Tag Archives: strategy

Are you stressed and unhappy?

Why are so many women under stress and unhappy?  And what can we do about it?

The American Psychological Association reports that 49% of women say their stress has increased in the past 5 years.  Has yours?  I know you have heard the detrimental effect of stress on your health, but you may have pushed on feeling you need to in order to achieve a certain goal.  If you are like most people, you attribute your future happiness to the achievement of that goal; and so you ignore your stress levels for this future reward.

However, your success and happiness are more directly tied to your enjoyment of your current life than the achievement of some future goal.  In fact, your ability to succeed is dependent on your ability to think clearly, solve problems, be creative and visualize yourself happy–all of which are hindered, if not completely halted, by stress.

Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor at the University of California, has shown that fully 40% of your happiness is available for you to control.  You and I often consider our outer circumstances as holding the keys to our happiness.  Because of this you probably focus much of your efforts on trying to change people and circumstances to increase your happiness. Sonja’s brain studies show that by influencing the 40% that is an internal job, we can greatly change our happiness quotient!  This is great news for me because it’s frustrating to have important aspects of my life out of my own control. How about you?

Have you noticed you cannot be happy and stressed at the same time?  They do not go hand in hand.  So the effort you place on increasing your happiness will also reduce your stress levels–a double win!

There are actually happiness exercises you can do to increase your happiness, today!  Nancy Clark writes about these in her article in Forbes.  Two of my favorites are paying attention to things you do well and congratulating yourself on your successes rather than rushing past them; and exercising gratitude.

I often coach women to make a list of their accomplishments.  Try it.  You can activate your confidence and improve your ongoing success by noticing and celebrating everything you do well and have achieved.  It is a list you should add to regularly; reading it daily if necessary during times of great uncertainty.  Another list that helps immensely is listing what you are grateful for about yourself.  See my challenge on this here.

The other tool I use is a gratitude log.  I learned this exercise from Christie Marie Sheldon and then later read about it in Wallace Wattles work, The Science of Getting Rich.  Christie calls it “Great Fuel.”  Don’t you love that?

Wallace says the key to attracting what you want can be summed up in one word, gratitude. That is a powerful statement and I think he is right.  Each night I write in my gratitude journal, kept by my bedside, all the things I am grateful for that day.  Some days things haven’t gone well and it is hard to find something to be grateful for so I resort to being grateful for my children and my health and my home and find I still have a lot to be grateful for.  Somedays the list is long and on others I am so profoundly moved by one thing I write about it in detail. Regardless of how my gratitude list looks, it always puts me in an improved state of mind before I go to sleep.

These are both powerful tools you can add to your life today and increase your happiness and decrease your stress, now!

Are you burned out?

I find when I am becoming burned out it is a sure indication that my days are filled with things I need to do but not things that inspire me.  I can work long and hard when I am inspired.  Burn out is a key indicator I am off track.  Forbes recently did an article about this very topic with 3 tips for combating burn-out.

Here is my strategy when I feel the heavy beast of burn-out eating away at my drive and my productivity.

The first thing I do is take time to break my daily cycle, whether it is an hour or a whole week away.

During this break I make two lists.  I list all the goals that would make me feel great if I was pursuing them or had accomplished them.  These aren’t plans, they are goals.  Things that make me stretch outside my current comfort zone and the successful outcome of would bring a huge grin to my face.

Then I make a list of what normally fills my day.

If I am not spending some time each day on things that move forward something on my first list I can be sure I need to change something.  Sometimes the change is drastic — like quitting my job.  But often it is just waiting until noon to answer emails and spending the first hour of each work day on a creative project rather than at the end of the day when all my “to-do’s” are complete–which rarely happens and I have little creative juices.

Making progress each day towards what really makes my heart sing is the key to my productivity — in everything else I do.  If you don’t know what makes your heart sing, take my free quiz and get a free meditation audio to help find it.

Quiet Revolution

Change the game, not who you are!

Sometimes the best strategy is not to fight for a change to the problem or to expect those in control to change their mind.  

When Gandhi wanted the British out of India he did not try to go to war with the strongest empire in the world at the time.

How many slaves were freed through the Underground Railroad well before law freed the rest?

How many small acts of faith did Mandela use to overrule apartheid?  

So maybe the answer to women only getting 7% of Venture Capital money or less of Investment Banking money is to change the game—rather than fight the status quo.   Maybe the answer to so few women Heads of State, CEO’s, Board of Directors, and other positions of influence is NOT to change who we are and be more like men!  If in the last 50 years this is all the progress we have made despite the numbers of women MBA’s, the number of women entrepreneurs, or the number of women Investment Bankers, and the number of women graduating college—than becoming more assertive or confident is not the solution.  Looking at the world through new lenses is.

Rather than try harder, work longer, and change more to be like men—lets look at the inherent strengths of being feminine and use these things to make a difference.

What are these feminine strengths?

  • The art of collaboration
  • Community building
  • Large results with many hands contributing small efforts
  • Rallying large numbers of supporters
  • Finding solutions
  • Mentoring and encouraging

The Internet and social media have given rise to many new ways of business—changing forever traditional marketing, sales, order fulfillment and raising capital.  These changes provide a remarkable platform for women to make a difference in the funding of new ideas, new businesses, new non-profit organizations, and to market directly to each other.  Women comprise over 80% of the purchasing power in the United States even though we represent less than 15% of the heads of corporations making the products and services we buy.

The time is ripe for change.  Women are more educated, have more resources, and have more time than ever before in human existence.  We can be the change we are seeking in the world by starting a new paradigm.

Think big.  Think bold.  Think of what you would like your community, your country, and your world to be like.  Let’s cease putting another moment of energy into what is wrong and what we do not like.  Let’s create the world we desire.  Let’s create a balance of power shift so subtle, so substantial, so sweet that once it is obvious what happened even those who would fight us today will be happy we did!

Join the conversation.  What does your utopia look like?  What small change can you initiate?  What would you do if you felt you could, if you felt no glass ceiling, if you had all doors open wide?