Loving the Chaos

Get excited and enthusiastic about your own dream. This excitement is like a forest fire – you can smell it, taste it and see it from a mile away.

Denis Waitley

What are you excited about?

Some days work seems like a real chore and I come home feeling tired and cranky. How do I leave work at work?

Stress levels in the workplace can sometimes be pretty high, especially in an uncertain economy. When you bring that home, you might as well just sleep at the office.

To make the transition from work easier, try using the commute home as a decompression phase. Imagine as you enter your car (or bus or subway train) that you getting into a transformational chamber. Set an intention that by the time you arrive home, you will have reset your mood and attitude.

Choose music that suits your needs in the moment – to re-energize, to uplift, to let go.

Turn off the talk radio or news.

Focus on your breathing.

Circumstances at work are sometimes out of your control. Making the shift from work to home is a conscious choice to take control in your life where you can.

Post a comment and share your best leaving work at work tip.

And don’t forget to to ask your own “how to” life motivation or strategy question.

Looking for some cool and best of all – FREE – resources?

Check out this list of free personal development ebooks compiled by Peter at thechangeblog.

As he says… ”many of these ebooks require you to subscribe to regular updates or a newsletter to receive the ebook (you can always unsubscribe, right?”

Take some time to browse. The tidbit of info you’ve been looking for might just be a click away.

I’m erecting a barrier of simplicity between myself and the world.

Andre Gide

How can simplicity serve you?

I’ve started hanging out on Twitter and the most interesting things cross your path there.

Like Jonathan Mead’s blog post earlier this week called The Lie of the Four Hour Work Week in which he challenges our ideas about work. It’s worth your time to read it.

Standing on a spot 

It resonated with me because he’s on the same page with respect to perspectives. The spot you stand on or the lense you look through on anything, work included, colours everything about it.

If you are standing on a spot called drudgery, then no wonder you keep hitting the snooze button in the morning. If you see work as just another pile of things to get through by quitting time, then you’ve already quit.

If you hold work as sacred as Jonathon suggests, everything shifts.

David Whyte talks about the three marriages in our lives: one with ourselves, one with our partner and one with our work. What if we held work in the same loving way as our partner?

 Jonathan asks this beautiful question:

“With the work you do today, how can you create the biggest positive impact in other people’s lives, while fulfilling your own dreams at the same time?”

That shifts things.

Don’t you love the internet? It connects you to the most amazing people you might never have met otherwise. It starts conversations. It shares ideas. It lets you shift spots even for a few minutes.

Go ahead – connect, converse, share, shift.

Yesterday I challenged the idea that the recession will result in better work-life balance.

If that is really going to happen, then people will need to start doing some things differently – not because the economic situation has prodded or forced them to, but because they really want to create a more balanced life.

As a life coach, sometimes my job is to point you toward the tough questions. So here are some no nonsense life balance tips. They are not necessarily the warmest and fuzziest suggestions but they are the ones that will set you on a path toward greater balance regardless of whether we’re in a recession or not.

1. Have a candid conversation with yourself.

Take some time to sit quietly and reflect on how in or out of balance your life is. Ask yourself these questions:

Do I have the time and energy to do the activities I love?

Do I go to bed feeling that I have accomplished the most important tasks that day?

Do I set boundaries based on my priorities?

Is life a joyful, fun adventure?

Be honest. If you answered no to these questions, then it’s time to begin to make some more conscious choices.

2. Write down your most important priorities.

If something catastrophic happened and your life was pared down to the basics, what would you want to preserve? I bet those things revolve around your health, your relationships with your family and significant others, your spiritual connection, and what else?

Make a list of these things – they reflect what is most important to you. Let’s call them your key priorities. Are they what get your attention before other things in your day?

3. Take something off your plate.

Remove one commitment from your schedule. We all have obligations that we have agreed to that in hind sight we know we should have declined. When you fill your plate with things that do not reflect your priorities (see #2), you take away valuable time and energy from honoring those priorities.

Go ahead and say no now. Do it with grace and respect. Make a statement that you are removing this commitment in order to honor your commitment to one of your key priorities.

4. Substitute the excuse you are using.

How many times have you told yourself, I would _______, but I’m too tired or I don’t have enough time? Actually you do have time and energy. You are simply using it for something else.

Instead of using your standby excuse of no time or energy, try substituting this:

I would _________, but it’s not a priority for me. It might sound something like this:

I would exercise but it’s not a priority for me. If that feels a little uncomfortable, then you know you are in an area that needs more attention from you.

5. Give yourself a pep talk.

It’s easy to get down on ourselves that we have let things get out of control in our lives. So cut yourself some slack and then choose to do something different. Switch your inner chatter from I can’t/won’t/shouldn’t to more empowering dialogue like:

“I‘m consciously making choices to create more balance in my life.”

“It’s okay to say no when I am honoring my key priorities.”

“That was then, this is now.”

There are lots of strategies and tips on how to create more life balance. Sometimes you need to begin at the beginning with the no nonsense basics. You can do this. Trust me – you will be so glad you did.

Post a comment with your no nonsense life balance tips.

Here’s an interesting headline:

Recession offers potential for more work-life balance.

That’s according to a researcher at the University of Iowa based on what happened during the Depression.

His theory is that as people’s hours are cut at work during the current economic down turn, they will have more time for leisure activities.

Well sure. That makes sense. But actually creating more work-life balance?

I’m not so sure.

It’s one thing to say that when people have more time they will use it for non-work related stuff. If you have six more hours available to you because your shifts have been cut, then of course you will likely spend them with your family or on your own fitness or volunteering in your community.

It’s a completely different thing to say that people will consciously choose more work-life balance.

Life balance comes from making conscious choices about how you spend your time.

It’s about knowing your priorities and then aligning your actions with them. It relies on the same principles whether the economy is turned up, down or inside out.

I’m sure if you could add an extra 2 hours to the day – stretch it to 26 hours – you’d think that there was more potential for work-life balance. But what would likely happen is you would go back to your unbalanced ways once you got used to the extra 2 hours. Unless of course you starting making decisions about how you spend your time based on your priorities.

That’s exactly what will happen as a result of the recession too.

People are considering all kinds of life changes – simplifying things, getting back to basics, enjoying  their leisure time. But they will return to old habits once the economy picks up unless there they make a concerted effort to do something different. During this recession people are reacting to the circumstances, rather than being proactive about creating the kind of life they want.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

You can take this opportunity and begin to create more life balance. You can be proactive. You can begin to do the things that will help you sustain this balance once the economy starts rockin’ and rollin’ again.

Tune in tomorrow for some tips to get you started.

Unhappiness is in not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.

Don Herold

What do you want?

Not geting what you want is often a wonderful stroke of luck.

Dalai Lama

What opportunties are you missing?

This weekend Edmonton Journal columnist Todd Babiak declared that he has been trained to be suspicious of positivity.

In these particularly gloomy doom & gloom times, it seems that positivity is in short supply if you watch TV or listen to talk radio. No wonder people seem a touch crankier than usual. Add to that last night’s switch to daylight savings time and  plunging temperatures and tomorrow could quite likely be a stereotypical Monday.

I’m a big believer in choosing your attitude. I don’t find some of the current victim mentality terribly appealing. I prefer the concept of controlling what you can and letting go of the rest.

 A wise guy once told me that misery doesn’t love company.

Misery loves miserable company.

Go ahead and choose positivity. Give it a concerted effort for 30 days and let me know how it goes. I’ll bet you find happiness loves happy company.

What’s your take on positivity?