Center for Workplace Happiness

If you’re like most people in the US, me included, this week has a big holiday in it that requires a lot of attention and planning. Maybe you’re hosting, maybe you’re taking a side dish or dessert, maybe you’re traveling to be with family, and maybe your attention and emotions are on how you’ll handle a holiday without someone or someones that you want to be with on Thanksgiving. Here’s a public service announcement:

Stop. Take a breath.

Thursday is Thanksgiving in the United States. It’s often the culmination of weeks of planning and days of cleaning and cooking. Recipes that only come out once a year are handed down through generations of cooks, each one hoping that they’re not the one that screws it up. Lives that are already hectic have more to-do items and expectations heaped on them. For many, the point of Thanksgiving where they become truly thankful is when it’s over.

Take a moment, right now, to do something radical...

There are a lot of cliches about laughter:

• Laughter is the best medicine.
• Laugh until you cry.
• Laugh all the way to the bank.
• He who laughs last laughs loudest.
• I’ll be having the last laugh.
• I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing with you.

There is no doubt that laughter is good for you, body and soul. Laughing releases your body’s feel-good chemicals, lowering your blood pressure and easing stress. Laughing with a group of people creates a release of oxytocin, the hormone closely related to feelings of connectedness, community and caring. Laughter therapy has even been incorporated into chemotherapy regimens, which seems to help cancer patients handle the chemo better and has been associated in some research studies with better long-term survival rates.

There’s a ton of evidence that laughter is good for you, so making ways to intentionally add more levity into your day is a great idea.

The bad news about laughter is that, no matter how hard you try,...

Your life is created by the stories you tell. What kind of stories are you telling?

And are you mentally arguing with this premise right now? It’s ok…many people would.

My Grandma Faught told stories of her poor health, poor bodily functions, and poor relationships with people. She was always the unfortunate, sad focus of her stories, and her life, just like her stories, was filled with doctor visits, unpleasant procedures and neighbors who didn’t like her and wouldn’t help her.

There’s brain science to back up how your life is created by the stories you tell – in every moment, there’s far too much input for your brain to be able to capture all of it, so it captures and catalogues the kinds of things you are generally focused on. Our brains unconsciously shape our perception of reality to meet our needs, desires, and past experiences.

So once again, take in this thought and apply it to yourself – your life is created by the stories...

Do you know someone who is the strong, silent type? Maybe you?

People who seem to go through life meeting every challenge, quietly dealing with major life problems, and being the rock for others are easy to take for granted. They don’t ask for help. They don’t even seem to need help.

The strong, silent type is the person others go to for help, and then move on when their problems abate.

The strong, silent type of person has problems, too. If you know someone who fits this description – maybe you – that person needs a friend who’ll listen. A friend who’ll ask questions until the silent one starts talking. They need a place to be vulnerable and ask for a listening ear, a caring heart and maybe even a little bit of help.

We all need someone like that. If you know a strong, silent type, please be that friend. If you are the strong, silent type, please let your friend in.

Want more? Click here for a free audio course, "Happiness is an Inside...

What do you love?

I love stars, sand on my toes, silliness from my dogs, pumping tunes when I’m rolling down the road, and the toy that grows out of the top of my head, my hair. I love my independent streak, my pretty, fun-to-drive car, clouds, and the sound of moving water.

What do you love?

Make a list of the things you love and beside each item, rate it for how often you focus on and enjoy that item. Give it a 1 if it’s not very often and a 5 if it’s something you experience and enjoy daily. Now, for the next week, keep your list handy and see if you can create more 4’s and 5’s from the things that might only be 1’s or 2’s right now.

When you focus on what you love, you create more contentment in your day, and when you have more contentment in your day, you open the door to more happiness and success. Just by focusing on what you love.

So…what do you love?

Want more? Click here for a free audio course, "Happiness is an...

Are you good at what you do? Sure you are – because that’s who you are. You show up and do the best you can do every day.

Are you an expert at what you do?

If you’re like most people, you might resist calling yourself an expert out of modesty or maybe even a bit of imposter syndrome. You know things. You have experiences. You have a unique point of view, and when that’s added to your experience and knowledge, you are literally the only person on the planet who can do what you do the way you do it.

What is your goal for your next career move, and why aren’t you moving towards that goal? There are people who are doing what you want to be doing who have less knowledge and experience than you, and yet they’re doing what you want to be doing. Do you think others look to them as an expert? Those same people would value your expertise, too, so go for it.

One life, as far as we know, is what we have to play with, so go for your goals and dreams, you...

There are a lot of examples of overcoming adversity in the world around us.

• Salmon swim upstream and leap up waterfalls – it’s their only way to keep the species going.
• Trees sway in wild storms, sometimes losing branches but remaining flexible enough to remain standing against Mother Nature’s worst.
• Airplanes take off against the wind, not with it – it’s the only way to get the lift needed to defy gravity.

Adversity happens to everyone – no one gets through life without having to overcome obstacles. When someone you care about is in a tumultuous place in their life, it might help them to hear about the salmon and the trees and the airplanes.

The salmon don’t stop at the top of the waterfall to tell all the other salmon how hard the climb was. People in painful conflict often do just that – they wallow in the difficulty instead of growing through it. Help that person you care about – maybe you – flourish instead.

Want...

Do you have a manager who behaves badly? What if, instead of expecting them you change, you embrace their style as an opportunity for you to grow?

Radical thought, right?

First, you can’t make them change. Second, you’re part of their team, which means you report to them and they have a certain amount of control over your livelihood and advancement.

When you break it down like that, you have two main courses of action – either choose to leave the company and hope you’ll find a better manager at your next job, or use this manager grow your ability to relate to and work with all kinds of people.

When you take the second decision, you embark on a journey of personal growth and become the kind of person more companies want on their team. And who knows – your current manager may watch you cope and grow and start behaving better with you!

Want more? Click here for a free audio course, "Happiness is an Inside Job"

#veterinarian #vettech...

Thanksgiving is nine days away, and in related news, it’s Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day. Was it started by a refrigerator company? Maybe – Whirlpool did some marketing about it in the 1990’s. When it started going mainstream, the 15^th of November is the date that was attached to it, so today it is! Perfect timing, since Thanksgiving, with its overload of leftovers screaming for space in the icebox, is only nine days away.

It’s easy to forget what’s in the fridge, so having a day that reminds you to root around in there and throw out things that might kill you is a good thing. It can also be easy to forget cleaning out other aspects of your life – aspects that seem benign and can actually be harmful to your mental as well as physical wellbeing. For example, I was recently shocked to discover that people who tailgate make me angry.

OK, so the tailgaiting thing wasn’t a discovery – what was the discovery was that the anger was...

Would you like to know how you can be a more compassionate person?

Would you be thrilled to learn that you can become more compassionate in the privacy of your own life, without having to go anywhere or learn something new and complex or even break a sweat?

And would you be chomping at the bit if I told you that the same thing that’ll make you more compassionate will also help your physical health?

OK, I’m through teasing you – dozens of scholarly research studies show a link between healthier vital signs like blood pressure and stress hormones and meditation, and now new studies show that a person becomes more compassionate when adding meditation to their daily routine.

Build 5 to 15 minutes into your morning routine for an eyes-closed, sedentary self-care session and watch your blood pressure drop and your caring heart enlarge. There are meditation apps you can put on your phone, and the Center for Workplace Happiness has a meditation podcast called the Mind Body...