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The Beautiful Atmosphere of Christmas: Bottle It & Breathe It All Year
Christmastime is exceptional. We wholeheartedly pause our busy lives to care about each other more sincerly. We give more deeply and smile authentically. We cry and count our blessings. Though the whole world marks the season a bit differently, there is no doubt that the atmosphere changes at Christmas . . . in a beautiful way. The air is full of hope, kindness, & love – in other words, the stuff I want to breathe in EVERYDAY. What if we could bottle that atmosphere for the rest of the year. Why not?
“Do Your Best & Forget The Rest” | Stop Striving For Perfection
Are you a perfectionist? Me too. At least I was until I grasped that humans just aren’t built for perfection. We mess up, fall down, fail. The average person farts 14 times/day. The secret is to, “Do your best & forget the rest.” Thanks to fitness guru Tony Horton for this great advice. Evaluate your time, energy, & priorities and get stuff done the best you can each time.
– Don’t Let Victory Defeat You: The Cost of Complacency –
The Dark Night Rises pans to an impactful scene where Batman is forced to fight Bane – the towering villain. In this bare-knuckle fight, Bane is poised to easily win the physical and mental battle. This iteration of Batman is too weak, too soft. Between punches, Bane taunts: “Peace has cost you your strength. Victory has defeated you.”
What a powerful point! Our successes in life can cause us to stop fighting, stop clawing, stop training, stop desiring to be better. We begin to forget how hard it was to reach these monumental goals in the first place. We become complacent, a losing proposition. You can’t be Batman but you can avoid complacency. Here’s how . . .
The Gift of A Fiery Soul
Ever met someone with a fiery soul? They are impossible to miss really. You spot their fire in their demeanor, enjoy it in their expressions. You hear it in their conversations, appreciate it in their interactions. Their zest for life is contagious. People who can harness their fiery soul via their character, thrive! Want some more fire in your soul? I have some ideas. #ComeBackToLife
Ramp Up Your New Year’s Resolutions
Want to be better in 2020? The new year is a great time to set some high goals. Energy, expectation, and hope are high . . at least for a bit. Stick with your New Year’s resolutions this year by ramping up now. In fact, now is time to set goals and try them out, a trial period to see if you really want to commit to something for a year. It’s a head start from the pack. Start to form these habits now to begin a butt-kicking 2020.
There’s Still Some Good In This World . . . And That’s Worth Fighting For
Life is often hard, unpredictable, and unfair. In tough times, we need fuel, something to get us up in the morning to fight another battle. The type of fuel you require is a personal choice. But, if you’re looking, I have something that just might do the trick, some wisdom I found watching The Lord of the Rings. The idea is to continually recognize that there is still some good left in this world and that this good is something to keep fighting for. Come identify the good in your life . . .
When Hope Isn’t Enough . . . Try Faith & Love
There are times where hope alone is often not enough. Hope by itself is a bit delicate. It relies on events and actions we cannot control and can be crushed easily. When something doesn’t go the way in which we hope for or takes longer to materialize than we desire, it’s easy to lose hope. For all its positive benefits, hope is often too easily defeated. Think about how many times you’ve lost hope in your life. This is a devastating feeling and reverses all the positives that came with our hope in the first place.
Sometimes we need more than an expectation that something good will happen. We need confidence that there is a plan for our life and that we are more than we think of ourselves at the time. Enter faith and love. Here’s why these two things matter . . .
The Professional Cost of Putting Family First
There is a professional cost to putting family first. Bosses – like most people – act out of self-interest when they cringe at your priorities. Just expect that, it’s rational. However, organizations are clearly better when people come to work authentically happy and fulfilled with their priorities intact. Those folks are more productive, creative, loyal, & fun. But . . . until bosses recognize that you can work hard, be an asset to the org, and still place your job a bit lower than your family, you will have to balance the tug of war between work and family – a battle that work need not always win. Here’s why…
Want To Be Happy? Put Family First
If you really want to be happy, maintain your family / faith / morality as top priorities. Your boss might (will) cringe at your choice, but that’s tough! Ponder the best memories in your life and tell me if most come from work or family. So, give your family more of your best energy and attention and reap the rewards.
Avoid the Happiness Vacuum
The secret to happiness is simple . . . your heart must get what it wants more often. But, how do we know what our heart wants? The best way to discover this information is by evaluating our top priorities and pivoting our lives accordingly. Read on for advice that has literally impacted thousands of lives.
We the Box-Checkers:
Part II
Part I introduced the idea that we are far too busy. We are busier than we should be or need to be in order to attain the success we seek. In fact, our busyness consumes precious energy that should be reserved for higher priorities – family, friends, experiences, even a good night’s sleep. Our reasons underlying our schedule are important, to be sure – get into grad school, find a good job, earn a promotion, experience a quality lifestyle. Our argument for doing too much is defensible – these high goals are tough to achieve without a solid resume, good grades, hard work, diverse personal and professional skills, and critical connections. I am not here to throw stones at your goals.
The problem with this approach, however, is that it’s exhausting and need not be. We place ourselves in a race with our peers and colleagues to check off as many boxes as fast as we can. We don’t really know how much they are accomplishing, so we run harder and faster. Our race quickly becomes an all-out sprint with more and more boxes to check. Exhaustingly, more boxes appear just as others are marked-off. Here, we figuratively find ourselves between a box and a hard place. Witty, huh?
Perplexingly, the results of our sprint are often disappointing. We tend to do most of these tasks relatively poorly (there just isn’t enough time) and with less than a happy heart (who wants to move through a life – a life you only get to do once – this fast). We seek success, but success need not be obtained this way. There is a better method to arrive at the same place. It all begins with this advice: Do less by focusing more. In other words, check fewer, but more meaningful, boxes. This post will show you how!
We the Box-Checkers: Part I
When people ask you how it’s going, do you respond, “I’m just so busy.” No one ever says this with a joyful heart. It’s always more depressed and monotone. But, wouldn’t we all rather spend more time with loved ones or just relax?
The problem is that we are constantly nagged by the next task? It’s stressful and somewhat disappointing see a to-do list grow and grow. There is always another thing to do, another promotion to seek, another group to join, more homework, different resume building opportunities. Let’s face it, we have become a society of box-checkers.
These observations have led me to two important conclusions:
(1) Very little of this work is being done well. How could it? People can only focus on so many things and stay awake for so many hours each day; and
(2) There doesn’t seem to be a lot of joy in the journey. How could there be? It’s beyond disappointing to accomplish a handful of important tasks just to see more and more appear. It’s discouraging to give a half-hearted effort to projects when you know you could have done better. At some point we want to arrive at a place where our efforts pay off.
This “too-busy” lifestyle reminds me of the higher levels of Tetris where the blocks just keep falling faster and faster until one inevitably crashes to the ground. That sucks because getting to that level required so much hard work. Oh, the stress of Tetris.
In the end, it all adds up to this counterproductive formula:
I will do a ton of stuff relatively poorly while running myself into the ground in the process. And, for all this work, I receive a padded resume with little to back it up in terms of foundational experience, memories, or knowledge.
There is a much, much better way. Read Part I of this two-part series to begin to see the light . . .
The Eavesdropping Employer
Your employer is watching you! Everyone sort of already knows this, right? But you may not know the extent or the reasons why. This short post introduces the topic and (hopefully) nudges you to learn more about your privacy at work. The bottom line is that monitoring is an important business tool to manage risk and ensure productive and safe workplaces. Employers should monitor their workplaces. Problems arise, however, when monitoring practices are excessive and lack transparency. Let’s dive in.
The Eagle Who Believed He Was A Chicken:
Breaking Mental Barriers
Here’s a meaningful story to make you think about some important stuff:
Once upon a time, a man found an eagle’s egg and placed it under a brooding hen. The eaglet hatched with the chickens and grew to be like them. He clucked and cackled, scratched the earth for worms, flapped his wings, and managed to a fly few feet in the air.
Years passed. One day, the eagle, now grown old, saw a magnificent bird above him in the sky. It glided in graceful majesty against the powerful wind, with scarcely a movement of its golden wings.
Spellbound, the eagle asked, “Who’s that?”
“That’s the king of the birds, the eagle,” said his neighbor. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to earth – we’re chickens.”
So, the eagle lived as a chicken for that’s what he thought he was.
The moral of this story is profound. Have you ever felt like you were born to do something different than what you see around you? How often do you see people falling in line, doing what they are expected to do or what people in their shoes always do? And, all the while, you want something different from your life! But, you just can’t wrap your mind around it.
Read more to find out how change perspective and break down artificial barriers.
Compassion: To Rise Above Ourselves
Virtue of the Week
A perfect way to ponder compassion comes from professor Mason Cooley: “Compassion brings us to a stop, and for a moment we rise above ourselves.” Isn’t that a wonderful way to think of it? When we’re compassionate, we stop worrying solely about our lives, our problems, and our to-do lists and begin to care about the plight of others. We plug into the people around us, lift them up, and try and make their lives shine. When we help people in need like this . . . we glow. Think about how amazing it felt the last time you truly felt someone’s pain and then helped them out of a rough spot. What a great feeling, right? Now, think about how the person you helped felt? Probably one thousand times better than you felt, right?
Come and see what it means to practice true compassion.
Courage . . . Find Some
Virtue of the Week
Courage is “the mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty.” Relevant synonyms are mettle, resolution, or tenacity. During my Merriam-Webster search, I discovered courage in the Top 1% of word lookups – out of over 470,000 words! It appears that courage is immensely popular. Well, those numbers show that it’s popular to think about courage. My hope is that it becomes more popular to act with courage as well. Courage should indeed be in the Top 1% of virtues we seek.
I like to supplement the dictionary with more colorful definitions of important words like courage. The author Joyce Meyer presents my favorite translation: “Courage is fear that has said its prayers and decided to go forward anyway.” That sentence encapsulates the concept of courage perfectly. Courage is not the absence of fear; it’s just the opposite. In fact, you can’t have courage without fear. I believe that courageous people are filled with fear from beginning to end of the struggle, but, for some reason, decide to engage anyway. George R.R. Martin described this idea well in his Game of Thrones series:
“That’s the only time a man can be brave,” his father told him.
So, it’s okay to be afraid. Isn’t that refreshing? Think of fear as your chance to demonstrate courage. And, to be honest, would you really want to live in a world where nothing scares you, where there are few obstacles to overcome? I wouldn’t. The bottom line is that I want some stuff in my life to be scary, so I can practice being courageous. Acting with courage feels wonderful.
Come and see some other key concepts to ponder when it comes to courage . . .
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
I hope to leave a legacy when I stop teaching. Truth told, I think about this all the time. You do too, right? Legacy-building is innate in hard-working, dedicated people. People like that want their life’s work to mean something, to impact others, to advance society in some way. Successful scientists do this via discoveries that improve people’s lives. Successful real estate agents do this by helping scores of people find a place to belong, start a family, and feel safe. Successful lawyers do this by fighting for a more just legal system or facilitating deals that make the economy grow. Successful doctors do this by healing sick patients and ameliorating suffering. Successful professors do this by inspiring students and furthering knowledge. You get my point: legacy matters and defines a person’s professional success.
Your legacy should be on your mind regardless of whether you are new on the job or on the verge of retirement. To me, the best way to measure a legacy is through the total number of inches a person gains over the course of a career. Notice I said inches and not touchdowns. It’s the little stuff that adds up to a legacy. That’s what people remember when all is said and done. For example, if I lost my job tomorrow, I wouldn’t go to my office and stare at my awards or start reading my resume. Instead, I would go home and open the box that overflows with letters of thanks from people I’ve impacted perhaps just a bit over the past fourteen years. These are the inches that truly matter in my job and you’ll need to frame the inches in your job similarly.
Maximum Impact: Discover Your Calling
The question I am asked by far the most often at DU or on the road is, “What should I do with my life?”
People of all ages and stages ponder this idea incessantly, desperate for answers. Let’s face it, people desire the fulfillment that comes with discovering their place in the world. Most everyone wants to make some sort of legitimate impact and leave some sort of legacy. If you evaluate the question more deeply, however, people are really asking me three questions:
1. What am I passionate about deep down in my heart?
2. How do I translate that into a successful career and life mission?
3. Will this path allow me to leave a sufficient legacy?
How many times do you think about these things every week? Every day even? Me too. At least I used to, until I discovered my answers. Here’s how.
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The Ethics Blog is the creation of popular motivational ethics speaker / professor, Corey Ciocchetti (coreyspeaks.com). Corey’s ethics blog covers critical ethics, character, and integrity issues pertaining to happiness, leadership, parenting, law, and society. This is a place to think about important issues facing our communities. We need more happy people, ethical leaders, engaged parents, and wisdom in general. Corey presents a roadmap to get there. Welcome to the conversation!
Learn more about ethics.blog here: https://ethics.blog/about