OPINION, The Record, Bergen County, New Jersey

Coping with stress in a trying job market

Monday, January 10, 2005
By ANTHONY ZOLEZZI and BILL BONVIE

MUCH ATTENTION these days is being given to the plight of the average American job-holder, caught in a vise between increasing downsizing and outsourcing on the one hand and ratcheted-up performance expectation levels on the other.

The result - for those "lucky" enough to be still employed, that is - is a diminishing of the spirit, a sense of oppression that dampens motivation and kills creativity. No wonder there is an unprecedented level of stress and the various health problems and ailments associated with it. The cost of such maladies has been estimated by the American Institute of Stress in New York as exceeding $300 billion a year. But broken spirits can't be measured in monetary terms, and that is the real travesty.

Accompanying the media recognition given this trend have been numerous warnings from health experts about the dangers of being chronically overworked. Their recommendations include getting adequate rest, eating sensibly, avoiding cigarettes and alcohol, and exercising regularly.

While such advice sounds good, it's a lot like whispering to someone who's asleep to wake up. To tell an overworked individual to get more rest and exercise regularly will not work unless you can wake their inner self up to the fact that they're more than just an employee in a white-collar workplace.

For far too many, a sense of personal identity is wrapped up with a job and a regular paycheck. What they've done, in essence, is to put all their ego eggs in one flimsy corporate basket - that belonging to an employer who all too often is under pressures from stockholders to lower cost at their expense. The kind of insidious pressure that results can cloud even the finest minds with anxiety about having their jobs sent overseas to satisfy a Wall Street analyst, thereby losing not only financial security but one's very sense of purpose in life.

What people in this predicament need to be made aware of is that their lives have far more meaning than merely what they do for a living, and that they need to develop other ways of maintaining their sense of self worth and optimism.

Oddly enough, they can come to this realization by following the example of their employers. If you look at the very basis of outsourcing or downsizing, it is a very objective approach to cost cutting or increasing efficiency. No emotion - just the bottom line. We impart the emotion by laboring under the delusion that we have more importance to the company than we actually do.

But if we know who we are, we can survive this situation by doing the same thing the employer does - that is, cutting our emotional ties with the company and considering it as expendable as it considers us.

It is only by learning to emotionally detach from both corporate control and the job itself that employees can really hope to cope with the problems of the daily pressure cooker in which they're currently apt to find themselves.

The type of detachment we're talking about doesn't mean not continuing to do the job to the best of one's ability. What it does mean is putting the job in its proper perspective - as merely a means of making a living - and not allowing it to dominate the core of one's being.

It means refusing to have an emotional stake in its control dramas, its disappointments, or even its successes. It means finding other outlets to validate one's existence, cultivating latent talents and interests, determining what it was you were really put on this earth to accomplish, and making that your personal mission and source of ultimate satisfaction, rather than job-related goals.

The paradox is that once you've developed the same thick-skinned attitude toward your corporate overseers as they in all probability have toward you, your productivity - and value to the company - is actually apt to increase. That's because working under constant emotional stress has a tendency to impede creativity in the same way that it acts to suppress the immune system.

But that's not the only benefit to building a psychological barrier between one's job and oneself. Doing so also enables people to start focusing on their own potentials and giving equal time to their own requirements, cultivating more outside contacts who might prove to be valuable allies and on becoming not only healthier and better adjusted, but less dependent on either the fortunes or good will of even the most benevolent employer.

Because let's face it - given the exigencies of the new global economy, business is unlikely to get any better anytime soon in terms of how it treats the "human resources" at its disposal (which precisely describes their status these days). It's therefore up to those of us who fit into that category to adapt to changing conditions by becoming not only more physically fit, but more self-reliant and self-confident.

That way, if the job - or, indeed, the entire company - suddenly disappears one day, we'll be emotionally equipped to surmount whatever economic inconveniences might result, our real identities unscathed by the loss of the artificial ones that corporations are in a position to both confer on us and to take away.

Anthony Zolezzi, a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur, management consultant, lecturer and former CEO, and Bill Bonvie, a New Jersey based freelance writer and ex-newspaperman, are co-authors of 
"The Detachment Paradox," a newly published survival manual for corporate employees. Send comments about this column to oped@northjersey.com.