Learn­ing a new skill

In this econ­omy it is more impor­tant than ever to keep your skills up-to-date.  It also is impor­tant to keep learn­ing new skills to keep your­self valu­able and able to han­dle new tasks.

I’ve been expe­ri­enc­ing the roller coaster of learn­ing new skills for the last sev­eral months.  I’m try­ing to become adept at the tech­nol­ogy involved in cre­at­ing and run­ning an online busi­ness.  There have been moments of sheer frus­tra­tion.  And there have been moments of sheer exhil­a­ra­tion.  I’ve learned to insert prod­ucts in my shop­ping cart.  I finally fig­ured out how to cre­ate my own web­site tem­plates.  The long hours of try­ing to under­stand Joomla, Word­Press, Dreamweaver, blogs, squidoos, arti­cle mar­ket­ing, link­ing and much more is finally start­ing to make sense.  I feel like I’m try­ing to learn a for­eign lan­guage and liv­ing in a for­eign coun­try.  I’ve had major melt­downs. I’ve had to walk away from it all to regain my per­spec­tive.  I’ve had cel­e­bra­tions to acknowl­edge mas­ter­ing a task.  I’ve got­ten excited to see arti­cles I’ve sub­mit­ted to direc­to­ries being viewed by web­site and blog editors.

And to my sur­prise, I kept com­ing back to try again and again.  There were many times I thought about just walk­ing away from the frus­tra­tion and expense.  But every time I walk away, I come back, try it again, and make small gains.

So what’s the les­son in this?  Per­sis­tence?  Try and try again?  Don’t give up?  If it is your pas­sion, you will prevail?

What do you think?  What expe­ri­ences have you had as you try to learn a new skill or job? How does the “try­ing” affect the har­mony in your life?

Work­places today are filled with stress. Employ­ers are stressed because of the econ­omy, for­eign com­pe­ti­tion and gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions. Employ­ees are stressed because of the fear of down­siz­ing, com­pe­ti­tion, the loss of their ben­e­fits, inter­ac­tion with their boss and co-workers, or increased workloads.

If stress is intrud­ing on you at work it can:

• Reduce your pro­duc­tiv­ity (which can cause more stress as your boss and co-workers rec­og­nize you are not hold­ing up your end of the job)
• Impact your health in both the short-term (colds, flu, headaches, stom­ach aches etc.)  and long-term if you don’t resolve the stress (car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease, mus­cu­loskele­tal prob­lems, psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­ders, etc.)
• Cause you to be less sat­is­fied with your job
• Affect your rela­tion­ship with your co-workers
• Affect your rela­tion­ships with your family

The first step toward deal­ing with work­place stress is to iden­tify what is caus­ing the stress.  Once know what is caus­ing the stress, you can then work on find­ing a way to resolve it. For me, one thing that causes stress is when I don’t know how to do some­thing.  Usu­ally it involves tech­nol­ogy in some way, shape or form.  One trick I’ve learned is to step away from the task that is stress­ing me.  The sim­ple act of walk­ing away for a few min­utes calms me down and helps me to reframe my mind.  Some­times I have to leave it overnight.

Another trick I’ve learned is to check my “self talk.”  Usu­ally when I’m frus­trated and stressed, I have this unhealthy self ‘talk going on.  “I don’t know why this has to be so hard.”  “How come every­one else gets this and I don’t.”  “I just don’t get it.”  Rec­og­niz­ing the lim­it­ing self-talk and chang­ing it to:  “I can fig­ure this out.”  “I just know I can do this.” or “This is easy and fun.  I can find the infor­ma­tion I need to fig­ure it out.”  has proven over and over that I can con­trol my emo­tions and my stress.

What causes you stress in your work­place?  What tips or tricks have you used to reduce the stress and strengthen the har­mony in your life, fam­ily and work?