In Part 2 of her series of tips on how to de-stress yourself and manage demands in all areas of your life, Kath Lockett looks at three more steps: taking time out, finding ways to laugh more and rediscovering romance. Use them to bring back a better sense of balance and enjoyment and deal with some of the stress hormones your body will have created at other times.

A ‘lily dipper’ in a multi-person canoe is someone who looks from the outside like they are paddling like everyone else, though they’re just going through the motions of real work. It’s important that each paddler carry their own weight by digging into the water long and hard; otherwise, someone else on the team has to carry it for them. In this story of paddling through the Canadian wilderness, the writer discovers how lily dippers can become a high performance team.

One of the most frustrating and irritating experiences at work is the endless talk, conversation and sharing of thoughts that takes place and leads to nowhere. That’s all many meetings consist of: moving the existing ‘mental furniture’ around. There’s nothing new because the door stays closed. Nothing comes in. Nothing gets out. Only the arrangement of the furniture changes. So why doesn’t anyone open the door?

To build the kind of lifestyle that allows you truly to live, work/life balance needs to be more than a buzzword. It needs to be a way of life. In the first of a series of items on how to de-stress yourself and manage demands in all areas of your life, Kath Lockett looks at two critical steps: learning to take pride in your imperfections and saying ‘No’ more often.

Whack-a-mole management is the common game of ‘whacking’ business problems as fast as they pop their heads up, using a ‘mallet’ made up of whatever suggests itself as the simplest, easiest and shortest-term action. Yet because it’s more concerned with looking good than with being good, and ignores systemic factors, whack-a-mole management always ends by making things worse. You do not have to manage that way.

When someone’s committed, it shows in the way they care and how deeply they are engaged — even at work. Explore the elements of healthy, conscious commitment and reflect on why some people show a limited ability to commit to anything — leaving them unhappy, frustrated and denied a sense of meaning in their lives. Then ask yourself the key questions that will help you establish a deeper sense of commitment to, and engagement in, what you do at work, at home and at play.

According to researchers from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, white-collar psychopaths are the biggest villains in the average worker’s work and home life. Nowadays, office technology helps these white-collar psychopaths take credit for others’ good work, unfairly apportion blame and play games with employees loyalties — all from the safety of a computer keyboard. Read how some people were successful in dealing with their toxic boss.

In the modern, financially driven organization, people are reduced to being extensions of the systems in use. Management is authoritarian, hierarchical and monopolistic. Using a comparison between Windows and Mac operating systems, John Fletcher charts the reasons why this approach to management seems bound to fail in the end.

We live in a world of duality: love versus fear, right versus wrong, negative or positive and so on. Maybe that’s why one of the qualities of a ‘mature individual’ is the ability to hold and reflect upon both polarities at the same time. Many refer to this as enlightening state where you do not have to opt for one over the other, but can entertain both polarities, with curiosity and without judgment. Here are some ways of learning from the dualities in your life and how you react to them.

Are you spending precious time and energy trying to resuscitate “dead horses” — attitudes and ideas you should have given a decent burial a long time ago? Are you telling yourself that if you just “stick it out” all will be well, and the dead horse will miraculously come back to life? When the horse dies, get off! Stop wasting time and effort carrying it around or trying to resurrect it.