Stress, for sure, is one of the main themes of modern life. Everyone has more work to do and not enough time, and everyone wants more money and is hustling to get it. This means family togetherness often gets shortchanged, which only leads to more stress.
A lot of meeting planners are stressed out. There's no question about it; go to the chart on the front page and the related story plus additional graphics on page 4, if you have any doubt.
We aimed to determine the degree to which various factors contribute to planners' stress, and the top three turned out to be volume of work, the work/life balancing act, and level of compensation. Also interesting to me was that world events ranked as only the ninth-most stress-inducing factor out of 10 listed.
It's true that for most people, there's no way the bombs that exploded in London could cause anywhere near as much stress as working 80 hours a week or struggling to pay the mortgage. Yet, an unscientifically created database in my own brain, drawing from my conversations and correspondence with people, indicates that all the noise going on in the world puts us significantly on edge.
It seems that almost daily we hear of things that keep us off balance. Many are of direct import to meeting planners. Terrorism is a big one, of course; even the threat of it induces some people not to travel. Also throw in the mix the seemingly heightened incidence of natural disasters — the tsunami, all the hurricanes, even the heat wave that wreaked such havoc at the Boy Scouts Jamboree.
My own definition of "world events" would go beyond such occurrences. I also would include in it all of the new business pressures meeting planners are feeling — the new era of corporate accountability, the extreme expense controls being put in place, the frantic environment of corporate mergers and acquisitions, the relentless march of technology, the explosion of information that is available to you if only you had the time to sift through all of it.
All of this noise in our brains is very modern stuff. A meeting planner living 100 years ago, if there had been any such thing, would not have had to think about any of it. There was no threat of terrorism. The idea of taking large groups of people to far-flung places like Florida and Southeast Asia would have been impracticable. And the business environment was vastly less sophisticated.
But even in our modern world, stress is extremely unproductive. So much of it derives from things that are out of our control.
You've got to work for a living, and employers today are expecting more out of you for the money they pay you. If you are a meeting planner, you have some ability to earn more money, but to earn a lot more you might have to leave the planning profession, and if that's what you love to do then it's not much of a choice. And of course, you can't control terrorists, the forces of nature, or macro business trends.
The famous Serenity Prayer asks for the serenity to accept the things we cannot change — and the courage to change the things we can. If we cannot change what's causing all the stress, we can change how we respond.
Keeping a cool head is probably the most valuable trait a meeting planner could have today. Planners cannot allow a loss of efficiency and creativity to be their response to all the external noise and heightened pressures. If they can react with an I-don't-care attitude about all of that, but retain an I-do-care attitude toward their meeting sponsors, customers and attendees, they will be able to come out ahead, even in these crazy, stressful modern times.