As a member of Madison’s Stress Management Task Force and a part-time employee of Guilford DAY [Developmental Assets for Youth], and through coaching and workshops centered on helping everyone from CEOs to children thrive, Dana Hilmer of Madison has dedicated her life to guiding area folks of all ages through their personal obstacles to realize their full potential.

In addition to her coaching sessions, Dana is also launching a podcast in April called “Thrive with Dana Hilmer.” She will interview wellness experts, authors, entrepreneuers, and thought leaders on what it means to thrive and live a good life, she says. She’ll produce it herself and it will be available on her website, danahilmer.com, and on iTunes.

Dana says, “What I love about doing radio is you get a chance to speak to everybody you want to speak with. It’s really exciting that you can read about somebody, and chances are they want to speak with you because they’re promoting their book or their program or whatever. It’s just a great opportunity to learn from some exciting and interesting people.”

Taking Stress to Task

Dana is also part of Madison’s Stress Management Task Force (SMTF), which is open to anyone and meets the second Thursday of each month from 7 to 8 p.m. at the Madison Youth & Family Services office.

SMTF formed after people in town watched a documentary that hit very close to home. Race to Nowhere was screened in Madison when it came out on DVD in 2011, and then again last April.

“It’s a movie about the dark side of the overachievement culture that our kids live in,” Dana explains. “When the movie came out about four years ago, I collaborated with MADE [the Madison Alcohol and Drug Education coalition] and brought it to town, and we had a panel discussion. It was really a great conversation, raising the issue that our kids are stressed and under a lot of pressure. Last year [Madison Superintendent of Schools] Tom Scarice approached Madison Youth & Family Services and suggested the movie be shown in town again.”

The documentary succeeded in sparking an important conversation in town, Dana says, “but what we realized is that we really need to have some action come out of it. The Stress Management Task Force is a group of concerned parents who, after that event, realized, ‘Okay, it’s not enough just to talk about it. What can we really do to create some change for the community?’”

The SMTF’s first event is tentatively scheduled for Thursday, April 21.

“We want to put together a community forum about youth stress,” Dana says. “It will include students, parents, teachers—the whole community. Part of that conversation would be, ‘What is the definition of success?’ And I hope everybody concludes that you define it yourself.

“The idea is to learn from each other and to learn from the students how stress is showing up for them. I think with that understanding, and with that communication, hopefully we can come out of it with a real action plan. I think there’s a lot we want to do, and right now we’re at that idea stage, I’m hoping at this community forum we’ll really lock in on a few projects.”

The stress crisis is partly caused by carefree childhoods fading into obscurity as generations pass.

“We’re finding that stress is showing up at younger ages,” Dana says. “I met with the Jeffrey PTO a couple weeks ago, and they’re saying it’s showing up as young as elementary school. I have kids at Brown, Polson, and Hand, so I see it firsthand.”

Dana and her husband, Dave, have three sons. Zach is a sophomore, Mikey’s in 8th grade, and Danny is in 6th grade.

Dana says, “Dave and I are college sweethearts, and we actually met at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, so we kind of joke that Madison works really well for us. Dave is in software sales. We’re fortunate he can work from home quite a bit, and he travels as needed for sales. I grew up in five different states and I’ve lived in eight states. We came to Madison with the attitude of, ‘Oh, we’ll check it out for a couple years.’ It’s beautiful, the schools are great, the price tag is more affordable than Westchester County, were we were coming from. We came with kind of a two- or three-year mindset and we loved it. We’ve been here for 11 years. I think this community is just lovely. It’s a great place to raise a family.”

Finding Her Calling

Dana says she was drawn to this work after seeing so many people who were “comfortably numb,” she says. “I feel like there’s more to life. I think a lot of people are putting their dreams on hold and they think, ‘I’ll do it someday.’ But sometimes someday doesn’t happen. I see that particularly with women, because women a lot of times put themselves last and put their dreams on hold. I really argue that there’s no ‘better time.’ Your life is not going to magically slow down and completely open up so you have all the space in the world for what you want to create, so why not do things one small step at a time?”

Dana had a chance to try this approach for herself seven years ago when she published a book called Blindsided by a Diaper.

She recalls, “I was writing it at the time Danny was a newborn, Mikey was 2, Zach was 4, and I had [no time] to be writing a book. But what I realized was that if you do one small thing a day, you can move toward your dream. My book was a huge lesson in that for me. It was the first time I really realized that if you just do one email a day, edit one essay a day, do one outreach a day, I got it done. That was a huge lesson that you don’t need to put things on hold. We’re all busy, so why not just make small progress and commit to it? I think that’s what motivated me to do this work—hearing so many people putting their dreams on hold and just being so-so about how they’re living.”

Visit Dana’s website at www.danahilmer.com or email her at dana@thriveitude.com to learn more. Her next four-week workshop Madison Beach & Recreation series starts the second week of March and will be held in the Madison Town Hall; the cost is $180 for Madison residents and $190 for non-residents. Contact Carrie Gazda at gazdac@madisonct.org for more information about the series.

Nominate someone for Person of the Week by emailing Melissa Johnson at m.johnson@zip06.com.