The M.A.P. Maker

Irritation-b-gone ("I'm fortunate that____.")

Do you ever find yourself wasting energy getting irritated at small things that don't really matter. I sure do. I don't even want to think about the cumulative hours and hours I have spent over the course of my life being steamed about things that weren't important in the greater scheme of things.

That kind of irritation is a needless energy drain in our lives. It accomplishes little, and only serves to make us feel bad, angry, like victims, etc.

The good news is that it's something that is easily remedied (or at least drastically reduced). How? Shift your perspective with a simple observation..."I'm fortunate that_______."

Let's say your internet is down and you're on the phone with tech support trying to figure out what the problem is. It took the person "helping" you ten minutes to spell your name right so they could find you in their system to begin with. Now that they have, they seem more clueless than you are about what the problem is. You have the company's entire repertoire of on-hold music memorized. Worse yet, they interrupt the hold music every ten seconds with an ad trying to sell you more of their services. 

It's easy to get wrapped up in what's irritating about that, in how the experience you're having differs from your expectations, and how it's keeping you from doing what you'd rather be doing with your day.

But then you break out the magic perspective shifting question. "How am I fortunate?" Try to make the answer relate to your source of irritation if you can.

For example, "I'm fortunate that I have an internet connection to begin with. Many people don't. I'm fortunate that I have this computer. Many people don't. I'm fortunate that this is one of my big problems today. Many people are trying to figure out where their child's next meal is going to come from." Or my favorite, "I'm fortunate that I have all this time on hold to think about how I'm fortunate." ;-)

This approach won't magically make all the irritation in your life go away, but if you make it a habit, you might just be surprised at how much of an impact it can make.

Check out The Occupational Adventure Guide

Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

Study: It's the little things that make us happy

My clients come to see me when they decide it's time to find the path to a career that energizes and inspires them. While "where to from here" is the overall focus, the discussions often delve into the question, "How can I make my life today as fun and energizing as possible?"

I'm a big fan of small, simple, and doable. One of the approaches to refining life in the moment is making a list of activities that are fun and energizing, then committing to picking one each day and doing it. No muss. No fuss. Simple as pie.

Here's a study that suggests that the small things in life can make a big difference in our happiness.

The study compared the ‘happiness levels’ of lottery jackpot winners with a control group, using a ‘Satisfaction with Life Scale’ developed by the University of Illinois. Respondents were asked how satisfied they were in relation to different elements of their life, their different mood states explored, how often they treated themselves and what form this took.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t the flashy cars and diamond jewellery that upped the jackpot winners’ happiness quotient. It was the listening to music, reading a book, or enjoying a bottle of wine with a takeaway that really made the difference.

Dr Tunney said: “Modern-day pressures take their toll on everyday happiness. As a result we try to make ourselves feel better and happier through personal rewards and treats. We’ve all heard the saying ‘a little bit of what you fancy does you good’, and treating yourself is the ideal way to keep spirits lifted when you’re down in the dumps.

The saying that "the best things in life are free" seems to apply here as well...

The survey contrasted cost-free activities, such as walking and snoozing, with expensive ones like overseas holidays. It asked how frequently they might purchase ‘staying in treats’ — like a bottle of wine — and how often they bought themselves items like shoes, mobile phones and DVDs.

The research found that happy people — whether lottery jackpot winners or not — liked long baths, going swimming, playing games and enjoying their hobby. Those who described themselves as less happy didn’t choose the cost-free indulgences. They rewarded themselves with CDs, cheap DVDs and inexpensive meals out instead.

How about you? What small things give you joy?

Check out The Occupational Adventure Guide

Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

Dare to drop your flaming hula hoop

What could you learn from a flaming hula hooper? When it comes to getting the most out of your potential, plenty. 

I went to a winter solstice celebration at Seattle Center yesterday, which featured a group of fire spinning performers around the main fountain.

Flaming hula hoops played a featured role in the performance. As I watched, one performer in particular captivated my attention. They were all impressive, but her performance seemed to have been taken up a notch. She brought an energy, intensity, and skill to it that felt like watching a fireworks display.

And here's the funny thing. While I was absorbed in the intensity of her performance, I saw her drop her hoop twice. Rather than looking flustered, she just picked up and jumped right back into it with abandon.

The experience got me thinking about why, of all the obviously skilled fire spinners there, she was my favorite. And I realized that the intensity I was so drawn to and the hoop drops were two sides of the same coin.

She probably could have toned down her performance to make sure that she didn't drop the hoop. But I have a feeling I wouldn't have been as captivated by what she was doing. She allowed herself to go to the edge of what she had to give.

In short, she went to the edge of "failure." She clearly had the skill so it wasn't reckless, but she didn't hold back and play it overly safe. And when she had a momentary lapse, she didn't let it stop her, but jumped in with the same zeal as before.

All of which leads me to the point of this post. Where is the flaming hula hoop in your life? What do you feel called to do that you're holding back on? What skill are you not fully using because you don't want to fail? What risk are you not taking because the outcome might not be perfect.

Watching that performer, the perfection wasn't in the flawless performance. The perfection was in the energy and intensity that she was able to share with everyone watching.

The most juicy, meaningful, amazing performances of your life aren't going to come because you played it safe enough to have a perfect performance. They're going to come because you risked enough imperfection to let you soar.

Check out The Occupational Adventure Guide

Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

"Giving-gifts" - Last minute gift ideas

So you've let your gift buying wait till the very last minute, and the last thing you want is to hop into your car and plunge into the sea of last minute shoppers. What to do?

How about giving a gift that allows people to give?

Here some last minute "giving-gift" ideas...

Kiva
Lets you invest as little as $25 in a microcredit loan. Best of all, it gets paid back and you can invest it again!

Heifer International
Help people break the chain of poverty with livestock. You buy a cow (or a goat, or...), and the recipient passes on the good fortune with its offspring.

Nothing But Nets
Help save a life from malaria.

HeroRat
Save lives and limbs by adopting a mine-sniffing rat.

TerraPass
Help fight global warming with carbon offsets

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription
Buy local. Eat fresh.

Just Give
Giving site that lets your giftee pick the charity they want to donate to.

Universal Giving
A grab bag of giving-gift ideas. You're sure to find one that tickles your (and your giftee's) fancy.

Oxfam Unwrapped USA
Oxfam Unwrapped UK
Another mixed bag of giving-gift ideas.

Of course, this list is perfect for birthdays or any other special occasion as well. You might even start doing some advance preparation by paying attention to what the people on your gift list really care about. Ask questions. Instigate conversations around making a difference, and pay attention to what puts a spark in their eye. Then tailor your next giving-gift giving with that in mind.

Do you have any other giving-gift suggestions?

Check out The Occupational Adventure Guide

Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

5 steps to train yourself to visualize

Numerous studies have shown the power of visualization, but it's something that has always been difficult for me. Even though I tend to be a fairly visual learner, I have a hard time visualizing in the abstract. As a result, visualization is a tool I have never taken full advantage of.

It's funny that, as big a fan as I am of breaking things into manageable pieces, it never occurred to me to take that approach to visualization. Fortunately, it did occur to Urban Monk's Albert Foong, who wrote a guest post on Litemind outlining five progressive exercises to train your visualization skills.

It starts out simple and small, and gets progressively robust and complex.

The visualization advice I've always read before has been, "Make it as real as possible. Incorporate the details. Feel it. Use all the senses."  I realize now that that's a little bit like strapping some figure skates on me and telling me to do a triple axel. Theoretically possible, but realistically outside the range of my skill. This approach makes a lot more sense. 

Maybe 2008 will be the year of visualization for me. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.

Check out The Occupational Adventure Guide

Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

Does your future self inspire you?

I talk a lot in this blog about the inspiration I draw from others. I've also talked about looking at your future self thirty years down the road and asking, "What would I look back and be proud of? What would I regret if I didn't do it?"

Now, thanks to Kate Hudson's post about drawing inspiration from your future self, I find myself asking, "How would my future self inspire me?"

If I were to create a future self who would be a source of inspiration to me today, what would that look like? What life would I have lived? How would I have lived it? What decisions would I have made? What impact would I have had on the world around me?

The first step in figuring all that out is taking a look at the people who inspire me and asking, "Why?" What is it about them that are inspiring? And once I put my finger on the reasons, how do they relate to my life?

This merits a deeper exploration, but off the top of my head I see several characteristics that are consistently there in the people that inspire me.

• They care.
• They're focused on making a positive impact in the world.
• They're doggedly persistent.
• They encounter obstacles, but refuse to let the obstacle define the path.
• They hear their own tune and dance to it, even when nobody else can hear it.
• They speak their own truth, unswayed by the opinions of others.
• They have had the courage to change and grow.

Once I have the list, I can start taking a look at my life through the lens of those inspirational characteristics. How does my current life measure up to them? Where am I strong in self-inspiration? Where am I missing a step? What do I need to do differently in the future? What do I have the opportunity to build on?

What about you? Who inspires you, and why?

[Hat tip to Inspiration Bit for the link to Kate's post.]

Check out The Occupational Adventure Guide

Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

Create a Fun Jar

In the M.A.P. concept (Meaning, Abundance, & Passion), abundance refers to multiple types of abundance, not just the financial variety. One of those is "fun abundance."

Want an easy way to work on improving your fun abundance quotient? Make a Fun Jar. You can read the original post for the full description of the idea, but here it is in a nutshell...

1. Brainstorm a long list of things you would qualify as “fun”. It’s best to do this in a fresh notebook, because you’re going to want to come back to this list often, and add to it as inspiration strikes.
2. Go through your list, and mark your items in terms of ease.
3. Take all the easy items, write them out on small slips of paper, and put them into a jar. That’s right. You’re going to create a Fun Jar. Seriously.
4. Every day, pick an item from your Fun Jar - and Do It. Remember, the Fun Jar contains only those fun things that are really easy to do.
5. Exercise your fun muscles gradually. Your daily shots of small bits of fun, courtesy of your Fun Jar, are a good start, but you want to target the bigger items next.

Fun is out there, just waiting to be had. Yes, even for you! It's easy to lose sight of it. It's easy to get so busy that you fall prey to thinking you don't have time for fun. But that's a trap, and it's a slippery slope.

Part of the key to thriving, both in your career and in life in general, is developing habits that feed your well-being. The Fun Jar idea is a great way to begin developing a "fun habit" using an easy, doable approach.

Check out The Occupational Adventure Guide

Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

Do you know "how-to?"

When it comes to achieving our goals, identifying the what-to's can be crucial - that is, identifying what smaller steps will lead you there, then taking them to reach your goal.

But what about the how-to's?

In one chapter of How to Change the World (one of my current morning reading books), the author describes how, in the early days of Ashoka (an organization that supports social entrepreneurs with new, paradigm-shifting ideas), they grappled with exactly what constituted a "new idea."

It turns out that the new idea is not one thing; it is a product of "how-tos." A new idea might include these considerations: How to better use local resources to solve a problem? How to overcome cultural obstacles? How to get legislation passed? How to finance an organization? How to train others to do the work? How to motivate clients and staff?

That paragraph got me thinking about how important the how-to concept is to our own individual efforts. Understanding the steps to take to reach our goals is great, but the path isn't always clear or easy. The how-to's give us some tools to help us navigate the landscape along the way.

Our own personal how-to's might give us an understanding of, for example:

• How to overcome obstacles that come up
• How to plant seeds for the future's potential
• How to create an environment that foster serendipity
• How to stay energized

None of those are specific steps along the way to reaching your goals. They're more meta-steps that help you get the most out of your journey.

When you have identified your how-to, you have a template you can apply to many different situations, which can have a simplifying effect on some of life's complexity. There are a bazillion things that could get in your way, for example, but many of them can be overcome by taking the same basic approach. It takes some of the guesswork and uncertainty out of the picture.

How do you create your how-to's? Questions are a great place to start. Take "overcoming obstacles," for example. You might ask yourself:

• How do I typically approach an obstacle?
• What problem-solving techniques work best for me?
• What questions do I need to ask any time I'm confronted with an obstacle?
• How do I identify what I need to know in order to overcome this obstacle?
• What are the resources that help me overcome obstacles?

When you have a conscious picture of how you do something, you can put less energy and time into wondering what to do and more energy and time into moving forward.

Check out The Occupational Adventure Guide

Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

Give kids the gift of altruism

As we close in on the holiday season, parents around the world are thinking about what to give their kids. Want something more meaningful than the latest whiz-bang toy for the kids in your life? Try giving the gift of altruism.

Here's an article that takes a look at the benefits of instilling a sense of altruism in kids, and some ideas for how to go about it. It takes more work than whipping out the ol' credit card, and it can only be given over time, but it also has a significant long-term effect:

...And here's added incentive for raising altruistic kids: Ever-growing research shows that altruistic people are healthier, happier and live longer than those who don't give back.

Sociologist Christine Carter has made this subject her life's work. She is the executive director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, where she studies the roots of happiness in youth. Carter focuses on positive behaviors and helping people raise emotionally literate children.

In the study, "In the Course of a Lifetime," published this year by University of California Press, social scientists followed adolescents born in the 1920s for 50 years and found that those who displayed altruism as teenagers were happier and healthier in the long run.

Carter suggests volunteering as a family.

"All the things that altruism is associated with -- empathy, compassion, caring -- are big parts of social intelligence," she says. "When you instill the desire to be altruistic, the kids get all the positive emotions and time with you."

Here's a suggestion that's near and dear to my "put your passion to work towards positive change that inspires you " heart.

If a child is unwilling to get involved, Carter says, you need to build on their strengths and show what an impact they can have. If your son is an athlete, encourage him to start a soccer league for homeless kids. If your daughter is a good writer, suggest she pen letters to nursing home seniors.

"Teaching them to share their natural gifts is how you build intrinsic instead of extrinsic motivation," Carter says. "The benefits of helping behavior are huge and often overlooked. Adults know the community benefits, but don't often think about the individual benefits."

Some lessons there for all of us, I'd say.

But wait! There's more! The article points out additional benefits of instilling altruism in kids...

Among those is increased confidence. The 2003 Commission on Children at Risk found that helping behavior contributes to diminished depression rates in adolescence. And come junior high school, when preteens begin to look inward, altruism can displace negative emotions, lower stress and increase self-efficacy and confidence, Carter says.

Toys break. Clothes are outgrown or fall out of fashion. Altruism though, lasts a lifetime. And so do its benefits.

Check out The Occupational Adventure Guide

Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

Get 25% happier with gratitude

What if there were a way to get 25% happier in your life. Would you want to try it out?

According to Alvaro Fernandez, author of Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier, it's a simple matter of gratitude. In an interview over on  The Huffington Post, he shares three key points from his book...

First, the practice of gratitude can increase happiness levels by around 25%. Second, this is not hard to achieve - a few hours writing a gratitude journal over 3 weeks can create an effect that lasts 6 months if not more. Third, that cultivating gratitude brings other health effects, such as longer and better quality sleep time.

He offers some suggestions on how to cultivate gratitude...

The most common method we use in our research is to ask people to keep a "Gratitude Journal" where you write something you feel grateful for. Doing so 4 times a week, for as little as 3 weeks, is often enough to create a meaningful difference in one's level of happiness. Another exercise is to write a "Gratitude Letter" to a person who has exerted a positive influence on one's life but whom we have not properly thanked in the past, and then to meet that person and read the letter to them face to face.

And talks a little bit about the findings and where they come from...

The benefits seem to be very similar using both methods in terms of enhanced happiness, health and wellbeing. Most of the outcomes are self-reported, but there is an increasing emphasis on measuring objective data such as cortisol and stress levels, heart rate variability, and even brain activation patterns. The work of Richard Davidson is exemplary in that respect, showing how mindfulness practice can rewire some activation patterns in the frontal lobes.

All in all, it's a fascinating interview, and worth the read.

(Need more prompting for gratitude exploration? Zip on back to my post with 15 gratitude prompting questions.)

 

Check out The Occupational Adventure Guide

Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM