Dealing with stress

My brother has an excellent post on his site about dealing with stress:

“If I hold it for an hour, I’ll have an ache in my right arm. If I hold it for a day, you’ll have to call an ambulance. In each case it’s the same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes.” She continued, “and that’s the way it is with stress. If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, as the burden becomes increasingly heavy, we won’t be able to carry on.”

I know I don’t deal with stress very well. I let things build until eventually it has to be released–and far too often not in very productive ways. That usually just adds to my stress, of course, because then I also have to patch up damaged relationships as well.

Ideally I will take some time to identify my primary stressor, and then deal with it. Often it’s some particular task or conversation that I’m avoiding. If I just push forward and get it over with I’m usually much happier. Unfortunately I need more practice at that.

How do you deal with stress? Drop a comment below, and then head over to my brother’s site and adds to the discussion there as well!

Building professional networks.

My brother Dan has begun writing a series of posts about developing professional networks, starting with making a case for building networks.

I started with my closest friends, because I knew they wouldn’t say ‘no’ to helping me. I then followed up with their friends. Slowly, over the course of three months, I built the network I should have been building all along. After 125+ networking interviews, I was offered a job that was created for me and for which I was the only applicant.

My brother is one of the friendliest, most outgoing people I know, and even he finds networking difficult. I look forward to his tips for making networking manageable.