Managing Stress

For this session, Leigh Martin, Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor Supervisor, has generously offered to share her expertise about maintaining good mental health in technical workplaces. Our careers can be a major source of stress in our lives. In the first half hour, Leigh will share with us strategies for managing common challenges:

• Grind culture. The tech industry is infamous for long working hours, heavy work loads, and poor work-life balance.
• Difficult personalities. Our industry often attracts colleagues—whether peers, reports, or supervisors—who struggle with social interactions. This can create a range of issues, from chaotic (or absent) planning, poor communication, and interpersonal friction.
• Devaluing of humanistic expertise. Technical writers generally are focused more on language, communication, empathy, and other “soft” skills. We’re also disproportionately women. In male-dominated, engineering-centric workplaces, we often have less influence than we would like.

For the second half hour, we’ll continue our conversation collaboratively. What stresses are you facing now? How might you apply what Leigh has taught us? What changes are you inspired to make?

Leigh Martin is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor Supervisor with 13 years of counseling experience in a variety of settings. She currently works at Cisco’s onsite health center, providing short-term counseling to employees and their families since 2020.

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We'll use Zoom for this social. Register to receive the Zoom link here in the event description. Then, when you log in to Zoom for the event, be sure that your Zoom name matches the name you used in your registration.