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February 13, 2007

A stress-free career?

New Scientist offers six steps to a stress-free career - a wonderful ideal at first glance, but hardly achievable, or even desireable as a goal. First let me give you the six steps:

  1. Create a good space
  2. Raise your status
  3. Be social
  4. Don't be too social
  5. Learn to switch off
  6. Modern stress-busting (activities to dissipate stress and its effects)
The ideal of a stress-free utopia is an empty myth - it is stress which is at the heart of growth. The problem is not stress itself, but unmanaged stress and ignored stress. It goes to the heart of suffering and its place in our personal growth. Meeting new challenges, finding ourselves testing new resources, building stronger networks and relationships... all emerge from response to stress as we learn and adopt new coping mechanisms.

It is part of our nature to hold to goals and ideals which are beyond us, which call us forward into a better future. This is the nature of hope - to keep us dissatisfied with what is so that we work to create what can be.

Certainly the advice in the article is helpful, but its premise needs to be questioned.

Posted by gary at February 13, 2007 10:15 AM

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