Making News...

March 24, 2011: Worcester Business Journal -- Article -- Knowhow: Stress Relief by Rita Schiano

January 10, 2011: Psychology Today --- Blog: In The Face of Adversity  Post: More Than Resilient

Adversity is defined as a condition marked by misfortune, calamity, or distress; an unfortunate event or circumstance. Potentially adverse events and circumstances come in all shapes and sizes, and how distressful they are is usually determined by our perception of them....

What can help us to be resilient, to bounce back during hard times? Certainly training and education about resilience skills and attitudes is key. Bay Path College in Massachusetts is a fine example. The college recently began offering a stress management course to students in its One-Day-A-Week Saturday Program, an accelerated, full-time degree program for women looking to earn an undergraduate degree. The women who enter the One-Day-A-Week Saturday Program are seeking to transform their professional and personal lives. Many of them have young children at home, work full-time jobs; a number of the women are working, single mothers, and so their stress level is high to begin with....

Rita Schiano, the course instructor, shared the following: "At the start of the course, many students believed the stress in their lives was insurmountable. I had to get my students to understand how thinking styles and habits that don't serve us affect our emotions and behavior." Each week she took them through a series of quizzes and thought-provoking questionnaires that helped them to identify and recognize their stress triggers. Next, she taught them a Kaizen approach to stress management -- making incremental change or improvement by breaking stress-reduction tasks into small, manageable steps.  Read full article....