Archive for the Positive Thinking Category
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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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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The Law of Attraction and Your Career
The Law of Attraction (LoA) gets a bad rep because of cheesy YouTube Videos and terrible books. They want to make the concept simple and enticing, but in doing so they lose much of the life changing impact that the practice can have. I didn’t believe until I started believing. Imagine that. 
We are who we think we are and that’s how we accomplish our goals. If we don’t believe we can write a great book, hike the Appalachian trail, or create a career that will make us so happy that we can’t believe our luck then it won’t happen.
Let’s break the LoA down. First, we have to understand confidence.
What is confidence?
Confidence is our belief in our abilities. When we believe we can accomplish a goal, our minds set to work to make our goals a reality.
I’m working with a client who is afraid to reach out to old customers. He has enough steady work right now, but he knows his slow time is coming soon. He is afraid of the responses that he will receive. There is a reason why they are no longer customers. Right?
My client doesn’t want to face this reality. So he continues to do the same things he always does – wait for business to come to him.
He may have confidence in many areas, but in his business he lacks the confidence to learn from past mistakes.
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9 Ways to Overcome Work Annoyances
* I was afraid to publish this post because it may seem too simple for some of my advanced readers, but even my advanced work happiness people had to start somewhere. And yes, even advanced people need refreshers. So here it is.
Work has hundreds of little annoyances that can kill your happiness if you don’t create a system to deal with your problems.
Co-workers, bosses, and tedious tasks can throw us off our emotional center. We must find creative ways to deal with these issues.
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7 Tips to Overcome the Monday Blues
Arrrrrgh days (Mondays) are the most difficult transition for most of us. We just had two glorious days off doing stuff we chose to do. Now we are back at work and doing stuff other people are telling us to do. We all have to do stuff we don’t feel like doing. Even if you are the CEO, your share holders, board members and customers are telling you what to do.
By adjusting the way you view your experience, you have the ability to be happy on a Monday.
You have to take some of the control back and make yourself feel good. I’m not talking about eating chocolate cake. I’m talking about doing small things that can redirect your focus.
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7 Ways to Bring More Positivity to Your Career
Some days, work just drain you of energy. It’s hard to talk to a co-worker, client, and customer while maintaining an upbeat attitude.
It’s easy to focus on the negative. It’s that little devil on your shoulder that likes chewing your ear off until you can’t take anymore and you just give in.
You know this doesn’t help you feel any happier, and it sure as heck doesn’t make you more productive. So let’s do something about it.
1. Look for learning experiences
Each day has quite a few hidden gems, even when you are working on those projects that wear you out. Look for little moments that can teach you a lesson. For example, you can examine how you deal with your anger at a failed project. How quickly can you process your feelings and get back into a good work rhythm?
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What to do When You Hit a Creativity Wall
Why do we only get so far before we hit a wall? We know the wall will eventually come,and every time it knocks us on our ass.
This happens because we let our frustration overpower our curiosity.
We forget to love this wall. Hug this wall. It’s there for a reason.
They show us how much we care. If we just gave up when we faced a challenge it probably mean that our hearts weren’t in it in the first place.
We hit a wall and we kick it for being “stupid.” This is just a wall. A wall can’t be stupid. But we are afraid to label ourselves as stupid so we pick something outside of ourselves to label.
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How do You Know if You’ve Contacted Adultitis?
Every now and again, I like to bring you short interviews to give you a new perspective on work happiness. During my study of work happiness I have found that there are many paths to the same goal. Some people believe that loving what you do is a must, while other people believe that relationships are vital to enjoying the work that we do. Interviews are a great way to get out of your own perspective and see what other people are doing to be happy at work.
There are so many amazing people in the blogging world, but one of my more recent finds is Jason of Escape Adulthood. He and Kim (his wife) have created a business out of bringing the fun back into life.
The first impression of Jason was a video that I watched of a water balloon fight between Jason and Kim. They were sitting in chairs and throwing water balloons over their garage to see who had the better aim. It was right then that I was hooked. Having fun in life is a big part of being happy, so I’m glad to bring you an interview with Jason.
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What I Learned from Working on My Habits
As I’m looking over January’s theme “Relaxing with my work”, I’m beginning to really see how hard I am on myself. I expect myself to master concepts that only great writers, CEO’s, and Zen masters fully understand.
Just because I tell myself to breathe all nice and deep and relaxed over the next week when I’m feeling stressed out doesn’t mean it will happen right away.
Maybe that should be a theme of the month. Stop being a big bully to myself.
I wanted to publish this review of my theme two weeks ago, but I felt like I was still processing my information. Now that I’m ready, let’s begin the review…
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The One Thing More Important Than Your Career
Every now and again, I like to bring you short interviews to give you a new perspective on work happiness. During my study of work happiness I have found that there are many paths to the same goal. Some people believe that loving what you do is a must, while other people believe that relationships are vital to enjoying the work that we do. Interviews are a great way to get out of your own perspective and see what other people are doing to be happy at work.
On this blog I try to push myself outside of my comfort zone to a place where I’m a little afraid. I have to admit that I was a little afraid of interviewing Penelope Trunk. Not because her blog is űber popular or because she was the CEO of Brazeen Careerist a popular career networking site.
I was afraid because of how honest she is. She wouldn’t be afraid to call me out.
She wasn’t afraid to tell me that career happiness really is a crock of shit. Her words. She actually said it a few times. She explains how we overcomplicate life in the audio interview that I posted below. You’ll just have to listen to the audio to find out why she believes so strongly in her ideals.
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