Who's good with stress management?

Very few jobs are more stressful for me, than representing the desires of management to their customers. You have no way to get out of the middle. I also hate not being involved in the conversation with a customer from beginning to end. "You told him WHAT?"

So:

Don't get mad when the computer locks up, hand write the notes you need, then use it as a touchstone with your customer. Who among us doesn't have sympathy for a locked up computer?

Don't ever EVER apologize for the price of a job. That implies that you could somehow do something to make it lower. Sympathize, yes. "It sure does cost a lot of money to keep a car on the road these days, doesn't it?"

Customer has a problem with the work you have done? "Uh-oh. Better get it in here right away, and we'll see what's going on. If it's something we did wrong, we'll look after it. If not, we'll figure out what needs to be done." Then, when it is your fault, EAT IT.

The primary person you need to please is the guy across the counter from you. Keep the customers happy, and the boss will be happy.

The ability to either eat a warranty job that shouldn't be, or to toss an unreasonable customer out on his ass are the two reasons I own my own shop.

Here is a personal experience.

From 20 yrs old to 29 I worked for Coca-Cola, the local delivery side of the business. Started as a driver and then the last 7 years in management. By typical standards, it's a good job but long, long hours and physical demands, etc. At the age of 29 I had burned out and decided to leave.
I took a job that I then did not like either. A lot of this was from leaving a job I knew to take a job that I really did not know (Industrial Sales). Often I would have bad days at the new job and my mind would go to, "maybe I should have never left Coke?" When you have these thought you tend to romanticize "the old days" ad forget some of what makes it bad.
I developed a little trick that worked great for me. On those bad days, I would call out to my former Coke co-workers who were still there. In those calls I wouldn't say much about my job but instead listen to them about their job. They were all miserable and on those calls all the bad emotions that I left behind would come rushing back to me. I would hang up the call reaffirmed that I made the right move.
Sure, I had new problems but at least I no longer had those problems.

I only kept that newer job for one year as I kept looking. Sure enough I landed in a newly formed company named Sprint Spectrum Limited Partnership and their brand new offering Sprint PCS. I spent the next 14 years in that industry and some of those years I can without a doubt say I had the best job that I could ever want.

So, what does this mean...
New job. New problems. But, remember the old job had problems too.
Work through the problems and change what you can.

Well, I am feeling a bit depressed at the same time. Coming from being the car chief on a Championship Winning Porsche for the last two years and then working for Gainsco/Bob Stallings, it was nice being somewhat known in the racing world and being the go-to guy for alot of problems.

Now, I look at myself as an employee number. Nobody here knows who I am or what I've accomplished (except for the Dealership Owner's Son, who is an E30 track day guy). I know I will get past this and in a couple months time, I will eventually get the hang of the computer system and correct lingo to use with customers, but I do miss racing.

Stress usually comes from short-term triggers (like that damn computer, or that angry customer) and if you have a short-term outlook you will get stressed every day.

So remind yourself that you are in this position for your child, and you will be working in some similar capacity for many years to come. (Even if you plan to move on someday, think of this as one step in a very long career.) The computer is going to act up, people are going to be jerks, it's all part of the job. The computer may or may not get fixed...not your call. You just work here. People may have to wait a little sometimes, again, not in your control. You don't control when cars break, the price of labor, cost of parts, the weather, etc. If people get mad, that is on them, not you. You are doing everything that you can do to help, you are pleasant and calm, and tomorrow, when they are gone, you will be there doing it again.

In reply to DukeOfUndersteer:

Ok, you've told us a big detail about yourself in your last post. There's generally 2-kinds of workers: Those who can crawl around in the biggest pile of E36 M3(literally or figuratively) day in/day out, come home & shrug it all off and live a happy life. Then there are those whose work/career is an extension of who they are. You are in the 2nd group, and there's close to zero chance you'll be content trying to be in the first.

So you have a few choices - you could look at this job as a current stepping stone to something else, and try to leverage every day to work toward that goal. You can find another job & bail out now before this one sucks the life out of you. Or you can get your ass back on the road with the team where you belong. It's very honorable and mature to want to be home to help out, but I guarantee your wife(and eventually child) will grow weary of your distress & displeasure in your new work, and wish you were back out doing what you love.

It's a hard life change for sure. I was an applications engineer for a company that made cylinder head porting & block work CNCs, so I was traveling every other week all around the world, and fairly well known in engine building circles.

When the kids came along I made the jump to the CAM software company that I taught at the previous gig. Now I'm in product management, fixing all of the things that annoyed me as an AE. But at the end of the day, all I have is a team that's working on the right thing, some new features in a computer program or I helped some customers get their setups running over the phone or gotomeeting. It's an awesome job, but when you have a blah day, it's hard to keep that in mind with nothing tangible to show for it that particular day. At the end of the day with the other job, there was a new cylinder head on the planet that I helped create out of a chunk of metal.

It got a lot more mentally manageable after the first 4-6 months.

Thanks everyone! I think I will have a good head start on what i need to do to combat stress. I am fairly happy with what I do now as my day-to-day job. Who knows, I might transfer to another dealership in this ring of dealers! There will always be a spot doing Club Racing with my Father-In-Law and my Wife, so it's not completely out of my life.

When you were in the racing world there were things that could go wrong. But there were a finite number of them and you or someone on the team had already thought about them and worked out a procedure to fix the problem. The biggest stress point was getting the problem fixed in a timely manner.

Now you work in a field where there can be an infinite number of problems and at least some of them have never been seen/thought of by you or any of your coworkers. And some like "irate customers" can never be totally fixed.

You need to keep in mind that "This is what is wrong, This is what we do do fix it, Let's get on with it" isn't going to happen in the new environment in the manner you are used to.

I used to travel all week and the family complained that I was gone and they missed me.

Two minutes after getting home from the airport my daughter was back in her room on YouTube and my wife was watching some HGTV show and I'm sitting in my office by myself.

Families are overrated.

golfduke wrote: People will look at me funny, but- Seriously. Meditate. Sit in a room for 10-15 minutes every day, completely silent alone and in the dark, and just focus on breathing, and being aware in your surroundings. Don't think of work, family, stress, anything other than simply being in that room, at that time. I used to have huge stress management issues, that let to anxiety, panic attacks, and ultimately when I'd ignore it for too long, complete mental and physical breakdown. I learned that there is not a single problem on your brain that can be solved in a heightened state of stress. I highly advise it. If you don't want to 'meditate', don't. Sit in a darkened room in isolation and just focus on slow-breathing- in through the mouth and out through the nose... as slowly and as big of breaths as you can manage. Think only of breathing. I'll go so far as saying this- If you set a timer for 10 minutes and do the above and really REALLY focus on breathing and not on any other life matters, I completely guarantee you will feel better physically and emotionally when time is up. It's not a cure-all, but it absolutely helps put things into perspective- problems will always be present. Take some time to relax and get your mind off them, for your own personal well-being.

This.

I personally have to just get away every once in a while. I get in my truck and go for a cruze in the National Forest near my house. After about 2 hrs of that my wife swears I come home a new man.

I also have to get 10 minutes when I first get home and decompress from my day, if I get that I find that I can then handle the stress of home much better because there is that small barrier between the two. This makes it so I dont bring home stress.

Lastly my wife is my sounding board. I dont know what I would do without her. She knows that if I say I need to witch about work for a minutes to not take it personally.

In reply to Son_Of_Toyman:

It's similar for me. I need to get out on my bicycles and ride. A long road ride is the best for me. It was something my ex-g/f never really seemed to understand. To her, me going out to ride was a waste of time and it always seemed like she resented it. Her "therapy" was washing and waxing her cars. She can easily spend an entire weekend washing and waxing one of them. Granted, they look awesome when she's done, but having my cars look that good just isn't as important to me.

Right now, my stress is related to working like crazy 300+ miles from home and 20 feet away from the client and contractors, so if there's any problem on either side they are standing next to me looking for a solution. The money is great (I'm in NH on per diem), but stress has been off the charts. Since I can't work on my cars or house up here in NH, I buy bikes and bike parts instead. I've nearly completely replaced the entire fleet since I've been here (since Jan).

And on that note... I'm going out for a bike ride...