Surviving in a culture obsessed with emotions
 

Have you noticed that the ‘appropriate’ question to ask someone today about a proposal is, “How do you feel about that?” Not, “What do you think of that?” or “Do you have any ideas on that?”

At least on this, US, side of the Atlantic, we live in a culture that is increasingly driven by feelings and emotions. Feelings are everything; thoughts are relegated to the second rate, suitable only for those poor people who haven’t yet ‘got in touch with their feelings.’

In a culture that extols feelings as the central concern in life, the result is not just a roller-coaster of ups and downs. It becomes almost impossible to discuss anything rationally, since you cannot dispute how someone else feels—however irrational or neurotic you think those feelings are. “But that how I feel,” becomes a simple way to end any argument, leaving things unresolved. Suggesting that any feelings are inappropriate, even silly, is dismissed as ‘unfeeling’. Empathy is promoted over reason, logic and even truth.

It’s high time for a little relief and a practical guide to coping with feelings in ways that don’t turn them into mad tyrants, personally and within any group.

The truth about emotions

Emotions happen. They are natural and inevitable. Neither statement makes them correct or the thoughts they produce true. Paranoia is not thinking, rationally and with evidence, that people are out to get you. It’s feeling they are, regardless of likelihood or any evidence to the contrary.

• You can neither force yourself to have ‘suitable’ feelings nor prevent ‘unsuitable’ ones from arising. Feelings cannot be controlled directly by any act of will.
• Feelings do not last, unless you work at keeping them alive. They always fade over time unless they are constantly stimulated, usually by imagining the original event again and again.
• Feelings, in themselves, are morally and ethically neutral. They just arise, whether you want them to or not. Feeling guilty about them is pointless. Questions of right and wrong are involved only when you act on your feelings, seek to stimulate them or deliberately keep them alive.
• Feelings need to be accepted, but not automatically believed or followed. Since feelings are merely an inevitable part of life, the only rational response is acceptance of their existence, followed by rational consideration of whether to do anything they suggest.

Danger! Emotions at work.

I encountered a situation this week where someone I know almost caused severe damage to his business by giving in to a temporary burst of negative feelings about a supplier. It was all sorted out in the end, but the trust between them has been damaged for some time to come. Worst of all, there was no real basis for the emotional outburst, other than frustration with a bad economy and fear that someone might, in some unknown way, be making things worse than they need be.

How many working relationships are damaged, even destroyed, every day by emotional outbursts? How many people nurse hidden feelings of anger or resentment, allowing them to poison their actions and make their own lives miserable? In the typical workplace, how many problems are directly due to jealousy, malice, fear or personal feuds? Yet, far from considering how to minimize such a potent source of workplace disruption, people equate authenticity—being who you are—with giving full rein to almost every passing emotion.

“All you need is love,” sang The Beatles. Sadly, it’s not true. Love is another feeling. A few moments with any divorce lawyer, police officer or paramedic will provide more than enough bitter evidence of how easily and frequently it dies, then metamorphoses into hatred.

Handling emotions sensibly

Ultimately, you are responsible for your actions and words, matter how you feel. Why allow feelings to provoke you into saying things you will soon regret? Why let your feelings—temporary and irrational as they are—push you around or lead you into making unforced errors?

Why wait to do something necessary until you feel like it? If it needs to be done, do it, regardless of how you feel at the time. Waiting to ‘feel right’ is the cause of most procrastination. Commonsense should tell you that, since you can neither produce a feeing by an act of will, nor prevent one, how you feel has no relevance to what you should be doing at any point in time.

Feelings happen, just like the rain falls. Getting mad at the rain won’t make it stop. Feeling guilty about how you feel won’t do anything except add guilt to the feelings you already have. Feelings should be left alone to rise and fall naturally. What you should be looking at is whether that feeling is pointing to something you need to do.

If you feel bad about something you said, that feeling may be pointing to a need to apologize. Think about it. If you feel good about a result, maybe you should be thanking everyone who helped you. Think about that too. If you feel unhappy, consider what may be causing it. If you feel excited, think about how you might use that energy in a positive way while it lasts.

Psychologists warn against repressing feelings. That means trying to pretend they don’t exist. It doesn’t mean you should not suppress—refuse to act on or encourage—feelings that are unhelpful or inappropriate. You aren’t responsible for the feelings that come to you, but you are definitely accountable for how you respond to them.

That, I think, needs careful and ethical thought, not goo-ey slogans about love. Barely a hundred years ago, ‘sentiment’ was viewed with considerable skepticism and distrust. It almost became a term of abuse. Maybe that went a little too far, but we surely don’t need to go to the other extreme and glorify emotions for their own sake.

Technorati Tags: emotions, feelings, relationships, responsibility, accountability

(This is a guest article by Richard E. Goldman, Author of “Luck by Design: Certain Success in an Uncertain World”)

Do you want to decide right now that you’re going to be successful; and that you’re going to be able to handle that success when the time comes? “Ha!” you might say. “I should be so lucky! I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.” No. If you want to design your own luck and put yourself on the path to success, start planning for it now. The graveyard of successful people who didn’t know how to handle their success is already brimming over. There’s no need for you to join them.

Do you always seem to have a bad boss or never get a break at work? It may have something to do with what you are presenting to the world. Your outer working life has to reflect your inner organization. Make sure that you have your personal values and ethos in order, and then take them to the workplace.

The reality is that there are no bad bosses, there are no bad breaks and there are no victims—unless you choose to become one.

Take a moment to re-read that paragraph. It’s easy enough to read, but understanding the content can take a lifetime. Give yourself an advantage and contemplate it now: what you bring to your work makes all the difference.

Understanding true success

Maybe a good place to start is to articulate what success isn’t. It’s not a big house, a fancy car, or a bunch of bling. It’s not the American Express platinum card or the limousine. Success isn’t easy, and once you have it, there is no guarantee that you’ll keep it. So prepare for success by accepting that success does not equal significance or security. Success is, quite simply, peace. Peace of mind that you’ve done the best that you can. Peace of heart that you are part of something—perhaps a family—whose members support you, love you, and will always be there for you.

Is success giving your all? Is it doing your best? Is it getting the job done? Again, it’s none of the above. Success is much more about the journey than the end of the road. It’s about the experience of your passion. It’s the satisfaction you can get from planning and then doing, and then watching the seeds of your planning and doing take root and create something that wasn’t there before. Real success is the ability to embrace the discoveries and enlightenment you encounter along the journey in whatever it is that you do. Crossing the finish line is inconsequential.

The road up the corporate ladder can be so consuming that you miss your original goal. You push and push to get that next raise, that next promotion, and one day you turn around and you’ve lost touch with yourself—and in many cases, you’ve lost touch with your family and friends too. You don’t always need the next toy, that bigger house, or that office with the big window and great view. None of it is worth it if in the process you lose sight of who you are or lose your connection with the people most important to you. All of that is a danger if you subscribe to the theory that success equals money.

You probably aren’t going to be the Big Dog

Just as money doesn’t buy happiness, if you think being the Big Dog will bring you happiness, there’s another bubble to burst. All too many people want (or at least think they want) to get to the top.

The numbers are always against them. By definition, there is only one captain, one quarterback, or one CEO and a limited number of teams and companies. There are leaders and there are followers. For the vast majority, the question is, how can you be a good follower and still have that role be consistent with the rest of your life? How can it be consistent with your values and your dreams? If your values and your dreams are more important to you than a title, then it should be pretty easy to accept that you’re not going to be the CEO.

Here are some tips on being a great follower:

• Recognize that being a follower is not a failure—it’s a function. A necessary function, just as every other part of a team.
• One day, you probably are going to be a leader, just not the leader. If it’s your project, then you’re the leader.
• You can be a follower without abdicating yourself. It can even help you in defining yourself—a terrific lesson in learning how to put your ego in neutral.

Leadership is all about perspective

Leadership is mostly a matter of perspective. Are you always looking up the ladder to see who’s above? Do you look at the rung you’re on to see who else is there? Or are you looking at the rung below? Instead of worrying where everyone else is, try to reconcile yourself with the possibility that you are in the right place, making the absolute best of the resources you have available to you on that day.

It’s clear that the work part of your life is often going to take center stage. Once that you’ve entered that arena, the next hurdle is management—both management of yourself and yourself as a manager. One day, somehow, some way, you will be called upon to manage. There is no time like the present to start preparing.

If you truly want to experience the peace that comes from being a real success on your own terms, make better
decisions, trust your intuition and live with integrity, start today. Start designing your own luck, so you can lead the life you were meant to live.

When you sit down and think about your life, think about this: the question is not what or why, but how are you going to live? A fulfilling life is passion driven and a big part of that life derives from the work that you do. It doesn’t matter what the work is. What matters is the passion that you have behind it and that you put into it.

Richard E. Goldman, author of “Luck by Design: Certain Success in an Uncertain World”, started working on the sales floor of a small clothing store with annual sales of only a few hundred thousand dollars. Over the years he helped grow that one store into the emerging and now omnipresent Men’s Wearhouse. By the time Goldman retired, there were 680 Men’s Wearhouse-affiliated stores across the United States and Canada, with annual sales in excess of $1.27 billion.

Goldman has also been a quiet force in business, education, and volunteerism. His luck—luck that he has actively created—has expanded his life in ways and directions well beyond anything he might have imagined as a child in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. You can read more of his story at www.richiegoldman.com.

Technorati Tags: leadership, being a follower, integrity, authenticity, true success

The secret to enjoying what you have lies mostly in letting it go
 

Our human tendency to want to possess things has been a source of trouble from dim antiquity. As soon as we have something pleasant, we want to hang onto it—to catch the butterfly of joy and pin it onto a cork slab along with the rest of our collection. The fact that we can only do this by killing it never seems to occur to us in time.

I awoke the other morning from a delightful dream and, of course, spent several moments trying to hold onto it. That’s when it occurred to me that, even if I had been able to do so, what would have been left was an empty shell, devoid of life and the capacity to grow.

The damnable urge to collect things

This tendency to grab and hold on—to acquire for the sake of acquisition—is just as clear in the workplace. People grasp at bits of knowledge and hug them to themselves. Maybe they hint that they have them—few collectors can resist the tendency to brag about what they ‘own’—but they are careful to keep everything to themselves if they can. In the process, their knowledge goes from being ‘live’ data that could lead to action to dead information that serves only to bolster its owner’s ego.

Managers try to amass patronage and influence, building up a web of political power with little or no idea what they might use it for except making them feel big. CEOs and corporate boards leap into mergers and acquisitions, despite the high failure rate, because . . . well, it’s what ‘big cheeses’ do and they don’t want to be left out. In their private lives, they collect art, or yachts, or huge houses they cannot possibly need—all the while amassing a vast store of dead ‘stuff’ that serves mostly to display their importance to other dead-stuff collectors.

What happens when you let go?

For a start, you no longer need to worry about protecting your collection of data, influence or rare Persian carpets from decay or theft. You are also freed from the notion that all this ‘stuff’ must not be used. It took so much time and effort—not to say expense—to gather together, even the thought of using any of it becomes intolerable.

Whatever you have can be used freely, or even given away, because there will always be more. If you don’t need to ‘own’ it, the supply of interesting and potentially useful information in the world is infinite. It’s the same with influence. Using it for a good purpose will quickly bring you more. Even something in finite supply, like great art, can be enjoyed by anyone willing to step inside a gallery and concentrate less on wishing they owned what they find, than on enjoying it for its own sake.

The poet William Blake expressed it best:

“He who binds to himself a joy
Does the wingéd life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.”

Holding onto a corpse is bad for your health

In the world of work, kissing an achievement as it flies into—and out of—your life lets you taste the pleasure, then leaves you free to pursue the next one without looking back. Enjoying the success of a project, then letting it go, frees you up for the next set of tasks.

Many organizations develop toxic environments because the people within them are grimly holding on to decaying achievements from their distant past. They cannot change, because their energies are directed to what once brought them success—even though it is now dead and poisonous. Marketers keep trying to resurrect a dying flagship product line, rather than admitting they need something new. Old products are given a quick surface skim of polish and sent out yet again, though the public are already aware they are little but walking, painted corpses.

Instead of recognizing that new times need new approaches, leaders too keep repeating what worked in the past—usually until it destroys them. The business schools too—who surely should know better—base their teaching on old, discredited theories and case studies from decades ago.

Let it all go. Stop clinging, even to the best of it. When the butterfly of success and joy flits into your life, enjoy it for what it is without thinking about possessing it. Let it live to produce a new generation of similar joys.

No one ever found their collection of preserved butterfly specimens producing eggs or caterpillars.

Technorati Tags: letting go, living in the moment, enjoying what comes, giving up possessiveness

“There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: impatience and laziness.” ~ Franz Kafka
 

The other day I was speaking with a neighbor—a single, 50-something woman who’s a high-level executive for a Fortune 50 company. She was coming home from work, carrying some packages. At the end of our conversation I said, “Enjoy your evening.” She replied, “Oh, I will. I have some delicious take-out.” Perhaps feeling this remark needed some context, she added, “I have some good stuff in the fridge, but these days the microwave just takes too long.”
 
Impatience is a familiar topic. At work, it causes people to be abrupt with colleagues and customers—cutting them off, interrupting them, and pushing them away if they don’t get to the point quickly enough. It makes us more prone to giving up too quickly on tasks that require focus and concentration; more likely to try to save time by cutting corners, being unethical, or not acting with integrity. It leads to increased stress, burn-out and anxiety. It even contributes to today’s obsession with being in control. If you have to rely on others, they may take too long.

We’re all in a hurry. Why?

There’s plenty of evidence that impatience causes us to spend inordinate amounts of time and energy repairing, re-working and re-doing what we did when we were impatient. Sadly, we live in a culture of ‘hurry up’—of fast-food, immediate gratification and impulse purchases. We act as if delay spells d-e-a-t-h. We’re like sharks who have to keep moving to get oxygen into our lungs.

But why are we in such a hurry to get to the next thing? What’s the rush? What happened to taking time to enjoy things fully? What happened to patience?
 

No time to breathe

This obsessive need to be somewhere else has created a joy-less life for many people. They can no longer find any meaning or interest in where they are right now. Happiness is always somewhere else; somewhere away ‘over there’ they must rush to get to. In their obsession with dropping this to get to that, they create a life filled with haste and empty of pleasure, joy and happiness. They’ve become so conditioned to being impatient they cannot settle, breathe or be at peace. They must always hurry on their way to the Nirvana they seek. Sadly, of course, they never get there. 
 
Instead, they race through life, giving up the capacity to experience happiness in the moment. They live in a constant state of frenzy and frustration. What they seek is always ahead of them—always just out of reach, however fast they run to catch it—like the cartoon donkey chasing a carrot being dangled in front of its nose by the rider on its back.
 

How to improve your patience

• Be aware of your feelings of impatience. Sense where and how they show up. Then allow your impatience. Don’t fight it. Don’t judge it. Don’t tell yourself a story about it. Just allow it to be.
• Breathe deeply into your belly. Feel your feet on the floor and, if sitting, feel your butt in your chair. Allow the floor to support you; allow your chair to support you. Breathe deeply.
• Send your breath to any areas of discomfort in your body. Don’t try to make anything happen. Just send the breath to the areas of discomfort.
• Notice your experience and as you do, time will begin to expand a little, then a little more, and a little more. As you watch yourself in this experience, the discomfort, the agitation and the impatience itself will begin to dissipate.
• See what replaces the impatience. As your feeling of impatience subsides, you’ll fine an opportunity to experience an inner OK-ness, right here and right now, in this moment. There’s no need to be somewhere else.  Patience has arisen in this moment.

Impatience is an ego-mind quality. The mind always needs to be “somewhere else.” Patience is a heart quality. The heart is just fine, right here, right now. This capacity to be in the moment brings focus, clarity and discernment. It is a state of responsiveness, not reactivity.
 
What does patience mean to you? Has it taken on a negative connotation? When you hear the phrase, “Be patient,” how do you feel? Do you dislike waiting? If so, why?

“Learn the art of patience. Apply discipline to your thoughts when they become anxious over the outcome of a goal. Impatience breeds anxiety, fear, discouragement and failure.” ~ Brian Adams

Technorati Tags: patience, being in the moment, enjoying life, relaxing

Caring is a good thing—but only if it is done by degrees to preserve your sanity, your marriage or your job.
 

Is it possible to care too much for the occasion? Is it possible to bring so much energy to a discussion or debate that the right solution gets lost in the drama? Do you bring the same level of energy to things that really matter to you as to those you could just let go? I am all for caring, but there is a point where caring too much creates unnecessary angst for everyone.

The ‘Circle of Care’ was created out of a discussion with a good friend of mine about how much should you care about a situation, and how much energy (if any) should you exert to try to resolve or debate an issue.

She claimed to have two positions—she either cared passionately or she couldn’t care less; there was nothing in between. Yet the ‘couldn’t care less’ position was not a good place for her. By nature, she is such a caring person that position was only a way to protect herself. She still cared, so the careless pose was not real. It did not bring the release from anxiety you should feel if you honestly did not care one bit.

We jokingly talked about creating ‘levels of care’ so that we could look at a situation and evaluate objectively how much energy we would allow ourselves to exert in caring about it. So the Circle of Care was born and, while it does have some cynicism built in, it can be useful in a pinch when you find you are becoming emotional and no one else seems to share the same level of concern.

When muscles are popping out on the side of your neck as you try to convince the team that Monday should remain Chinese-food day and everyone else wants Indian, you have to ask yourself if this is the hill you want to die on.

Understanding the Circle of Care

The Circle of Care is inclusive and gives you a wide playing field. It is a great screen to let you determine if the issue is really and truly important, or whether is it something you can and should let go—in a matter of a second or two.

There are times when you should go to the mat for an issue, and there are times when it should never have featured on your radar. Time is precious. Only what matters most is worth your energy.

Sometimes going to the mat is what must be done. There are also times when supporting someone else’s decision, even if it is opposite from yours, can be liberating—when an attitude of ‘I could not care less’ is exactly right.

I am not claiming that I have found the universal solution to knowing when to care and when not to, but it has certainly been fun applying this notion to situations.

The Circle of Care is made up of five levels:

1. Level 1: Care Passionately—This is critical for you. You are willing to go to the mat for this issue and may be willing to die on this hill to defend your position.
2. Level 2: Care Enough to Influence—This is an important point. You are definitely willing to debate its merits and argue passionately, but civilly, about it. You may not be willing to die on this hill, but you’ll fight your ground.
3. Level 3: Care Unless Career Ending—A somewhat important issue, but you are not willing to make this the issue you are known for. You’ll argue for your point, but tread lightly and generally give in with a good grace. You will only fight if losing might end your career.
4. Level 4: Care, But You Can Release—You can go either way. You may enjoy a debate, but you can live with and support the outcome whatever it may be.
5. Level 5: Realm of Careless—You don’t care at all, so why are you in the debate? This is not an issue for you. Move on and be grateful you have not been sucked into the vortex of extra worry.

As you can see, although there is nothing scientific about the Circle of Care, it’s still useful. It can talk you down when you are about to escalate the argument on an issue that is either not that important or you have no control over. Instead of rushing to the barricades over every little disagreement, you pause, think about it, breathe slowly, then decide what you want or what, if anything, you can do.

The Circle of Care in action

This past weekend, the Circle of Care saved my date night (Don’t get jealous, we are just trying to keep up with President Obama and the First Lady). We made the decision about the movie we were going to see without the normal drama that goes with selecting the right one.

Typically, selecting a movie is a major debate that can get a little ugly—but not this time. I put myself in the ‘Care, but I could release’ space, so we selected an excellent movie, enjoyed the evening and are still married. Go figure.

Hail to the Circle of Care!

Karen Senteio is a business and life coach and president of VERVE. She has over 20 years experience in developing and coaching individuals and groups to achieve personal success and work-life balance. You can visit her web site at Verve and contact her at Karen@vimandverve.net

Technorati Tags: caring, prioritizing, staying balanced, saving energy, stress, being yourself

Sometimes positive thinking gets in the way
 

One of the things I find tough is coping with people who suffer with ‘delusional optimism’. It’s not that I object to people looking on the bright side. It’s the extent to which I see people hurting themselves and their prospects by doing so as a matter of principle that bothers me.

Many people love to think of themselves as ‘can do’ types. They revel in the notion that—somehow—thinking positively will automatically produce a life of ease and plenty. The ‘American Dream’—the idea that enough hard work will get you anything you want—is endearing, even though it is, unfortunately, wrong-headed. If you truly want to find success, especially in the world of work, it’s better to approach everything by expecting failure. Not ultimate failure, but plenty of it along the way.

‘Delusional optimism’

‘Delusional optimism’ is a habitual failure to accept reality, unless it matches the positive outcome you want. Like Positive Thinking, it’s a way of trying to fool your mind into seeing something ‘good’ instead of whatever is actually there. It’s imposing your own standards of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ on events, which have no such qualities: they are what they are. As William Shakespeare wrote: “It is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.” In this case, our own thinking, which may be confused, poorly informed or simply wishful.

Delusional optimism causes people to either ignore or down-play risk, and so becomes an additional risk factor in its own right. Russell Ackoff, in Management in Small Doses wrote : “The cost of preparing for critical events that do not occur is generally very small in comparison to the cost of being unprepared for those that do.”

Like the nonsense peddled as the ‘Law of Attraction’, delusional optimism works by persuading people that wishing for something hard enough will magically cause it to happen; or that staying positive will, equally magically, prevent bad things coming along.

It would be nice to be able to work magic, but the only kind that exists in our world is the kind you see on the stage; and that takes hard work, years of practice and is based on deluding the audience into seeing what you tell them to see, not what is actually happening.

Refusing to give up

Another element in delusional optimism is a dogged refusal to give up. This also seems more revered in the USA than elsewhere in the world. It too causes unnecessary pain and loss as people go on pouring time, effort and resources into projects that ‘died’ long ago.

A while ago, I wrote a post about the damage that can be done by allowing ‘hardworking idiots’ to run things (“Are today’s organizations creating hardworking Idiots?”). It is the most popular article I have ever written for this site. The damage that can be done by people who match delusional optimism with enthusiasm, hard work and incompetence is terrifying.

Why it’s better to expect failure before you begin—then keep trying just the same

Failure is a part of everyday reality. You try things and sometimes you succeed, sometimes you fail. It’s extremely unlikely that you will succeed in everything you do, and equally unlikely that you will fail. Life is a mixture. Sometimes up, sometimes down.

If you expect some failure before you begin, you can plan for it. It won’t take you by surprise. You don’t, of course, expect to fail at everything—that is as irrational as expecting to succeed all the time—but you do expect that some things won’t turn out as you want them to.

“Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play.” ~ Thomas Hardy

Creating realistic expectations

Many people have pointed out that a good deal of the trouble we have all gone through in the past few months has been caused by organizations and bosses setting up completely unrealistic expectations. By claiming to be able to deliver endless growth in profits, they produced no profits at all.

We do exactly the same to ourselves. Puffed up with delusional optimism, we fill our minds with expectations we will never be able to fulfill. If we had been realistic, the goals we set ourselves would, for the most part, have been fulfilled. Our failures would have been offset by our successes.

Instead, we set ourselves up for continual failure, not because of lack of ability, but because our expectations allowed for no failure at all. By being determined to have it all, we spoiled our pleasure in what we did have. By avoiding the extreme of delusional optimism with an occasional touch of pessimism, you’ll find realism—the middle ground. That never hurt anyone.

Pessimists make back-ups. Optimists believe they’ll never lose their data.

Technorati Tags: positive thinking, self-delusion, unrealistic expectations, facing reality, planning

We’ve all heard about so-called stress tests to check up on the potential for banks to fail. By checking their finances and the strength of their balance sheets in advance, the government hopes to give them time to correct any problems and get ready for whatever lies ahead—this time without relying on government bail-outs and rescue plans.

The government isn’t likely to step in to rescue any of us, but it might not be such a bad idea to follow their lead and try a little self-examination before anything worse comes along.If there’s anything you need to do to ‘get in shape’ to cope with more tough times, better to get started on it now than wait until the crisis arrives.

If you had to face a stress test to check on your ‘workplace viability’, would you pass? Here are my thoughts on what such a test might contain.

• Have you kept your skills and knowledge up to date? If things get really bad—and maybe you lose your job—you’ll need them. You may be able to raise the finance at that stage to go back to school, but adding extra debt when things are already tough might not even be an option. Start doing what you can today, if it’s only spending some time at your local library, or on the Internet, looking through relevant articles and magazines.
• How stable are you financially? Most of life’s problems are a little easier to handle if you have some money behind you. If you’re up to your ears in debt, even the smallest loss of income could tip you over the edge. Sorting out financial issues always takes much longer than you expect. The earlier you get started on putting your finances into a sound state, the better.
• What is the state of your personal network? Are you keeping in touch with friends and colleagues, past and present, who might offer you help if you need it? In a tough job market, networking may be essential to avoid a long wait to find the kind of job you need.
• How strong are your family relationships? Bad upsets can put a terrific strain on personal relationships of every kind. If yours aren’t how you would like them to be, there may still be time to improve them. Should you have to face serious career or financial problems, you will need support. Your loved ones should be the first people to whom you turn. If, because of wrecked relationships, that isn’t possible, you will be adding loneliness to all your other difficulties.
• How fit are you physically? Stress, anxiety, overwork and lack of sleep are all known to undermine people’s health. You may need all your strength and vitality to survive a rough patch. Start now to make sure that you’ll be up to it.
• What about your mental state? If you feel frustrated, depressed and miserable right now, how much worse are you going to feel if your life takes a wrong turning? That probably won’t be the time to try to get yourself together. Again, start to work on your mental state now so you’ll be feeling good about yourself when it’s really needed. If you have to face job interviews, or stand up to a bullying boss, you’ll need resilience and mental confidence.
• Are your expectations realistic? If you’re assuming that nothing bad will, or can, happen to you, you are going to be surprised and angry when it does. If your target is perfection, you’ll never reach it. If your aim is to have it all, your frustration when that doesn’t happen will probably prevent you from enjoying whatever you do have.
• Are you facing up to reality? Are there things in your life that you try to avoid acknowledging or won’t deal with? We all try to put on an acceptable—even brave—face when dealing with others, but it’s a risky thing to do in the privacy of our own hearts. Trying to delude yourself about who you are, what you can do and where your problems lie causes bad upsets in normal times. When things get tough, it’s a recipe for total disaster.

Over the past few decades, introspection has got a bad name. It’s all been about action—getting things done and hitting those targets. If your whole time is taken up in running yourself ragged to keep the boss and the organization happy, it’s easy to neglect your own life. Now may well be the time to do something about that. You don’t want to find yourself overwhelmed by events that you could have dealt with better—or even prevented—if only you’d had time to get yourself together first.

Technorati Tags: personal development, careers, career choice, self-development, new job, getting a promotion

Ideas for Rebuilding Your Life and Career
 

(This article appeared in the last Slow Leadership newsletter. If you would like to receive future articles like this, please use the links on this page to subscribe to future issues.)

How can you move on when it seems nothing and no one will give you a break? As unemployment grows and new jobs attract thousands of applicants, is there any way to keep yourself feeling tough enough to bounce back?

One of the first casualties of tough times and adversity is self-confidence. It’s hard to believe in yourself when you have lost much of what achieved over the years and attempts to start again are met with rejection.

You cannot change what has happened, but there are ways to help rebuild your confidence as a prelude to rebuilding everything else.

These are some of the most useful ones.

• Slow down. It’s tempting to rush into finding a way back to where you were, but is that the right place to be? Losing what you had gives you the opportunity to try something different—something that might suit you better and give you greater happiness. It’s well worth careful thought.
• Lighten up. It’s easy to fall prey to melodrama. The media, in particular, love to dramatize, turning every problem into a crisis. Don’t join them. If you take yourself and your difficulties too seriously, they’ll look so big and scary you will feel defeated before you start.
• Things are rarely as bad as they seem—or rarely as good as either. We can all imagine unending horrors ahead. It really doesn’t help.
• Accept your fear. The more you obsess about your fears and try to fight them, the more power they will have over you. if you can accept that you are afraid and move on, their power will grow less. Curiosity is the great antidote to fear. Fear shuts you down. Curiosity opens you up. It’s better to try things in a spirit of frank curiosity, even if they don’t work, than to allow your fears to freeze you in place.
• Remember that failure won’t kill you. Nobody likes to fail, but it happens to everyone sometime. Your dreams may be looking sick, but they are not dead. There’s always a chance to start again or move in a different direction. Of course, if you sit around and do nothing, while complaining how badly things are going for you, you’re stopping yourself from taking that chance. In coping with adversity, we are often our own worst enemies.
• It’s not just about you. What undermines self-confidence as much as anything else is embarrassment. You imagine that others are thinking badly of you. In reality, the world doesn’t revolve around you and most people don’t care about what you do. They are far too busy worrying about themselves and their own lives. Simply accepting that one fact can free you from an enormous burden of worry. No one is watching you all the time, nor judging your every move, so you’re free to get on and sort yourself out in your own way.
• Stay realistic in your outlook. Positive thinking is simply one way of looking at things, as is negative thinking. Neither, on its own, gives you an adequate picture of what is happening. Like day and night, life and earth, you cannot have one without the other.

Adopting a relaxed and realistic approach to life—neither seeking to be positive nor negative, but accepting the way things are—can be wonderfully liberating. Trying to be positive all the time leads to false consolations and hopes. Being negative and pessimistic produces depression and alienates others. As so often, the middle way is what you should strive for.

Adversity is the mother of change

When things are going well, we have little incentive to change anything. We are too comfortable. But when they go badly, it’s worth reflecting that maybe they weren’t so great in the first place.

If you can see your present troubles as the crucible in which a new life is being formed, you can focus on how that should turn out and stop worrying about what went before. Just deciding what you want out of life, then focusing on trying to make that happen, will give your self-confidence a boost.

Start today

My final piece of advice is this: do something right away. It almost doesn’t matter what. Few things build competence more than getting something done. Few things undermine it more than doing nothing. Work out what is the next most obvious thing to do and do it. It’s that simple. Keep doing that, over and over again, and you can achieve almost anything.

Technorati Tags: adversity, moving on, building a new life, self-development, resilience

An important part of change is understanding who you are and what you value.
 

(This is a guest post from Karen Senteio)

Getting to the point of understanding who you are and what matters to you most takes work—sometimes painful work and shocking moments of revelation. In traveling this road, we become stronger and clearer about what we want. In addition, we learn something else. We come to know what we do not want. That is powerful information. Knowing where we draw our line in the sand is a power play that is ours to use when the moment is right.

One of my favorite movies is The Joy Luck Clubbased on Amy Tan’s best selling novel. It chronicles the life of four women who come of age during wartime in China, their friendship as adults and their relationships with their Americanized daughters. It is heart wrenching as it takes you through the painful personal growth of the characters, and the perseverance they show to make the decisions that shape their lives. I have watched it at least seven times and I learn something new each time. I also cry every time.

“Know your worth”

In the movie, one of the older characters visits her daughter, There she witnesses her son-in-law abusing her daughter, emotionally and verbally. Her daughter somewhere along the way lost her ability to value her own heart, dreams and spirit. In an emotional scene, the mother confronts her daughter and gives her the gift of three soul-searching words: “Know your worth.” The movie does not show how it happens, but the daughter regained her voice and spirit and abandons that miserable marriage.

Not everything is as serious as deciding whether or not to leave a marriage, but the advice the mother gave to the daughter resonated with me and has a place in my permanent bank of wisdom.

It is a simple string of three words that can make you stand strong in formidable circumstances. To understand, and be confident in, the value you possess will allow you to be clear about when it is time to take a stand, draw a line in the sand or make a move.

“Know your worth” is power you already possess

If your worth is buried somewhere in your mind, and you have not looked for it in a while, dig for it. It is there. Keep digging. It is there.

“Know your worth” is a fantastic life screen that you can apply when deciding whether to ask for more money when negotiating salary. It is the logic you apply when you decide the person you are dating is not really worthy of you—and is using you. It should be the standard you apply when you evaluate if you are spending time with folks who do not share your value system.

There is a time to compromise, but this is not the time. If you know your worth and you step out of a situation or relationship that is not worthy of you, you have moved on in a way many people never manage.

“Know your worth.” Say it aloud—or shout it—if you need more power behind it. Put it in your permanent bank of wisdom. It is a keeper. I purchased The Joy Luck Clubfor less than twenty dollars, but it is priceless. I think I will watch it again tonight.

Karen Senteio is a business and life coach and president of VERVE. She has over 20 years experience in developing and coaching individuals and groups to achieve personal success and work-life balance. You can visit her web site at Verve and contact her at Karen@vimandverve.net

Technorati Tags: authenticity, self-worth, self-confidence, personal values, living the life you deserve

(Another guest article by Karen Senteio)

In tough times, you can still come alive again—but only if you are willing to risk coming out to play.
 

When we were kids, it was the best thing in the world to have friends knock on your door and ask you to come out and play.

Opportunity knocked and you were ready.

Somewhere along the way, it became harder and harder to step out of the house and play. I am not sure if the kids stop knocking or we stopped answering. Either way, we stopped inventing, playing, dreaming, doing and taking action on the things that interested us. They were silly childhood things that no longer had a place in our lives.

Well, I beg to differ. They are what will make you come alive again.

Find that child again.

It is the childhood skills of reinventing, exploring, doing and taking action on opportunities that are the new core competencies in making real change in your life. Those are the keys to open doors that seem closed. You have these skills, though they may be locked up somewhere in your head.

Lucky for you, that little kid inside you knows where the keys are. Find them and shake them. Hear them jingle. Wouldn’t you like to use them again?

• If you are in a dead end job and you desperately need a new opportunity, shake those keys.
• If you are thinking about starting a new business, but are afraid of what people may say, or whether it will work, shake them.
• If you are thinking about going back to school, but think you are too old to be of any use, shake them.
• If you think you have burned too many bridges to change who you have been, shake them.
• If you are thinking big and others are telling you to play small, shake them. Shake them until you shake some sense into yourself.

What are you waiting for? The sun is shining. Opportunity is knocking. Go out and play.

Karen Senteio is a business and life coach and president of VERVE. She has over 20 years experience in developing and coaching individuals and groups to achieve personal success and work-life balance. You can visit her web site at Verve and contact her at Karen@vimandverve.net

Technorati Tags: opportunity, moving on, making a fresh start, life skills, inner child, starting out again