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Laura Dancsak knows all about stress and burnout, and these days she’s combining her personal experience with her extensive health-related knowledge to teach people what it took her 20 years to figure out: how to reduce the impact of stress on their lives and their health.
Indeed, Laura Dancsak’s career has taken a rather circuitous route. As a young woman, she started out as a nurse. But although she comes from a family of health care providers - her mother and grandmother were both nurses and she has uncles who are doctors – she’s quick to tell me nursing was not a first choice for her. “There were few options for women in 1974. You were either a nurse or a teacher or a secretary, and I knew I didn’t want to be a teacher or secretary.”
As more opportunities opened up for women, Laura left nursing for a career in finance and banking, but she missed the people contact and switched careers again. This time she landed a job as a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company, where she climbed the corporate ladder for 12 years to a senior management position, until this role was no longer fulfilling to her.
Although her jobs had been varied, some common themes had already started to emerge. When she entered nursing, she worked as a pediatric nurse on a cancer ward. “Back then we’d see maybe two or three kids on the ward,” she recalls.
“Now we have entire wards of children with cancer.” She believes that environmental factors, such as chemicals in our food, air and water, are largely responsible for the change.
Working as an occupational nurse for Shell further enhanced Laura’s awareness of the role environment plays in our health. Later, as she worked selling pharmaceuticals, Laura increasingly grew to believe that drugs are just a temporary fix, and don’t address the root causes of our ill-health. So this time when she was looking for a new job, she chose a company that sells products aimed at creating healthy homes and also taught courses on healthy home environments.
Her stint in the world of finance contributed to her career path in a more personal way. Having suffered from stress and corporate burnout in that world, she was very attuned to the fact that stress is a significant component of our social environment.
When a friend of hers got her stress management license from a company called HeartMath and started to share her knowledge about the role of stress in determining our health, the information struck a chord. The more she learned, the more she realized how profound that effect can be on everything from our emotional well-being to our immune system, cardiovascular health, and even our weight.
So Laura herself went to the Institute of HeartMath in California, took the program and became a licensed HeartMath stress management consultant.
One of the things that made a huge impression on Laura was the impact that negative and stressful thoughts have on our entire body. She tells me about one experiment where researches measured the effects of stress on the immune system.
Subjects were asked to think about a stressful incident for 5 minutes, and researchers measured the physiological changes in his body; the immune system didn’t rebound until 6 hours later.
On the other hand, thinking about something positive, something that they love, care about, or appreciate, caused a spike in immune system, and that spike lasted for about 6 hours.
While knowledge about the effects of stress was a key piece of the puzzle, Laura only got to the point of being able to teach others how to deal with stress by addressing those very issues in her own life.
Her biggest life lesson, and one she aims to pass on to others, is to listen your heart, “that inner voice and knowledge we have when we’re calm. When you don’t listen to it, it becomes obvious. Following it always works”
“That’s happened for me,” she says. I’ve learned to listen to it and it’s given me direction, good direction. But that little voice, you can’t hear it when you’re stressed.”
In order to tune into that inner guidance system, she needed to learn and practice the stress management tools and techniques she teaches and take time for herself.
She now treasures quiet time reading, listening to music, walking her dog or simply appreciating a sunrise. She finds spending time outdoors particularly calming because it helps restore her sense of connection to the earth.
Skiing, golfing and gardening are all activities she’s passionate about. Incorporating balance into her life in these ways has helped Laura improve her connections to her emotions, an ingredient she believes is key to coping with stress.
All around her, she sees people who are living on the edge, so stressed that they can snap at the slightest irritation, but often aren’t even aware of how stressed they are or the effect that their emotional responses are having on them.
“Many people have lost touch with their emotions and therefore need to be retrained. We can actually change the neural pathways and break the automatic habitual response to stressful situations.”
The fact that people can change their response to stress and improve their health is just one of the things that excites Laura about her work. She loves the process of research, and feels that her strong knowledge base in a variety of complementary areas is one of her biggest strengths. She’s also energized by being able to share that knowledge with others and by seeing a change in them as a result.
When asked to name her favorite thing about her job, Laura tells me that she’s creating a course for the community college. Designing programs is nothing new to Laura. Her biggest accomplishment professionally was going to work as an occupational nurse in a male dominated unionized world at Shell.
She came into a place that had never even had an occupational nurse, and walked away with a fully functional facility and program in place. “I designed the facility, hired staff, equipped it, and designed the programs,” she says.
Her pioneering and entrepreneurial spirit has served her well. At various points through her five year journey since leaving the pharmaceutical industry, she faced some pressure from her husband to ‘go back to work’. “I couldn’t go back to that environment,” she says, “so I had to create something for myself.”
As I talk with Laura, what impresses me most is the interplay between her personal life experiences and her professional background and training.
Using personal experience and her inner voice as a compass, she draws on her broad knowledge base to help people learn skills and techniques to combat stress in their own lives, so that they too, can improve their health and find the direction that’s right for them.
And while Laura helps people shortcut the process she went through, she herself wouldn’t have found a job so well suited for her if it weren’t for talking the scenic route.
Written by: Marie Sedivy |
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