It’s time to start blogging again. Late last summer, my life went crazy for a while. This past (almost) year has been a blur. My “real job” became off-the-charts busy, then my husband changed companies, then we moved to a new house, then I changed jobs, then I learned what “off-the-charts busy” really meant.

Have you been on auto-pilot and overwhelmed like me?

The thing is, life will never slow down to the point that I feel I have enough time to do everything I want to do. Life continues on, regardless of the part I play in it. I can fill every hour trying to keep up with it, I can get sick for a few days and disconnect from it completely, I can try to grab it by the horns and wrestle it into my idea of what my life should be. None of those actions changes the pace of my life. There are some that do:

Wake up

Are you shoving things that matter to you behind the “someday” wall? Someday I’ll spend more time playing with my children. Someday I’ll write that novel. Someday I’ll start going to the gym. Someday I’ll start eating better. Someday I’ll figure out what kind of career I really want to have.

Identify your big rock

You know the metaphor of the big rocks? The little things that crop up each day are like grains of sand. The medium sized rocks are routine things you do. The big rocks are things that are important to you. If you fill a jar with sand, then pour the medium sized rocks on top, there will not be room for the big rocks. If you reverse it, putting the big rocks in first and then the medium sized rocks, the sand fills in all the gaps between the rocks and you can get it all into the jar. Your day is the jar.

Stop living in reactive mode, answering every little fire that flares up in the day. Choose 3 priorities for today. I’m planning to choose one work thing, one family/household thing, and one thing to nurture myself. Those are the big rocks. If 3 seems huge, pick one. One thing.

But it must be meaningful.

Does your one thing bring joy to your life? Does it make you feel like your life has meaning? Do you feel on-purpose when you do it? If not, choose something else until you can answer “yes” and your rock is meaningful.

The other things on your to-do list are important, too, but if you have to ignore them to get the one thing done, ignore them. If you came down with a 24 hour bug that made you spend the day in bed, the world wouldn’t end. It won’t end if you have to postpone some of the things on your to-do list for one more day.

No matter what happens today, do your one thing. And be proud of it.

I wrote this post this morning, my first one in about 9 months. I didn’t have time to put a picture in it, but that’s a smaller rock I can do later.

What will you do today?

Share it with me in the comments.

Pam* lost her job on Monday, and she wasn’t sure what to do. Despairing, angry, and cynical, she wasn’t in any mood for chirpy platitudes like, “This just opens to door to your next big opportunity” or “When fate closes a door, it always opens a window somewhere.” No. Pam is a realist, and she didn’t need a cheerleader. At least not that first day. Pam needed some help adjusting her mindset.

Have you just lost a job? Here are the first 5 things to do:

1. Allow yourself time to grieve.

Losing a job is tough. You had co-workers you enjoyed, an office culture you were used to, the security of a place to go every day and a regular paycheck. You are probably in shock, too. Give yourself time to go through the grief cycle. Everyone swings like a pendulum through a range of thoughts, feelings and behaviors after an emotional shock before regaining a bit of equilibrium. Sometimes it takes a few hours. Sometimes a day or two. Give yourself permission to go through it, and don’t try to rush it.

While you can’t wallow and linger in depression and grief, you can’t shut yourself off and refuse to acknowledge the emotions either. They will come back to bite you later.

2. Don’t make any drastic changes in your appearance for 24 hours.

Don’t head to the stylist for a radical new haircut or color. If you usually wear a beard, don’t shave it all off immediately. Don’t get a tattoo. When you make decisions in the throes of emotion, you often wind up regretting it later. In the case of your appearance, you will need every ounce of self esteem and normalcy in the coming weeks. Looking at a stranger in the mirror won’t help.

3. Keep your head in the current time, not in future visions of woe.

“I’m unemployed,” Pam moaned, “I can’t believe it.”

“No, you aren’t,” I stated, “you are getting paid as much today and you were yesterday, and you will be tomorrow, too.”

Pam was lucky. She hadn’t been fired, her company had lost a client. They had given her a 60 day notice. She had some time. But her mind was running through wild, undisciplined halls of terror. It was time to reign it in. The best way to do that was to focus on the reality of today, not the scary stories of her freaked out inner lizard.

Pam was worried about whether other companies would hire her. What would happen if she put her resume out there and received no calls? What would she do after weeks of interviewing and no offers? Pam was so busy wringing her hands over a fire in a back alley with the homeless in her own mind that she couldn’t focus on all she had today.

Today, Pam was fine. She wasn’t homeless, she had food in the fridge, she had a reliable car. Pam had everything she needed for today, and more. She would continue to have those things for at least the next 60 days, because she would have a steady paycheck for at least that long. Yes, it would be wise to stop buying non-essentials. Yes, it would be wise to not make any major purchases until she was settled into a new company. But for today, Pam was doing just fine.

4. Control what you can. Don’t try to control what you can’t.

Pam didn’t have control over whether recruiters would call. She didn’t have control over whether an interviewer would choose her for the job. She didn’t have control over how much a future employer would offer her. However, she did have control over some things.

She could make calls to people she knew and ask for a referral. She could update her profile on Linked In. She could upload her current resume to a few job sites. She had actions to take, and she had control over her own actions.

5. Reverse your needy mindset.

This might be the most important trick of all. It’s remarkably easy to feel anxious about finding a new job when you know you will be losing your current one. However, the desperate clinging energy will end up repelling job possibilities.

If you are in a situation like Pam’s, you don’t have to tell an interviewer that you have lost your job. For all they know, you are one of the several hundred applicants who are just looking for something different. A chance to grow. An opportunity to get away from a difficult boss. An entry point into a different role or job function. There is no need to let them know that the clock is ticking and you have 57 days and counting to find a new position.

Fear is not your friend when it comes to job hunting. Fight it. If you were halfheartedly looking around before this news, start thinking that you are just stepping up your job search. If you weren’t, take it as a bump from fate that will put you on a new track.

You are strong. You are talented. You are imminently desirable as an employee. Act like it.

Your Turn

Have you ever lost a job? Are you dealing with a job loss now? What is your best advice? Share it with us in the comments below!

*Names are part of a composite sketch made of real people and situations, but changed enough to protect privacy.

Today is my son’s birthday. He’s no longer a baby and not yet a pre-teen. Yep, we’re at that fun transition stage where he’s still young enough to want to cuddle sometimes but old enough to want his own independence.

He’s also old enough to develop his own limiting beliefs.

This morning as I thought about this, I realized I might be responsible for some of them. There are some beliefs I want to encourage. There are others I want to actively try NOT to pass along to him.

Some of the limiting beliefs that I want to encourage in him:

• I should treat others the way I want to be treated
• I should be respectful to adults, and also to other kids
• When I feel shame, the best way to get rid of it is to apologize and ask forgiveness

They are limiting, but in a good way. If he follows them, he will change his behavior when necessary and will get along a bit better in this world.

Here are a couple that I recognize in myself, and that aren’t always true. These rules of thumb I want him to use generally, but realize that sometimes they don’t apply:

• I should always do what adults and authority figures tell me
• I should do my best to look at the bright side of life and be cheerful

Here are some that I fight against myself, and hope he doesn’t inherit:

• I need to please everybody
• If everyone isn’t happy with me, I must be doing something wrong
• If someone doesn’t like me, I need to work harder until they do
• When I feel angry, depressed or frustrated I should stuff it down and cover it with false cheer and happy behaviors

The Acid Test

For each of these limiting beliefs that I’ve grown up with, the test I ran them through to see whether they were helpful or hurtful is this:

Would I like my child to believe this and act accordingly?

Your Turn

What limiting beliefs do you hold? Which ones help you get along better in the world, and which should you modify or abandon?

In a meeting with my team at work, I was becoming more frustrated by the minute. I’ve used my strengths as a programmer, web developer, help desk manager, database architect, and a business analyst. I’m also an ENFP, honed in on the needs and motivations of people and keenly interested in building relationships – whether in my personal life or with a customer. However, in this group of brilliant engineers (almost all of them ISTJ‘s, honed in on the need for planning and organizing and keenly interested in how things work – not people) my ideas were falling on deaf ears. Actually, I can’t even say they were deaf ears. They were definitely hearing me, they were just dismissing everything I said.

Stung by what I took as criticism and angry that I wasn’t being heard, I stopped voicing my ideas and waited the meeting out. My strengths were useless in this situation. Suddenly, a saying I had read before popped into my head and helped me take a new perspective:

In a land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

In my previous roles my analytical and technical abilities were valued because I was working with a team of like-minded people eager to build customer relationships and not all of them had technical experience. Here, my team was technically proficient and analytically talented and my strengths were nothing special. In fact, my focus on people and building relationships was actually a detriment because everyone was focused on solving the problem with a technical solution.

In this world, I was average. I realized that if I seek out situations where we are trying to solve problems that I am well suited for and where my strengths are different than those of my team, I am more likely to be heard and appreciated.

Your Turn

Where do you shine? Are your strengths different than your team? Do you work on the kind of problems you are best at solving? How can you make yourself a one-eyed king? Share your story in the comments!