You Must Get Up to Win: 5 Tips For Staying Up.
The truth is, if success was easy everyone would have it, but it would not be so highly coveted. While success does not follow a straight path and may come with many difficulties and pitfalls, the journey is well worth it when you reach the desired destination. Unfortunately, many people don’t get to enjoy that last part of their success journey because they abandon the path before reaching their reward.
In any game, including the game of life, you have to get back up each time you fall to have a chance to win. There is no guarantee that you will win by getting up, but if you stay down you will lose- even if by default. Sometimes you receive a blow so hard you question whether or not you should get back up, but if you remember why you entered the game and still want a chance at winning, you have to get up.
Frankly, getting up is only the first step, because once you’re up you need to find a way to stay up. As you work your way back to your feet, there are a few steps you can take to help you stay on them.
Practice Patience. Success is indeed a journey, not a destination. There are times that we all may need to have that poster up on our wall as a reminder. Every step you take along your journey to success has its place in helping you reach your success goals. Be patient with yourself and your process. Trying to take short cuts often lead to more setbacks, but an unsuccessful attempt does not signify the end of the journey. Instead it is a reminder of a need for proactive waiting- You know what you are after and you have to be willing to proceed through the journey to get to it. You may not be able to leap over the dam without falling in a few times, but if you take a moment to find the bridge and walk across you’ll probably get there sooner- That is proactive waiting.
Assess the cause of the fall. When fall off your path you need to take a moment to figure out what happened so that when you get back up you don’t repeat the same mistakes. Determining what steps took you off your path will allow you to also explore alternatives that will help you move forward. Remember, history will continue to repeat itself as long as man is foolish enough to not learn from it. Look at the things you did to keep you on the path before and the steps that led you off it. Then use your judgments and skills to determine how you can replace these faulty steps with more productive ones.
Use your time wisely. Ever notice when a fighter falls he sometimes stays down for a few counts before he gets up? He’s taking the time to gather up his energy so that he has the strength to attack once he’s up. If you fall off your path to success this is not the time to sit around dwelling on what you did not do. It’s time to regain your strength to get back in the game with renewed energy. Look at every unsuccessful attempt as the elimination of a method, getting closer to finding the method that will work. Use that time to gather the resources that you will need to help you last longer on your next attempt.
Strategize your moves. Just because success is a journey does not mean you should just go along haphazardly and hope to get where you wanted. Every step you take should have a defined purpose; even if it’s as simple as moving the journey along or making it more pleasant. You should have a strategy that can get you from where you are to where you want to be. Having a strategy helps you maximize your resources and have greater influence and autonomy on how things go. Having a strategy can be the difference between creating your success versus hoping to succeed.
Evaluate. Constant evaluation gives the reassurance that you are taking the right steps when you see that you are staying on the right path. It also provides an opportunity to make adjustments when you have deviated from the path or when there is a need to deviate. Take care not to spend more time in this stage. Evaluation should be taking place constantly as you progress in your journey, as a result you do not need to spend an excessive amount of time on this at every turn. Manage it well.
Failure only exists when you don’t make the next attempt.
I’m just saying though…
Dream Big… Live Bigger…
DrJudiC
www.DrJudiC.com
7 Tips For Preventing Burnout
Burnout is something that is experienced by many individuals from students with a course overload, to the frontline employee who has no autonomy and feels unappreciated or the high level executives feeling the pressure to do everything. It’s a state of being emotionally drained which often comes from trying to give more of ourselves than we have to give. Though the symptoms are usually progressive, they can also be sudden, and fall into 4 major categories
Behavioral- Decrease in efficiency, reduced capacity to cope, dreading work.
Interpersonal- Withdrawing from friends and loved ones, lack of enjoyment or participation in life affirming activities.
Physical- Increased presence of insomnia or sleeping too much. Feeling fatigued or always getting sick.
Emotional/Mental- Hyper-irritability or depression, feelings of emptiness or helplessness.
Of-course these are only a few examples of the wide array of symptoms that one can experience. One of the most prevalent symptoms is the change in thought and attitude toward the job. The job you once loved becomes a dreaded enemy. The passion you had about starting your business feels more like an inescapable burden. Before you get to this point there are a few things that you can do to prevent it.
- Self-care is the first and most effective way to prevent burnout. Self-care is the simple process of taking the time to attend to your personal needs (including physical, emotional and social needs). Take care of your body, from going to the doctor to eating right and working out. You have to make sure that you are physically and mentally able to work to ensure maximum efficiency. By giving yourself a break and participating in life-affirming activities you save the stress and time it would take to deal with burnout.
- Have a life. No matter how much you enjoy your job, it can’t be all that you are. You must take time to have a life outside of work that involves people with whom you can just be yourself, where the expectation is simply that you are there as a you. Participate in life affirming activities. Go to a ballgame, attend a musical or just run in the rain. Maintain a balanced life where you have time to have fun and be serious because the body and mind need both. Do the things to get your blood pumping and remind you that you are alive.
- Keep a strong social/ emotional support system. Surrounding yourself with positive and supportive people helps keep you in that state as well. Humans are social beings. We need social interaction with our peers and even more interactions with those who keep our spirits up. When the pressures or frustrations of work start to become overwhelming those are the people you can turn to for temporarily relief while you figure out your next step or just to help you figure out how you want to move forward. When the work loads get heavy and schedules get overloaded, people have a tendency to cut out more of the leisure activities and socializing. Doing that is a great disservice to your wellbeing. When you feel you have no time to socialize, find time to reap the benefits a good support network.
- Learn to prioritize and schedule. The feeling of having to do too much at once is a stressor that can make work seem more overwhelming and a result more tasking. Being able to prioritize responsibilities and allotting time to address individual tasks makes projects more manageable, thus less stressful. Setting aside time to attend to particular tasks gives you a plan of action, which is also very effective in decreasing work-related stress.
- Address conflicts between your values and responsibilities. If you find yourself in a situation where your professional duties conflict with values and/or professional code of ethics don’t mumble about it under your breath. Doing something that conflicts with your values takes a heavy mental and physical toll. It’s like trying to keep your head above water while swimming upstream against heavy currents. You can do it for a while but eventually your body gives out. If you find that your responsibilities are in conflict with your core values, take the time to figure out an acceptable resolution for you, and present it to those with the authority to accept such adjustments. Whether that is your clients as a business owner or your managers as an employee, you have to address it with the ones who can make the change happen. Complaining to coworkers or friends only remind you how wrong things are. This information should be shared with friends and coworkers mainly in the context of having them help you brainstorm and come up with a solution.
- Be valuable, but not invaluable or valueless. You don’t have to be all for the job. When I find clients doing this, I often use the gruesome example that if they died today, the organization would begin working to replace them tomorrow. This is not to devalue the person, but simply remind them of the reality. You want to be great at what you do. You can even be the best at you do. It’s when you try to take on everything that it becomes a problem. As you attempt to take on every duty professionally, you reduce the time that you have to replenish the energy being exerted. It’s great to apply yourself. Going above and beyond the call of duty can lead to great career advancements. Making yourself carry the weight of an entire organization however places you on the fast track to burnout. There is a balance and you must find it. Even when you are building your own business, don’t put the pressure of being the one and only on your shoulders. You can still be there for your clients and provide optimal service without having to be everything to them.
- Choose autonomy over authority. Much like being the one who does everything, being the only one who makes every decision can also weigh heavily on you. Focus on the decisions at your pay grade. If you are a department director and have an office manager, let the office manager worry about ordering the office supplies (you can still put in a request for you preferred pens). Empowering your team to make decisions within the scope of their responsibility frees you from having to take on that responsibility. Delegate tasks and allow your team to take ownership. This also helps strengthen your team because autonomy is necessary at all levels of the organization. It allows people to be individuals who think for themselves instead of mechanical pieces of the organizational machine. This also allows them to feel like valued members of the organization. When your team has ownership of their projects and responsibilities, they are more productive and happier employees who will rely on you less and are less demanding on your time.
I’m just saying though…
Dream Big… Live Bigger…
DrJudiC
www.DrJudiC.com
Don’t Let Success Eclipse The Objective- 5 Tips for Maintaining Success
For most of my life I have been known as the sleepless one. My insomnia would have me up at that oddest of hours, where I’m wide awake with nothing to do. About 8 years ago I found some tools that helped. The biggest component was creating a space that was for sleeping where when I entered the room my body and mind knew it was time to relax. This required a major change since I had bee doing homework and watching TV in my room since middle school.
I moved out of my apartment where I had a desk in my room and found a place that offered a designated workspace. Since 2003 my home has always had a designated workspace which has now grown into and actual home office. My room has always been set up to provide the necessary relaxing environment and the system was working fine. As long as I went to bed at what was my bed-time, I could fall asleep and get the rest needed for a productive next day.
Seven years later this was such the norm that I forgot all about the reason for it. During the recent cold days I would go to my room with my computer. I found myself going there to do my paperwork, research and writing. As I was working in the warm and cozy environment my mind and body were readjusting to the new program. Before too long I was still up at 3 or 4 AM with my mind in full productivity mode as I toss and turn. I was getting great ideas of thing I want to do, how to fix and issue, marketing strategies, but the only thing I wanted was sleep. Blissfully unaware of the world sleep.
What actually happened was having such great success that I was taking it for granted. I lost sight of the goal and in turn started to slip back into old patterns. I lost sight of the goal I started with, which is an error many people make. When starting out in a new school or new positions we often run into this. New business owner do this much too often. When working toward the goal, it’s easy to stay focused on t as a target to be reached, but success is not a one shot deal. Once you reach it the level of success you once sought you still have to continue to work on maintaining it. Non one wants to have a successful business this year and just drop it all next year. Once you set a goal you want to arrive at that point and stay there or move forward. If you forget what you are trying to accomplish or why, you are less likely to keep working for it.
This is not to say that you should not enjoy success, rather that you should be mindful of how you got there, so that you will not what you need to do to stay there. When you enjoy the benefits of your success you are more likely to want to work to maintain it. You just have to be cautious not to take it for granted and become so complacent that you are so busy enjoying that you forget to maintain.
When it’s time to maintain the success you have earned, keep these in mind:
- When you reach a goal set a new one- Whether you are working toward maintenance or advancement a goal keeps you working toward something.
- Always set and implement Action Plan for every goal- A goal without an action plan that is being implemented is just wishful thinking which does not yield results.
- Keep yourself surrounded with others in that stage- When you reach you the success that you’ve worked for stay close to others who are there keeps you doing the things you stay there. After working so hard to succeed, you need to be around people who can show you how to keep succeeding and staying away from those behaviors that prevented you from getting there before.
- Elevate others- Knowledge is one thing that you can get more of by sharing it. By helping others learn to climb the ropes you climbed you are keeping your skills while doing good for others and making a change in the world.
- Seek ways to improve your processes- The world is evolving and if you are not keeping up you are likely to get passed up. Staying away of new research, methods and products always you to grow with clientele and their needs.
I’m just saying though…
Dream Big… Live Bigger…
DrJudiC
www.DrJudiC.com
Life & Success Lessons From The Golf Course 3: Reboot, Refresh, Resume
A few days ago I was out of the driving range and found myself wasting a bucket of ball. Some of them I hit so badly that I could just walk up a couple of steps to retrieve them, but the re-hits were not that much better. I had done much of what I needed to do from stretching, working on my stance and my grip. I must admit that it was getting frustrating, because just the other day I was doing so well after my lesson. With my driver, 7 or hybrid it was all either a complete miss or at best a few feet. The harder I tried the more comical the resulting misses. Eventually, it was decision time and I decided to move on to chipping which is the best part of my game, followed by a few minutes with the putter. I was getting great results.
What was happening was that I needed to break from what I was doing to regroup and start over. That is something we see often when working on certain projects or in some meetings. When you find that your actions are not yielding desired results, it’s time to step back to reassess and return for a fresher start. Many of us have had to sit through an overdrawn project meeting and came out wondering what happened to these last few hours. That was a result of the person leading the meeting not realizing that I was time for everyone to take a break from the issue at hand and come back later—often with fresh insights and new perspectives.
Taking a break does not necessarily mean hours or days, it could be as simple as 10 or 15 minutes just to step away. That brief moment allows you to shut down the current cycle of thoughts or behaviors and switch to a different mode. When you return, it’s like you are rebooting your mind and body to continue the work you had been doing. It’s almost like when your computer freezes up. In some cases you can continue to work with it, but it moves slowly, or sometimes not at all. After you take a moment to restart it, it starts to work again and faster than before. Yes, you lose the few minutes that it took you to go through the reset period, but in the end you make that up by not having to wait two minutes for every command to be executed as before.
By taking breaks, you give yourself the benefit of a fresh start, which also allows you to make the adjustments necessary to get you on the right track. If my swing is off I can most definitely stay there and try to fix it, but when my body is used to being in that off position it’s more difficult to change that than it would be if I was starting in neutral. We are pattern driven and once we settle into the rhythm it’s hard to transition out of it. A halt however gives you the opportunity for a new start and some rest in between to rejuvenate and give more energy.
So next time you find yourself stuck in a pattern that is not giving you the results you want, remember that it is ok to stop for a moment, because the break that you take to regroup and reorganize will more than likely be shorter than the time that you would lose trying to push on.
When you take a break you can do some of these things to make the break more productive:
- Just relax for a moment- Sometimes the body and mind need that.
- Find a distraction- Something that will force you to get your mind off the task at hand— My weaknesses are Tetris and Minesweeper. Whatever you choose, make sure you have what it takes to stop in five or ten minutes
- Meditate or do breathing exercises- This allows the recirculation of your energy which is great for fresh start. When you need to rebuild momentum getting oxygen into your body is one of the things you can do.
- Cat naps- Depending on the setting and time available this could be a great tool. Closing your eyes for a few minutes gives a great opportunity for introspective reflection- and if you dose off you feel refreshed when you awaken.
- Change course- If what you are trying to do is not working out, you can move on to something else that you need to do and return to the original task later. Just changing the schedule around a bit will not hurt much- just make sure that it is a change of pace that you need and not rest.
I’m just saying though…
Dream Big… Live Bigger…
DrJudiC
www.DrJudiC.com
