Life Lesson

If you’re like me, you’re probably reading this with music on. Take a moment and listen to it (or turn your favorite song on) and listen for the moments that there is silence during the song.

One of the most beautiful elements of meditation (or, you know, breathing) is that pause between breaths. That moment that you’ve expelled your breath and your body prepares to take in anew. It’s magic if you take a moment to focus on it.

The single greatest interview tactic a journalist is taught is to ask a question and then shut up. 9 out of 10 times the interviewee fills the silence.

Silence isn’t absence, it’s presence and it’s power.

Stay Positive & …………

Thanking someone in a slack can be perceived as sarcastic.

An apology doesn’t resonate as much in an email than in person.

Saying “I love you” may check a box if it’s in text format, but it’s a world of difference to say it face-to-face.

Giving candor to a colleague will lead to performance changes faster if it’s done via a Google meet than through a written performance review module.

Funny how this list could go on and on; and it’s all the important stuff.

Stay Positive & Which Scenario Are You Opting For

p.s. the exception here may just be a handwritten note mailed. That sometimes carries more impact than something said in person. Oh, the irony.

My wife and I have a little container of change for an adventure fund that we’ll probably use for the girls one day when it’s full.

Would we rather have a massive barrel full of change already, though? Of course we would, despite the obnoxiousness of the size and the hassle of converting it to cash. But given the option between a barrel and what we have now, the selection is obvious.

Real life change works just the same.

A little bit of change is manageable, still beneficial, still growth.

A lot of change is hard and a hassle but far more valuable in the end when it’s cashed in.

I heard a great reminder about change the other day that’s worth sharing here: you can either have control or you can have growth.

It’s an “or” statement… and the catalyst from control over to growth? You guessed it: change.

Stay Positive & Change Pays

It’s not necessarily that you can choose to be happy (though there’s truth to that).

It’s that you’ve already chosen to be happy.

Consider this: you’ve already achieved the goals you said would make you happy.

Read that again.

Stay Positive & Happy Day To You

My daughter was having a meltdown about the cinnamon sugar not covering her entire piece of buttered toast.

Of course, it did, but some of the sugar dissolved in the warm butter.

The full meltdown was avoided when I pulled out some water and salt to demonstrate how things can dissolve. The maniacally best part? I got to see her have a disgusted face when she tasted the water to realize there was salt still in it despite it dissolving.

She’s never complained about the cinnamon sugar on her toast again. She learned and she enjoyed learning.

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I was debating the usefulness of a marketing campaign with a colleague and we were in a disagreement. I changed the topic to compare our strategy to that of another agency working on a fly fishing campaign (my colleague recently went fly fishing). The comparison made total sense and it led her to say something that made my argument about our campaign moot: “but I hate fly fishing.”

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It’s one thing to ask chatGPT to show its work and explain something, but it’s incredibly more powerful when you ask a follow up question like “Can you finish this sentence? The way the moon and sun switch in the sky is like….”

Stay Positive & Analogies Are Like Making A Half Court Shot At The Buzzer

The light can either be on or off. Simple. You know what you’re getting. And chances are either choice won’t impact you all that much in that it’s easy to determine which you need.

A bit more challenging?

You can either have growth or you can have control. Like the light, you can’t have both.

Just like we’d never turn the light off and think it’s on; let’s not have growth and think we can also have control… or vice verse.

The faster we realize it’s an “or” and not an “and” the faster we can move forward…and often with far less stress.

Stay Positive & Find The Switch

Telling someone you love them helps more often than it hurts.

Doing a job that isn’t yours helps more often than it hurts.

Exercising helps more often than it hurts.

I’m sure you can think of a few more things like cleaning up and organizing before you have to, checking in on the people in your network before you need something, and working on protocols that prevent disaster than protocols that clean a disaster up.

The list goes on.

The point is that we lean in when it sucks because we know it helps more often than it hurts.

Stay Positive & Doing Something That Sucks Every Day Is A Good Place To Start