mindful framing

Integrating, instead of balancing, your work and life

June 26, 2019 By Oscar Segurado

You hear it all the time – to be happier and more productive you should balance your work and life. But in practical terms, what does this mean?

Take a moment to picture an average day in your work and personal life. Let’s imagine you are a parent who works from 9-5 and still manages to find time for healthy meals and downtime with your children. Work and life seem to be clearly separated by the time allocated to each activity. Right?

Wrong. Interconnectivity and the way our brains are wired make this separation impossible. This parent cannot simply forget the kids from 9-5 or ignore work responsibilities after 5.

For many, a thriving career serves as a powerful motivating force that provides life’s meaning through goals and satisfaction. For others, work provides the means to pursue personal goals.

There is a middle ground. Rather than striving to separate work and life, an effort that can lead to anxiety and stress, why not weaving them together? Follow these 3 rules for a seamless work-life integration.

Reconsider your occupation

It’s a given that no matter what’s your profession, there will be always be pros and cons for your chosen career, ups and downs in your workplace.

Wouldn’t be amazing if most people could enjoy the profession they chose and their current workplace? Moreover, wouldn’t it be nice to feel a natural inclination or urge to complete the tasks at hand – instead of dreading every assignment.

Start by taking a look at your profession and career path to see if it feeds and nourishes your passion for excelling and expanding. Let’s imagine you work in a publishing house as a staff writer, if you love your work you may be naturally inclined to wake up and write.

On the other hand, you may hate sitting in front of a white screen ready to write a new piece. This doesn’t mean you need to start thinking about a career change, just take some time to evaluate what your honest heart’s desires and potentially refocus towards a new path.

With renewed motivation, you can certainly begin writing and publishing daily. Small steps everyday go a long way when changing the course of your career’s direction.

When you are satisfied with what you do, it’s a joyful process to incorporate work into your life with ease.

**Realize that it’s okay to love what you do**

At times, we feel an urge to work in an exciting project in our personal time, even sacrificing a well-deserved weekend or vacation time. We need breaks, but we also need to feed our desires to excel and achieve. Sometimes you will feel a strong momentum and sense a powerful life force that requires our full attention and effort. Go for it!

There are also times when our personal life should be a priority. For instance when a family member needs support or we need to take care of our health.

Integration means not feeling guilty when answering emails late at night and tying up loose ends from work after spending a time with your family or unwinding. These few minutes will make your next day more streamlined and efficient. It’s okay to work your job into your home life and to consider personal matters while at work.

Modulate your energy

It takes a lot of effort and stress trying to draw a distinct line in the sand between work and life. The two mingle together often, so rather than creating unrealistic expectations, why not finding ways to recharge your energy throughout your day?

Every single one of us has energy spikes, dips, and times when we coast. It’s entirely fine to feel down and without motivation. It will pass.

Being aware of our energetic mood helps us to realize where we are at emotionally, physically and mentally.

In an article from McKinsey & Co, Gila Vadnai-Tolub explains that we have different energy modes: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. Each type of energy offers us a unique form of fulfillment, but we can’t expect to be highly functioning for all of them every moment.

It’s okay to realize that during work, you might need a moment to watch a fun YouTube video so your brain relaxes. And at home, your may want to spend time thinking on a new project from work.

Being aware of what we need in each moment to achieve emotional and energetic satisfaction helps us to meld both work and life together.

Vadnai-Tolub suggest 3 approaches to leverage our energy levels:

Allow yourself the time and space to not always be in high energy mode. It’s okay and desirable to find time to slow down and relax. Be lazy some times!

Choose to see the good. Remain attentive toward what is going right in your life and work. We all have room for improvement. Take it with a grain of salt, improve when you can, and keep moving toward goals with optimism.

Boost your energy. If you work at a desk all day, maybe you can go outside during lunch hour and appreciate the fresh air, even dedicating some time to thinking or resolving personal matters. Also, you can find moments of inspiration by letting your mind wander towards what you appreciate and love in life.

Life doesn’t have to be cut and dry. Our modern lives call for modern solutions. This may mean that it’s time to stop trying to draw lines and create compartments in our lives. Let’s discover what we love to do… and do it!

5 Steps to Become a Life-Long Learner

June 11, 2019 By Oscar Segurado

Have you realized that you are not the same person you were five years ago? Some aspects of your character and values may have been impacted by unforeseen learning experiences!

Life offers us a continual stream of new possibilities for growth and expansion. There is a good chance that your work, social and personal life requires you to adapt to our ever-changing world.

Ideally you want to acquire relevant knowledge while avoiding all the noise that generates our environment. You can be up-to-date without over-stretching your mind or causing unnecessary anxiety following 5 easy steps.

Embrace the trial-and-error process

When you take on a new challenge, it can be exciting at first, but as you dig in, you might find your self drowning in uncharted waters.

Let’s imagine that you are building a personal or professional website. You might spend a lot of time on figuring out how to create different features, and you will certainly make mistakes. It’s okay to get a little lost in the process and let yourself run into problems and errors. Trial and error is a great way to construct a new, valuable skill set for future use.

The next time you try to build a website, you will know not just what to do, but also what not to do. You have learned from your mistakes, the most fundamental way of learning. Every misstep is an opportunity to learn a lesson, improve, and move forward.

Find the right environment

Take a moment and consider where you focus best and get your job done with ease and pleasure. For some, a coffee house with background music and chatter is ideal, others prefer a quiet place while some people need the pressure of the office environment.

Irrespective of working for yourself or a company, don’t hesitate to personalize your workspace to suit your needs. The days of one-size-fits-all learning (or work) environment are fast fading.

Instead, we now seem to understand that to achieve impactful wisdom, we should value the unique environmental needs and learning styles of each individual.

Read constantly

Reading should become a pleasurable activity. You must acquire the discipline of reading, in print or digitally, while reducing audio or video content. Reading does a few things to help you enhance learning.

First of all, your brain is focused on the information at hand. You let go of superfluous or unhelpful thoughts in order to concentrate. While reading you can either stop and reflect or accelerate and skim through words and sentences. You are actively controlling the information flow, while audio and video learning is a more passive approach.

Secondly, delving into a good book automatically brings fresh vocabulary, ideas and perspectives into the forefront of your consciousness. And more importantly, it helps hone your visualization skills and imagination capabilities.

When you acquire data through the written word, you improve your writing and oral communication skills. Your daily life and conversations can bring out opportunities to express and connect your new perspectives to the world around you.

Take breaks

As you sit down to complete a task, it can be tempting to enforce high expectations to master a new skill in one go. Yes, it’s commendable to have goals, but respect for your mental and physical boundaries should be front and center.

If you push yourself too hard, adverse outcomes can occur, such as:

Fatigue
Inability to make decisions
Lack of focus

However, if you incorporate breaks into your learning process, you give your mind (and emotions) the much-needed space to refocus and refresh.

Being mindful of our concentration patterns allows us to optimize our learning style in a significant way. A leader cannot expect his team to perform and be balanced without letting their minds and bodies recharge and relax. The introduction of a mindfulness practice is a way to increase learning readiness in high-performing organizations.

Sleep well

A night of restorative sleep can offer clarity and bring cohesiveness to the learning elements you have acquired throughout the day.

As you problem-solve or attempt to master a new skill, sleep may seem like the last thing you should do. Often, we can feel a strong desire to power through until we figure everything out.

But in reality, ‘sleeping on it’ can bring a valuable boost to our learning curve. A recent study has confirmed that a good night’s rest can protect already stored memories while improving the access and organization of knowledge in the brain.

In essence, becoming a life-long learner requires daily habits that replace intensive data, information and knowledge gathering with a focus on acquiring wisdom with the right coordinates of time and space.

4 Infallible Ways to Handle Anxiety at Work

April 18, 2019 By Oscar Segurado

Have you ever spent a day feeling completely scared at work, but you’re not sure why?

We all experience anxiety at work from time to time, but a heightened sense of fear that occurs daily and on an ongoing basis can have a highly uncomfortable impact in the workplace.

Linda Geddes, explains in New Scientist Magazine two different cases of anxiety:

The first case is about a man who withdrew from answering phone calls at work. He feared that his words would be incoherent, and he might mess up his sentences. This type of anxiety is driven by true insecurity and lack of practice speaking on the phone.

In the second case, a woman had such intense fear that she felt agitated and lightheaded every morning right after waking up. Her anxiety had her thoughts swinging in a pendulum between two choices: What accidents could happen while traveling to work? And, what horrible unplanned consequences might happen if she stayed at home? There is no rationale for these beliefs, there is an underlying anxiety that may require a therapeutic intervention.

Sound familiar? While you may not experience anxiety to the degree described in these examples, anxiety isn’t fun and can massively impact your work life.

Is anxiety always bad?

Believe it or not, anxiety does serve a purpose. In reasonable amounts, feeling the sensation of anxiety can alert you to danger and will keep you vigilant and aware, more productive at work.

But if you find that feeling anxiety influences and interferes with your day-to-day life, then you may be experiencing too much anxiety and should seek the help of a trusted medical professional, explains Nick Grey, Clinical Psychologist at King’s College in London.

What causes anxiety?

Maladaptive Beliefs. According to Grey, maladaptive beliefs can cause anxiety. They are beliefs that work against you and are not accurate representations of how a situation will pan out. For instance, let’s say you take a ride on a roller coaster; you may fear that your heart’s increased rate will cause a heart attack.

While a heart attack is a possibility for someone with a heart condition, for most, believing that you will have a heart attack is a maladaptive belief that hinders your ability to appreciate the moment.

Chronic Worrying. Maladaptive beliefs can spiral into chronic worrying about various events or activities for about six months, explains Grey. Two chronic worry examples caused by maladaptive beliefs might look something like:

Feeling you are responsible for everyone around you, all your colleagues.
Feeling that your responsibilities at work matter more than your health and emotional wellbeing.

With all of this in mind, what causes the symptoms of anxiety?

When severe unease takes over, you can feel as though there is no way out. And this debilitating fear is linked to the amygdala, an anatomical part of our brain.

Our amygdala has two main roles:

Processes emotions
Triggers the release of hormones and neurotransmitters responsible for our fight-flight-or-freeze responses

Imagine you are in a meeting and your boss opens the door and asks you to step out. Most people will feel some response in this situation. You could feel intrigued waiting for unforeseen news, or the sight of your boss could trigger a powerful fear.

You might be tempted to leave the meeting and confront your boss (fight). Or stay seated and tell your boss to wait until the meeting is over (freeze).

In either case, your body is receiving stimuli and signals from a place of stress.

Studies suggest that those with post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, store fearful memories within the amygdala and can bring an exaggerated response to stimuli.

However, for a person who functions in an usual fashion, when fear arises, he or she can temper a learned response with new memories, explains Geddes.

How can you tackle anxiety?

Exercise. It turns out that going for a walk, biking, doing yoga, or any other physical activity that you enjoy can be extremely helpful in battling anxiety.

Have you ever felt emotionally ‘off’ and gone for a long walk through your favorite park? You are sure to experience the calming effects from being in nature, breathing more deeply, and a general lift in mood.

When you exercise, the experience releases mood-boosting endorphins that help you feel happier. Concentrating on a physical activity removes your focus from fear and allows your mind to zero in on the task at hand.

Remember, you don’t need to start a new or expensive sport. Yes, surfing or joining a posh gym can help, but start with something that feels approachable and affordable.

Diet. A study led by Phil Burnet (at the University of Oxford) found that increasing fiber intake encouraged the growth of beneficial gut bacteria which helped people pay increased attention to positive messages on computers (and less to negative ones).

When the volunteers of the study woke in the morning, they had lower levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) in their blood.

The study showed that the volunteers experienced seemingly small, but significant effects on the underlying psychological conditions that contributed to anxiety, notes Burnet.

Between full-time jobs, maintaining various relationships, and balancing health, modern life has us busier than ever.

Therapies. Certain medications given to a person with severe anxiety (and under the care of a professional) can reduce the perceived threats in a person’s experiences.

Benzodiazepines, for example, includes medications such as Valium. These treatments can filter out unthreatening stimuli. However, it’s worth noting that benzodiazepines can be highly addictive and should be given and observed under the care of a doctor.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy tends to be the golden go-to standard in anxiety treatment because its focus is to address the hindrance caused by maladaptive beliefs.

Once someone’s maladaptive beliefs are determined, CBT seeks to challenge them so that fears can be overcome.

Self reflection. Spending a few minutes each day reviewing the triggers of your anxiety and focusing on the present moment through mindfulness or mindful framing, will serve several purposes:

Develop a framework to assess unexpected experiences and thoughts
Develop natural routines and habits that will impact your mental wellbeing
Develop emotional intelligence and empathy towards yourself and others
Develop a comprehensive approach towards physical wellbeing

If you suffer from anxiety, be brave and tackle your anxiety head on, seek help inside and outside. Your mind has the key to a top-notch hospital and fully stocked pharmacy with safe and efficacious solutions. Anxiety can be transformed into vital energy.