There is no doubt that the successive lockdowns of 2020-21 have dramatically changed our daily lives on so many levels, and figures show that more people have experienced anxiety due to the social, financial and work restrictions that have been placed on us.

The workplace is a very demanding, quick-paced and increasingly uncertain place in which we operate on a day-to-day basis, but does it always have to be a stressful place?.

Pressure to meet deadlines, deliverables and working with difficult people, among other factors, puts modern employees under unreasonable amounts of stress.

In fact, being constantly stressed out is so universal that many people have accepted it as unpleasant, but a way of life - it has become the norm.

While a certain amount of stress is acceptable and can actually be beneficial for you—keeping you alert and focused, helping you cope well with challenges—beyond a certain acceptable limit, stress is nothing but bad for you, if it is not channelled and managed.

Not only does it affect your mental stability but also your health, relationships, productivity at work, and overall quality of life.

People are different, so we all react differently to the same set of circumstances; something that one person may find stressful, another may regard as only mildly challenging or even normal.

How you tolerate and respond to stress depends not only on the particularities of your situation but also on what type of person you are; your natural inclinations, beliefs and behaviors.

In this podcast we look at some of the ways that workplace stress impacts people and we look at :

Stress trends in the 21st century

What stress looks like in the workplace

The effects of stress

The cost of stress

Is your workplace causing you stress?

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.

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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.

Staying focused, motivated and driven can be tricky, especially when you have a busy working and/or family life to deal with.

Check out this podcast to find 10 golden rules for staying motivated learning English.

When we start learning something new, it can be a novel experience at the start and we want to put a lot of effort into our learning, but as time goes on, we can start to flag and at times we just cannot get the motivation to continue learning.

This is especially true if we don't have a clear plan for our learning or if we can't see our progress moving along as fast as we would have expected.

Try some of these golden rules.

How many are you using now?

How many come as a surprise to you?

Will you try and use some of them?

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Why are you studying for an MBA?

An MBA, or a Master of Business Administration, is a very popular choice for many today as a way of either changing career path or boosting an existing career path.

An MBA is expensive, demanding and has high entry requirements, so why do so many people study for an MBA?

I asked the question, "Why are you studying for an MBA?" to a group of international delegates studying for the one year, full-time Aerospace MBA in Toulouse, France.

Accredited MBA courses and business schools seek to prepare students for senior management roles in business.

They do this by exposing them to all areas of business including accounting, finance, marketing, soft skills, strategy, economics and human resources.

An MBA can open up new avenues and opportunities for graduates and is usually a life-changing experience in many ways. The Aerospace MBA at Toulouse Business School was ranked 4th by the SMBG and is ranked as one of the best universities and business schools in France.

Here are some reasons why people study for an MBA

Here are some more reasons that answer the question, Why are you studying for an MBA?

Click here to see the Animated Podcast version which is designed to give learners an extra helping hand.

Knowledge management (KM) is the process of capturing, developing, sharing, and effectively using organizational knowledge. It refers to a multi-disciplined approach to achieving organisational objectives by making the best use of knowledge. (Source Wikipedia).

Some of the challenges facing Human Resource Managers and their departments in the coming years.