Hello, my name is Dr. Dan guerra. I'm a clinical psychologist with a private practice based in Manhattan, New York City. I'm also the co author of a book entitled, from stressed to centered, A Practical Guide to a healthier and happier you. I do some executive coaching as well, both for individuals and teams in the areas of leadership development, work life balance, and stress management. This class will address stress in the workplace. And we'll be the first of a series of classes.

So first, we'll learn a bit about what stress really is and maybe what it's not. And how to identify stress triggers in your life. And also some practical skills that'll teach you how to manage stress better, both personally and professionally. And then we'll finish up with the introduction of an action plan. And this is will be developed so that you can hold yourself accountable to your own goals in the area of stress management, and work life balance. I have found that it really takes very little to learn how to manage stress effectively.

In other words, it doesn't take a lot of arduous work or burdensome amounts of time to have a positive impact in your life. But it does take a bit of willingness, commitment, and regular application on your part in order to reach some level of success. The strategies that I'm going to show you are evidence based, time tested, and they definitely work when applied. Your job is really at first to just get a cursory understanding of these practices and then to put them into play to apply them regularly and have a way to measure the impact of the technique. First by writing down your action experiences as a beginning point to help you hone in to what's working. And to what extent it's work.

Stress in the workplace usually manifests in things like workload level time demands, difficult conversations, and sometimes difficult co workers or supervisors. I'm sure some of you out there can relate to that. Stress also has a component in the workplace that's related to changes that are going on outside, for example, changes in the organization or poor communication that's out of our control, and sometimes another relatable experience. Something like the right hand doesn't really know what the left hand is doing. How many of us have been in a situation like that before? I know I have.

So before we delve into those specific work issues, which we'll also tackle in later classes, were first must have an understanding of the basics of stress and how it shows Up. In US, this is really the starting point, because after all, we can try to focus on the external events that are bringing stress into our life. But really, it's the internal ones that we have somewhat more of control over and it chance of changing directly. So this class will be the first of a series of classes that I plan to develop, that will expose you to a wider range of techniques, and practices, and hopefully levels of understanding that can help you develop a broader and deeper range of tools and practices to apply for stress management, and also to address a variety of different contexts and situations. So we're about to begin with a few slides to introduce these concepts.

And as I mentioned, we're going to end with a real nice practice that I hope you'll enjoy.