Growing Your Career into a Healthy New Year

Clutter. clutter clutter. Immediately the word conjures mounds of collected, no-longer-useful material goods. Clutter is not always physical. Clutter is a concept that quickly clouds our thinking, too.

At the end of they year, clean out the clutter for new opportunities and new thoughts.  This year, don't just roll into the next one. Take stock of 2017 and step with intention into 2018. 

You spend most of your time in your career, so enjoy it! 

Before entering into the new year, stop and think about how YOU can grow yourself. So much energy is spent dwelling on someone or something else that negatively impacted our own planned steps: "My company didn't do this," or  "They decided it wasn't the right time," etc. Know that whatever you are doing, you are learning. Learn to appreciate the unexpected, like this double iris that bloomed in my garden this winter! A bump in the road, does not set you off course.

It is your responsibility to take care of yourself and know your own value. So, this December, build a strategy for the new year. Give yourself an end-of-the-year invitation to grow. Create a checklist that allows you to put away all the mental clutter from the last 12 months. Take time for a little self-examination, then refresh and refill. 

I find this daily foundation in my life to be extremely helpful: 

1) Listen to new ideas

2) Collaborate with Others 

3) Be Healthy

4) Be Helpful 

5) Be Grateful 

5) Reflect 

Staying healthy and engaging with others in meaningful ways outside of work are key elements of your happiness. And that happiness extends into your performance and, ultimately, determines your success at work. 

How to Help this Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving, remember what it means to help.

H is for Humor
E is for Esteem
L is for Listen
P is for Praise

The Sustainability of Endurance

Are you able to hold on and carry it through?  You can get it over the one-yard line and the thirty-yard line, but can you make it to the goal? Our greatest challenge is to have the endurance needed in this age of technology to ride  comfortably with its cycles and  its fickleness.

The utopia of a Spring garden—its newness and bloom surprises—is quickly followed by the Summer months of July and August. The garden grows double-time, basking in the vitamins from the sun and warm weather. This is the season that puts me to the test. Longer and more frequent days are are required in the garden, trying to stay ahead of the growth, the bugs and other challenges. The peak of summer gardening is all about endurance.

I often find myself asking, “Can I ever get ahead of the upkeep and care?” And, the funny thing is, after a long week of labor in the garden, I am always rewarded.   When I sit in my favorite spot over looking the garden at dusk, I relax and take in all of the joy it brings me. I know that it is never fully complete or finished. I accept that it is a work in progress. Actually, I love that it’s always a work in progress. Isn’t it all? The splashes of colorful flowers dotted across he varying hues of green are a backdrop for a very special kind of dance where humming birds and butterflies flow to the rhythm of the gentle breeze.  And it’s never the same performance twice.

We must all endure through seasons of extra work, some emotional or physical strain, and longer hours at different times in our lives. Just remember, no two days are the same. Each day is a new performance in the greatest work-in-progress of all: life.

Handling Transition

From a post industrial society to a highly technological society

From childhood to adulthood

From beginning or ending a relationship

From employee to manager

From working life to retirement

From health through illness—and back again

We live transition. Every day. On a big scale and on a very personal scale. And, the first transition I talk about on this list is probably having the most impact on how well we cope (or not) with the transitions in our personal lives.

The more people I talk to, I realize that no one really talks about how to adjust or prepare for transition that is constantly swirling around us. Is it because it’s so constant, we just wade through it?

There is an important conversation to be had. This high-tech society in which we live gives us less and less time to stop and ponder when what we really need is to give ourselves the permission to take our time as we walk through the transitions of life.

Over time, I’ve learned that a transition works ONLY when we accept in advance that our calendars are going to change. A transition is going to change your timing in life. Accepting a promotion, for example, means you are going to have to take some steps away from your own time.  Transition means that your whole “person” is changing along with it.

People don’t talk about the emotional changes – the anxiety, uncertainty, instability, and the loss. You will, no doubt, need to prepare and let go of some things to invite that transition into your life in a positive way.

Talk about it.

Give yourself time.

Process it – emotions and all.

How do you welcome something new into your life?