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Posts tagged with “work”

Recognizing and Overcoming the Fears That Make Us Settle

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“Fear, uncertainty, and discomfort are your compasses towards growth.” ~Celestine Chua

Settling feels awful. Take it from me—for the past few months I’ve been holding the Scepter of Settling in both my personal life and my business.

And it hasn’t felt good.

The other morning, as I sat waiting in LaGuardia Airport to board a plane for a three-day intensive business retreat in North Carolina, I had this sudden, radical a-ha! moment in which pieces of my life, both personal and business, just clicked into place.

Have you ever had that happen to you?

I realized I was settling in …

4 Lessons on How to Find the Right Direction in Life

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“Life’s blows cannot break a person whose spirit is warmed by the fire of enthusiasm.” ~Norman Vincent Peale

“Something just doesn’t feel right,” I thought to myself as I walked into my house after a long commute from work, being greeted by my exhausted spouse, who was trying to manage the kids after putting in a long day at her own job.

Work hard, save money, buy a house, and live happily ever after. The formula I grew up with didn’t seem all that great anymore. Was it broken? I mean, I worked at a good job but felt …

3 Tips to Be Happier in Work and in Life

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“It isn’t our position but our disposition that makes us happy” ~Unknown

I am just winding down from a business trip that has been both trying and inspiring at the same time. I’ve recently been put into a role to manage a department in a functionality I know nothing about, working with people I’ve barely met, and changing a formerly toxic environment.

To say the least, I have a challenge ahead of me. Now six months into the position, I took my direct reports to breakfast and told them the sole purpose was for them to give feedback on how …

When Efficiency Isn’t Efficient: The Shortest Path Isn’t Always Best

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“There is more to life than increasing its speed.” ~Mahatma Gandhi

“The shortest path between two points is a straight line.” That comes straight out of my eighth grade geometry textbook and if you can’t trust math, what can you trust?

That pronouncement rang my chime. It put words to an unspoken feeling I had had for a long time. What could be better, truer, or more perfect than the shortest path?

Kids Do the Darnedest Things

As a teenager, I started putting in place “straight lines” in my life everywhere I could impose them. I got out of bed …

How Mindfulness Can Help You Discover What You Want to Do in Life

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“Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.” ~Rodin

When I was in college, I knew what to do and everything clicked along.

But as graduation approached, I got nervous.

I’d always assumed that some “good job” would turn up when I got out of school. But now it was in my face that I had no idea where I was going.

I took a career workshop where we figured out our favorite interests and best skills. What the class didn’t provide was any follow-up to help me actually find the dream job.

I didn’t know …

We Are More Than What We Do: Allowing Our Authentic Nature to Shine

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“The light at the end of the tunnel is not an illusion. The tunnel is.” ~Unknown

In this society of ours, parents teach their children to do, to perform, to produce. We learn that to be adult, we need to be “productive members of society.” At social gatherings, more often than not, the first question among strangers is “What do you do?”

My first memories include identifying so deeply with my movie director father that when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always replied, “A writer and director.”

Then life happened, and I spent decades …

Rituals for Renewal: 7 Steps to Lower Your Stress

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“Every day brings a choice: to practice stress or to practice peace.” ~Joan Borysenko

Every day I meet with people who are stressed and want things to be different. I also encounter people who are so distressed they’ve accepted suffering’s dominion over their life. Almost all, however, are interested in the concept of change.

Still, taking small, conscious steps toward a healthier emotional, mental, and physical life can sometimes seem overwhelming. More people have told me “I’m so busy—I can’t fit one more thing into my day!” than not. But what’s the alternative? It’s being just happy enough to be …

Realizing Your Dream: Stop Dwelling on “What Ifs”

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“Excellence can be obtained if you care more than others think is wise, risk more than others think is safe, dream more than others think is practical, expect more than others think is possible.” ~Unknown

I think I always had an idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I sort of tweaked it along the way. I knew I wanted to work in the field of science, but like most kids, I wasn’t exactly sure where I fit in.

When I was 10 years old, I wanted to be an astronaut. At the age of …

Book Giveaway and Author Interview: 52-Week Life Passion Project

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Note: The winners for this giveaway have already been chosen. Subscribe to Tiny Buddha for free daily or weekly emails and to learn about future giveaways!

The Winners:

It’s not easy to do something you’re passionate about for work—and not only because it’s hard to discover your passion or find a job to leverage it.

Once we know what we love to do, we then need to work through all kinds of limiting thoughts, beliefs, and fears that may prevent us from taking action. Then we need to decide what that action should be—how …

Direct Your Emotional Memory to Feel Good Now

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“When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.” ~Henry Ford 

You’re stuck at work and you dream of something better.

This dreaming usually starts off great. You imagine yourself sitting at a desk working on a million dollar project or teaching underprivileged kids how to multiply seven times three.

Whatever your vision is, it’s good to daydream about this, but what usually happens is that we snap out of it, and reality smacks us in the face. We’re answering phones, running errands, and hating our lives.

I’ve been …

Are You Too Busy? 5 Signs of Chronic Stress

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“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” ~Socrates

A few years ago, the focal point of my life was my work. It took up and made up a huge portion of my life. In retrospect, I would even say that work became a sort of obsession. I became so obsessed with being productive that I set aside almost every minute of my waking hours for some work-related activity.

I even coupled meals with work; toilet breaks meant mentally drafting reports and traffic jams signaled the start of phone meetings. You may look at this picture and think of me as …

5 Amazing Blessings from Being Fired

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“Sometimes the wrong choices bring us to the right places.” ~Unknown

I was fired via email as my plane touched down at LAX.

I am not the kind of person who gets fired, who gets dismissed, who is asked to leave and is not welcomed back.

This was not my track record, no. What was happening?

I had seen the ad on Craigslist, and it looked perfect. An educational theater program for kids was seeking instructors and administrators to help revitalize the company. They needed someone with current experience in the entertainment industry who was an educator and also had …

How to Adopt a Growth Mindset and Stop Fearing Criticism and Failure

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“There are no failures. Just experiences and your reactions to them.” ~Tom Krause

Ever found yourself working for a bad boss? I was shocked to learn recently that three out of every four people report that their boss is the most stressful part of their job and that it takes most of us up to twenty-two months to free ourselves of them.

I thought it was just me!

A few years ago I joined a large accounting firm to help them manage their employees. Though they were nice enough people outside of work, at the office, their professional pride …

The Top 25 Excuses to Wait on Your Dreams and How to Overcome Them

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“The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses…The gift is yours—it is an amazing journey—and you alone are responsible for the quality of it.” ~Bob Moawad

If we try, we can always find a reason not to do what we want to do, and it can seem perfectly valid. We can convince ourselves that we’re being smart, realistic, or safe, or that we don’t even really want it.

We’re great at justifying the status quo, because we know exactly what that’s like, even if it’s …

Keeping Our Hearts Open at Work and at Home

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“A person’s world is only as big as their heart.” ~Tanya A. Moore

I had a great boss. He was a creative spirit, just like me. He gave me total autonomy and creative license, and honestly, I did the best work of my career under his leadership.

I can remember coming to him with outlandish ideas—never-been-done-before ideas—and he would listen, and then we’d spend hours brainstorming on how to bring them to life. When we brought them to life, we always shared in their success.

We had a special relationship, and I felt like we could talk about anything.

And …

What to Do When You’re New: In School, Work, or Your City

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“If you light a lamp for somebody, it will also brighten your path.” ~Buddhist saying

Moving to a new country as a kid can be traumatizing because of the challenges of fitting into a new culture and new social customs.

When I arrived in Northern California at the age of ten with my parents and younger two brothers, we were excited about being in America (home of Disneyland) but apprehensive about our how our classmates would react to us and how we would fit into the social environment of a school in a new country.

My earliest memories of …

Scaling Back to Propel Yourself Forward in Work and Beyond

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“Your work is to discover your world and with all your heart give yourself to it.” ~Buddha

Let me paint a picture for you, instead of clouding this post with emotion. To be more specific, I think I have Asperger’s Syndrome, and even if I wanted to cloud it with emotion, I would probably fail to convey the correct ones.

I was born in Zimbabwe to well-educated and financially comfortable parents, which is as lucky a background as some people on this continent get to have. Unfortunately, my parents were also incredibly emotionally distant, and my earliest memories include several …

Balancing Home and Work: When Life Is in the Distractions

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“It is not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” -Unknown

My son has chickenpox.

It started a few days ago and today is his third day at home.

As a work at home mom who is her own boss, I’m fortunate that I can be at home with my son instead of having to ask my employer for time off work.

I have been working from home for the past five years with three young children, and it was only just a few weeks ago that my youngest child started school full-time.

I felt that …

4 Myths about Doing What You Love for Work

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“Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.” ~Buddha

“Big flud strikes Revere!”

That was the headline of the newspaper I made with my sister when I was six. I hadn’t yet honed my skills as an editor, but I knew a good fake story when I heard it.

Eight years later, while wading through my anger toward several people who’d hurt me, I wrote a short book called The Line of the Virtues about the grey area between good and bad. An older coworker at my afterschool job asked, “Are …

Overcoming Shame at Work When You’ve Made Big Mistakes

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“When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.” ~ African proverb

Hitchen’s Kitchen. It sounds like a diner straight out of a romance novel. But there I was standing in yes, the kitchen, getting my first dressing down at my first paying job.

At sixteen I had screwed up waiting tables. I got the special of the day, swiss steak, mixed up with sirloin. And so I kept putting in tickets ordering sirloins and the cook kept on grilling them.

And then it struck. The customers were happily eating sirloin while paying the “special of the …