You spend at least a third of your life at work, so you better be spending it doing something you find rewarding. If the job you wanted turned out to be not what you expected or if you had to take a less than ideal job to make ends meet, there are plenty of ways to make your job more bearable until you can move on to a job you like. The key is to focus on long-term goals and possibilities so your current situation feels less hopeless and so you can move on faster to doing something you enjoy.
Remember that this is temporary
You have two choices: to wallow in how much you hate your job and let it bring you down or to take action and find a way to get out of there and over to a job you want as soon as possible. The only way to move on to a better job is to focus on doing everything you can in the present to get you there faster.
Always do your best
When you apply to a new job, you’re going to need strong references and work experience. Even if you don’t like your current job, you shouldn’t waste your time there either. Use your current job to gain experience and skills, to learn as much as possible, to take advantage of training programs, etc. and to show your current boss that you’re a great worker so he can pass that on to your future employer.
It’s National Stress Awareness Month!
What’s there to be aware of?
We’re all familiar with the symptoms of stress, but most of us don’t know just how harmful stress can be. In small doses it can motivate you to take action, but when stress is excessive or long-lasting it can be dangerous for your physical and mental health. When I say dangerous, I mean depression, cancer, heart attack, premature aging, anxiety, and much more. No matter what you’re stressed about, it’s not worth all that. Read on to find out what causes stress, what stress causes, and what you can do to stay stress-free and healthy.
What is stress?
Stress is what you feel when you’re under pressure. The symptoms you feel, such as fast heartbeat, sweating, and blood rushing, are part of your body’s natural “fight or flight” response.
Meditation is a state of relaxed alertness in which the mind stays focused in order to decrease its chattering and wandering. A common misconception is that meditation is about completely emptying the mind or quieting all thoughts; rather, it is about choosing which thoughts to focus on. The purpose of meditation is to embrace your true self, let go of judgment, and strengthen your mind so that you can remain stable through life’s fluctuations.
The benefits of meditation start to show from the very first time you try it and develop into profound positive effects after a few weeks of practicing regularly. Meditation has been shown to:
Further, when you shift the inner peace and awareness from your meditation practice to the rest of your life, you become more stable, centered, and accepting of your experiences and of yourself and others.
The #1 complaint I hear from clients and friends is that they don’t have enough time. Between work, school, kids, and other obligations, they believe they can’t make time in their schedules to pursue their dreams, to reach professional goals, to have more fun, to exercise, etc. They are unhappy and wish they could make a change, but they feel stuck. Here is what I tell them:
When you say that you don’t have time for something, what you’re really saying is that it’s not important. When you rephrase “I don’t have time” as “pursuing my dreams is not important” or “achieving my professional goals is not important” or “taking care of my health is not important” you might realize that your priorities are a little mixed up. Claiming not to have the time takes the responsibility off of you and allows you to play the victim. Stating that you have decided something is not WORTH your time makes you realize that you are the one in control of your time and you can change your situation.
The truth is that you do have enough time, but you’re not making good use of it. Time is constant. You can’t make more of it, but you can get more out of it. Here is how to make better use of your time to be able to fit in everything important.
Comparing yourself to others is a sure-fire way to ruin your self-worth and chances of being happy. Your self-worth determines your satisfaction with yourself and your life, your confidence in pursuing what you want, and your ability to stay stable through life’s fluctuations. It is one of the most important, intimate, and individualized components of understanding and accepting yourself—which is why it’s unreliable and unsafe to base it on other people. When you measure your self-worth by reflecting on your own qualities and achievements, you reach a point where you are proud and secure with who you are. But when you turn that reflection outward, focusing on others’ traits and successes that you lack, you slip into a downward spiral that makes you feel inferior and insecure. The good news is that these comparisons begin and end in your own mind.
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” -Eleanor Roosevelt
You are the one who decides whether to neutrally observe other people or to compare yourself to them. You decide whether to notice or even admire someone else’s positive qualities or to measure yourself against them and inevitably come up short. You decide whether that comparison means that you are simply different people with different traits or whether that difference means the other person is better than you.
Our insecurities can hold us back not only from being able to love ourselves but also from being able to love others. It is easy to close up your heart to protect it from being hurt, especially if you have suffered heartbreak or betrayal in the past. However, you suffer more by denying yourself the joy of giving love to others. Even if it makes you feel vulnerable, giving love and opening your heart ultimately fills you with deep strength, security, and genuine happiness, and allows your relationships to thrive.
If you have given love in the past and been hurt in return, a logical defense mechanism is to close your heart to avoid going through that pain again. It can be scary to go out on a limb and give love and to risk someone not reciprocating your feelings or, even worse, taking advantage of them. Hardening your heart can seem like a good way to protect it, but in truth the best protection is to open your heart more fully and love more freely.
Being at a healthy weight is simple (really!). Eating correctly and having a healthy body that looks and feels great is easy. I promise. But you can forget how easy it is because you’ve been brainwashed.
Don’t believe me? How many of these apply to you:
It’s important to have goals so that you always have something to work toward, to look forward to, to challenge your mind, to improve your skills, and to expand your interests. But it can also be hard to turn vague dreams into clear, concrete goals. Here is how to set effective goals that you actually achieve.
I recently went to a Postsecret live event where Frank Warren, the creator of Postsecret, shared lessons and stories from his experience running the site. Postsecret is an online community art project where people anonymously mail in secrets on postcards which Frank then posts on the site every Sunday. In 8 years, Frank has collected over half a million secrets. Some secrets are powerfully deep and emotional, some are refreshingly funny and silly, all are real and relatable.
That relatability is what Frank kept emphasizing all night—first by telling us that the secret he receives most often is “I pee in the shower” and asking other “members of the club” to raise their hands, which most of the audience did, and then by sharing a story about a secret he received toward the beginning of the project which he said “changed everything.”
Every goal comes along with obstacles that make the goal worth achieving and make you feel accomplished when you achieve it. However, while you’re still pursuing your goal, the obstacles can sometimes overwhelm you and make you lose sight of the motivation and excitement you felt when you were starting out. You might feel frustrated, discouraged, tired, and stuck because you don’t know how to move forward past the obstacle. The key to getting through a problem that makes you feel like you’re running into a brick wall is to turn it into a positive challenge that makes you want to scale that wall.
1. Accept your situation in order to fix it
To fix your problem, you have to keep a calm, clear mind. Be honest with yourself about what’s going on and what’s wrong. If you try to deny the problem, you won’t be able to solve it and you’ll just stay stuck.