Who Is Calling Please?

“Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.” ― Rollo May

Think about the last time you sat down with family or friends at a dinner.

Maybe you were in a coffee shop or out on the back porch enjoying the spring air with others. If you looked around, how many others including yourself had a cell phone in hand. Occasionally glancing at email, Facebook or even Twitter.

How surprising that technology has become a necessity in everything.

I am probably just as bad as the next person when it comes to this modern day occurrence. If I go back to my days growing up, I remember the phone being attached to the wall in our house. It was in the kitchen and the handset had a three-foot cord.

An interesting fact is that before mobile phones, no one asked where you were when calling. This is because phones were tied to a physical location and if someone were calling you, that is where you had to be.

When people sat down to eat dinner, if the phone rang there were some who rushed to answer it. In some households you did not get up and answer the phone. Dinner was a time for family, or friends and conversation.

Dinner time was not completely pure as televisions were usually blaring the nightly news in the background. Yet for all the good things technology brings to the table (pun intended), we also allow a bit more to be taken away from us.

What if we declared meals together cell phone free?
What if we turned off our tablets while on vacation?
What if we talked more instead of updating our status?

On a vacation my wife and I had taken, work weighed heavy on my mind. I constantly checked my emails and allowed the stress to eat into personal time with my wife. Two days into our vacation, a thunderstorm damaged a nearby cell phone tower. Cell service was gone and it forced me to set the phone down and stop thinking about work.

It made me concentrate on us and that was a very fulfilling experience.

Find time to walk away from the every day, to walk away from the technology that ties you down. I am not saying these technological wonders are a bad thing. Great tools have made our lives much easier, but there is a time to walk away from them and just be you.

Enjoy some time off and we'll call or text you later. With location services turned on, we'll know where you are any way!

Stay inspired my friends.

Handling Stress

“We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.” ― David Mamet

Maintaining a positive attitude all of the time, doing all the right things, trying to be the "do it all" person can leave you bewildered and wondering where all of your time went. Life and all we try to accomplish in such a short time can have frustrating effects. So how does one do a better job of managing your own time?

An article in Best Life Magazine, titled "Under Pressure" (before publication ended in 2009), the author talked about stress and the effect it has on your life. That article along with a side article by Kate Dailey called "Time Crunch: How to whittle down a too-much-to-do list", the following presents five quick ideas that you can apply in your life to help you.

Ask yourself the following questions to help prioritize your list in life.

DOES IT FIT INTO THE BIG PICTURE?
"The priorities that people set and what they actually do are often inconsistent," says Mark Ellwood, a productivity consultant in Toronto. "I hear men say 'My family comes first' all the time, but then they're working 70 hours a week." Ellwood uses this exercise with his clients to help ferret out what they really want: If you had a day at work with no e-mail to return, no phone calls to make, and no deadlines to meet, what would you do with your time? Some men would use it to plan the big project they want to launch. Some would brush up their skills by taking a seminar. Most would work on high-priority projects so they could go home early and hang out with their kids. These are the worthwhile objectives your schedule should accommodate most.

IS IT IMPORTANT OR JUST URGENT?
Tasks that need to be done right away, like fixing an overflowing toilet or compiling sales figures at the request of the boos, are urgent. Tasks that means a lot to you but don't necessarily have a time factor attached are important. "Rarely do the two go together," says Ellwood. "The urgent often wins out." The challenge is to make meaningful changes so that you spend substantial time on long-term goals rather than putting out fires all day.

AM I THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN DO THIS?

There are times when only your skill, wit, charm, or intellect will suffice. Those times are rare, and they're almost never meetings. "It's a good developmental tool to have subordinates represent you at meetings," says Barry Miller, Ph.D., an adjunct professor of management at Pace University, and the manager of alumni career programs and services. "They get to interface with higher-ups and learn on the job, and you free up your schedule."

DO I HAVE TO BE THERE IN PERSON?

Don't waste your time with a meeting when a well-placed phone call can do the trick. "Face time is important when you're building new relationships," says Miller, "but once you've established that relationship, the pressure is off." What's more important is giving people a sense that you're tuned in to their needs and you're thinking of them.

WILL IT COST ME IF I DON'T GO?

Also known as "Who will I piss off?" Your psychiatrist doesn't care if you're a no-show for your 4:30 session (He'll bill you $150 either way), but the cost of not attending the 5:00 cocktail party full of potential clients could be much, much higher. It follows, then, that skipping out of your son's birthday party after you promised him for months that you'd be there will cost you a fortune in emotional capital, not to mention some psych bills of his own down the line.

You can have a great life, you can see yourself through the stress life throws at us, you can be!

Stay inspired my friends!

Breath of Air

"The time to relax is when you don't have time for it." -Sydney J. Harris

This has been one of those stressful weeks at work. It has been filled with the angst of understanding a problem and how to fix it. It also involves how to relay that information to another person to help them understand.

I get reminded by people that I need to read my own blog articles from time to time. That is because I am human just like everyone else. I get frustrated, stressed, down, and generally bent out of shape at times. What matters is how I or you recover from those episodes.

In actuality, it is very much like swimming, or learning how to swim. You can get very flustered and begin thrashing about in the water. That is the moment in time that most experts will tell you to just relax.

In fact you could take the following three tips on learning to swim for most any stressful situation.

1. Understand how breathing works and how it's related to every move you make in the water (life). How could you think about anything else first?

2. Next is to relax a bit because you now understand how breathing works. Your relaxed body will learn basic swim strokes (refocus).

3. Throughout all this, to repeat; you won't worry so much about breathing because you already understand how to get your air (balance and focus).

Simply put, step back and relax and most importantly - breathe.

Relaxing - Enjoy The Weekend

The big lights, the city full of fun and excitement. The weekend is here and for many people a couple of days of relaxation. The same goes on every where around the globe. From the smallest of cities to the large metropolis, people are shouting out, "Thank Goodness Its Friday."

Take time to reconnect with your wife, your kids, your friends and others in your life. Take time to reconnect with yourself, to decompress and let the worries of the week melt away. Use the chance to maybe attend a church service or to gather with others.

The coming week looms ahead but for now, two days await you which will recharge your body and mind. Myself, its the start of a vacation week and there will be much to enjoy. Live life and enjoy it, not only on the weekends but everyday that you can.

It really is a great life you live and there is much to enjoy. Take care and have a great weekend.

Burning Yourself

A recent article in Readers Digest - "Burned Out", a story unfolds regarding how we tend to be the 'do all' people. Between family activities, trying to get ahead at work, being the charity worker and getting to the gym to stay healthy - there just doesn't seem to be enough time during the day.

Yet it isn't time that is a factor. The same amount of seconds, minutes and hours still exist within a 24 hour period as did when time was first measured. As individuals, we are the ones that fill up the seconds of our day. And as you may have noted, I said the 'seconds' of our day. For those that are nearing burnout have pushed themselves to the point of having to count the seconds.

With the stress comes increasing mental and physical fatigue. Your job suffers, your friends suffer, your family suffers and you suffer. There are many symptoms and signs that any short search of the internet or talking to your family doctor can help reveal.

While the Readers Digest article concentrates on 'burn out' at work, stress and 'burn out' can happen to anyone that stretches themselves too thin, trying to be the 'all and everything.' To overcome burnout, the article suggests the following eight recommendations. For more detail on each, I'd suggest reading the article.

- Make time for yourself
- Develop a method to calm yourself
- Analyze what you love and hate about your work (or whatever it is your are doing)
- Settle for less than perfect
- Take good care of yourself
- Cultivate a support network (those fish net connections I've talked about)
- Set limits (saying 'no' is a valid answer)
- Plan for the future

American author Natalie Goldberg is quoted as saying, “Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.” Maybe take seven minutes out of your day...and yes, that is only 420 seconds...to relax and think about it.

Seventh Day

A day of relaxation, a day of reflection and a day to rejuvenate for a new week. You take time out through out your week to catch your breath. It is a necessary part of everything we do in life. The frustrations can build due to work, family issues or the everyday things that life throws at you.

With good attitude and a cheerful spirit, most days pass with an ability to see it through. You may even find yourself using my belief in a 'seven minutes a day' to stop and reflect. But on the seventh day, which may be a Saturday or Sunday, it may be any day that fits into your life schedule. The seventh day should be used to stop and regroup your self.

I would not be so bold to say that life goes after others, it comes after me and those around me as well. Each of us has to take time to re-gather our thoughts. To build ourselves back up for another round of taking on life. It gets easier as you go on in life. You find moments during the day that you can use, those seven minutes, that will work well for you.

The English author Ashleigh Brilliant once said, “Try to relax and enjoy the crisis.” Life is a series of mini-crisis as some may say. I say if you take time out each day and also provide a day for yourself, life will be much grander. Take time for yourself and you will be better prepared to impact others.