Save Your Health — Eliminate Stress at Work

US News & World Report published today a story called “Why Your Job Could Be Making You Old.” The story cites the claim that stress contributes to health problems and rapid aging.

Physicians have long observed that people with stressful careers and lifestyles tend to develop health problems–especially when their jobs carry extreme consequences for mistakes. According to a theory advanced by Michael Roizen, chair of the Wellness Institute at the Cleveland Clinic and co-founder of RealAge.com, many American presidents have aged approximately two years for each calendar year in office.

The author, Emily Brandon, then discusses ways to to cut back on stress, and advises exercise and healthy living to to build up an immunity to stressors. She only briefly touches on employment stressors, so here are a few more valuable tips for avoiding stress at work.

Build a Firewall Between Your Work and Home Lives

Allowing your work problems to follow you home can have a devastating impact on your home life, your family and relationships. It’s not the easiest thing in the world just set aside your work issues, especially if your job requires a huge time investment, or if your career is central to who you are as a person. But it is possible.

Likewise, stress at home can adversely affect your work. They key here is to remain mindful of your emotions. If you’re stressed at work, ask yourself if what you’re really upset about isn’t an issue from your personal life.

Maintain Good Communications with Your Superiors and Co-Workers

Work stress often comes from being in a position of ignorance. Does my boss like my work? Will there be layoffs? Will I ever get that promotion? Yet workers often don’t try to find their own answers to these questions, out of fear — fear of their boss, or fear that they will get an answer they don’t like.

Instead of wallowing in stress, just talk to your boss and your co-workers about your issues. Be professional, of course, and don’t ask inappropriate questions or spread gossip. But if you’re worried about how your boss perceives you, then ask. You may be worrying about nothing. But if you do get negative feedback, that’s good too — you need to know these things if you want to keep your job. Don’t wait for a performance review to find out how you’re doing.

Be reliable.

If you’re late for work a lot, or miss too many work days, then you’re creating your own stress. It’s not as hard as it seems to change your life and health habits so that personal issues don’t get in the way of your career.

However, there are issues — serious illness, family problems, etc. — that will affect your work, and you can’t do anything about. Or at least, solving the issues will take time. This is a common source of work stress, but it’s easily fixed. Talk to your HR manager. Your firm may have policies directly related to your situation, and might be willing to help you out with paid time off or extra money.

Even if your company won’t help you out, at least they’ll know your work is being affected by serious issues, and that you’re not merely irresponsible.

Got some advice of your own? Comment below!

Tags: Advice, Careers, communication, Emily Brandon, health, stress, US News & World Report

Pedantry: A Simple Way to Impress Current or Future Employers

I’m a pedant when it comes to the English language. That’s a word that usually has a negative connotation, but I wear the label proudly.

From Wikipedia: “A pedant is a person who is overly concerned with formalism and precision, or who makes a show of learning… The term in English is typically used with a negative connotation, indicating someone overly concerned with minutiae and whose tone is perceived as condescending.”

Condescending? Is it condescending to point out when an adult professional is violating rules of grammar, punctuation, and spelling that they should have mastered in the third grade?

A lot of people seem to think proper English usage is unnecessary, especially online. They are wrong. There are a number of reasons to speak and write properly — clarity, for instance.

But in the workplace, proper language usage is vital. Especially in this new, disastrous economy, you need to do anything you can to put yourself ahead of other employees and applicants.

Even people who themselves are incapable of forming a correct sentence can recognize when someone else is writing or speaking properly. It’s impressive. It says “I am a well-educated professional person, and I take my job seriously.” You don’t have to be pedantic like me, and point out everyone’s mistakes, unless that’s part of your job (it’s part of mine). But by employing proper usage, you’re making a statement about yourself. It’s as important as business-appropriate clothing and personal hygiene, or showing up to work on time.

If you’re not a writer and editor like me, you may have fallen out of practice, or you may be making mistakes you don’t know are mistakes. You don’t have to take classes or read grammar guides to improve your business English, although that would help. You just need to start consciously paying attention to your speaking and writing. By eliminating carelessness, I assure you your English will improve quickly.

Here are some tips to get you started, based on common mistakes I see in my job.

1.) Use your computer’s spell check function, but never rely on it. If the spell check in your word processing software or on your web browser identifies a word as misspelled, don’t just let the program fix it. Check it yourself — sometimes the spell checker makes mistakes. Also, read through and edit your text even if you’ve used the spell check. When I originally typed this very paragraph, I wrote “word precessing.” Since “precessing” is a real word, the spell check didn’t catch it.

2.) Pluralize properly. The plural of “mouse” is “mice,” but the plural of “computer mouse” is “computer mouses.” Yes, really. Words that end in “s” just get an apostrophe, so it’s “my boss’ car,” not “my boss’s car,” unless you’re in England. There is no such word as “mediums.” The plural of “medium” is “media.” So say “I am an artist in several different media.” “Data” is always plural; the singular form is “datum” (isn’t Latin fun?). And proper pluralization brings us to:

3.) Subject verb agreement. What’s wrong with this sentence? “The group of high school seniors and sophomores were late for the big game.” The problem is that “group” is the subject of the sentence, not “seniors” and “sophomores.” And group is singular — “the group WAS late for the big game.” Always make sure your verb matches your subject. Likewise, “the mainstream media are castigating Obama,” not “is castigating.”

4.) Only use quotation marks for quotes. That’s it. Don’t use them for emphasis. Some people will put quotes around a word when they’re using the word sarcastically — “Jane went to see her so-called ‘boyfriend.’” This is okay on occasion, but don’t do it all the time. And as that last sentence showed, a quote within a quote gets ‘these marks,’ whatever they’re called (I didn’t claim to know everything). The final quotation mark goes after the punctuation. “Understand me?”

5.) Another pet peeve. “Literally” does not mean “a whole lot.” It means “take what I saw as literal, not figurative.” So “his head literally exploded” is wrong, if you mean he got angry. It’s only correct if his head literally exploded — like in the movie Scanners. Say “he jumped the gun” if someone started something too early, and “he literally jumped the gun” if the person was in a footrace, and started running before the starter pistol fired.

6.) I’ll leave you with this quote, apocryphally attributed to Winston Churchill:”Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put!”

I could go on for days, but this is a good start. This stuff is really easy, and following these “minutiae” will make you, your writing, and any work you do seem more professional.

Oh, and please don’t confuse “its” and “it’s.” It’s really annoying, and English has its rules for a reason!

Tags: Advice, English language, grammer, job search advice, language, pedantry, punctuation, workplace

The First Day on the Job

Congratulations to President Barack Obama!

By his own schedule and design, today is his first day of hard work – although it could legitimately be said that he’s been at it since the election. And whether you’re a Republican, Democrat, Republicrat, Reagan Democrat, NeoCon, Green Party member or ragingly apathetic, it is difficult not to feel SOMETHING for his constructively aggressive attitude and confidence. What kind of job will President Obama do, and why should you care? Well, we hired him, and he took the gig. Now, what should the average schmuck like you and me be watching for and learning from Obama about going into a new job?

Here are some employee basics that apply as much to a fish feeder at Sea World as to the new Leader of the Free World:

Communications: Tout your strengths, deftly acknowledge your weaknesses but tell anyone who’ll listen why you’re right for the job.

TeamBuilding: Assemble, coordinate, congregate and delegate with those who most compliment you and fill-in-the-blanks that may not be your strongest suits. (There is no “I” in “teamwork,” but there are a couple of them in “idiot.” Don’t be one of those!)

ConsensusBuilding: Work with those you may disagree with or who may not immediately see your way. Acknowledge that there’s a job to be done and a united effort is required.

Document your Progress: OK, so the President has a press corps doing that, but you’ll need to keep your own data for future reviews, future career moves and, well, the future.

Remember, that tired old adage about first impressions is pretty true. Start strong! And if you’re doing something that sucks or is sucking the life out of you, start over. There are plenty of jobs here. The may not put you in the White House, but doing something you like to do and were meant to do may keep you out of the nuthouse. Your call.

Tags: Add new tag, Advice, Employment, First day at a new job, how to get a job, how to keep a job, how to succeed, Jobs, Leader of the Free World, obama, President, teamwork