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Stress-proof your life and your business

A one-day psychology course at the University of York not only helped Sarah Byrne in her corporate events business, it also taught her a lot about herself.

Sarah heard about the ‘Challenge of Change’ course at a meeting of the business network group, York Professionals.

It was really useful to to identify traits and coping mechanisms in others, including my employees, I can now spot when someone is responding in a certain way due to stress which means I can help them deal with that.

Sarah Byrne
Mosaic Events

The course is based on a book by Honorary Reader in Psychology at the University, Dr Derek Roger: ‘Managing stress: live long and prosper’. The aim iof the course, which is delivered by Dr Jo Clark of the Psychology Deparment, is to help people adapt to change, by identifying causes and symptoms of stress and demonstrating techniques for handling it.

The course was attended by professionals from different sectors – mainly consultants or company directors. It began with a questionnaire to help identify people’s traits and to see how they currently cope with stress.

The course provided some practical tools to handle stress. It covered handling stress in your own life, and helping others to handle stress in theirs. “It made me think about the language I use and the way to talk to people to try and avoid making a situation feel stressful,” says Sarah. “But it also taught me not to try and solve other people’s problems for them, but rather help them to solve things for themselves.”

While the course has proved useful to Sarah for managing her own work and running her business, it’s also spread into other parts of her life.
 “Lots of things outside our work can stress us out,” says Sarah. “Although the cause may be different, the symptoms are the same and can be managed in the same way. I’ve already used what I learnt on the course to help some of my friends who are going through tough times in their lives.