I have moved this blog to my own server at
http://www.happyfrom9to5.com/blog
I look forward to continue a relationship with you and to add value to your life.
Claudia
miércoles 28 de enero de 2009
viernes 9 de enero de 2009
Happiness as a virus
Everybody is talking about that medical research appeared in early December at the British Medical Journal saying that happiness spreads like a virus.
I looked for the actual research that is it here. I prefer to read the whole thing when available and not the blurb posted at media sites.
Haven't read it yet but when I do, I'll post my comments.
I looked for the actual research that is it here. I prefer to read the whole thing when available and not the blurb posted at media sites.
Haven't read it yet but when I do, I'll post my comments.
jueves 8 de enero de 2009
Beautiful utopia...
As I'm catching up on all my reading, I came across this post by Alexander Kjerulf at the Chief Happiness Officer Blog about getting a warm welcome letter from your boss in your first day at the office.
Wouldn't it be awesome to be received that way? Wouldn't it be awesome to have a boss who actually supports you and seeks your happiness because he/she knows you'll be more productive?
Wouldn't it be great if my ideal boss whould have a supporting boss like that as well?
Isn't that a beautiful utopia?
While in theory it's achievable, when dealing with human beings we also deal with fragile egos, emotional distress and all what makes us human.
I like the idea of living in a world where we all know how to deal with our bad days but since we are all on different evolutionary levels, it's not reasonable to expect such a thing.
However, we can and we must learn how to deal with our OWN bad days in order to create a better world for ourselves. Eventually, it will touch the world around you and create changes but meanwhile we will be at peace in our souls.
Wouldn't it be awesome to be received that way? Wouldn't it be awesome to have a boss who actually supports you and seeks your happiness because he/she knows you'll be more productive?
Wouldn't it be great if my ideal boss whould have a supporting boss like that as well?
Isn't that a beautiful utopia?
While in theory it's achievable, when dealing with human beings we also deal with fragile egos, emotional distress and all what makes us human.
I like the idea of living in a world where we all know how to deal with our bad days but since we are all on different evolutionary levels, it's not reasonable to expect such a thing.
However, we can and we must learn how to deal with our OWN bad days in order to create a better world for ourselves. Eventually, it will touch the world around you and create changes but meanwhile we will be at peace in our souls.
martes 6 de enero de 2009
When the crisis is around the corner, what do you do?
Finally the effects of the crisis are being felt all over the world. People are scared, they talk to other people and the fear gets bigger and bigger. Like a vampire, fear feeds on fear. It's all over you: in the news, at home, when you talk to friends and coworkers, when you hear that this or that company in your area laid off people.
I've been there before, in 2001 to be more exact. I was downsized, there were no jobs on the horizon except for slave labor (funny how people take advantage of desperation paying pennies to workers when they can get away with it), and the economy kept spiraling down. When were we going to hit bottom?
Eventually we did and everything became a lot worse.
But with doom also came opportunities. In a few months and despite the bad news being spread all the time, some people started seeing opportunities that hadn't been there before. They opened up thanks to the doom. Many of those people are still in business and have become pretty wealthy. When big names started running away and withdrawing, they saw a cheap entrance into a business they already knew about, saw the upcoming opportunities, and with very little capital were able to create profitable companies very fast.
What can you do then to be able to see these opportunities?
James Ray in his post offers some ideas to avoid fear as much as possible and being open to endless possibilities. I wish I had seen this list 8 years ago, it would have saved me many tears.
1.- Clearly define what inspires you.
There's a big difference between taking action out of inspiration versus desperation. Use this season as an opportunity to hibernate into the recesses of your own mind and define what you choose to create in your next spring.
2.- Control your focus.
Energy flows where attention goes. Are you focusing on lack or opportunity?
3.- Feed your mind.
What's your constant mental diet? Do you spend hours in front of the scare news or are you reading good books, attending more positive seminars, watching uplifting DVDs and listening to powerful CDs?
4.- Strengthen your body.
Your physical health and vitality have a tremendous impact on your performance as well as your mental and emotional fitness. Exercise releases stress as well as strengthen your body and mind.
5.- Inventory your friends.
Doom and gloom attracts more doom and gloom. Jettison those "energy vampires" around you and surround yourself with opportunity seekers.
6.- Quiet your mind.
Take time to meditate daily and to slow down if only for a few minutes. Ten to fifteen minutes of meditation will relieve hours of stress and increase creativity and resourcefulness.
7.- Rid your life of escapist activities.
Overindulgence in TV, sleep and alcohol only accelerate the problems you're attempting to avoid.
8.- Make a daily gratitude list.
Focusing on all the good, gifts and God in your life puts you in the right line of thought, feeling and their subsequent actions, which will attract and create more good, gifts and God.
9.- Change your attitude.
Realize that everything that's happened in your life thus far is here to serve you, teach you and help you grow. Find the lessons in your past results, forgive yourself for anything you could have done better and apply the lesson to move forward and create a better future.
10.- Get resourceful.
For the next three days, go to a place where you can have uninterrupted time... Come up with 20 new ideas to grow your income, create new results and improve your life. You cannot leave your spot until you have twenty. And no editing! All ideas are good ideas. Do this for three successive days with 20 new ideas each day.
I'm more prepared today for this crisis than for the last one. I learnt and if I lose my job again, I know that I won't go through the hardships I went through last time.
Be prepared. It's as easy as getting, right now, a Plan B. Think: if I'm laid off today, how will I survive? Then find your Plan B.
I've been there before, in 2001 to be more exact. I was downsized, there were no jobs on the horizon except for slave labor (funny how people take advantage of desperation paying pennies to workers when they can get away with it), and the economy kept spiraling down. When were we going to hit bottom?
Eventually we did and everything became a lot worse.
But with doom also came opportunities. In a few months and despite the bad news being spread all the time, some people started seeing opportunities that hadn't been there before. They opened up thanks to the doom. Many of those people are still in business and have become pretty wealthy. When big names started running away and withdrawing, they saw a cheap entrance into a business they already knew about, saw the upcoming opportunities, and with very little capital were able to create profitable companies very fast.
What can you do then to be able to see these opportunities?
James Ray in his post offers some ideas to avoid fear as much as possible and being open to endless possibilities. I wish I had seen this list 8 years ago, it would have saved me many tears.
1.- Clearly define what inspires you.
There's a big difference between taking action out of inspiration versus desperation. Use this season as an opportunity to hibernate into the recesses of your own mind and define what you choose to create in your next spring.
2.- Control your focus.
Energy flows where attention goes. Are you focusing on lack or opportunity?
3.- Feed your mind.
What's your constant mental diet? Do you spend hours in front of the scare news or are you reading good books, attending more positive seminars, watching uplifting DVDs and listening to powerful CDs?
4.- Strengthen your body.
Your physical health and vitality have a tremendous impact on your performance as well as your mental and emotional fitness. Exercise releases stress as well as strengthen your body and mind.
5.- Inventory your friends.
Doom and gloom attracts more doom and gloom. Jettison those "energy vampires" around you and surround yourself with opportunity seekers.
6.- Quiet your mind.
Take time to meditate daily and to slow down if only for a few minutes. Ten to fifteen minutes of meditation will relieve hours of stress and increase creativity and resourcefulness.
7.- Rid your life of escapist activities.
Overindulgence in TV, sleep and alcohol only accelerate the problems you're attempting to avoid.
8.- Make a daily gratitude list.
Focusing on all the good, gifts and God in your life puts you in the right line of thought, feeling and their subsequent actions, which will attract and create more good, gifts and God.
9.- Change your attitude.
Realize that everything that's happened in your life thus far is here to serve you, teach you and help you grow. Find the lessons in your past results, forgive yourself for anything you could have done better and apply the lesson to move forward and create a better future.
10.- Get resourceful.
For the next three days, go to a place where you can have uninterrupted time... Come up with 20 new ideas to grow your income, create new results and improve your life. You cannot leave your spot until you have twenty. And no editing! All ideas are good ideas. Do this for three successive days with 20 new ideas each day.
I'm more prepared today for this crisis than for the last one. I learnt and if I lose my job again, I know that I won't go through the hardships I went through last time.
Be prepared. It's as easy as getting, right now, a Plan B. Think: if I'm laid off today, how will I survive? Then find your Plan B.
lunes 5 de enero de 2009
How age impacts your view of life
I read this article at Steve Roesler's blog "All Things Workplace" and thought it was appropriate to share given the beginning of the year:
We're living in a literal and figurative season where people are often waxing nostalgic over the "good old days." Holiday gatherings yield family stories that make one wish that somehow we could be back at Grandma's house again because it was, apparently, so wonderful. World financial markets prompt the same kinds of recollections of the past as well as--for some--grandly optimistic outlooks for a "new" kind future.
You may be either nodding or shaking your head in agreement or disagreement. Exactly.
"Looking at the world through rose-colored glasses" is a saying that we hear often. Many people look at things optimistically, regardless of the circumstances. However, according to a psychological study our views on past and future happiness change according to where we are in our lives.
Dr. Margie Lachman and colleagues found that younger and middle-aged people tend to underestimate their past happiness and to overestimate their future happiness - probably because to do so helps motivate them to strive for a better life. This data came from a survey of over 3000 American adults conducted twice and spaced nine years apart.
Age Changes Outlook
Older people (aged over 65) were more accurate in recalling their past and future life satisfaction. This probably reflected the need to accept their life as it had been lived, combined with their greater understanding of the human capacity to adjust emotionally to whatever life throws our way. Indeed, in line with the predictions of the older participants, most people's life satisfaction, in this study and others, actually changes very little through the years (in Western democracies, at least).
Lachman's study team also looked at how adaptive it was for people to have either rose-tinted or darkly clouded views of their past and future. The results showed that at whatever age, it is beneficial to have a more realistic view of the past and future. Those participants who more accurately perceived their past and future happiness tended to suffer less depression and enjoy better health.
"The young have an illusion of continued improvement, seeing the past as worse than it really was and the future as better than it turns out to be," the researchers said. "This illusion is consistent with their motivational orientation toward continued growth and gains."
Workplace Application
While the future belongs to the young, the absence of older workers could be a recipe for unrealistic decision-making. Adding reality and experience to idealism and energy doesn't equal "resistance to change;"it adds a much-needed dimension to decisions and execution that may provide a real pathway to move ideas and products forward.
During the past few years we've seen the headlines for Talent Wars, Saving Institutional Knowledge and Learning, and Diversity. My experience so far with recent layoffs has been that workers nearing retirement are being offered packages to accelerate their decisions. I understand the legal and financial benefits of such a strategy to the corporations involved. However, when the corporate sun starts shining brightly again, I wonder if the decision-making maturity and collective knowledge of these newly "retired" workers will be irreplaceable and actually prompt a lengthening of the recovery process.
Then, who ya gonna call: Ghostbusters?
______________________________________________
For more on the research cited here:
Margie E. Lachman, Christina Röcke, Christopher Rosnick, Carol D. Ryff (2008). Realism and Illusion in Americans' Temporal Views of Their Life Satisfaction: Age Differences in Reconstructing the Past and Anticipating the Future Psychological Science, 19 (9), 889-897 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02173.x
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c500653ef0105369cf9ac970c
We're living in a literal and figurative season where people are often waxing nostalgic over the "good old days." Holiday gatherings yield family stories that make one wish that somehow we could be back at Grandma's house again because it was, apparently, so wonderful. World financial markets prompt the same kinds of recollections of the past as well as--for some--grandly optimistic outlooks for a "new" kind future.
You may be either nodding or shaking your head in agreement or disagreement. Exactly.
"Looking at the world through rose-colored glasses" is a saying that we hear often. Many people look at things optimistically, regardless of the circumstances. However, according to a psychological study our views on past and future happiness change according to where we are in our lives.
Dr. Margie Lachman and colleagues found that younger and middle-aged people tend to underestimate their past happiness and to overestimate their future happiness - probably because to do so helps motivate them to strive for a better life. This data came from a survey of over 3000 American adults conducted twice and spaced nine years apart.
Age Changes Outlook
Older people (aged over 65) were more accurate in recalling their past and future life satisfaction. This probably reflected the need to accept their life as it had been lived, combined with their greater understanding of the human capacity to adjust emotionally to whatever life throws our way. Indeed, in line with the predictions of the older participants, most people's life satisfaction, in this study and others, actually changes very little through the years (in Western democracies, at least).
Lachman's study team also looked at how adaptive it was for people to have either rose-tinted or darkly clouded views of their past and future. The results showed that at whatever age, it is beneficial to have a more realistic view of the past and future. Those participants who more accurately perceived their past and future happiness tended to suffer less depression and enjoy better health.
"The young have an illusion of continued improvement, seeing the past as worse than it really was and the future as better than it turns out to be," the researchers said. "This illusion is consistent with their motivational orientation toward continued growth and gains."
Workplace Application
While the future belongs to the young, the absence of older workers could be a recipe for unrealistic decision-making. Adding reality and experience to idealism and energy doesn't equal "resistance to change;"it adds a much-needed dimension to decisions and execution that may provide a real pathway to move ideas and products forward.
During the past few years we've seen the headlines for Talent Wars, Saving Institutional Knowledge and Learning, and Diversity. My experience so far with recent layoffs has been that workers nearing retirement are being offered packages to accelerate their decisions. I understand the legal and financial benefits of such a strategy to the corporations involved. However, when the corporate sun starts shining brightly again, I wonder if the decision-making maturity and collective knowledge of these newly "retired" workers will be irreplaceable and actually prompt a lengthening of the recovery process.
Then, who ya gonna call: Ghostbusters?
______________________________________________
For more on the research cited here:
Margie E. Lachman, Christina Röcke, Christopher Rosnick, Carol D. Ryff (2008). Realism and Illusion in Americans' Temporal Views of Their Life Satisfaction: Age Differences in Reconstructing the Past and Anticipating the Future Psychological Science, 19 (9), 889-897 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02173.x
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c500653ef0105369cf9ac970c
martes 7 de octubre de 2008
What is left after the fat cows are gone
In times of a good economy, nobody cares about anything. We all think the good times will last forever and we tend to forget that the economy moves in cycles, some are good and some are bad.
Like in the Bible story, when we are living in a time of fat cows, we would love for it to last forever. We actually think it will last forever.
We overspend, because there is easy credit.
We don’t care to make any real career progress, because we can always find another job with a better salary.
We don’t save, because the good times are finally here to stay.
When the lean cows period sets, we don’t have savings, we become expendable in our jobs, we are downsized, laid off, we don’t really have anything good to offer to an employer because we didn’t get ready.
We can’t go back in time. What’s done is done. What we didn’t do, we can’t do right now…
Really?
Well, I believe we can. No, we can’t make up in 2 days what we haven’t done in 10 years but we can take the steps to weather the storm, survive and most likely, make a profit.
It is not that difficult but it requieres a decision on your part. Are you ready to actually roll up your sleeves and work towards a safer short term future? A future where you are a lot less worried about what way is the stock market going?
Get a plan and put it in action. Don't be paralyzed. Act.
Like in the Bible story, when we are living in a time of fat cows, we would love for it to last forever. We actually think it will last forever.
We overspend, because there is easy credit.
We don’t care to make any real career progress, because we can always find another job with a better salary.
We don’t save, because the good times are finally here to stay.
When the lean cows period sets, we don’t have savings, we become expendable in our jobs, we are downsized, laid off, we don’t really have anything good to offer to an employer because we didn’t get ready.
We can’t go back in time. What’s done is done. What we didn’t do, we can’t do right now…
Really?
Well, I believe we can. No, we can’t make up in 2 days what we haven’t done in 10 years but we can take the steps to weather the storm, survive and most likely, make a profit.
It is not that difficult but it requieres a decision on your part. Are you ready to actually roll up your sleeves and work towards a safer short term future? A future where you are a lot less worried about what way is the stock market going?
Get a plan and put it in action. Don't be paralyzed. Act.
domingo 28 de septiembre de 2008
Breaking free from a job
Have you seen how men almost always only deal with their jobs because the rest of their lives is already resolved by us women?
Let's face it: we women have several full-time jobs. Our jobs are our career, being a mother, a wife, a daughter, a girlfriend. With a little luck we get paid for least one of those jobs and often not very good.
All these take a tremendous amount of time and we end up forgetting our dreams. What happens is that, when we forget about ourselves, we also forget about our purpose on this planet, about all people who could help by sharing our gifts and our experience.
The good news is that we can make money and have time and be willing to do what we want by doing what we love.
How is this done? By building your own business.
I do not mean that you will transform yourself into a giant corporation, but turn your experience into profits.
You could tell me you're too tired to save the world. Maybe, but ... wouldn't it be great not having to get up to go to work every day? Wouldn't it be great to be your own boss? Wouldn't it be great to make good money? And wouldn't it be great to have time for your family when you want it?
You can have it all. It will take effort and sacrifice, don't be fooled, but the rewards far exceed that first effort.
Having a side business can give you the safety net you need to not be afraid of losing your job, especially in this shivering economy. Think about it as a plan B.
Being employed has advantages. Combine them with being the creator of your own work, doing something you really like and getting paid for it you you get almost the best of both worlds.
Then, the day you want to leave Cubicle Nation, you will have a business running and waiting for you to take it to the highest places. Like having a passport, visa, place ticket and paid hotel reservations at your destination.
Breaking free from Cubicle Nation is possible. Are you ready to jump?
Let's face it: we women have several full-time jobs. Our jobs are our career, being a mother, a wife, a daughter, a girlfriend. With a little luck we get paid for least one of those jobs and often not very good.
All these take a tremendous amount of time and we end up forgetting our dreams. What happens is that, when we forget about ourselves, we also forget about our purpose on this planet, about all people who could help by sharing our gifts and our experience.
The good news is that we can make money and have time and be willing to do what we want by doing what we love.
How is this done? By building your own business.
I do not mean that you will transform yourself into a giant corporation, but turn your experience into profits.
You could tell me you're too tired to save the world. Maybe, but ... wouldn't it be great not having to get up to go to work every day? Wouldn't it be great to be your own boss? Wouldn't it be great to make good money? And wouldn't it be great to have time for your family when you want it?
You can have it all. It will take effort and sacrifice, don't be fooled, but the rewards far exceed that first effort.
Having a side business can give you the safety net you need to not be afraid of losing your job, especially in this shivering economy. Think about it as a plan B.
Being employed has advantages. Combine them with being the creator of your own work, doing something you really like and getting paid for it you you get almost the best of both worlds.
Then, the day you want to leave Cubicle Nation, you will have a business running and waiting for you to take it to the highest places. Like having a passport, visa, place ticket and paid hotel reservations at your destination.
Breaking free from Cubicle Nation is possible. Are you ready to jump?
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