Dear Job Stressed
By Mary Dempcy and Rene Tihista
Davies-Black Publishing: Paperback $15.95  

By Darlene Davis

Stressed out? Over the edge?  Overworked? Overwhelmed? Burned out?  Take heed, stress can exact a heavy toll on your physical and emotional health.  Thousands need medication just to make it through the day.  Perhaps it is time to stop and really listen to the physical and emotional messages your body and mind are sending you.  Unfortunately, many people try to ignore the stress they are experiencing rather than learn from it and seek a new direction. 

“When you give so much of your time, energy, sweat, and toll for an employer, always keep in mind that you are responsible for your own best interests,” husband and wife team, Dempcy and Tihista admonish their readers.  Although there is a limitless supply of books, tapes, audios, CDs and studies that address the health hazards of stress, it is rare to find a source that focuses entirely on job stress and does so from the employee’s perspective as Dear Job Stressed does.

Based on over twenty years of front-line research, stress management gurus Dempcy and Tihista have developed The Stress Personalities Model.  Their model helps you identify yourself among seven common personalities: Pleaser, Striver, Internal Timekeeper, Critical Judge, Sabertooth, Worrier, and Inner Con Artist.  They are personalities “because each is a behavior pattern with recognizable traits that can be identified and measured,” explain the authors.

If time is of the essence and you want to short cut to your particular stress issues, don’t skip the How to Read This Book section.  This section provides a capsule description of each personality type.  You can quickly identify some of your stressor characteristics and fast-forward to the chapter that will give you expanded information.  For example, if you are a workaholic, start with Chapter 3 and meet your “running partner, Striver”.  If short fused, impatience, hostility, or passive-aggressive is your game go to Chapter 6 and you will come face to face with Sabertooth in action.

A chapter is dedicated to each of the seven personalities and describes a scenario of a stressed-out employee in a typical work situation.  You can take a mini-test to help determine if your beliefs and behaviors match that particular stress personality type.  The authors promise over 100 specific tips for handling the most frequent encountered stress situations on the job. 

Stress is and will continue to be a reality in our work lives.  Moreover, it can be subtle.  “Because Stress Personalities are normal behaviors that you tend to use in different situations, you may respond from a Stress Personality you haven’t acknowledged in yourself.”  For those of you who are looking for a fresh perspective to understanding and better managing you daily stressors, checkout Dear Job Stressed next time you are on Amazon.com.