Yearly Archives: 2023

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Seven Habits that Will Completely Change Your Career

Seven takeaways:

  1. Check your baseline: Take a moment to take stock of your current situation. It is essential to have a clear understanding of where you are right now. Identify any areas of your career that need particular attention, and do a deep dive on your goals, passions, strengths, and weaknesses. This self-assessment can guide your plan for moving forward.
  2. Give more compliments: In the workplace, it’s easy to focus on what’s not working and forget about what is. Taking the time to recognize and acknowledge the efforts and successes of your coworkers can create a more positive and supportive work environment. By validating peers and giving positive feedback, you can strengthen your relationships with your colleagues, and create an identity as a positive, forward-thinking member of the team.
  3. Overcome perfectionism: The fear of failure can be a major barrier to career success. Instead of striving for perfection, focus on progress and continuous improvement. Set realistic goals and celebrate the small victories along the way. Remember that mistakes are a natural part of the process and that taking risks can lead to significant growth and success.
  4. Invest more in yourself: Investing in yourself is one of the most valuable things you can do for your career. Take the time to build skills, mental acumen, physical health, and spiritual centeredness by being intentional about learning. Prioritize your own growth and well-being over external validation and focus on building a strong foundation for your future success.
  5. Take leadership seriously: Even if you’re not in a formal leadership role, you have the power to be a role model, and to affect positive change on your team, or at your company. Focus on developing your leadership skills, including self-management, decision-making, and adaptability. Embrace creativity and problem-solving to help you stand out as a valuable member of your team.
  6. Expand your skills: Consider investing in your skillset. Identify areas where you could use improvement, and look for opportunities to learn and grow. Take courses, attend workshops or conferences, or even pursue a new hobby that might teach you valuable skills that you can apply in your work.
  7. Connect: Take the time to connect with your peers, even if it means stepping out of your comfort zone. Attend work events, participate in team-building activities, and seek out mentorship and coaching opportunities to help you build your network- you never know

by Murielle Marie for Forbes:
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Note: At the time of this posting Forbes offers 4 free article views per month.

This site may contain links to articles or other information that may be contained on a third-party website. Advisory Services Network, LLC and MAP Strategic Wealth Advisors are not responsible for and do not control, adopt, or endorse any content contained on any third party website. The information and material contained in linked articles is of a general nature and is intended for educational purposes only. Links to articles do not constitute a recommendation or a solicitation or offer of the purchase or sale of securities.

Happiness is a Warm Coffee

Five takeaways:

  1. When caffeine is ingested it takes on a naturally occurring chemical called adenosine, which is produced throughout the day to help you eventually relax– the body’s message that bedtime is approaching.
  2. Caffeine disrupts adenosine receptors, effectively pushing the adenosine out of its parking spot in the brain. The jittery feeling you get from drinking a lot of coffee is a measure of how much your adenosine supply is disrupted.
  3. Caffeine naturally makes you happy: study after study shows that intake of caffeine leads to a “significant increase in … happiness and calmness and decreases in tenseness.”
  4. When viewed collectively, the macro effect of caffeine consumption is a boon to humanity. Writer Michael Pollan argues in his book Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Created the Modern World that caffeine’s arrival to Europe in the 17th century led to booms in productivity, safety, and innovation: that it accelerated the formation of the world we know today.
  5. While too much of anything is never a positive thing, studies have shown that habitual coffee consumption can reduce all-cause mortality. It can also help autophagy, the natural process of cleaning out cellular trash, and it has been linked to reduced levels of fatty acid in the blood of aged mice, which has been linked to diabetes and cancer in humans.

From Arthur C. Brooks at The Atlantic:
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Note: At the time of this posting The Atlantic offers five free article views per month.

This site may contain links to articles or other information that may be contained on a third-party website. Advisory Services Network, LLC and MAP Strategic Wealth Advisors are not responsible for and do not control, adopt, or endorse any content contained on any third party website. The information and material contained in linked articles is of a general nature and is intended for educational purposes only. Links to articles do not constitute a recommendation or a solicitation or offer of the purchase or sale of securities.

Nothing Drains You Like Mixed Emotions

Five takeaways:

  1. Well into the 20th Century, many psychologists believed that mixed emotions existed on a continuum. Which was to say: Researchers didn’t think you could feel good and bad at the same time. Evidence soon mounted that positive and negative emotions can co-exist, and often switch in and out of prevalence very quickly.
  2. Last year, a study by the Journal of Happiness Studies measured the relationship of wellbeing to positive, negative, and mixed emotion. The study showed that mixed emotions plummeted overall wellbeing far more than negative emotion.
  3. A commonly used “solution” to the pain of mixed emotions is to force oneself to view everything as either 100% positive or 100% negative. Scientists have found that this kind of “Dichotomous thinking” is unhealthy. They instead urge “Dialectical Thinking,” which boils down to viewing everything through the prism of acceptance: the knowledge that mixed emotions are natural and not a cause for alarm.
  4. To become more dialectical in your thinking, start by consciously acknowledging your conflicting feelings, as opposed to letting them battle away in your subconscious. Accept that life does not present itself in black and white. This will provide a sense of relief and control over decisions and emotions.
  5. Seeing the true complexity of relationships or decisions or experiences takes us beyond the superficial “great” or “horrible” descriptions that do more to confuse/frustrate us than to add any clarity to our lives. By embracing mixed emotions, we not only control them, we enable deeper understanding and experience.

From Arthur C. Brooks at The Atlantic:
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Note: At the time of this posting The Atlantic offers five free article views per month.

This site may contain links to articles or other information that may be contained on a third-party website. Advisory Services Network, LLC and MAP Strategic Wealth Advisors are not responsible for and do not control, adopt, or endorse any content contained on any third party website. The information and material contained in linked articles is of a general nature and is intended for educational purposes only. Links to articles do not constitute a recommendation or a solicitation or offer of the purchase or sale of securities.

Marriage is a Team Sport, Not a Competition

Five takeaways:

  1. Competitiveness between spouses is a common cause of marital strife, but it can be overcome with the intentional adoption of a unified mentality as a couple over an “I” mentality as an individual within a partnership.
  2. Couples who view themselves as a component of a unique couple identity in which neither partner’s individual identity is dominant—tend to be better at coping with conflict. If the overarching view of the dynamic is unified, the divisiveness that arises in competitive feelings are more easily overcome.
  3. Since feelings of competitiveness are never going to be erased completely, a key tactic is to change just what kind of competition you allow yourself to pursue. If you take on competition as a couple, and include your partner in your goals, the effect on a relationship can be positive.
  4. Feelings of competitiveness are a prisoner’s dilemma. In a relationship driven by competition, both parties prioritize their self-interests, leading to mutual dissatisfaction and less-than-desirable outcomes. Conversely, when each partner makes individual sacrifices for the benefit of the relationship, both parties reap greater rewards.
  5. Three clear tactics couples can take to overcome feelings of competitiveness are:
    • More We, Less Me: To prioritize your partnership, make “we” the default pronoun when communicating with your partner and others. This can help reshape your attitude through the “As-If Principle,” allowing you to act as a team and make joint decisions for the benefit of both partners.
    • Put Money on Your Team: Pooling finances in a relationship can improve happiness and relationship longevity, even if partners have different spending habits, due to practical spending habits that emerge when resources are combined.
    • Treat your Fights Like Exercise: An argument can be stressful, but it can be channeled productively when viewed as an opportunity to solve a problem collaboratively, which strengthens the relationship.

From Arthur C. Brooks at The Atlantic:
Read the whole story.

Note: At the time of this posting The Atlantic offers five free article views per month.

This site may contain links to articles or other information that may be contained on a third-party website. Advisory Services Network, LLC and MAP Strategic Wealth Advisors are not responsible for and do not control, adopt, or endorse any content contained on any third party website. The information and material contained in linked articles is of a general nature and is intended for educational purposes only. Links to articles do not constitute a recommendation or a solicitation or offer of the purchase or sale of securities.
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