Companies of all sizes have been focussing on both the health and welfare of their employees in recent years, but not until recently have they paid similar attention on the mental health of their staff.

When the Confederation of British Industry canvassed its members they found 90 per cent agreed employers should show concern for the mental health of their staff and employees. Yet only one in10 of their member companies had actually drawn up a stress management and mental health in the workplace policy.

With most people spending a high proportion of their time at work the importance of mental health in the workplace should not be overlooked. Because of the stressful nature of work the mental and psychological well being of staff should be equally important as all other aspects of health and safety at work. In fact it should most probably be the factor of most concern within a companies health and safety regimen.

It is welcome news that firms are becoming increasingly aware of mental health concerns in the workplace, encouraging management and staff to cope better with work related stress through attendance at courses.

These kinds of mental health training courses are invaluable on two levels; firstly it enables staff to be more aware of the stress they are feeling and provides them with tips and techniques to control those feelings and, secondly, it equips staff to recognise signs of stress in their co-workers.

Stress management and mental health in the workplace courses are undoubtedly of valuable for businesses. Long term, stress leads to a slump in production which subsequently leads to a tumble in profits. Short term stress results in absent workers as well as other problems in the work place. By sending staff on stress management and mental health in the workplace courses, employers are allowing those of their workforce already suffering stress to recognise the effects, or to be able to initiate safeguards to prevent it occurring.

Attending mental health in the workplace awareness courses will also produce this, one of the biggest benefits. Both management and worker will learn just what stress is as well as what its cause is.

There are days that you find yourself drowning in constant work and daily appointments. You struggle with everything from home, work, or school. Everything needs to be done and the problem is you do not have enough time on your hands.

Learning time management is very important for us to tackle everything that we need to do. This can help you do work with lesser time involved, eliminate wastage, achieved your goal, and finish everything before a day ends or just to meet deadlines.

The common mistake we do in managing our time is just trying to cramp all our chores in a single day. We work ourselves into a disastrous state that sometimes we are just like walking time bombs that can explode anytime. Learning time management can help us solve this problem.

If you are swamped with work and do not know how to manage all your activities, in due time you can easily burn out yourself. To make the most out of your time, it would require planning on what to do at the moment and then make the best possible decision. You need to relax before making a decision and this can help you focus on what you need to do.

Remember, if you feel rushed all the time you will not be able to concentrate on anything and can possibly make hasty decisions that can easily lead to disastrous outcomes. Anything done in haste can be a waste of your efforts. It is possible that you will never get things done.

When planning what to do with all your work, try to be calm and compose yourself first. Think what urgent matters do need to be done immediately and then write it down. Prioritize your list and do it on a per day basis, which means what you can only finish for a particular day.

Put in mind never to rush yourself. With the list on hand, try focusing on your first chore. Work on it as fast and as efficiently as you can. After finishing the first chore, go to the next one and repeat the same process for every chore until you have finished everything on the list. In no time at all, you will have everything done.

Learning time management is very simple, you just need to relax and focus. Never procrastinate because your chore will never finish itself, you have to act on it. Do what needs to be done in a calm state of mind.

For those that might occasionally miss a deadline, or find that they just can’t get everything done, it might be valuable to learn how to develop some better time management skills and tactics.

You may actually have plenty of time but are wasting a lot of time or you may have simply taken on too much at once. By managing time effectively and efficiently it is possible to balance work and home pretty well.

Time management is not about managing time but what you are doing with your time. No matter how much you try there are only those 24 hours in a day, the same for all of us. Getting to the bottom of where you are wasting time is always a good place to start!

To manage your time effectively, you first need to determine what the activities are that you waste time doing and how long you tend to do these things instead of the other important tasks. Perhaps you spend too much time surfing the internet or chatting unproductively on the phone. Make a list of what you do when you waste time and how long these periods tend to last.

In order to get the most from you time management efforts, you need to set goals that you can reach and feel a sense of accomplishment. Setting goals and reaching those goals helps to change your behavior from a procrastinator to someone that gets things done – it helps you focus too.

When you make some progress with this, you will be able to understand better what is working for you and do more of it!

There are plenty of tools to use for effective time management these days, from precise software or other proprietary tools. You could even simply just write down what you want to get done and what you are going to do with your time and see what that brings you.

By prioritizing goals and tasks for the day the most important tasks are likely to be done properly. Determining which tasks are crucial to be accomplished and which ones can be done another time – or even better, delegated, it’s possible to make much more out of the available time.

Instead of putting some tasks off, you may be able to delegate to others on your team. This is a valuable development tool to expand the experience of your team, especially when you can provide support to them as you gently hold their metaphorical hand!

Once you finally have a time management routine that you can stick to, you will find that your are much more productive than before. Once you have reached this point you should start setting time limits for yourself, being challenging and stretching and then you will see what really can be achieved with your mind set to it.

In 2007 the major trade association for public speakers, the National Speakers Association published a major survey about the public speaking industry.

One of the the things they concluded was that “NSA speakers are involved in many types of speaking engagements” including: Seminars, Training Events, Breakout sessions, Keynotes, Consulting

The two main audience types for their work was corporations and associations.

Then in a “perfect storm” of circumstances, the economy tanked and wiped out all of the reliable business models in the public speaking industry. The reason for that, in my view, is that professional public speakers ignored the new rules.

What am I trying to say? Just that when the economy was good, speakers focused on getting speaking engagements, then showed up and delivered their message to whomever was in attendance. Some of them sold their books or other products from the back of the room while others positioned themselves for consulting or training work with the companies in attendance.

They spent little time thinking about building relationships with those attendees who were passionate for the topic being presented, instead they focused on the companies that were there. They never considered that if the companies or associations budgets were cut and speaking opportunities reduced significantly that they would need a different way to sell their products and services.

Adhering to the new rules may have been a major help to those speakers who have really struggled in the last year or so.

The new rules tell us that speaking is merely a way to distribute content to those people who are hungry for information on the topic we speak on. In that sense, we’re not speakers, we’re publishers.

Because of the power of the Internet, we can market to a targeted audience in countries all over the world. While we’re not likely to speak in all of these countries, we can still serve our followers and fans everywhere who’ll read our information, hire us to deliver our services and buy our products.

Since the market for speaking engagements is significantly reduced, the time is now to realize that the hunger for information on every imaginable niche topic is stronger than ever before. As a publisher your job is to seek and build relationships with people who are passionate about your topic and offer them your unique information in multi-media formats.

You can start by having a video shot and then turn your new video into an audio, transcribed and printed as a book, offered as a series of articles, posted to your blog and more. If you want help with this, contact me and let me know what your needs are. My professional speaker training may be all you need or perhaps you will want to access some one-on-one help.

Stress management seminars are effective venues by which people are taught techniques on how to better handle stressful situations in the everyday hassle whether in school, at home, at work or other social settings. These seminars are conducted by a professional whose expertise is on managing stress, thus you are assured of only the proven and most efficacious ways of relieving, reducing and managing the pressures of stress.

The seminar is done through simulation of different stressful scenarios where you are given the opportunity to actually participate in. The situations involve the happenings and events that characterize the conflicts that give rise to stress in school, home or workplace.

By being active participants in the seminar, you are given the chance to somehow re-enact triggers to your stress but in a controlled setting and so feedback opportunities are present where each event is analyzed to help you realize why and how stress started in the first place. Having impartial comments and opinions from the seminar conductor and other peers give you the hints for coping and skills that you may not even be aware of.

Like tackling a disease process, these seminars will also help you understand the etiology of stress, how it starts, the triggers, how to reduce and deduce stress, ways of deviating from negative thinking, striving to maintain a balanced life, and other relevant topics and strategies of coping. This comes in various presentations like writing activities, group work and sharing, and individual writing activities.

Communication is one of the primary skills that you can learn from any stress management seminar. During highly stressful scenarios, it matters that you know which style of communication you would apply so that you know how you would express your needs. These seminars would tackle the various styles of communication so that you would be able to know how you would be more interactive and respond to different conflicting scenarios.

Stress management seminars are the best avenue for you to learn the ability to be able to manage and eventually overcome stress in a very positive manner. You will not just get to know yourself more but you will also be knowledgeable in combining effective strategies and ways that can help you fight stress at your best. It will also help you improve the way you see and interpret various life situations and help you be free from feelings of severe tension which can lead to anxiety.

Its real important to reward yourself. What is the definition of reward anyway? The dictionary defines reward as, “something given or received in recompense for worthy behavior”- a definition that makes sense. I have a slightly different definition: giving yourself a gift for all the blood sweat and toil you have put into a task, so that you have a sign that all the hard work and effort is actually finally paying off. You will want to work harder because you will be more motivated.

One of the best ways to define reward is with an example. My Dad would be one. He is a successful person and has always been a guy with an amazing ablity to work hard. A child of the depression, he grew up in a small town in the south, very poor and didnt have much. Because he was determined and was willing to do the hard work- he actually started climbing the ladder. He advanced from manual laborer, to factory worker, to highly paid company executive. At a defining moment in his career , he went to the local dealership and bought a shiny new Cadillac. As a kid I didn’t understand why. Why would he go out and buy a big monster gas guzzling car? Just filling it up cost a fortune. So I asked him that one day when we were driving. His mark of success or reward was that car. He had made a vow to himself, that if he ever “made it” he would reward himself by getting a Cadillac. Now the reward had been granted. The dream had arrived.

The story illustrates a key point. It is very important to reward yourself for achieving your goals. It is important to reward your self for the following reasons: 1) You will feel like you are making progress. 2) To have a tangible reminder of why you are working so hard. 3) To finalize the achievement of a specific goal. 4) To help measure your progress and celebrate it. 5) Because it feels great and motivates you even further.

I don’t know if you have ever heard the story about Tabitha, Steven King’s wife. It is a great story that is about reward. For years Steven King tried to make a living as a writer. They as a couple were “poor as church mice” as the old saying goes. At some point he finally made it and signed a very high dollar book deal. When he came home and announced the news, she said “so does that mean I can buy a blow dryer now?” They were so poor she had not been able to afford one at all. Now the blow dryer she had been coveting was in her future. Tabitha and Steven reported when she bought the blow dryer, it meant more to her than anything.

Goals both short and long term are critical to your success. Then take those same goals and with each one design a specific reward to match it. When that happens the fire will be lit!

Billions of people are experiencing the effects of stress worldwide. Most people blame stress for wreaking havoc to their lives and careers. The search for the best techniques to relieve stress is never ending, considering the fact that more and more people are getting stressed over different things.

The symptoms of stress can be felt physically, mentally, emotionally, and behaviorally. Sometimes these symptoms can be blamed to be caused by certain illness but if you have doubts about your health condition visiting a doctor is advisable. But going to a doctor and asking for a prescribed medicine for your stress can worsen your condition instead of alleviating it. The stress relieving medicines you are given can be addictive and can have negative side effects to your body when used for a long time.

The truth is, sometimes the way we look at stress is what makes it have a negative effect on us. Originally, stress is built for the purpose of coping up with events that pose as a threat to us. With stress, we can cope up with events and circumstances that we wouldn’t normally be able to cope up with. Too much stress is the problem, especially when we have no idea as to how to deal with the stresses that come our way.

Too much stress can get us disoriented. We tend to panic under the effects of stress. It is important that we relax. Research has found that aromatherapy can alter brainwaves and decrease cortisol levels, which our body produces as part of the body’s stress response. What results is the change in our behavior and perception towards stress. Aromatherapy can be a convenient stress relieving practice due to its availability. You can do it anywhere, as long as you carry your essential oils with you.

Aromatherapy is magical in its stress relieving effects. It helps calm the mind and body, while activating your body’s relaxation response. Massaging, which is also a relaxing experience, can be used in combination with aromatherapy oils. It not only promotes a stronger body to fight fatigue, it also helps relieve anxiety and depression.

Aromatherapy can also used in tandem with meditation to quickly induce a state of relaxation. To fight stress relaxation techniques are often applied. This is because when we are stressed, we panic and tense up a little. These are easily countered by the use of aromatherapy. It is the simplest, most convenient, and cheapest form of stress relief methods out there.

There is a reason why self help books have been popular for years. The idea behind such books is that people should be confident in their own skin and be able to make use of their talents and abilities to overcome their distress. One such genre of self help books come in a number of titles on stress management. These stress management books are for people who feel they are defeated by stressful routines of their lives and need to find a way out.

Stress is the major contributing factor in people’s lives owing to the demands of the workplace and the recent concerns about the ongoing recession. Many of us have been affected by long periods of additional pressure and constant worries regarding money. Whether you are an entrepreneur concerned about your business or a housewife trying to survive on your husband’s low income, stress can cost you your health and add more misery to an already bad situation.

A stress management book can help you turn your life around simply by making due changes to some aspects of your life and by giving you suggestions on how to ensure a better lifestyle. You can do this by goal setting and by incorporating some practical ideas from these books into your routine. You will be able to manage your priorities better and reduce the clutter of emotions you have inside you.

A good stress management book can also guide you on how to give your life a lift even in the worst possible times. One cannot change the events that have happened in your life but you can learn how to live with whatever you have gone through. There are a number of ways you can reduce stress and learn to cope with your problems. You need to learn to remain positive and calm and deal with your hurt and anger to eliminate stress in your life.

Self help books on stress management have helped a lot of people come to terms with their fears and demons. Sometimes stress is caused simply because we don’t know how to deal with a certain state of affairs that has come upon us. It is also caused by our inability to deal with the difficulties. A stress management book can teach us to maintain a structure in our life which helps us eliminate stress and give positivity to an otherwise negative circumstance.

To manage your time is to dominate your time and work rather than being dominated by them. Your time clock revolves around your life. Every thing you think and act takes time. How you use your time determines where and how to use your life. It is ironic to say that nobody has enough time, yet everyone has time as long as there is.

The question lies on the many reasons as to why time management is important. Getting an answer to this probe will open up your minds into the varied ways on how to manage time. No matter how well you use the techniques and strategies to improve your ability to manage time, still it would be a waste of time if you have not studied the main reasons why it is important to consider those techniques.

Needless to say, it is now important to manage your time successfully because of seven good reasons:

1.You will have more chances for success.

Personal productivity and self-fulfillment can be achieved effectively.

2.You can utilize your mind better.

Time management skills require intellectual capacity to plan, organize, delegate, and monitor. Utilizing your mind to practice the skills will help you better in eventually making time management a habit.

3.You can enjoy your life much better.

Having a balanced time between work and play will make your life easier and enjoyable.

4.You can gain more knowledge.

Increased knowledge of the skills in planning, organizing, delegating, and monitoring can maximize your thinking capacity to do better.

5.You will be happier for having more time being friendly.

Prioritizing time for family and friends would make you become happier as you will be able to build lasting relationship with them.

6.You will feel more joy for having more time to love.

Not ignoring your loved ones despite your hectic and busy schedules is a joy to work for in order for you to gain love, too.

7.You will have a better health and soul.

Creating a stress-free day-to-day living through proper management of time would make you healthy inside and out.

Knowing all the reasons why time management is important to learn makes it easier for you to have a full grasp on how to manage your time wisely. The answers as to the benefits if you have more time to work, think, play, read, and enjoy are nothing less but all those seven good reasons above.

Once you get clear on WHAT you want to achieve, it’s crucial to know WHY you want it.

If you have an important goal, it needs a big why. Otherwise, you won’t have the determination and resolve to overcome the inevitable challenges you’ll encounter in the process of achieving it.

Most people are too focused on the how and they miss the all important why.

When it comes to investing our precious time and energy into a worthy objective it makes a huge difference if our why is strong. If we have enough benefits-enough REASONS for the goal-we substantially increase our chances for success.

I believe the Universe hangs onto the answers we seek until it’s convinced we’re inspired by enough desire. When our desire is equal to the task, we find what we’re looking for.

Weak passion, weak answers. Little zeal, little determination.

How’s YOUR why? If you’re not making the progress you think you should be making in achieving your goals, maybe you haven’t inspired yourself with enough reasons why you want them.

Let’s take losing weight. Many people have this goal. But based upon the average weight of North Americans, very few are achieving it.

But what if you HAD to lose weight? What if you were promised a million dollars to lose that extra 20 pounds you’re carrying around? You could do it, couldn’t you?

Of course you could. And all that changed was the payoff. Your why got bigger.

So maybe all that has to happen is for you to come up with enough reasons to lose the weight. There are many, of course, but have you ever listed them? Have you reviewed them? Do the benefits stir you with strong emotion?

Jim Rohn says, “When the why gets stronger, the how gets easier.” I agree.

What can you do today to increase your motivation and determination to achieve the goals you’ve set? Make a good list of why you want each important goal. If you do, and if you review them often, you will be focusing not only on what you want, but why you want it.

It works.