This article by Kathleen McGinn Spring was prepared for the June 12, 2002 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved. Stress Management From One Who Knows Fay Elliott Moore knows from stress. Yes, she was recently laid off from Merrill Lynch, but really, in the greater scheme of things, the lay-off was a small potatoes event in her life. "I was upset momentarily," she says, "but then I thought I could start my own business, and I got excited." That business is the Lawrence Center for Mind*Body*Spirit at 1213 Lawrenceville Road. It's genesis was a really bad job that brought Moore to the brink of a breakdown and started her on stress-busting strategies -- including exercise, biofeedback, and meditation. Over the past seven years, she has needed to draw upon the serenity she taught herself to achieve as she has coped with everything from a serious car accident to the death of her husband to a battle with breast cancer. On Tuesday, June 25, at 7:30 p.m. she speaks on managing stress to Jobseekers, a free group that serves as a networking, support, and information resource for individuals who are out of work under the direction of Niels Nielsen, president of Princeton Management Consultants. Call 609-924-2277. In addition to running the Mind Body Spirit Center, she teaches meditation at the Aroga center in Skillman. Moore holds a bachelor's degree from Marist (Class of 1977) and an MBA in organizational behavior from Rutgers. She started her career at Chase Bank and then in the mid-1980s took a job at a data corporation, running its software division. "I was working 17 hours a day," she recalls. "I was so stressed out. I was practically at the point of anxiety attacks." It was then that she began to learn and practice the stress reducers that she credits with seeing her through the difficulties that, unbeknownst to her, lay just ahead. "I was in a car accident six years ago," she recounts. She was injured, but not as severely as was her husband. He was in a coma for 18 months and died of his injuries. After the accident, she began to take classes in mindfulness-based stress management. "I learned I could not control anything but my response," she says. "Most stress is caused by mental reaction. We are genetically programmed for fight or flight." When presented with a danger -- whether it be a charging animal or a lay-off notice -- adrenalin kicks in and the body's sympathetic nervous system takes over. Blood flow to the muscles increases fourfold, heart rate goes up, sweating increases, and rational thought often becomes impossible. The opposite of a sympathetic nervous response, Moore explains, is a passive nervous response. "It calms you down," she says. The two can not function at the same time. So if a passive response is cultivated, "you calm down," says Moore. This leads to the possibility of positive action. "A lot of people think meditation means you don't do anything," says Moore. "No. You spend enough time not doing to see how there may be other ways of approaching a problem." In mindfulness-based meditation, says Moore, individuals "learn to sit with what is." They learn to experience their situation and see it will not kill them. "You begin to learn that what has gone on in your life is not something to be afraid of. You tame adrenalin and put yourself in a place to be conscious of the opportunity to change circumstances." Moore used this power to see her through breast cancer surgery. She developed the disease two years after her car accident, and is not surprised that she did so. Researchers assign points to life stressors. Pile up enough points, and, says Moore, you will get sick. Not maybe, but definitely. At the time of her accident, Moore had enough points to put her stress level off the charts. Still, she survived. Now cancer free, remarried and the owner of a new business, Moore credits meditation with helping her make it through a truly tough decade. Despite all that she has been through, Moore does not minimize the angst laid-off workers are suffering. She saw how distressed many of her fellow pink-slippers at Merrill Lynch were. And after her lay-off she spent some time at Project Re-Employment, where she met central New Jersey workers who had been out of work for months. One client had been let go with two weeks notice and no severance. Few were finding it easy to jump back into the labor market. "This is a bad time to be unemployed," she observes. "There is a huge push toward slowdown." On a list of the top 20 stressors, losing a job ranks eighth. But changing careers, financial difficulties, marital problems, and relocation also carry high degrees of stress, and many times laid off workers have to deal with all at one time. Here are some ways to get that stress under control: You've got to relax. Your health depends upon it. Relaxation techniques include meditation, breathing exercises, yoga, creative visualization, progressive muscle relaxation, stretching, and biofeedback. Movement is a great help. Try jogging for six miles and feeling tense. It's nearly impossible. Rhythmic exercise, whether it be jogging, biking, roller blading, or swimming has an incredibly calming effect -- and the effect generally lasts for hours after the exercise ends. Find someone to love -- or even like. One strong personal relationship offers tremendous stress relief, and so do a number of more casual relationships. Moore says people who have 12 personal contacts a day -- street corner conversations, phone chats, meals out with friends -- reduce their stress levels considerably. To add yet another level, consider adopting a dog or cat. Says Moore, "interactions with pets are relaxing." Be good to yourself. Within the bounds of the often-tight budget that accompanies unemployment and the time constraints of the job hunt, pamper yourself as much as possible. Take in the summer air, tend a garden, hang out in the library, go to the beach. Get help. If you have meditated, practiced yoga, ridden your bike up and down the canal until its tires threaten to unravel, maintained contacts with a variety of friends -- and maybe a cat or two -- and still can't shake your stress, consider giving your doctor a call. Write about your troubles. Not necessarily a substitute for professional consultation, writing can help vent feelings and can lead to insights. Laugh. Feelings and attitudes appear to play an important role in health -- and in a job search too. Employment interviewers can smell fear as well as your average dog can. Try to stay upbeat, looking for any and all hidden positives that will spring from your lay-off. As with saving, exercise, and any number of other good habits, starting a program of relaxation -- and particularly meditation -- is best done early. "Practice when nothing is going on," advises Moore. People who are helped most by meditation, she finds, are those who have been meditating for a long time. "If you wait until you're distressed," she says, "you may not be able to think well enough to meditate."
These articles by Bart Jackson and Kathleen McGinn Spring were prepared for the April 23, 2003 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved. * * * Office Professionals: Control Your Destiny Fay Elliott Moore, a self-employed HR consultant, put herself through college and graduate school part time, a process that took 15 years. She worked a number of jobs to meet her tuition bills. Among them was secretary, where she drew a boss for whom no one else would work. A perfectionist back in the days before computers made typewriter ribbons and carbon paper obsolete, he demanded that the letters going out over his signature contain no mistakes -- none at all. Moore, who had failed typing in college, soon developed a crick in her neck from bending tensely over the keys, typing the same letter over and over until it was flawless. She also developed an attitude that endeared her to the proverbial "boss from hell." "I was a business major, so I wanted to learn all about his business," she recalls. She got to know her boss's clients, and their issues. "I became an integral part of his business," she says. Before long, the formerly-imperious boss was eager to become her mentor. Moore had found a way to take control of her job, and she took the skill with her when she moved on. "You don't have control unless you take control," she says. Moore, principal in the Lawrenceville-based Fully Awake Inc., leads a workshop on achieving work/life balance at "Take Charge of Your Success!," a day-long event beginning at 9 a.m. on Friday, April 25 at the Conference Center at Mercer, which is located on the West Windsor campus of Mercer County Community College. Also speaking are Judith Lindenberger, principal in the Titusville-based HR consulting firm the Lindenberger Group; Connie O. Hughes, the keynote speaker, who is deputy commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Labor; Constance Herrstrom, president of Princeton-based Premier Financial Planning; and nutritionist Vindi Kaur. Cost: $129. Call 609-586-9446. In preparing for the conference, Moore conducted an informal survey of administrative professionals she knows to determine what issues are most important to them. "They don't have control over their time," she found. A common scenario involves the boss who says a report needs to be on his desk tomorrow, and then comes back later in the day and piles on more work, which also is due tomorrow. "Managers are not clear in communicating their needs," she says. "They don't tell them (their administrative assistants) where they're going." This leaves the administrative professionals outside of the communications loop, and floundering with multiple assignments and no sense of the boss's priorities. The situation becomes more complicated, a number of administrative professionals reported, because they often need to field assignments from multiple bosses. Moore empathizes. She has been there, and not only during her years as a secretary. A native of New York City, and a graduate of Marist College (Class of 1977), she holds an MBA in organizational behavior from Rutgers, has worked for PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Merrill Lynch, and has spent a number of years working as a consultant. At one point, she was in a consulting firm with three partners. "One wanted me to be in San Francisco; one wanted me to be in Chicago," she says of a common tug of war. The way to get out from the middle, she says, is to throw the issue back on the partners or bosses, and make them decide among themselves which assignment needs to be the priority. Here are more suggestions of her suggestions for taming work and achieving work/life balance. Write it down. The famous study following Harvard graduates and tracking their health and progress for decades turned up an amazing factoid. "Two percent of the men put their goals in writing," says Moore. "Those two percent have earned 80 percent of all of the money earned by the group." Moore has seen the power of putting goals in writing in her own life. When she was in college, a representative of a Big Eight accounting firm visited her school, and she decided on the spot that she wanted to work for such a firm. She knew her goal was not realistic. "They don't hire from obscure schools," she explains. Nevertheless, she wrote down the goal, and "put it on a shelf." Eleven years later she was hired by PriceWaterhouseCoopers into what she says was her dream job, one she would still have if the traveling hadn't eventually gotten to her. Slice it up. In her workshop, Moore plans to have participants draw a pie chart of their lives. How much time is devoted to career? to family? to health? to personal development? to making money? to social and community activities? Each person has just so many "packets of energy," Moore says. It is easy to say that family comes first, or that nothing is more important than good health, or that reaching toward a better job is a top priority. But a look at how those energy packets are spent may tell a different story. "If all of your energy goes into your job, there is nothing left over," she says. Take the time to sketch out where the hours of the day are spent and the conflict between stated priorities and real priorities may be stark. Make a choice. Decide to give attention to running an eight-minute mile, re-connecting with far-flung cousins, or earning an advanced degree and there is a good chance that goal will become a reality. The alternative for so many time-stressed employees is to surrender to others' priorities and to just float along. But, says Moore, "even if you think you're not choosing, you are." Hanging around in an office spending the better part of each day complaining about "that crazy boss" is a choice, and an especially draining one at that. Learn to negotiate. Assertiveness skills are especially important for administrative professionals. Moore says she has a sense that Gen Xers are better at asserting themselves than were their mothers. This is good, but she says that the art, while essential, needs to be practiced carefully to avoid any appearance of whining. "Pick your battles," is her advice. She says that suffering silently erodes any respect superiors might have, but that a constant unwillingness to take on extra work can kill a career. If the issue, for instance, is a request to work late, she suggests that administrative professionals pitch in cheerfully on some occasions. Having done so, they have won the right to say a firm and confident "no" to late nights on other occasions. Be willing to leave. Moore had one boss for whom the occasional late night was not enough. "I was commuting four hours a day; I was working my butt off," she says. It wasn't enough, and she was smart enough to know it. That boss would never be happy without enormous quantities of face time, so she transferred away from him. Putting in the same hours for a new boss, she won rave reviews. She realizes that staying with the first boss would have seriously hurt her desire for a life outside the office, and, furthermore, would have damaged her career. While Moore ditched that overly-demanding boss, she remains friendly with the "boss from hell" for whom she worked as a student. The key in both cases, she says, is "don't play." Life is too short to waste complaining about a bad boss. Learn to work with him (or, of course, her) in a way that furthers your professional and personal goals, or move on.
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