Archive for August, 2010
How to Feng Shui Your Workspace
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Estela M. L. Go of My Dog Ate My Blog
Want to improve both your productivity and happiness level? It’s time to feng shui your workplace. Feng shui is a practice that will help you design your environment so that it brings the best of you out. By following the 10 practical feng shui tips listed below, you can increase your productivity, your positive energy, and your working experience.
10. Practical Tips
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9 Tips to Boost Your Motivation
There are days when you will struggle to do even the easiest task. A short email can feel like an hour long torture session. These days can really test your will.
These rough days also give you a great opportunity to achieve significant personal growth at work. When you are struggling the most, you should rely on every resource you have.
I put together a list of 9 things you can do to shake off your blues and boost your motivation:
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Reposition Your New Career
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Art Decker of New York self storage
“When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” This occurred to me during a recent move, but I was skeptical. I was moving from Chicago, where all my friends and family lived, where all my work contacts were located, to San Francisco. San Francisco is a beautiful city, but I did not know anyone and my cost of living was about to skyrocket.
All my thoughts were consumed with discouraging statistics: Groceries in San Francisco are 14 percent more than in Chicago, health care was going to cost me 8 percent more, and my housing was slated to increase roughly 108 percent. Not only was I going to have to adjust to a new city and find new friends, but I was confronting the reality of a significant downsize. I was not thrilled and even the lemonade in San Francisco seemed expensive!
Though I wasn’t in the mood for making lemonade out of my lemons, it seemed more refreshing than sipping lemon juice at a pity party. Here’s what I did to embrace my new adventure.
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How to be Fearless and Fear Less
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Susan Chambers of SAGE Editing and Research Services.
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unjustified, unreasoning terror which paralyzes needed effort…” (Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1st Inaugural Address, 1933)
Did you know that 12% of Canadians (source: Canadian Mental Health Association) and 18% of American adults ages 18 and older are diagnosed with an anxiety disorder in a given year (source: National Institute of Mental Health) When you convert the abstract numbers to real people, these findings translate as a distressingly large number of individuals suffering the often debilitating impacts of fear and anxiety; health concerns, a sense of being overwhelmed and helpless, an inability to take action or make changes, and a reduced quality of life. My guess is that it was in fact the side effects of overpowering fear, the “…nameless, unjustified, unreasoning terror which paralyzes needed effort…” rather than the emotion of fear itself that concerned Roosevelt, back in 1933.
According to an article in Psychology Today by Gordon Livingston (2009), a psychiatrist, the inaction that stems from excessive, irrational fears or fear-based thinking often shows up as a decision to live life from a “safe” position and not take risks, even if that means forsaking opportunities that might provide greater joy and expansiveness to one’s life. But what are these fears—or perhaps more accurately, anxieties—that keep so many of us immobilized to some degree or another? How are they triggered? And how do we overcome our fears or at least control them so they don’t take over and imprison our spirits and minds, leaving us depressed and further discouraged (a loss of heart)? Let’s start with human nature and the nature of fear.
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Why You Must Learn to Accelerate Emotional Space
Have you ever been so caught up in your anger that you can’t let it go?
Your anger, if unmanaged, ages you faster, slows the healing process, and gives you trouble developing friendships.
Most of us have some anger issues, especially when we are around people that annoy us. I have a friend who can’t stand a client that he works for. He tells me about his annoying voice and all his stupid requests. When he retells his stories we laugh about his client’s personality.
It made me think about how my friend uses our conversations to create emotional space. Emotional and physical space are really all about perception.
Back in 1910, people thought New York was so very far from Paris. It takes 5 days to travel by boat in 2010. In 1910 it must have taken over a week. Now it’s a little over seven hour plane ride. That’s 1/24th of the time.
I used to think that the day was so long when I had to work side by side with an annoying co-worker; now an annoying person can actually be fun. You will learn a few techniques that will help you accelerate your emotional space, teaching you how to improve friendships and your happiness.
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