STRESS

Identify the sources of stress in your life

Stress management starts with identifying the sources of stress in your life. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Your true sources of stress aren’t always obvious, and it’s all too easy to overlook your own stress-inducing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Sure, you may know that you’re constantly worried about work deadlines. But maybe it’s your procrastination, rather than the actual job demands, that leads to deadline stress.

To identify your true sources of stress, look closely at your habits, attitude, and excuses:

• Do you explain away stress as temporary (“I just have a million things going on right now”) even though you can’t remember the last time you took a breather?
• Do you define stress as an integral part of your work or home life (“Things are always crazy around here”) or as a part of your personality (“I have a lot of nervous energy, that’s all”).
• Do you blame your stress on other people or outside events, or view it as entirely normal and unexceptional?

Until you accept responsibility for the role you play in creating or maintaining it, your stress level will remain outside your control.

Stress in our lifes

We all have stress.

With our busy season on us once again this week our subject is "Stress Management".

How to identify it and some ideas and suggestions on how to manage it.

Like I said we all have it, work, finances, personnel relationships, health issues with yourself or a loved one.
It all can stress you out and if you allow it it will effect your mood and attitude and in return it will just add more stress.
One day carries over to the next and the next and without even knowing it you become "that guy".
The guy that others point to and whisper about and the one that people start to avoid so not to hear all of your troubles and negativity.

First and foremost understand that we all have it.
Just because we don't wear it on our sleeves and share it with everyone does not mean we do have stress also.

Take the time to read the blog this week as we try to discuss - Stress Management and do your friends and loved ones a favor and send them this link so they can join in. Maybe someting will be said to help them too.

And please feel free to share your stories.

Connect the dots...

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Steve Jobs

Shhhhhhh...do you hear that ...?

Do you hear that.....it's the theme from Jaws......the busy season in the moving buisness it once again upon us.
This week our registrations and offers heated up for moves wanting to load in May, June and even some July.
I can feel the tention and the felling of being overwhelmed in operations already.
It is always difficult to adjust our minds and our daily routines when the gun goes off.

More and more , especially with our military moves, it is like flicking on a light switch. One day we are slow and the next day we have problems trying to get jobs covered.

For the past few years May has been the month that it begins and it looks like this year will be the same.

Drivers and agent dispatch are also adjusting and getting prepared, if that's possible.

With that drivers always start to get wondering eyes and want to know what the other guy is doing in fear that they will not get that "fat" load .
Paul Arpin would always say it is not always what you do in the 3-4 months of the busy season that counts, it's what you do the rest of the year.

Agent operations start to fill their bag as quick as they can because they have been slow and they want to assure their business.
Be wise and watch what you take and who you take it from.

More people think that they can just always take jobs from any carrier, they look at the discounts and for a few percentage points they jump around.
Again it is not what you all do in the next few months that will matter in the long run. Who will feed you year round? Who do you trust will be there when you need them?
In order for us to keep good scores and our alliances with our top accounts we need to be there for them year round. If so they will reward us all with that tonnage that we all need in the off season.

Take a breath...take one day at a time and keep your partners and your alliances in check, you will need them. Any business is all about working with each other and knowing that the other guy has your back.

At Arpin we still have Paul Arpin's philosophy with our drivers. He grew this company knowing that our drivers are our most important partners. Having been a driver himself he knew first hand.

For all you dispatchers out there hang on to the raft once again and work together.
For all our drivers, thank you and understand that you have a building full of people at Headquarters that are working for you- year round.
For our agent operations out there please communicate with all of us and assist our drivers when they roll into your town.

Remember we are family -and if you don't stand for something you will fall for anything.

RUN WITH IT

I have worked with a lot of people that are very good employees and will do what ever is asked of them.
What separates the good and the best is the ones that do not wait to be asked to do something, the anticipate what needs to be done and they DO IT.....THEY RUN WITH IT.

Understand that to separate yourself from the crowd you only need to be in front of it.

There is always a place for those employees that follow instructions well and do what is required and if all goes well you may even be able exist in that position for a good amount of time.

Do you want security? Are you satisfied with just having a job, or do you want a career ?

You want to be the person who is the " go to person " the person who not only does what is asked of them but sees how to make it better it goes after it.
Comes up with ideas and follow your heart, believe in yourself.
Do not want to step forward in fear of making a mistake, everybody makes mistakes.

It does not matter what you do or what title you may hold, always give your best and do not settle,
RUN WITH IT

Really??

A few weeks ago I received a phone call from the head of our agent advisory board, he has said that another agent called him pitching a fit over having to pick a job up. According to the the chairman of the AAB the agent was actually yelling, he said that it was 12,000 lbs and March and could not understand why dispatch had called him to pick up 12,000 lbs.
(He does not call and ask dispatch why)

Well, after further investigation the move was planned on a driver who lived in the area of the origin agent and days before the load the driver called with some very sad news, his wife had been diagnosed with a brain tumour. He of coarse needed to be home to help support his wife and help her with her visits to the doctor's.

Dispatch had just found this out started to look for a plan "B" to load his jobs. They also noticed that the 12,000 lbs was registered as a shuttle so the dispatcher called the origin agent only to ask if it would be possible under the circumstances to shuttle the job back to their warehouse if we came up short in finding another driver.
From there the agent owner calls the chairman of the AAB yelling.......REALLY??

As it turns out the original driver planned actually helped us load it and we transferred it.

As I have said many times before there are always reasons and stories, our job is to move past them and to try to solve problems- together- the best we can.

This is a people business and in it real life things happen, people get sick, emergencies arise , accidents occur.....it happens on a local basis as well as the long haul fleet.


We have had drivers and employees do the same thing, when something happens negatively it is a knee jerk reaction that we all have to point and blame.
Slow down, worry about your house and thank GOD that whatever occurred to cause the situation did not happen to you.

Be part of the solution..

SPEAK UP

Below is an excerpt from a book, Rolling Pennies in the Dark" written by Douglas MacKinnon.

As I see it, one of the major problems facing our nation, and especially the poor of our nation, is that nobody wants to get involved. NOBODY.
And because nobody wants to get involved, mostly bad things happen. Very bad things. And these bad things happen because good people choose to ignore the evil before them and purposefully look the other way.
I have always been struck by the quote by Pastor Martin Niemoller with the United States Congress in 1968:

They came first for the Communist,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionist,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me
and by that time no one left to speak up.

Our country and the world in general are on a collision course with this indifference and selfishness. Every day we spiral down further into the abyss of ignoring those who need our help, while running and hiding from the trouble.

"We are our brother's keeper"

SPEAK UP