Tag: gratitude

2020 has left a trail of exhausted people, mentally drained, after coping with a year of high uncertainty. We learned to adapt by force and reinvented ourselves. But more importantly, where we developed resilience, our ability to bounce back in the face of adversity grew and as a result, we came out stronger.
 

Ready for 2021? Bring it on! …but how?

How are we supposed to be ready for new endeavors when most of us feel the urge to step down and go slow for a change?
2021 is already proving itself challenging. We aren’t close to overcoming the COVID-19 crisis and we still need to care of ourselves and others.  Meanwhile, the world keeps changing. New opportunities emerge in the midst of this crisis and lots of organizations struggle to survive and transform their businesses. It can feel overwhelming.
Leaders are not only dealing with their own need to reconnect and reinspire themselves, but they also need to take care of their teams, as many continue to work remotely while performing other roles (homeschooling, taking care of our elders, looking after our home etc.). Some may be suffering from change fatigue, by being constantly called to change their way of working, taking on more responsibilities as a consequence of employee cutoffs and new demands.
However, not everything is doom and gloom. There is a silver lining: we have learned a lot in 2020. We have increased our ability to confront difficult circumstances and take advantage of new emerging opportunities driven by change. Each of us has what we need to rise and shine. We just need to remind ourselves of it and invest time in renewing our energy and leading the way into 2021.
 

Balance work / life integration

There are simple, yet powerful, things you can try that will help refuel your energy, reignite your enthusiasm, and bring focus to what’s important, thus improving your wellbeing.
 

1. Disconnect to re-connect.

With travel restrictions and lockdowns throughout the world, taking time off to stay home seems counterintuitive for some of us. We usually connect holidays with traveling. However, now, more than ever, we desperately need time to pause and disconnect fully from work and daily activities. We need time to recharge, even if it means staying home, relaxing, and doing nothing. Some of the most brilliant ideas have flourished while doing nothing… just being. Plan for it and make sure you also unplug from technology. Technology has been a main character in our lives in 2020. Let’s give ourselves a break!
 

2. Re-commit to yourself, connecting with what is important in your life.

Take some time to reflect on what you value most: is this the life I want to have? What do I really want my life to be about? How do I want to live my life? What gives meaning to my life? Where do I want to invest my time and energy?
Gifting ourselves with time to envision what we want and grounding our thoughts re-connects us with what’s important in our lives and gives meaning to everything we do. Spiritual meaning is an unlimited source of energy.
 

3. Do something you love every day.

Make a list of the things you enjoy doing that lift your spirit and feed your inner self. Set aside some time every day to do the things you love. The key to refueling your energy is to be consistent and invest time in you. This will help you to be centered and present.
 

4. Count your blessings.

Practice gratitude deliberately every day, until it becomes a habit. Gratitude and appreciation unleash joy and happiness and provide us with a sense of wellbeing and peace of mind. We can train our minds to focus on abundance rather than scarcity, on appreciating what we have instead of what we miss. It helps reorganize our priorities to enjoy life as it is.
 

5. Celebrate your achievements.

Take time to celebrate what you have accomplished, even what you judge to be unimportant. Don’t take it for granted. Small celebration rituals, such as sharing what makes you feel proud with others or voicing your emotions can be enough to reinforce a sense of accomplishment, strengthen your character, and fill yourself with new renewed energy and craving for more.
 
A new year is a great time to stop, pause, and recommit to ourselves and what is important for us. It’s a time to refresh and consciously replenish our energy. There are small and important practices we can learn and apply every day that helps us stay focused, energized, and enjoy the ride, increasing our wellbeing and living a more conscious life.

2021. The calendar year has changed. However, if we are expecting things to be different just because a new year has begun, we are bound to be disappointed. We are still talking about this phenomenon and it continues to be hard for us and our people to find our way through it all. In such times, I have found three things really make a difference in helping me to find my center and be at my best in seemingly never-ending uncertainty. Like all things, with practice, we can become much better at these skills. The sooner we start, the fastest we will get there, so let´s dive into each of them.

  • Be at Your Best in Seemingly Never-Ending UncertaintyAcceptance: Stop judging and start embracing. Our mind moves really quickly into judging what is good or bad news, what might happen, and why people or the world did this to us. The more your mind goes in that direction, the more precious time you lose, when you could be taking action, leveraging whatever happened. Resisting it will not change the fact that it happened, but taking conscious actions to accept it can be the most powerful way to drive creative and effective responses in ourselves and our teams.
  • Gratitude: We sometimes forget that each of us has a lot of resources and abilities that we have developed throughout our lives that have prepared us to confront almost anything. When a new challenge appears, it is extremely powerful to connect with all of our strengths and successes in life until this moment, the things that have allowed us to be here right now and be able to respond. In any challenging situation, there is beauty, opportunity, and something new to experience that will make us stronger.
  • Resilience: Focus on learning and strengthening yourself. We usually react to unexpected events with an energy of “adaptation and reaction,” as if we have no other choice. We feel sad or happy based on the feedback we receive. Building our ability to have a more resilient mind so we can focus on learning from all situations, will make a difference in our capacity to respond faster and better, situation after situation.

It’s true, there is no magic wand that we can quickly wave to become better at all of this. The sooner we realize that this is the case, the sooner we can connect with our energy to make it happen through work, dedication, and practice. The best way to help ourselves and our teams bring the best versions of ourselves in these uncertain times is by connecting with the skills we need to develop in order to thrive.
Are you ready to move one step forward in this direction?

Quote from James Anthony Froude "You cannot dream yourself into a character,; you must forge and hammer yourself one." Never let a good crisis go to waste.
In the first post of this series, I shared an anecdote of how I once heard an executive in the US say “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. On the second post, we briefly explored some ideas about how the crisis and how we respond to it might have a long-lasting effect, with downstream effects impacting our character. In this post, I would like to share some thoughts on how a practice of empathy and gratitude can be a character-building ‘workout’.
As the pandemic continues to wreak havoc in our healthcare and economic systems at the macro-level, the downstream impacts it has on our lives are extremely varied. However, it is difficult to keep in mind the different impact ‘modalities’ it has. The conversations, articles, podcasts, news, etc. from the last weeks have gotten me thinking about the different realities people are experiencing – and it’s prompted me both to empathize more and be grateful for my own situation (still working on it!). We can look at some of these different realities through a large number of different ‘lenses’ or perspectives to help with the mental and emotional exercise. Let’s start with the lens of work situation by looking at a very very high level way of grouping different types of work circumstances many of us are facing right now.

Knowledge / remote workers

This is a segment of the population in many countries that has the great fortune of being able to continue their work from home. Some were already doing it before the crisis, but many people in several countries are now full-time remote workers, for the first time. Those who had not worked remotely before might be struggling with the basics: i.e. setting up a proper physical space, improving their setup to have proper internet connectivity (have you been on a videoconference recently where someone is struggling to get good wifi signal inside their house?), proper headset, etc. For some others, the challange might be not only the setup, but also the learning curve to work remotely: I’ve heard from many of our clients how they have struggled to teach their people how to work remotely overnight, with some even paying online courses to teach their workforce how to operate in this environment. There are some others who now struggle to manage a workforce which became a distributed one overnight.
On top of this we can layer other type of complications – a Wall Street firm HR Director recently shared with me a situation they are facing with their younger workers. Many of them might find themselves working out of a densely populated urban area in which they live with roommates in a small space (think NY or San Francisco, for example). In their small apartments, they might not even have a suitable space to camp out with their laptop and take a call, or said space is not enough to have all roommates trying to do it simultaneously. Others might find themselves locked in their house with their kids running around with no school – trying now to double not only as remote workers but as homeschool teachers. I have heard hundreds of variants of this type of situation, but even though it is undeniably disruptive and stressful, it is a great situation to be in, especially if we consider others.

Still with a job, risking it

There are many others who are fortunate enough to still have a job, but it can’t be performed remotely, and it needs to be performed. Thousands of healthcare workers (facing greater risks than anyone), bank branch employees, supermarket employees, essential service provider workers (water, electricity, internet) among many others. They not only have to deal with potentially having their kids at home, but to continue performing their job – and essentially doing it knowing that everyday that passes they risk contagion, with all the uncertainty that comes with it. “Will I get mild symptoms or end in the hospital? Can I pass it on to my kids and or older relatives living with us?” are thoughts we all might have, but I can only imagine the way they are amplified for those having to leave home everyday to go to work.

Now unemployed – and unprotected

Then we have millions who are now (or about to be) unemployed… and depending on which country they are in, and their situation, this can be a downward spiral with potential ramifications worse than the virus’ most common course. A startup CEO in Mexico recently told me “in my country, poverty will kill more people than the virus”. There are billions of people who live either under the poverty line, or who barely surpass it yet require income on a daily or weekly basis to survive. An interruption in income of a few days can mean they can’t pay rent or other essential expenses. Losing employment can mean they lose their medical insurance, whether private or public…

Other lenses

Sickness and death is yet another lens through which we can try to empathize. Both can touch us all – whether we live in the 1% strata or live in poverty, employed or unemployed, no one is immune to this. We’ve heard about infected (and recently dead) royals and celebrities all the way to the mass graves for the less fortunate ones.
There are additional, countless lenses through which we can try to empathize with others during these times: age (i.e. older people seem to have higher mortality rates), having access or not to testing and healthcare if needed, being able to take care of oneself even for basic chores like shopping, the political situation of where you live (those under totalitarian regimes might be on slippery slope to lose even more freedom), etc.
Whatever the lenses we choose to practice empathy, they can be helpful to get some understanding of what others are living during this crisis. If you are reading this, there is a very reasonable chance you are in one of the more fortunate situations: hopefully you have the financial means to weather this storm out, or you still have a job you can do remotely. If this is the case, remember, even if you are experiencing hardships, count your blessings: there are probably millions who would see your current situation as an answer to their prayers, if they could switch places with you today. Realizing that can help put things in perspective – and it’s one of many ways in which we can individually do our work to avoid letting this crisis go to waste.
 
First published in LinkedIn 

In March the World Happiness Report for 2019 was published and the outcomes were quite discouraging. Negative feelings such as worry, sadness and anger increased by 27 percent between 2010 and 2018 and overall global happiness went down. One chapter of the report is titled, “The sad state of happiness in the United States and the role of digital media”. Happiness and well-being have been on a slow decline since 2000.
Several explanations, including decline in social capital and social support, as well as an increase in substance abuse and obesity, are cited as causes for the decline. This report and research suggest there is another explanation for this decline. Americans are making a fundamental shift in how they spend their leisure time. A large amount of time is spent interacting with electronic devices and this may have a direct link to unhappiness. Time spent in beneficial activities are now used for screen time. There is a decline in face-to-face time and sleep. This has caused a decline in well-being and may also explain the decline in happiness.
On a scale from 1 (unhappy) to 5 (extremely happy), how would you rate your happiness?
If you rated yourself below a 4 it might be time to give your life the “Marie Kondo” treatment. Marie Kondo or KonMari, a Japanese author and consultant, has taken the United States by storm with her book, “The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying Up” and the recent Netflix series, “Tidying Up With Marie Kondo.”
How can we take some of KonMarie’s lessons and techniques and apply them to life?
Marie suggests that, before you start tidying, you practice some gratitude. Here are some guiding questions:

  • What am I grateful for today?
  • What am I grateful for in my life?
  • Who am I grateful for?

 
The main premise of KonMarie’s book is to tidy up by asking yourself “Does this item spark or bring me joy?” If it does, you keep it and if it doesn’t, you say, “Thank you” and toss or donate it.
 

“To truly cherish the things that are important to you, you must first discard those that outlived their purpose.”

 
Let’s start!
As a first step, try to connect to your personal values. Values are principles or standards of behavior; they are one’s judgment of what is important in life.
Examples of values include: integrity, freedom, love, kindness, commitment, accountability, perseverance, etc.
Write down your top three values and then answer these questions:

  • Are you currently living according to those values?
  • Is your behavior aligned with your values?

 
Work
Think for a few moments about your job, the work you do and ask yourself some of these questions:

  • What am I grateful for in this job? (Yes, we start with gratitude!)
  • Are the values of the company I work for aligned with my personal values?
  • What is the purpose of the company I work for and do I feel connected to that purpose?
  • Am I excited to go to work in the morning?
  • Does my work spark joy for me?

 
If you answered yes to all those questions, that’s awesome.
If you had a few nos, unlike KonMarie, who suggests you toss the items, I am not suggesting you should quit your job.
The purpose of this exercise is to give you some insight into where there might be some unhappiness. Now that you have identified the problem, you can take some corrective action and do something about it.
 

“If you are not part of the problem, you cannot be part of the solution.”

 
Social circle (e.g. friends and family)
Reflect on the people you surround yourself with:

  • What am I grateful for when it comes to my social circle?
  • Who are my cheerleaders and supporters?
  • Who might be holding me back?
  • Who are the friends who are always negative?
  • Which friendships are aligned with my values, and which ones aren’t?
  • Which of my friends bring me joy, and which don’t?

 
Again, I am not suggesting you end your friendships. All these people came into your life for a reason. This exercise serves as a way to take inventory of how and with whom you spend your time.
As a breast cancer survivor, this process happened almost organically for me. There were those who stayed with me throughout the process and those who became invisible and disappeared.
 
Time
We just never seem to have enough of it. When was the last time you took a tally of how you spend your time?
Think about the last week and write down how your time was allocated each day. Working, exercise, family, volunteering, school, writing, etc.
In addition, if your phone has the capability, check how much “screen time” you had over the course of a week.

  • What am I grateful for when it comes to time?
  • What patterns can I identify in my time tally?
  • Is my time allocation aligned with my values?
  • Where did I “waste” time?
  • How would I like to allocate my time?
  • What time sparks joy for me?

 
Remember the self-rating about your happiness at the beginning of the article? Would you change it now that you have read this article?
Reflecting on your work, social circles and use of time is there anything that stood out? Anything you would do differently?
Here are some powerful questions to ask yourself about your happiness:

  • What will I stop doing?
  • What will I start doing?
  • What will I continue doing?