Stress Awareness Month happens each April. It’s important to learn some strategies for coping with this particular issue. Stress awareness Month, which always happens in April, has now been going for 19 years and things just don’t appear to be getting better. Stress can be debilitating, and it can cause and/or aggravate health problems. Stress is a normal part of human existence — nobody is immune to it — it’s important to arm ourselves with knowledge so that we recognise when stress rears its ugly head. (Amazingly, we don’t always notice it’s happening to us.)
In this series of podcasts we will be looking at various themes concerning stress :
The statistics of stress
Workplace stress
Signs of a stressful workplace
Stress and Covid 19
Managing & coping strategies to combat stress
Measure your workplace stress
Evaluate your stress levels.
STRESS AWARENESS MONTH IS IMPORTANT
It reminds us to pay attention to our health – According to the official website, “Stress Awareness Month is a national, cooperative effort to inform people about the dangers of stress, successful coping strategies, and harmful misconceptions about stress that are prevalent in our society.”
It’s going strong – Stress Awareness Month has been an ongoing campaign of awareness and education since 1992 – 19 years already.
Because we’re all feeling it – A recent survey found that about two-thirds of workers report engaging in behavior such as drinking or crying regularly in order to deal with stress.
How stressed do you feel in work?
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How stressed do you feel in life in general and the Covid 19 Pandemic?
National Pet Day is April 11, although if you’re a pet owner, you know there’s not a day that goes by that you don’t celebrate your animal companion! So hug your hedgehog, bond with your bunny, and cut your kitty some catnip!
Which pets do you have ? Cats ? Dogs? Rabbits ? So many to choose from !
Which pets give you the most joy ?
Listen as Chris (a dog lover) and Sue (a cat lover) talk about the extraordinary pet facts…. they’re quite amazing !
In this series we are going to be looking at ways that we can enhance and improve our learning and perhaps crushing some of the myths about learning techniques that we learnt in school.
Every day we meet people with different techniques for learning vocabulary, but most of them revolve around some pretty shaky ideas, those being ‘if you write stuff down, you’ve learnt it.’
If only things were that simple …
This rarely works, due mainly to the fact that some important steps have been missed out – those being, actively learning the vocabulary and then actively using it.
Let’s put this in prallel with sport, to illustrate the idea.
Imagine that you are a huge cycling fan and you love the Tour de France and you would like to experience the grueling (look that one up if you like) hardships of a day riding in the mountains of the Tour de France.
So, you get all the magazines about the Tour and mountain cycling, you have the maps and you have read all the technical stuff on hydration and nutrition during a massive climb in the Pyrenees mountains in the south of France.
You have even chosen your mountain, Le Col du Tourmalet – wow! that’s a big one, and have bought a fabulously expensive ‘S-Works’ bicycle for the climb.
You’ve seen the videos and read all the information, but that’s as far as you go – THAT is how a lot of people learn – they don’t go the final mile of training before getting on the bike after weeks of muscle and stamina building. They don’t prepare for the day that they will be climbing Tourmalet on their bike.
OK, they know all about Tourmalet, Le Tour de France and mountaing cycling – but they have no guarantee of ever being able to achieve the ascent of a mountain on their bicycle.
Listen to the podcast, N°1 in a series, to get some ideas to improve your learning.
No Top14 Rugby this weekend and the 6 Nations has finished, but the Champions Cup rugby continues for the next two weeks – this week the last 16 clubs fight for their places in the 1/4 finals, which will be played on the following weekend.
The matches this weekend feature the following;
Leinster v Toulon
Gloucester v La Rochelle
Wasps v Clermont
Munster v Stade Toulousain
Exeter Chiefs v Lyon
Racing 92 v Edinburgh
Union Bordeaux Bèbles v Bristol Bears
Llanelli Scarlets v Sale Sharks
Some great matches to be played – try and predict the scoresor the winners & losers before listening to the podcast to see how good your general knowledge of rugby is.
In a previous podcast Effective Presentation Skills we talked about warming up before doing a presentation or speaking in public.
But what does “warming up” actually involve ?
In this podcast Chris explains the importance of breathing and focus in order to reduce stress, and Sue gives some diction exercises which help with articulation and problem sounds for different nationalities.
These exercise are not intended to make you worry about a perfect English (British) accent but they are aimed at helping you move your mouth in certain ways to help you get the best pronunciation you can.
Remember that as a non-native English speaker having an accent is quite normal but when speaking in a professional situation always try to speak clearly with a good beginning and a crisp ending to words. In more informal settings you don’t need to be so particular.
Here are the exercises:
1.Blue blood, black blood. Black bug, blue bug.
2. Down the deep damp dark dank den,
3. Four furious friends fought for the phone,
4. Hotdog, Hamburger
In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire hurricanes hardly ever happen,
5. Kiss her quick, kiss her quicker, kiss her quickest.
6. You know New York, You need New York, You know you need unique New York.
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