What if your employees could be impervious to stress?
A long time ago, I had a nurse whose daughter was injured in an accident. Before this, she was a fabulous employee, always going the extra mile making my patients’ experience smooth and filled with compassion. She was one of the best employees I ever had. After her daughter’s accident, she became super stressed and extremely difficult to work with. Months went by and her attitude about work steadily declined. I felt like I was working with a hedgehog, she was that prickly. The worst part was my patients felt it, too. And that just didn’t work for me. Her emotional volatility made it hard to get through the day with her at my side. It was easy to give her lots of slack when her family was actively in crisis, but as the months wore on, it became harder and harder to have her as an employee.
Luckily for me, she quit before I had to fire her. This gave me the freedom to start again with a new employee guilt free. But you know how that goes: it took awhile to find the new employee and then took months for her to fully learn the ropes and get up to full capacity on all our systems. (Medical offices are nothing, if not detail oriented complications!) In the end, that one incident (my nurse’s daughter getting injured and needing care for a couple of weeks), negatively affected my practice for nearly 8 months. By then, things were so much harder in the office. There were mounds of catch-up work to do trying to deal with all the details that had fallen through the cracks. It felt nearly impossible to get back on track to our friendly, patient centered equilibrium. We’d lost our stride and the whole office felt it.
It’s extremely difficult for a stressed employee to be a good employee.
I am sure, if you’re in HR or a leadership role in your organization, you know this kind of story only too well. It’s extremely difficult for a stressed employee to be a good employee. And it is much, much better, in the long run, to help a good employee find their stride again than it is to hire a
new one and have to spend all the time, energy and expense that goes into onboarding them.
As you may know, the statistics on how stress impacts the workplace indicate a serious problem that needs solving. Below are just a few highlighted statistics from Stress.org, an organization that studies stress and solutions to stress. If you really take these numbers in, it’s almost mind boggling how big an effect stress has on our bottom lines . As you read, consider how these are playing out at your company.
- 83% of US workers suffer from work-related stress.
- US businesses lose up to $300 billion yearly as a result of workplace stress.
- Stress causes around one million workers to miss work every day.
- Companies spend around 75% of a worker’s annual salary to cover lost productivity or to replace workers.
- Only 43% of US employees think their employers care about their work-life balance.
- Stress caused sleep deprivation for 66% of American workers in 2018.
- For many, high levels of chronic stress leads to depression and depression leads to $51 billion in costs due to absenteeism and $26 billion in treatment costs.
- Work-related stress causes 120,000 deaths and results in $190 billion in healthcare costs yearly.
And this is just work related stress. Stress at home affects three out of four employees enough that it reduces their productivity. I don’t know about you, but these numbers give me pause.
As employers, we can’t do much about our employees' out-of-work stress. Sure, flexible, generous leave helps, as does allowing for flexible schedules and on-site day care, if your company is big enough to be able to provide that. But we can’t do much except be compassionate when their teenager is stressing the family out or an elder needs extra care or a loved one is going through chemo. What we can do is help our employees learn to manage their stressors in healthful, helpful ways.
And that’s where The 7 Tools comes in.
We all listen when our employees tell us what is going on for them as we know without a doubt whatever is bothering them (at work or at home) will affect their productivity at work. Sadly, only 40% who are suffering from stress will talk to us. But listening, while important, isn’t enough to solve the problem. What employers need is a game changer. They need something to help their employees handle the stressors in their lives with greater equanimity. And that is just what we offer.
Employers need something to help their employees handle the stressors in their lives with greater equanimity.
Our course, Taming the Bear: Taking the Bite Out of Stress, is a 12 week experiential online course to help employees transform their relationship with stress. The class is a combination of instructional videos, exercises and small group coaching calls to help students internalize the learning and work through their own situations. Students learn specific tools that allow them to have greater emotional regulation in all areas of their lives. We have been teaching this course since 2005 and we know it works.
We teach skills that make people more resilient to life’s difficult moments.
Students learn:
- How to identify their own personal stress response
- How stress affects the body, emotions and mind
- How to take a pause and then respond instead of emotionally react to what life throws their way
- How to change the way they respond to stress so life’s natural stressors no longer have such control over their health and well-being
- How to understand the unconscious beliefs that keep them responding to life in unhealthful ways
- And most importantly, how to make lasting change in their lives
Interestingly, what makes people experience a situation as stressful has more to do with their internal beliefs about themselves and the world than it does about the situation itself. I am sure you have seen this in your employees. Ever notice how one person handles a tough situation with grace and another not so much? When you look at the people and understand what they believe about themselves, it’s easy to see it’s the people rather than the situation that dictates their response.
Taming the Bear teaches students a framework that allows them to uncover and change limiting beliefs. By releasing limiting beliefs, students are able to feel less emotionally reactive. They are able to bring their best self to work, relationships, and, perhaps most importantly, to the way they engage with themselves. With practice, students are able to stay present during the difficult moments without losing their equanimity. Suddenly, life’s inevitable stressors don’t knock them off center. They up their game and are able to stay on track with greater ease. And this leads to greater productivity and better attitudes around the office. The best part is, while the course is only 12 weeks, the benefits last a lifetime!
Taming the Bear Alumni are able to bring their best self to work, relationships, and to the way they engage with themselves.
There are so many reasons for your employees to take this class and they all affect the bottom line. Studies show that stressed employees have less:
- Energy
- Creativity
- Focus
All of which leads to poorer work quality and efficiency.
Stressed employees are worried employees. Their minds are filled with thoughts of problems rather than solutions.
They come to work late more often. They are sicker and out of the office more frequently. If your company self-insures, all this sickness is expensive in more ways than one.
But worst of all, stressed employees are often difficult to get along with. With the increase in stress comes greater emotional
volatility. If your company requires any kind of teamwork, a stressed employee drags down the productivity of their whole team, not just themselves.
You can see quickly how all this adds up to a major impact on the bottomline of the whole company. And this is only the beginning.
Stressed employees lead to greater staff turnover, both themselves and the people who work with them tend to leave.
Taming the Bear for Employers in a Nutshell
Taming the Bear is a 12 week online course co-taught by father-daughter team Dr. Steven M. Hall, MD and psychotherapist Grace Porter, MA. The course gives students a concrete and actionable process to reduce emotional reactivity and handle life's challenges with greater equanimity.
Who benefits from Taming the Bear?
Employees who are:
- struggling at work
- not living up to their potential
- emotionally reactive at work
- used to perform well and are now struggling
- need to increase their emotional intelligence
- struggle to receive feedback (positive or constructive criticism)
- distracted by their homelife
- often out sick
What it entails:
- 12 weekly modules each containing
- A video covering the material for the week
- An experiential video focused on putting the new skills into practice
- Homeworks and handouts
- A 90 minute live group coaching call where students learn to put the ideas taught in the course into action in their own lives as well as learning from each other's experiences
- Access to a community forum for processing, asking questions, and supporting each other
- The whole course takes most people about 2.5-3 hours a week to complete
There are two ways to offer Taming the Bear to your employees.
- You can sign them up for our regularly scheduled publicly offered classes
- You can put together a group of 5-10 employees for a private class
Pricing:
Email us at info@the7tools.com to discuss the option that will work best for the needs of your organization.
Benefits of sending your employees through Taming the Bear:
- Reduced stress
- Improved emotional regulation
- Increased productivity and creativity
- Improved self awareness
- Greater self compassion
- Become better workers and better leaders
Help your employees be the best employee (and person) they can be!
Our Students Say It Best:
"I went into Seven Tools thinking that I would "fix" some things that showed up in my personal life--as a wife, mother, and friend. The course definitely helped me evolve on this front, but what surprised me was the impact that the Seven Tools made on my role as a corporate leader. The tools have helped me to alter the way I deal with pressure/chaos/conflict at work, and have moved me down the continuum of reactivity so that I can respond to issues that arise versus being purely reactive. Doing the work to learn and apply the seven tools has taught me to be a spectator to my own thoughts--suspending judgment of others (and myself) in a way that allows me to lead with more compassion and conviction. Decisions I make have more depth, as I've found a way to pull at the threads of instincts, reactions, and emotions to uncover what lies beneath the surface. Getting to the depths of what is true allows me to make better decisions and to authentically and honestly communicate "the why" behind them. "
-Erin Scruggs, Senior Director, Global Talent Acquisition at LinkedIn
"Now that I am a few months beyond the Taming the Bear course, I am amazed at the extent of the change I see in my daily life.
I am so much better able to recognize when I am feeling reactive about a topic/situation/conversation. This increased awareness, combined with the process of The 7 Tools learned during the course, means I am able to consider my feelings and actions with curiosity rather than being completely caught up in the moment and reacting.
Meeting myself with so much more compassion than judgement, like we learned in the course, has also been a game changer for me. My days feel lighter since I am being kinder to myself."
-Bridget Ruiz, Founder of Sixth Wing LLC
“Taming The Bear was undoubtedly one of the most impactful experiences in my 15-year journey with Traumatic Brain Injury and Post Traumatic Stress. Incorporating the Seven Tools of Healing into my daily life provided perspective and practical skills that allowed me to transform my perceptions and effectively manage my emotions. It is a life changing experience I would recommend to any service members or veterans that have been to combat and then find themselves in a battle to rediscover their souls.”
Charles Bailey, US Army, Retired, OIF & OEF Combat Veteran
"This class was not about recognizing that I was overstressed and under-resourced, but instead about recognizing why I continue patterns that lead me to stressful situations as well as my response to stress and how it is based on my beliefs.
Taming the Bear is a journey into yourself to begin the process of understanding deeply held and likely unconscious beliefs that are causing you more stress and internal dissonance and leading you to make decisions that keep you stuck in these stressful patterns. Through compassionate awareness, this class then offers you tools to be able to hold yourself with tenderness while you work on creating new belief structures / thought patterns to create a life with less stress and more joy and success!
My favorite thing about Taming the Bear is the community of people being real about themselves and their lives as we learned how to be more real each week. Watching the empathy for ourselves and each other grow."
-Deb Reid, Private Practice Family Nurse Practitioner - Board Certified, Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner, Reiki Master
One study found that 20% of employees said they lost five hours of productivity to stress EVERY WEEK...five hours! How many hours does that add up to in your company?
We can help you with this. Taming the Bear gives your employees the tools they need to become more resilient, emotionally intelligent, and compassionate humans, which means they will be better employees and your bottom line will benefit.
One of the common side benefits of Taming the Bear happens when more and more employees of the same company take the course. Students learn a language that allows them to resolve conflicts with greater ease and become better team players. Their rise in productivity affects those around them.
Taming the Bear gives your employees the tools they need to become more resilient, emotionally intelligent, and compassionate humans.
We would love to speak with you to explain the program in greater detail. You can reach us at info@the7tools.com or by using the contact form below.
Learn how Taming the Bear can help your employees be at their best!
