Complete freedom from stress is a practical possibility, thanks to a unusual mix of philosophy and HR. Padraig O'Morain went on a course that counters the traditional notion of stress and its causes.
The crisis hit on Friday night. The launch of a project which had been in preparation for more than a year was in jeopardy. Saturday morning brought no improvement. It was Tuesday before the matter was finally resolved.
But where, I asked myself, was the stress? The experience was unpleasant, even scary and played on my mind for most of the weekend but the fierce stress I would have expected to feel was not there. I slept like a log instead of lying awake fretting.
I had left the stress back in Bewley's Hotel in Ballsbridge at a workshop based on the principle that the causes of stress are internal: we generate our own stress and, knowing that, we can choose not to generate it while dealing with everyday issues.
The course, organised by Loretto Mara of High Performance, was presented by Trish Murphy, a psychotherapist and former probation officer. She is a director of PSM Ltd, a consultancy, training body and mediation service started by Brian McGeough who has married his human resources experience in industry with his love of philosophy, particularly Socrates.
That's an unusual mix but it's one that has won plaudits from customers such as VHI Healthcare, IBM, Commerzbank Europe, Focus Ireland and Heineken Ireland. PSM makes a startling claim, namely that its training "permanently changes how the person acts, thinks and responds."
At the start of the two-day workshop attended by eight people from companies and the public service, Trish Murphy made another startling claim. "Complete freedom from stress is a practical possibility," she wrote on a flip chart. What, she wanted to know, did we think of that?
We did not think much of it. This participant suggested you would have to be dead for the proposition to be true. Nobody accepted it as a realistic statement. By the end of the two days, we had changed our minds. The training consists of putting out a series of propositions and looking at approaches to stress which follow naturally from these propositions.
"If you know the principle of something, the 'how to', how to behave, how to think falls into place," she declared. Techniques which are not based on a true principle simply distort everything.
The key principle is that all causes of stress are internal. If you are stressed because you are stuck on a country road for an hour behind someone driving at 25 miles per hour, that stress derives from something you want in your head and not from the car in front of you.
You want the car in front to move at a speed which suits you. If you wanted the car in front to move at 25 miles an hour, you would not stress yourself about it. So you have a choice about whether to get stressed or not. We produce our stress by opening up what she calls "the angle of misery".
The angle of misery is opened by daydreaming, inner chatter (the "what ifs" and "if onlys" and so on) and by a preoccupation with outcome. The latter is a behaviour in which we tell ourselves we'll be happy when the slow driver gets off the road or we get this job finished or we get the kids married off or we retire or... or
The antidote is to stay in the present and remain aware of what is going on without the internal chatter.
"Spot it and drop it," she says of that internal conversation we are so used to having with ourselves. Day dreaming she describes as "practising senility".
But what of the rush of tasks and events which afflict people nowadays and give them little time for quiet or stillness? By failing to acknowledge the completion of each of the day's tasks we allow stress to accumulate to the point where we are drained by the time the day is over, she says.
The completion of each task: getting the kids into the car, getting them into school, making a phone call, writing a report and so on, should be followed by a moment of acknowledgement. This can be done by getting in touch with your senses, for instance, by hearing what's going on in your environment or resting your hand on the phone for a moment.
She urged all of us to get used to doing a relaxation exercise which takes only a minute or two: noticing your feet on the ground, your body on the chair, the clothes on your body, your breathing, the taste in your mouth, the sounds you hear nearby and far away. The exercise can be done many times a day, unobtrusively.
But how can you know what to do next if you're not winding yourself up into a lather about it? Simple, she says, you keep asking yourself "what is the need now?" and you have a far better chance of recognising the need if you drop the chatter, the daydreaming and the worrying about the outcome.
At the end of the two days the participants went off relaxed and happy.
A week later, this participant, for one, is still stress-free and beginning to believe something profound happened in that hotel.
Handling the stress factor
: When Brian McGeough was working in the hospitality and financial services industries, he noticed that training workshops changed the way people talked but not the way they behaved.
"After a very short time they would revert back to form," he says. "How can we get HR training based on true principles that really has an effect on people's behaviour?" was the question he asked himself when setting up his own business.
The answer lay in his love of philosophy. The key was to teach people principles, not techniques. "If technique moves away from principle it becomes so corrupt, so disconnected."
"Have a nice day" no longer means "enjoy the day and I am interested in your welfare," it means "move along quickly there." The principles taught in the workshops have been around for a very long time, indeed: "Socrates would feature through all of the work."
The fundamental principle behind PSM's approach to stress is that "the cause is not external. If we spend all our days thinking it's external when it's internal, what a series of mistakes we will make. Our approach is causal," he says. "It provides true understanding and addresses the real causes of limited performance. Development is a matter of recognising and removing limits on potential."