The ‘bluebird of happiness’ Gretchen Rubin has some ideas for you!
Do you need a happiness boost—right now? If so, take a look at this menu of options and make your choices. Remember, the more you tackle, the bigger the boost you’ll receive.
When you’re feeling blue, it can be hard to muster up the physical and mental energy to do the things that make you happier. Plunking down in front of the TV or digging into a tub of ice cream seems like an easier fix. However, research shows that these aren’t the routes to feeling better.
Try some choices below. The more you push yourself, the better you’ll feel. If you can’t tackle a big task, just do something small. Even a little step in the right direction will give you a lift.
According to my groundbreaking happiness formula, to be happy, you need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth. What’s dragging you down? Is it a lack of fun, of connection? Do you feel a lot of guilt, boredom, or anger? Do you feel that something’s “not right” about your life? Do you feel stagnant or stuck? Focus your efforts on the choices that will do the most to address what’s not working in your life.
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
One of my favorite things about life is that we all get a chance, once a day, to start over.
The morning comes bearing gifts of renewal, redemption and a chance to start all over again. The fresh dew on the Spring leaves glimmer as the sun is just starting to poke her head out from the horizon and imbue each morning with the promise of revival. Moments like these remind me that life goes on.
And not only does life go on, but this very morning you have a chance to make a new decision about HOW it goes. I know I don’t get it perfect; I mess up every day. I try to kick sugar and I fail 20 times a week. But I try and try again. And each day I am closer to my result.
The same thing goes for goals, achieving dreams and the quality of your life. You may not have gotten it perfect in the past, but perfection is never what we can really achieve – only progress. When you stop trying to be perfect and embrace progress OVER perfection – you free yourself to live a life on your terms. We, my friend, are human beings, and by our very nature are not perfect.
But what we can do is welcome the promise of the morning, of each new day that reminds us that we can try again and today get it 1% more right. We can be 1% more on our own side, we can love ourselves 1% more and we can come 1% closer to our dreams.
You and I don’t need to get it all done today, because we can’t; but we can achieve 1% more than we did yesterday. We can forgive ourselves 1% more than we did yesterday. We can show up for our loved ones more than we did yesterday.
The promise of the morning inspires me every day. Today, I am to do 1% better than I did yesterday. Day-by-day, slowly but surely these small incremental changes will bring about MASSIVE change in our lives.
Embrace the promise of renewal each morning, and for today, don’t try to be perfect, just be 1% better than you were yesterday.
You don’t have to be an emotional sponge, picking up every feeling around you. Learn to distinguish whether what you’re feeling belongs to you or to somebody else:
Linda has a grown son. Whenever her son is going through a difficult time, Linda takes her son’s emotions on, as if those feelings belonged to her. She’ll talk to her son on the phone for a while. He’ll express himself intensely and powerfully about how he really fee]s about everything in his life. After all, Linda’s his mom. It’s safe to tell her how he really feels, even if he can’t tell anyone else.
Linda may feel fine when she begins talking to her son. But by the end of the conversation, Linda doesn’t feel that good anymore. She may feel angry, upset, or worried—or whatever her son was feeling before he talked to her.
Sometimes we soak up other people’s feelings because we forget to protect ourselves. Often, we do this because of the depth of feeling we have for this person. The remedy for this is the same as it is when we’re dealing with our own emotional stuff. We recognize what we’re feeling. We give that feeling its due. Then we let it go. We squeeze out the sponge.
Sometimes, it just takes the act of recognizing that we’ve taken on another person’s emotions to clear those emotions out. If we strive for awareness, we’ll begin to recognize when the feelings we’re feeling aren’t our own.
Children are often open and unprotected. If we re going through a lot of feelings around them, they may absorb our emotions, too. It’s important to share our feelings with others arid let people talk about their feelings to us. But we need to pay attention. If we’ve picked up someone else’s emotions, we need to let those feelings go.
God, help me know that part of being close to people and loving them means I sometimes take on their feelings. Show me how to protect myself so I can keep my heart open to the people I love without taking on their feelings.
Some thoughts on beginning blogging from a writer at FlowingData…
I answered a few questions for Amstat News not too long ago, and the questions were centered around why I, as a stat grad student, take the time to write for FlowingData and why others should give blogging a try. The questions were more from a career standpoint, but it really all comes down to this. It’s fun.I have fun picking apart designs and playing with data. It’s fun reading comments. It’s fun looking at others’ work. It’s fun learning how to make stuff. It’s fun getting emails from people who were totally scared of numbers, but are now taking stat courses.
People often ask me how much time I spend writing posts, but it’s like asking someone how much he watches TV or plays video games. How many hours have you spent roaming an art gallery?
I’ll let you in on a little secret though. Maintaining a blog doesn’t take as much time as you think. You just need to manage your time wisely. Don’t waste minutes checking stats, tweaking design, etc. Get rid of the extraneous, and you’re just writing in a journal. Doogie Howser wrote every day and he was a doctor and he had a social life. So it must be possible.
Hold on. I think I have a point here.
I guess—if you’re thinking about starting a blog, go for it. I highly encourage it. FlowingData has definitely been a good thing for me. There’s a book on the way, and I’ve been lucky to connect with people and groups I probably never would have been able to otherwise. But don’t just do it because you think it’ll advance your career. Do it because you actually like what you’re doing, and other stuff will follow. It’ll be much more fun that way.
Sorry for the longish curation excerpt, but this was a great post by ‘askflowingdata’ at the FlowingData blog that I just had to share! Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization. btw, here’s a bit of ‘Doogie Howser’ eye candy for those unfamiliar with the reference…
…and every day I am reminded that ‘I am my father’s son’. As I get older, I am more and more aware of the positive impact he has had on my life…
Recently, I attended Mass with my parents and there he was again — reading the Epistle at Church [photo above]. It gave me pause to think about his influence on my life. Here are just a few of the many of the things he taught me:
A Lohenry’s place is at the front of the room.
I don’t mean this in a vain way. In a world where most people would rather die or have a root canal than speak in public (Seinfeld reference), my dad modeled public speaking as a way of life for me. My earliest public memories of him are like this — reading at church, leading the worship team, etc. Because of his example, I became a consultant, a teacher and a public speaker who thrives on being in the front of the room. I am my father’s son…
It’s ok to have a big vocabulary — words have meaning and it’s good to know what those meanings are and be able to use them effectively.
I remember sitting around the dinner table and my father would bring up a ‘word of the day’ — some new word that had interested him recently. Sometimes, it would be a joke with a fractured pun with a punchline like ‘people who live in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones’. He passed on a love of language and wordplay that has become my passion and my craft. In my academic career, I studied German, French, Russian, Croatian, Norwegian and Italian and my mastery of English vocabulary is well-known — I can only trace this love of language and communication to his influence. I am my father’s son…
Technology is fun and awesomely powerful.
When I was in college, I was a German major and my father was a systems analyst working with mainframe computers in the ‘glass house’. Every time I wanted to understand more about his passion, he’d sit down and start drawing diagrams to explain computers at the machine level and it would go nowhere. Later still, I used one of my electives to take a FORTRAN programming class back in the day of punch cards and mainframes because I wanted to better understand his world. I gave him the final project for that class on Father’s Day 31 years ago and told him ‘I don’t ever want to have anything to do with computers ever again’. Well, it would seem that he had the last laugh on that one! These days, among other things I am a website developer and I just launched his new site yesterday. The business blogging that I do is the perfect marriage of communication and technology — again, I am my father’s son…
Adoption is a loving option.
My father met and married my mom and me when I was around three years old and he adopted me at the age of five. There was nothing in his life that prepared him for this situation but he stepped up to the challenge. I still remember going before the judge and having him ask if I wanted this man to be my father. I don’t know if it would’ve made much difference if I said no but I do know that saying yes has made all the difference in my life. Not only did my yes open the door to a lifelong relationship with a man who always did his best to be a dad but later in life when I fell in love with a beautiful single-parent much like my mom I did not think twice about whether I could adopt her son. We have formed a family of eight people who would not exist without his example. I am my father’s son…
Real men cry.
That’s all, real men cry and it gives me great pleasure to know that he’s crying as he reads this just as I am crying while I write it…
I could go on and I will at some point I’m sure, but as I reread this before clicking the publish button, I’m reminded of the song ‘Leader of the Band’ — perhaps one of the world’s greatest musical testimonies to fatherhood…
The leader of the band is tired And his eyes are growing old But his blood runs through My instrument And his song is in my soul — My life has been a poor attempt To imitate the man I’m just a living legacy To the leader of the band.
I may not play guitar like Dan Fogelberg, but my ‘instrument’ is my words — spoken and written — combined with my computer skills. ‘I’m just a living legacy’ and I AM my father’s son…
Attract the right kind of traffic by creating exceptional content.
Engage your audience so they know, like, and trust you. Let them know you’re the likable expert who’s going to give them the information (and eventually the products and services) that won’t let them down.
Then use smart copywriting and conversion techniques to turn those raving fans into customers.
No, it’s not paint-by-numbers, but it is a proven, systematic way to build your business.
But sometimes I hear people say, “Geez, that sounds like a lot of work.”
Well, ok, I’m going to give it to you straight. It’s work.
But a lot of work compared to what? Digging latrines? Losing your mind in a cubicle farm? Spouting half-baked opinions on a reality TV show?
So let’s break it down … building a business our way versus building a business by other people’s methods.
People no longer want to be sold to; they want companies to help them find an informed way to buy the right product or service at the right price. They still watch ads, but often online rather than on TV, and they’re much more likely to view ads that friends have recommended. When something goes wrong with a product, they want to be able to reach the company instantly and get a quick solution.
How companies adapt to this energetic and sometimes chaotic world will define their future success. The website, Facebook page, blog and Twitter feed are no longer add-ons to a business’s communication budget: They should be central to its marketing strategy, and used in coordination with other marketing efforts.
As a first step in addressing your problem, make sure your site is set up not just to handle transactions, but also for communication – and that when customers leave comments or send emails your team always follows up. Depending on the channels you choose, this might mean helping your customer service staff adapt to new methods of communicating. Once they have, you must continue to keep in touch with customers yourself.
In the past, I would ask Virgin customers to write to me with problems or ideas, and I often called people to talk about the problems that came up. It was a great way to check on our businesses’ quality and standards – though many of the complainants believed one of their friends was playing a practical joke on them. To this day, I try to answer as many e-mails as I can and encourage our executives to do the same.
Beyond customer service, you may need to consider that the old divisions between advertising, marketing and public relations have broken down, so it’s time to review how your marketing team works. Virgin Atlantic recently created a Social Relations team to manage the combined media space and to make sure our sites and communications are current and interesting, maintaining the cheeky flair that characterizes the brand.
You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source if you’d like to read the rest of Richard Branson’s perspective. Comment below or ‘connect’ above so we can talk about how this applies to your business…
Show me a modern political candidate who doesn’t understand television, and I’ll show you a loser.When TV became the dominant medium for Americans to consume news and entertainment, political candidates could no longer be successful without looking polished in televised debates, appearing on talk shows and spending big on commercials.Like the television boom of the 1960s, we are standing on the precipice of a big shift in how public figures are perceived and how campaigns are conducted. Our frontier is social media, and its impact on mainstream political culture is coming on fast.While my colleagues have been making their predictions about what’s on the tech and social media horizon in 2011, there will be no major U.S. elections next year. Here, we’ll be postulating about social media’s impact on the more long-term future of American civics.
Interesting data from a great source that should have you thinking…
“In the digital era, news has become omnipresent. Americans access it in multiple formats on multiple platforms on myriad devices. The days of loyalty to a particular news organization on a particular piece of technology in a particular form are gone. The overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms to get news on a typical day, including national TV, local TV, the internet, local newspapers, radio, and national newspapers. Some 46% of Americans say they get news from four to six media platforms on a typical day. Just 7% get their news from a single media platform on a typical day.
The internet is at the center of the story of how people’s relationship to news is changing. Six in ten Americans (59%) get news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day, and the internet is now the third most popular news platform, behind local television news and national television news.
The process Americans use to get news is based on foraging and opportunism. They seem to access news when the spirit moves them or they have a chance to check up on headlines. At the same time, gathering the news is not entirely an open-ended exploration for consumers, even online where there are limitless possibilities for exploring news. While online, most people say they use between two and five online news sources and 65% say they do not have a single favorite website for news. Some 21% say they routinely rely on just one site for their news and information. ” Source: Overview | Pew Internet & American Life Project
Me? I use over 600 online sources aggregated in one great tool; Google Reader! Occasionally, I listen to WTAQ, but that’s not for the news — it’s to catch my good friend Jerry Bader! I rarely if ever watch television or read a dead tree newspaper for the news — I get it ALL online. I’ve covered my methodology in great detail here and here. Comment, call or contact me if you’d like to take your news aggregation needs to an unprecedented level…
Interesting perspective on the use of time and intelligence…
“I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.” Source: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus – Here Comes Everybody
Television is to us, however, what gin was to the British a few hundred years ago and smart people are beginning to take notice…
“Clay Shirky has noticed the trend of talented people putting five or six hours an evening to work instead of to waste. Add that up across a million or ten million people and the output is astonishing. He calls it cognitive surplus and it’s one of the underappreciated world-changing stories of our time.” Source: Seth’s Blog: But it’s better than TV
Think about it! How much time do YOU spend watching tv? How could you use that time to take over your world?
Google is like the Lucy van Pelt of media. She is quoted as saying “I’m torn between the desire to create and the desire to destroy.”…
“Today, a new Google project popped up in Google Labs (Google Labs) that is a unique extension of this effort. It’s called Living Stories, and its goal is to provide a new and efficient way to read news coverage on breaking stories from one location. Oh, and it’s enlisted The New York Times and the Washington Post for help.” Source: Google and Top Newspapers Experiment with a New Way to Deliver the News
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZhCY9FF608
Another tool I’d be checking out if I were a news anchor!
Today I’m announcing a new feature on the site; the ‘Five Minute University’. What’s that about? Well, the tool I use for screencasts, Jing, limits me to a five minute screencast. Todd, you say! Wake up — use Camtasia, use Flashback Express, use something that allows you to record longer. No, I say. I have a tendency to bloviate on topic that I’m passionate about and five minutes forces me to get my thoughts together!
The ‘Five Minute University’ is also an homage to one of the funniest bits I ever saw on Saturday Night Live [back in the days when it was actually funny]; Don Novello as Father Guido Sarducci outlines the concept here:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8x8eoU3L4
Now, here’s my first 5 minute course on using Google Reader as your inbox for the internet…
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zvf8E6knJtY
Questions? Feedback? Leave a comment or use the contact page to reach me…
The ‘bluebird of happiness’ Gretchen Rubin has some ideas for you!
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Bright, shiny objects! 
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