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Your New Year 2019! Your Life!

As we approach 2019 and 12 new chapters wait to be written I wanted to take the opportunity to wish all my connections a very Happy New Year for 2019!

As we head into the New Year take some time over the next few days to think about what sort of life you want in the coming year.

There’s a growing number of people struggling with their work-life balance. A large percentage of people feel that their job demands that they should be available 24/7 since they can check in from anywhere using their smartphone. This type of constant availability takes a toll on both a person’s mental and physical health. Humans need to socialize, relax, and care for themselves to stay happy and healthy.

Here are four simple ways to improve your work-life balance:

Unplug
It’s easier said than done, we know, but avoid checking your phone for work matters after hours. This constant checking may have become a habit you wish you’d never started, and if you are honest, practically all work-related matters can wait until the next day. It’s key to unplug from work when you get home each evening and on the weekends. Let your coworkers know you won’t be returning emails, calls, or texts regarding work after hours so that they can prepare for this change.

Work Smarter
If you can’t seem to get all of your work done within the allotted 40 hours, you aren’t alone. An alarming number of Americans work more than 50 hours a week, every week. Before you go to your boss to ask for a reduction in your workload, take a careful look at how you are spending your time. Track it for a few days and see what’s causing you to stay late each night and come in early each morning. You will no doubt be surprised by the ways you can change or eliminate distractions and other time-wasters.

Take a Stay-Cation
Another vital way to get your work-life balance in order is to make use of all of your vacation days. A large number of US workers lose essential time with their family or with themselves because they don’t take all of their vacation days, or in worst cases, don’t have any vacation days at all. If you feel uncomfortable about using all your holiday in one long vacation, schedule the occasional day off here and there to enjoy “stay-cations.” Breaking it up like this will give you the mental health days you need while ensuring you don’t come back to an overwhelming mountain of work.
Train Your People
Many of us grew up hearing, “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” Unfortunately, this gets ingrained to the point where we feel we can’t delegate any tasks lest they end up back in our laps in worse shape than before. If you have employees you manage or freelancers you outsource to, take the time to train them well. Make sure they know exactly how to do things. Of course, this will take time upfront. But, once they understand your requirements, you’ll be able to hand off more work and give yourself some slack.

As we head into the New Year take some time over the next few days to think about what sort of life you want in the coming year.

Here are four simple ways to improve your work-life balance:

Unplug
It’s easier said than done, we know, but avoid checking your phone for work matters after hours. This constant checking may have become a habit you wish you’d never started, and if you are honest, practically all work-related matters can wait until the next day. It’s key to unplug from work when you get home each evening and on the weekends. Let your coworkers know you won’t be returning emails, calls, or texts regarding work after hours so that they can prepare for this change.

Work Smarter

If you can’t seem to get all of your work done within the allotted 40 hours, you aren’t alone. An alarming number of Americans work more than 50 hours a week, every week. Before you go to your boss to ask for a reduction in your workload, take a careful look at how you are spending your time. Track it for a few days and see what’s causing you to stay late each night and come in early each morning. You will no doubt be surprised by the ways you can change or eliminate distractions and other time-wasters.

Take a Stay-Cation

Another vital way to get your work-life balance in order is to make use of all of your vacation days. A large number of US workers lose essential time with their family or with themselves because they don’t take all of their vacation days, or in worst cases, don’t have any vacation days at all. If you feel uncomfortable about using all your holiday in one long vacation, schedule the occasional day off here and there to enjoy “stay-cations.” Breaking it up like this will give you the mental health days you need while ensuring you don’t come back to an overwhelming mountain of work.

Develop Your People

Many of us grew up hearing, “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” Unfortunately, this gets ingrained to the point where we feel we can’t delegate any tasks lest they end up back in our laps in worse shape than before. If you have employees you manage or freelancers you outsource to, take the time to develop them well. Make sure they know exactly how to do things. Of course, this will take time upfront. But, once they understand your requirements, you’ll be able to hand off more work and give yourself some slack.

Learning To Reflect

At this time of year we all tend to be a little more reflective as we think back over the year that has gone and ponder what is to come. I know I have certainly found myself reflecting on the experiences, challenges and opportunities that 2018 has presented and am looking forward to hopefully securing a new role as a Learning and Development Manager early in the New Year.

Sometimes when we reflect we can focus on the negatives and that can be worthwhile if we look at the learning from those experiences. However, we also need to ensure that we reflect on the positives as well and again take the learning from them into the year ahead. But how do you become more self-reflective or if this is a new idea for you how do you start?

Being self-reflective simply means that you look inside yourself to find out what you could do differently. When you are more self-reflective, you tend to have strong emotional intelligence, act with integrity always, and be a lot more confident due to that. To become more self-reflective, you may want to do some self-reflective exercises.

Positive Affirmations – It may help to write down as many positive affirmations as you can on strips of paper. Put them in a jar. Whenever you need to think positively about yourself, just pull out one of them and focus on what it says. You don’t really have to write them down, though; you can tell yourself positive affirmations about any situation that is currently happening in order to relax and look inward.
Meditate – The practice of meditation where you sit and empty your mind for a period will help you become more mindful. The act of clearing your mind will bring things to your mind that you need to attend to later. But, for now, when you meditate, take a few minutes to think of nothing and to totally clear your mind of everything but your breathing method.
Create a Vision Board – One way to reflect is to create a vision board about your hopes and dreams. You can even create one after the fact of something that happened, as a way to process the event and work through any issues that occurred.
Ask Yourself Questions – “What could I do better next time?” It doesn’t matter what the situation is, but if you can ask and answer this question, you’re going to give yourself great insight – especially if you remember this when you’re in a similar situation.
Keep a Bullet Journal – A bullet journal is where you write down just words to remember what happened instead of sentences. When you need to reflect on something, you can look back at past entries. When you need to reflect on the future, you can project positive entries.

These exercises can help you look into yourself in a different way. You’ll feel more competent, useful, and grateful in life when you do these self-reflective exercises designed to look inside your mind in a gentle and positive way.

The Importance of Good Self-Care

In my previous post I touched on the importance of good self-care and I want to explore that a little more. The evidence from my research shows that people who have high self-confidence tend to take really good care of themselves.

They are good at self-care and make it a priority in their lives. This can feel strange to some people who weren’t taught that growing up, and it can seem self-centered. But the truth is, it’s not. You have to take care of yourself because honestly, you’re the only one who really can.

Your Happiness Depends on It – You are the only person who truly knows who you are, what you want, and why. Essentially, every single one of us is alone with our own thoughts, morals, and actions. They affect us the most when we put ourselves last. If you want to be happy, you must not just be good to others but be good to yourself too.

Your Health Depends on It – When you are focused on self-care, you’re also focused on being healthy, eating right, exercising, and staying hydrated. Being healthy means that you take care of yourself and put your health needs before the wants of others, or even your own destructive wants. It’s the highest form of self-love.

You Can’t Help Others Unless You Help You First – By now you’ve heard the story that the flight attendant shares if you’ve been on a plane or watched a movie. If the oxygen mask comes down, you must put yours on first before you can take care of someone else’s mask. The reason is that without oxygen you will pass out and you can’t help anyone if you’re not there. If you’re not putting yourself as a priority for the things you need in life, you won’t be good for anyone else.

You Become More Likable – It may seem counter-intuitive but when you practice self-care, people tend to like you more. That’s because you will have a different attitude. You’ll seem well rested, well fed, and relaxed. Plus, when you are happy, it spreads like wildfire and makes others happy too. People like people due to how they feel when they’re around them.

You’re Worth It – The main thing to remember is that you are worth the self-care that you give yourself. You should take care of yourself as well as you would any child, an aging parent, or friend. You’re your best friend and your best advocate, and sometimes the only one who can make the choices.

When you want to be more self-confident, taking care of your needs is the first step. When you are happy, healthy, and less stressed out because you give yourself the time and effort you need, you will simply be happier. When you are happier, you will appear more self-confident and more people will gravitate toward you because of that.

Handling Failure and Rejection Effectively

There are times in all our lives when we might perceive ourselves to have failed at something or for example when we are jobhunting we might experience rejection. Failure or rejection can be challenging to deal with because it can dent our self-confidence and make us think less of ourselves.

Therefore it is clear that in order to become more resilient and better able to handle things we need to to build self-confidence and learn how to deal with failure. No one is successful 100 percent of the time. Everyone can’t always win. Once you get past your early school life we learn fast that awards aren’t for everyone, every time – at least outwardly.

Let’s look at some solid ways to deal with failure and handle rejection that can help to build your self-confidence.

It’s Usually Not Personal – It’s hard to realise, but most of the time when we fail or get rejected at something it’s not personal. Even if it’s the failure of a relationship, there are many factors that aren’t personal that come into play. Try to look at the situation from a distance to remove the personal factors from it.

Learn from the Situation – When you fail at something, allow yourself a little bit of time to go over the failure so that you can learn from it. Write down what you personally could do differently if the situation were to arise again. Be honest with yourself about this so that you can learn.

Don’t Obsess over Failure – While you do want to learn from the situation, you don’t want to take forever obsessing about it and going over it repeatedly. Instead, give yourself a time limit to think about it, get it down in writing, and move on from it.

You Don’t Need Others’ Approval to Be Successful – One reason that failure is often problematic to us as humans is that we don’t want to look bad in front of other people. But the truth is, no one must approve of you for you to be successful. Every single person fails, including even the most judgmental of people.

Change Your Perspective – Sometimes it can help to look at failure from someone else’s perspective. If it was a contest, think about the winner and how they feel. If you can focus on that positive aspect of your loss, it can be a lot more worth it.

The truth is, everyone is going to experience failure or rejection at times if they’re truly trying to succeed in life, whether it’s work or personal in nature. If you aren’t challenging yourself in any way, life will be kind of boring.

If you can view failure as an opportunity to learn and proof that you push yourself, you can turn failure into success because of what you learn from it. For this reason, paying attention to how you care for yourself is important too and I will look at self-care in another article.

Thank You! Dealing With Compliments

Some people have just as much problem dealing with compliments as others have to deal with criticism. But it’s important to learn how to deal with compliments because they can be a way to build up your self-confidence and start believing what others say realistically.

Say Thank You – When someone goes out of their way to give you a compliment, the best way of dealing with it is to say thank you and mean it. Look them in the eye and say, “Thank You”. This is going to not only go far in giving others a good impression of you, but also help you believe the compliments you get.
Don’t Make Excuses – When someone gives you a compliment, don’t make excuses about why you’re not good enough. You’ll turn that person into a liar and make them uncomfortable. In fact, you mainly teach them not to compliment you at all, and then you’ll start feeling bad about yourself later.
Share the Credit – Sometimes, someone will give you a compliment but someone else deserves it too. The best thing to do at that moment is to share the credit with the other person because that is the truth. Don’t do this unless someone else really is responsible for the outcome, though; you don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable. Be genuine and real about it.
Mind Your Body Language – When you are getting a compliment, don’t giggle, cover your mouth or slouch. You should look right at the person and thank them with gratitude without feeling awkward.
Don’t Try to Out-Compliment Someone – When someone you admire gives you a compliment, don’t automatically start to compliment them too until it becomes a battle of the compliments. Instead, just thank them. When the time is right you can compliment them too.

Learning to deal with compliments is a good way to build your own self-confidence to a higher place. When you are confident enough to smile and say thank you and mean it, you are doing great and oddly, people will like you more.