• !!
I
Stress Beaters.
long face, examine the reasons for this. Being seen as a generous person is great, but if you are always in debt can you alter your spending patterns?
If there are strengths that everyone can see, can you use these to further your career or improve your personal life? You might not think you are any good at doing a certain thing, but if half a dozen different people say you are, they can't all be lying.
At the end of a week's medical course, the organizer asked everyone to name one strength of each person on the course. To my surprise, and without any collusion, a dozen strangers all labelled me as logical. Vulcans with pointy ears are logical, not me, but knowing all 12 could not be wrong I sat down and thought about my stresses in as logical a manner as I could. As a result, my thinking highlighted problems and obvious solutions that I would have either ignored or missed completely. The result? A change of job, less stress at work and more quality time with my family.
It is one of the most common cliches to say a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, but I've just said it, and it's true. Learn about your strengths and make them work for you.
We all have strong points, but often do not realize what they are. Ask family and friends to list yours — and tell them to be honest. Nurture and use your talents.

Give your mind a workout
We may think about exercising our body, but give little thought to exercising our mind. I was reminded of this when meeting the manager of a highly successful health spa, who had come to see me with stress-related problems. He was a walking advertisement for the physical benefits of his business - fit, trim and physically very healthy - but his mental condition was appalling. He had one particular staffing problem, which he could not see any way to overcome. However, instead of dealing with this in a correct managerial way he had simply tried to ignore it. He thought that by increasing his physical well-being he would somehow solve his business problems. Of course this failed, and he was under severe stress as a result. He had made the big mistake that so many people make, and which is guaranteed to create more problems - he had not taken a long, cool look at what was happening in his life, and what he had to do to put it right. This always raises questions you need to ask yourself:
Have I done everything in my control to try to solve this problem, or am I making a lot of noise about something I have only made a half-hearted attempt to deal with?
If not, why not? Is the problem too big, or do I feel I want nothing to do with it?
If I want to walk away, is it because I am past my level of competence or am I not getting the support I need from the rest of the organization?
Is the failed project a result of events outside my control? Just as you should not judge a book by its cover, there may

193
192