A friend once said that what she loves about travel, is that every time you go on a trip, you are changed forever. She is so right. We see and experience things when we go to places we’ve never been that simply cannot happen by armchair travel through a Google search. This summer, I had an extraordinary opportunity to go to Africa--and it was one of those trips that changed me in ways I am still synthesizing.
The moment we get busy, taking care of ourselves is usually the first thing to go as we put caring for others and job responsibilities first. Many of us take our bodies for granted, pushing ourselves to the limit, basically ignoring our physical and emotional needs until the body screams out and demands attention. But, what can we do to build healthy habits to go the distance? Here are three areas to focus on…..
For many people, breaking away from the gravitational pull of work is extremely difficult. Our drive to get things done, feel a sense of accomplishment, and succeed often keeps us working well past the point of diminishing returns. We find ourselves saying, “Let me just squeeze in one more thing from my to-do list and THEN I’ll go home for the day,” or “Once we get past these huge projects, THEN I’ll take a vacation.”
Your energy levels have a profound impact on your effectiveness. Think about it. Amongst your circle of friends, you can see the differences: there is the friend who is up at the crack of dawn, to the one who always hits a workout after 7pm, to the one wide-awake working on proposals well after midnight. Harnessing your energy cycles isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” conversation. So how do you figure yours out?
Time management is the art of accurately calculating how long things take, how to plan an appropriate amount of time for tasks and find more efficient ways to get them done. Wouldn’t it be great if your kids were good at it? Imagine the drama you can avoid by not having a nightly battle over homework, or a last-minute dinosaur diorama crisis, or a college essay deadline disaster…
When Glenn Close won a Golden Globe for her role in “The Wife” earlier this year she said something in her acceptance speech that made me stand up in my own living room and say “Preach!” She talked about her mother, (who’d spent her life supplementing herself to her father), and who, in her eighties, told Close that she felt hadn’t accomplished anything because of it…
It never ceases to astound how the duties of running a household are, by and large, considered a mother’s domain. Now often referred to as “emotional labor,” this burden is getting a lot more attention these days.
