is not the sentiment on which the country was founded!  If we continue to pass the buck and ask the government to regulate home loans, retirement plans, and Christmas shopping, we will continue to erode the freedoms that we enjoy all because we lack the personal accountability and moral responsibility to do the right thing.  It is time we stop pointing out all of those specks in other people’s eyes and get to work on the log in our own eye.

 

Stay the Course

With the economy in the tank and the Dow dropping like eyelids at a 30-hour Matlock marathon, we have heard the same advice repeated endlessly – stay the course.  Almost any financial expert will tell you that if you give up on your stocks now, you will lock in your losses and waste the investment that you may have taken years to grow.  “Don’t panic,” they tell us.  It may take some time, but the market will recover – it always does.  Experts agree that the best thing to do now is to continue investing.  If we will consistently invest during times of economic uncertainty we will be thankful later.

 

If only we were as loyal to our personal relationships as we are to our mutual funds.  What happens when relationships take a nosedive of the same magnitude as our current economic crisis? We usually end up selling and locking in our losses.  We stop contributing; thinking that further investment into a failing relationship is a waste of time.

 

Whether your current relationship struggle is with a family member, friend, neighbor, or co-worker, I urge you to stay the course.  If you continue investing during times of relational uncertainty, you will be thankful later.

 

Excess Baggage

 

 

My wife and I welcomed our second daughter into the world just over two months ago.  With a 3 year old and a 2 month old, we are beginning to understand why people actually think that mini-vans are a good idea.  I’m not getting one, but I understand.

 

Maybe my memory is a bit cloudy but it seems like when I was a kid, my sister and I just piled into the back of the Buick and off we went.  Car seats?  I guess those weren’t invented yet.  Back in those days, we didn’t even wear seatbelts.  Half of the long trips were spent sitting on our knees looking out the rear window or trying to get comfortable enough to sleep on the floorboard without the hump causing sclerosis.

 

Nowadays things are different.  Our two car seats look like they were designed by NASA.  They take up the entire back seat and by what I can tell from the car seat laws, they will continue to do so for the next six years.  The stroller for our infant unfolds to approximately the size of a Geo Metro and any additional space in the car is quickly consumed by toys, diapers, wipes, food, etc.  Oh yeah, and don’t forget the DVD player and two monitors (one for each kid).  I was one of those parents who said I would never use a DVD player to mindlessly entertain my child in the car… then I took a two year old on a 6 hour road trip.  We now have DVD players.

 

The catch here is half the stuff we cram into the vehicle never gets used. We simply pack it in “just in case”.  As a society, our lives are following the same pattern.  We now have access to more information, more entertainment, more people, more activities, more hobbies… more everything.  We have to be careful not to dilute our lives to the point that we do a little bit of everything and not much of anything.

 

As this year closes, this is a time for renewal and making plans for the upcoming year.  Each year, I make a list of goals and break it down into things that I want to accomplish on a monthly basis throughout the year (I know – I’m an engineer, I can’t help it).

 

This year, I’m making an additional list.  I’m making a list of all the things that I am not going to do.  I encourage you to do the same.  Make 2009 a year of simplification and focus.  It’s great to have big plans and grand intentions, but if you don’t eliminate all the junk that prevents you from doing the most important things, you’ll just be spinning your wheels wondering where all the time went.   So go ahead and give yourself permission not to do all of those things that pull you away from doing what is important.

 

Time Warp

It’s hard to believe, but tomorrow is my daughter’s third birthday.  It seems like it was just yesterday that we were burping her while trying to steady her wobbly little head.  Now she is quite capable of burping on her own and doing somersaults over our dog.  Where did the time go?

 

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity provides a means by which time can be “stretched” by moving at close to the speed of light.  That’s great, but it’s not very practical with today’s gas prices.  I think he should have spent his time trying to figure out why time seems to go so much faster as we get older.  Do you remember how long it took for Christmas to come when you were a child?  What about those endless summers of your youth?  Birthdays that were once infrequent milestones now seem more like gravel roads.  Quick – without doing any math, how old are you?  Unless your age happens to have a zero at the end of it, that one probably stumped you.

 

One of the reasons that time seems to go so fast is because we are trying to cram so many activities into our lives.  We treat our schedules like a flight attendant trying to get an oversized bag into an overhead bin.  We pack it in and slam the door shut.  When the door pops back open, instead of removing anything, we rearrange it, pack it in tighter, and slam the door harder. 

 

The problem with trying to do so much is that it really robs us of the opportunity to do anything significant.  I’m not trying to say that we should be lazy and not do anything.  On the contrary, I believe that staying busy with a plethora of activities is actually a form of laziness.

 

Rather than putting forth the effort that it takes to identify those activities that allow us to utilize our God-given talents, positively impact people, and dedicate our time to something larger than ourselves, we surrender ourselves to societal stand-by activities.  We sign up for things that we are dispassionate about because our friends are doing it… or we don’t want to deny our kids a particular experience… or we just feel obligated.  After over committing ourselves, we complain about those activities as if they are to blame for our hectic schedule.  In truth, we are to blame because we lack the courage to say no to all of those things that eat away at our passion.

 

There’s a line at the end of the movie The Usual Suspects that says, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”  How true this can be if you allow insignificant busyness to supersede your life’s mission.

 

Control Freak

One thing I have learned from writing a blog is to always keep a post or two written ahead of time, so I don’t have to think of something at the last minute.  This comes in handy when something happens and you don’t have time to write (like having a baby).  It’s pretty obvious, but this was written last week right after our first trip to the hospital…

 

For those of you who don’t know, my wife is pregnant and is ready to give birth at any minute now.  To say that she is about to pop is an understatement – she looks like a tick that struck a vein.  She was induced with our first child, so we had a nice controlled setting where the contractions began at the hospital with all the beeping equipment already hooked up and charts drawing little mountain ranges.  This second one is a little different.

                          

She began having contractions early last week.  They started getting more frequent and then subsided.  On Wednesday night, they really got going.  At first they were about 12 minutes apart and not too uncomfortable (easy for me to say, right).   Then she went into this quiet phase where she wasn’t really giving me much information.  I don’t do well when not given information.  I kept asking her what was going only to hear a sheepish, “I don’t know.”

 

I had no idea how frequent her contractions were, but mine went from about a minute apart to a constant tightness.  I was becoming the stereotypical sitcom father-to-be.  Sara called the paging service for her doctor and was waiting for a call back.  Sara was patiently sitting with the phone in her hand.  I was frantically checking bags, packing them in the car, changing camera batteries, making sure the dog had plenty of food and water, taking the dog out one last time, rechecking the bags, checking to make sure we had our insurance cards and identification, unpacking bags to find said identification, repacking bags, reloading the car, mowing the yard, changing the oil, painting the kitchen, milking the cows, and washing the windows.

 

About 20 minutes later, still no call from the doctor and Sara was still waiting patiently with the phone in her hand.  By this time I had whipped myself up into the Looney Tunes depiction of the Tasmanian Devil and not so gently insisted that she call them back.  Shortly after her second call to the paging service, Dr. Payne called us (I guess Dr. Misery, Dr. Anguish, and Dr. Distress were out of town).  Once again, Sara is on the phone and I am outside the information loop – not good. 

 

To make a long story short, although the contractions got down to 4 minutes apart, she didn’t go into full-blown labor and my shortcoming of being a massive control freak was underscored.  For you women out there, that is why men are so bad at the whole birthing process thing.  We have not control and are reduced to bystanders.  Yeah the nursing staff may call us “coaches” but who are we kidding?  Of all the people in a delivery room, I am the least mission critical.

 

Now, rewind back to those moments before we went to the hospital.  I had no control over what was happening, so what did I do?  I created a bunch of busyness to keep myself occupied so that I could believe that I was somehow being productive.  It seems foolish and almost comical, but don’t we do that all the time?  We feel the urge to seek out and fulfill our mission, but to do so would mean giving up control.  When faced with the possibility of losing control, we create work and busyness that we can control however tedious and unimportant it may be.  We’ll generate reports, send meaningless emails, do housework, or start a new project for the sole purpose of being in control.  Remember when we talked about significance a while back?  I think we are prevented from experiencing true significance until we surrender control and stop doing work just for the sake of working and staying busy.

 

Are you overcome by busyness?  Do you spend your time frantically working toward insignificance?  Where are you afraid to give up control?