Eli Bay

As part of the incessant need to provide monkeys to research labs around the world, teams of monkey catchers have developed an interesting system to capture live monkeys. While it is still dark, the teams take long-necked heavy ceramic vases to places where monkeys are known to frequent. Fresh bananas are then placed in them and the teams go off and lay similar traps elsewhere.

The poet, W. H. Auden, dubbed our time as "the Age of Anxiety". It is predictably certain, that in a post 9/11 world that is becoming aware of inconvenient truths like global warming and pandemics, general and pervasive anxiety will continue to grip the hearts and minds of growing numbers of people.

As I do training and speaking in dozens of companies, associations and government organizations every year, and have done so over the past three decades, I can state from experience that clinical levels of anxiety are approaching epidemic levels in the most workplaces.

Without bothering to ask for our consent, globalization and technological innovation has rapidly created a new world. In today's demanding work environment, there are few personal skills more valuable than being able to flow with the accelerating and unremitting changes which are driving our workplaces and defining our time.

As we move through the twenty-first century, it's important to develop better coping skills and to build much needed resilience to the unusual scale of today's changes.