The Corner Office Redesigned

 

When working in a traditional company downtown, one can easily spot the superstar professionals. They’re the ones with the corner office on the top floor and a personal assistant, and they strut around in the expensive designer suits.

When you work from home this may look completely different. The term “corner” could be referring to a corner of your living room, and the power suit might very well be a pair of sweatpants.

Working from home sounds like a dream to a lot of people. No commute, snacks at hand, and no chatty colleagues at the water cooler. But this freedom comes with additional responsibility. There is even a struggle to remain productive.

My friend Laura got her first taste of working from home during the pandemic. At first, she worried that she wouldn’t be productive while away from the office. But she found the opposite to be true. She got more done.

Although, for most of us, the traditional work week is 40 hours, those hours don’t correlate with much of an outcome. Let’s face it, we’ve all spent days sitting at a desk doing nothing, merely because it’s expected. We have to ditch the time sheets and evaluate our performance based on what we actually do.

How much happier are people who work from home?

As it turns out, there are stats on that. A survey from TINYpulse, a firm that studies employee engagement, found that remote workers score an average of 8.1 on a ten point happiness scale. Other workers average closer to 7.5. Other studies show remote workers take fewer sick days and can actually put in more hours a week without burning out.

Working from home gives us the freedom to fill our days as we see fit which gives us a wide open schedule. This is nice but, without some form of organization, it can lead to stress and distraction. We can end up wasting time and energy deciding what to do and when to do it.

This can be avoided by making a plan for how to approach your working hours.

You can create a ritual to replace your commute. Maybe start the day with a short walk or mindful meditation, and end the day with journaling or picking up the kids up from school as a closing activity.

How about starting each day with a workout and devoting the evenings to friends and family? The point is that, with well thought out goals, you’ll have a target to reach for when organizing your professional path.

Some say working from home can seem isolating, but it doesn’t have to be. With some effort and planning, a remote workspace can remain a close and collaborative community. It’s true that sharing a physical space makes socializing easier, however, we now have plenty of technology to create the “virtual watercooler” and even re-create typical team-building activities in the digital world.

You can schedule a video-cocktail hour or virtual dinner party so you can talk to colleagues in a more informal setting. We should not be afraid to get creative.

By adopting simple strategies like finding a daily routine and checking in with colleagues regularly, it’s possible to stay productive, connected, and ambitious while working remotely.

The History of Happiness

 

I say you should never take happiness for granted. However, there are countless fascinating perspectives to be found in its long and thought-provoking history.

Granted, the emotions of fear, love, hate and, of course, happiness are the most basic human emotions. They are doubtlessly central to what it means to be human.

It’s interesting that we didn’t always regard happiness as something natural or even human! Long ago, happiness was seen as something from the gods, and it was definitely better not to be messed around with.

We are in debt to the great minds of history. They developed our modern conception of happiness, transforming it from something mysterious and arbitrary into something to be pursued!

It wasn’t until the city of Athens was democratized in the fifth century BCE that people began dreaming of a happy life that they could influence. Prior to the downfall of the Persian Empire, people thought happiness was out of their power. With all the misery at the time — poverty, inferior medical technology, political suppression and so on — happiness seemed better left to the gods.

After the empire’s defeat, Athens began to blossom. Now a democracy, people began experiencing a new freedom — inspiring them to believe they may have some influence over their happiness.

Socrates and his student Plato believed that people could have more control over their lives, and thus their happiness. they argued that it wasn’t just up to fate, luck or the gods. It was up to the people themselves. To them, happiness was the ultimate goal, far greater than mere earthly satisfactions. Longing for happiness was a natural human tendency,

Aristotle saw things a little differently. He believed that we must look to the world; only there could we unearth our role as humans and the true role of human happiness.

The “Dark Ages” were so called because they sat between the “light” of the Roman Empire and the European Renaissance. But some historians say it was dark because everyone was so grumpy and miserable. During these times, many people had a negative outlook on both life and the concept of happiness. Full of despair, they felt trapped in their own bodies, which frequently caused them pain. It’s not at all surprising that, during this time, the Black Death obliterated almost a third of Europe’s population.

By the fifteenth century, people began to lighten up and started philosophising about life and happiness.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, most people viewed happiness as a natural light, and this is where our modern notion that everyone has a right to happiness stems from.

Drafted by Thomas Jefferson, the American Declaration of Independence states that it’s a self-evident truth that everyone has certain unalienable rights, including the right to the pursuit of happiness. The prevailing belief was that everyone was on their own in the journey toward happiness.

Ben Franklin used wine to illustrate his point, saying that God had given us the opportunity to grow happiness all by ourselves, for example, by cultivating wine. I’ll drink to that!

I still say we all have a say in our happiness. If you’re not feeling happy, go out and change that. Having a bad day? Eat some chocolate! Drink some wine!

Living Gratefully

I think we can all agree that all of us want to be happy. However, happiness means different things to different people.

Some say that in order to have happiness, you must have gratefulness. Some say it is the other way around.

There are many people who have everything that it would take to be happy and are NOT happy — because they want something else or more of the same. I know people who have lots of misfortune; misfortune that I would not want to have — and yet they are deeply happy. They radiate happiness. Why? Because they are grateful.

Therefore, it is not happiness that makes us grateful. It is gratefulness that makes us happy.

What do I mean by gratefulness? And how does it work? We all know from our own experience how this goes. We experience something that is freely given and valuable to us. We didn’t ask for it or work for it. It is freely given. Gratefulness spontaneously rises in our hearts. Happiness spontaneously rises in our hearts. That’s how gratefulness happens.

The key to all this is that we should not only experience this once in a while. We cannot only have grateful experiences. We can be people who LIVE gratefully. Grateful LIVING is the thing.

How can we live gratefully? By experiencing and becoming aware that every moment is a given moment. It’s a gift! It is freely given to us, valuable to us and we have no guarantee that another moment might be given to us. And yet, that’s the most valuable thing that can be given to us — this moment with all the opportunity that it contains.

What’s really valuable is the opportunity. Opportunity is the gift within every gift. We say that “opportunity knocks only once” , and yet, every moment is a new gift! If you miss the opportunity of this moment, another moment will be given to us. We can avail ourselves of this opportunity or we can miss it.

In essence, we hold the master key to our own happiness in our own hands. Moment by moment, we can be grateful for this gift.

Does that mean that we can be grateful for everything? Certainly not. We cannot be grateful for violence, for war, for oppression, for exploitation. On a personal level we cannot be grateful for the loss of a friend, for unfaithfulness, for bereavement.

Even when we are confronted with something that is terribly difficult, we can rise to the occasion and respond to the opportunity that is given to us. If you analyze it, more often than not what is given to us is the opportunity to enjoy and we miss it because we are rushing through life and not stopping to see the opportunity.

Once in a while, something very difficult is given to us. When this difficulty occurs, it is a challenge to rise to that opportunity. We are given opportunities to suffer, to learn, to stand up for what we believe. Those that make something out of those opportunities are the ones that we admire, that make something out of life. Those who fail….get another opportunity. We always get another opportunity. That is a wonderful richness of life.

How can each of us find a method for living gratefully?

It’s actually what we were taught as children when we were taught to cross the street. Stop, look, go.

How often do we stop? We rush through life. We miss the opportunity because we don’t stop. We have to get quiet and build stop signs into our lives.

The next thing is to look. Open your eyes, ears, nose and all your senses to this wonderful richness that is given to us. That is what life is all about — to enjoy what is given to us. We can also open our hearts for the opportunity to help others. To make others happy because nothing makes us happier than to make all of us happy.

When we open our heart to the opportunities, the opportunities invite us to do something — that is when we go. Go and do whatever life offers you in that present moment.

There is a wave of gratefulness because people are becoming aware of how this can change our world. If you’re grateful, you’re not fearful. If you’re not fearful, you’re not violent.

If you are grateful, you act out of a sense of “enough” and not a sense of scarcity and you’re willing to share.

If you’re grateful, you enjoy the differences between people and you’re respectful to everybody and that changes this power pyramid under which we live.

People are becoming aware that a grateful world is a happy world. We all have the opportunity to stop, look, go and transform.

Heart Revolution

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The Future of Shopping; Brick or Click?

 The pandemic has pushed us to rethink the ways we get our food, shifting from supermarkets to super-local farms and delivery services. Will it stick?

The grocery store was my friend Maria’s happy place. She would head there daily after dropping her kids at daycare, picked up something for dinner, some fruit, a pint of ice cream. Then COVID-19 happened.

Weeks of panic buying, followed by months of empty shelves and long lines, made getting food an experience infused with fear, anxiety and sadness. Now, we all avoid eye contact! As a result, many shoppers changed their buying habits — and that’s what Maria did.

Today, her produce comes from a local farm. A community supported fishery delivers fish, and the smoothies her kids love so much automatically arrive at her door every four weeks. For pantry staples and other grocery store items, she orders from Amazon Prime.

It’s all an effort to make shopping a contactless experience, but it also gave her the push to sit back and reexamine her choices: to purchase from companies and farmers that are doing good in their communities, stay mindful of the environment, and buy local, in-season food when possible. This high-tech, slow-food hybrid means that she gets ingredients that are fresh and delicious, responsibly produced and also “joyfull”, she says!

It wasn’t just Maria that wanted to avoid the crowds. Between March and June, online grocery sales in the U.S. jumped 80% from $4 billion to $7.2 billion — according to grocery analyst firm Brick Meets Click. By June, 22% of U.S. adults were ordering online for delivery or pickup. More producers, like small-scale farms and local growers, began connecting with consumers through e-commerce — functioning as virtual farmer’s markets and, in some cases, selling food once destined for restaurants.

There are pros and cons of shopping this way. It forces you to plan out meals and purchase the things you need in a more thoughtful way. The downside is (you guessed it) cost. To be able to afford the extra delivery fees for grocery orders, prices had to be adjusted.

For many, this luxury is not an option. Before the pandemic began, an estimated 1 in 9 Americans didn’t have access to enough food on a regular basis. That number has skyrocketed during the crisis. The nonprofit Feeding America has seen an increase of 60% in demand at its food banks compared to last year, and 4 in 10 people served between March and June were new to food assistance.

Some subscription services do have charitable arms, like Thrive Market’s Thrive Gives, which uses member donations to subsidize purchases for families in need. Federal nutrition programs such as SNAP , also launched an online program. Retailers are limited, but it’s a step toward making hands-off shopping more accessible to all.

When the pandemic is finally over, there will be some return to normal. Online slow-food shopping will wane as some people make frequent supermarket runs part of their routine again.

But many shoppers, like my friend, discovered that there’s value in supporting smaller, often local businesses — for the food and also for the community.

The Power of Personal Discipline

What comes to mind when you hear the word ‘discipline’? Does it sound restrictive? Does it make you feel like you’re limiting your freedom? Is it best to avoid it?

Earlier in life I used to avoid discipline because it seemed difficult and felt constraining. The issue was that when I was not disciplined, I would end up creating the very things I was trying to avoid.

I learned that the only way to be truly free and creative in my life and work was through the embracing of discipline. When I avoided discipline I created more work and stress in my life.

I found I could bring the best of myself to my work when I met my commitments, when I was organized and when I was diligent. I am at my best when I am willing to do the “right things” even if, especially if, they are difficult. I realized that I was at my most free when I was most disciplined. Discipline is a actually a source of freedom not the opposite of it.

In what areas of your life could you most benefit by applying discipline?

For me, it was exercise. Although, I walk regularly throughout the week, I felt stiff and inflexible many times throughout the workday. I knew I needed to incorporate another type of workout into my day. A workout that didn’t take much more of my time or monetary expense.

After some searching, I came across a 5 minute stretch routine for women over 50 on YouTube. Aside from taking only 5 minutes, I was putting my body through its full range of motion. It put me in the right mindset and I know I am doing my health a huge benefit. After the first few days, I felt calm and centered and really, really good.

It was a simple action that, when done daily and consistently, started to change everything.

I no longer get overwhelmed by the thought of discipline. I just take a simple action and do it consistently and see what happens. Once it becomes a habit, I move to the next and the next, eventually it becomes my autopilot.

I know I have become more of what I am capable of by applying discipline — try it -you won’t regret it.