Work Life Balance And The Power Of Positive Thinking

Title:
Work Life Balance And The Power of Positive Thinking

Word Count:
1042

Summary:
Can we learn how to respond optimistically and hopefully to events that challenge work life balance? According to psychologist and researcher Martin Seligman, the answer is YES. While some folks appear to be hardwired to respond optimistically to ups and downs in life and work, others are wired for pessimistic responses. Fortunately, you do not have to settle for the wiring you were born with. Find out how you can improve your resilience and hopefulness by acquiring positive thinking skills.


Keywords:
work life balance, positive thinking, hopefulness, resilience, optimism, pessimism


Article Body:
It's important to get a handle on mood swings or energy shifts if you want to maintain your work life balance and be successful in business. According to psychologist and researcher Martin Seligman, some folks appear to be hardwired to respond optimistically and hopefully to work life balance upset and life's ups and downs. Others are wired for opposite responses. Fortunately, you do not have to settle for the wiring you were born with. With practice you can improve your resilience and your hopefulness by acquiring solid positive thinking skills.

I like to think of the process of building hopefulness, resilience and positive thinking skills as an analogue to building physical fitness: it takes attention, concentration, commitment, and repetition. If you approach a workout program with those qualities, you can almost always improve your fitness.

The first hurdle to get over is the belief that you already need to be different in order to succeed. You don't. You are the way you are and you can start from here, overwhelmed, worried, anxious, whatever. Don't fall into your story about how you feel, but take a stand for what you intend to accomplish to restore your work life balance and where you plan to go. You do not need to feel better before you try these practices -- do them now. Another caveat: Do not interpret your progress in the short term -- measuring increase in strength and endurance after a single workout would be silly.

Seligman points out that people with an optimistic approach to life habitually accept positive thoughts and dispute negative thoughts. Those of us who are wired to be more pessimistic tend to dispute the positive and accept the negative. Optimists tend to assume that their life balance will be restored, good events will happen again and that bad events are an exception; pessimists assume the reverse. I am oversimplifying his rigorously considered arguments, and I encourage you to read the book if the science of this is important to you.

Here's a practice he recommends for shifting from hopelessness to hopefulness. I successfully use it with my clients to help them restore their work life balance. He calls it ABCDE for:

Adversity -- Beliefs -- Consequences -- Disputation -- Energization.

A - Adversity
Start by spelling out the nature of the situation. Notice that you can experience hopelessness in response to ostensibly positive situations as well as to negative ones. For example, getting a new client or being accepted into a final round of interviews can upset your balance and send you into a whirlwind of anxiety and fear that produces just as much hopelessness and overwhelm as not getting the job or not making the cut.

B -- Beliefs
This is your opportunity to spell out the thoughts and beliefs that are fueling the negative response.

C -- Consequences
Look at the consequences of your beliefs -- what happened as a result? How do you behave? What happened then?

D -- Disputation
Actively dispute the beliefs that break your life balance and send you into the downward spiral. This is where you practice arguing with yourself in a productive way.

E -- Energization
When you have been effective in disputing the problem beliefs, you feel an influx of energy, a sense of renewed hope, or at least of peacefulness.

So, here's an example from my life:

Adversity:
I was excited about moving forward on two projects when I fell on my bike and cracked my ribs. I was okay and working hard with this for almost three days, then depression and anxiety set in and my usual positive thinking ability left me. Instead of feeling like moving forward I felt like bursting into tears.

Beliefs:
How will I ever restore my work life balance and get things done if I can't stop these mood swings? Maybe I am just not meant to lead these projects. I don't know enough and I can't seem to get started -- I probably should have said no in the first place. It would be better to bow out now, as embarrassing as that will be, than to keep going and have a bigger train wreck later when I just can't make the grade.

Consequences:
These beliefs leave me feeling very sad and small, like a six year old, and then I wonder how a six year old can possibly be a leader. I find it hard to concentrate and I just want to hide.

Disputation:
Constant low-grade pain can take it out of anyone. The world is not going to come to an end if you delay things because you've been injured. And who says you have to do it alone anyway? Some of the problem is that you don't have enough information to go forward. That calls for making requests of others, not for blaming yourself. And when you're not leaning on yourself so hard, your positive thinking ability starts coming back and your mood lightens -- so maybe it would be smart to cut yourself some slack this week after letting folks know what is going on. You don't have to crawl under a rock -- you can reach out instead to restore your work life balance. And even if some work projects end up being passed on to others, there will always be other opportunities.

Energization:
I called and emailed colleagues to regroup. Not only did these conversations relieve my anxiety, they made simple next steps quite clear. In one case, my summary of a conversation ended up being exactly what our group needed to move forward. Who knew? I had been worried about making things happen on my own when all along my strength was in articulating and clarifying complex input from many sources.

See how this works? I do strongly recommend the book as there are many more practices in it that address different aspects of overwhelm and ways to restore your work life balance. But if you struggle with hopelessness and challenge yourself to work through this one exercise on a regular basis (and if that means five or ten times a day, so be it), your positive thinking skills will grow and you WILL get relief. Remember -- don't measure change before it can happen -- keep doing the practices long enough for significant positive shifts to take root and grow.

BONUS : Title:
Work – Satisfying Goals

Word Count:
476

Summary:
Every business talks of goals. No business can run without goals and no business can achieve anything without goals. The goals give direction to the business about where to head and what to achieve.


Keywords:
strategy,execution,plans,goals,achievements,business,job,work,team


Article Body:
Every business talks of goals. No business can run without goals and no business can achieve anything without goals. The goals give direction to the business about where to head and what to achieve. Therefore for every business, goals are most important. Generally businesses set SMART Goals - specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based. What about our personal goals in career and work? Are we to follow the goals of the organization and try to achieve them or set some more for ourselves that help us in our personal growth. What about having satisfying goals for ourselves? Let us discuss this further.

As a member of a business organization, all of us have to try and achieve the larger goals of the organization. That is true even for self run businesses. But can we reach the goals of business in a way that helps us achieve our own satisfying goals? We can. Let us see how? In the beginning, decide about what gives you satisfaction in your career. It can be - to learn something new every month, or to increase efficiency of ones work every month, or to work in a relaxed manner always, and so on. Each one of us will have his/her goal that satisfies ourself. So you will have to draw a list of goals that are desirable for your satisfaction and try to achieve them one after another.

For example, my first satisfying goal can be that I learn something new every month this year. I may be handling any work, but I want to learn something new about that work every month. That will make me feel personally satisfied. How do I do that? I can work on my given job, try and achieve my business goals and learn something new along with that. This new learning can also help me achieve business goals in time. Now if my organization makes and sells detergents, I will not only achieve the goals on quantity of sales but also about how as a sales person I learn one more sales method every month (This provided I am working as a sales person).

Setting my own satisfying goals and achieving them will not only make me happy and more confident but also make me move along faster in my career. Many of us are centered only on organization goals. Once we add our own satisfying goals to them we will be moving much faster in all the directions. Trying to achieve personal goals can also help remove lot of frustration and if a management can discuss satisfying goals for every employee and guide him/her about achieving them, the organization will have more of satisfied employees. The only care to be taken is that satisfying goals should help achieve business goals and not distract from them. So start defining your satisfying goals from today.