Young Man (YM): Master, how long will it take for me to achieve enlightenment?
Gautama Buddha (GB): It all depends on you.
YM: If I put in ten hours of meditation every day, how long will it take?
GB: Maybe ten years.
YM: What if I put in fifteen hours meditation?
GB: Maybe fifteen years.
YM: (getting irritated) What if I meditate for twenty hours?
GB: Maybe twenty five years.
YM: I cannot understand your logic! The more effort I put in the more time it will take ….this is ridiculous! Please explain.
GB: As long as you are fixated and obsessed about your goal you will not achieve it. Just do spiritual practice without one eye on the goal. Let events take their shape.

I was reminded of this story when I saw a TV interview of Nobel Laureate, V Ramakrishnan, an Indian American. The new laureate was the very epitome of humility and one of his statements was eye opening. He said that he embarked on his research, not out of a desire to win laurels but out of curiosity to solve a scientific problem. He was not working with one eye on the Nobel Prize.

My understanding of life is that the things we desire most: money, power, status etc are best left to shape themselves. What we must keep as our main goal, is best exemplified by what a friend of mine, told his young sons. He told them, “It does not matter what you do in life. I request you to aspire to be the very best in terms of excellence in whatever you do. If you choose to be a janitor, try and become the best janitor in town.”

In other words, excellence ought to be our ideal and everything else ought to be a side effect.

Now that we are talking about outstanding Indians, readers might like to know about another illustrious Indian American who figures among the people of excellence in his chosen field. He is Dr.V Ramachandran, an outstanding neuroscientist. He is respected all over the world on account of his pioneering work in understanding the human mind. What is striking about him, apart from his commitment to excellence, is his humility. He travels frequently to India to meet his aged parents at his humble home in Chennai. My friends tell me that he can be spotted sitting in his verandah sporting a lungi and banian, sipping kaapi (coffee) and reading The Hindu paper. He is known to be accessible to anyone who chooses to meet him.

That raises another point. It is time that our media gives extensive coverage to those among us who have excelled (not necessarily in financial terms) so that they might inspire youngsters to not only aspire for world class efforts but to imbibe the personal qualities that go into the making of a Nobel Laureate namely: curiosity, vision, sustained endeavour, without an eye on the perquisites and of course….humility.

Busy? Get in line.

If I ever tell you that, “I’m so sorry that I’ve been too busy to…” then I’ll pay $500 bucks to your favourite charity and get you a year’s supply of Haagen Dazs bars. Of course I’m busy. That’s life. That’s my life. That’s most people’s lives. Grown up humans tend to be…busy. Add kids, or business start ups, or illness into the mix and you have…much more of life to be busy about.

“I’m just so busy,” is the typically gasping, rushed, whiny refrain that’s become a contemporary anthem. It doesn’t make us look more important, it makes us look just-this-side-of-frazzled. It’s typically used as a lite apology, an excuse, a duck-out, as if your Life Master is making you do stuff that you don’t want to do. Even as a well-intended social pleasantry, “Sorry, I’ve been busy,” has a little victim ring to it.

Whatever is on your plate got there because you said yes to it – in the fullness of ambition and desire and wanting to eat life whole. Sometimes we take on to-do’s and commit to climb mountains because our soul demands it. Sometimes life throttles us with unforeseen and unrelenting demands. Sometimes busyness is the result of keeping up with the Joneses. Busy can be good. Busy can be bad. Busy is most often a choice.

The “busier than our predecessors…age of technology…workaholic culture,” argument. I don’t buy it. Yes, we appear to be more compulsive, less nuclear, and surviving on less sleep than the pioneers, but their lives were just as packed. They were extremely busy planting potatoes and raising barns, and surviving from sunup to sundown (they got more sleep than we do on average because they didn’t have the luxuries that light bulbs afford, and they did more physically exhausting work.) The fifties housewife was just as busy. Before eco-evil but ever-so-handy tools like disposable diapers, the Swifer and microwaves, June Cleaver had to work it.

“Sorry, I’ve been busy,” is often used to appease busy-bodies – the kind of people who email you to double check if you got their email from yesterday, or their thank you note.

So what do you tell ‘em when you’re late? When you can’t fit another moment into your daytimer, when you have to send regrets, or pass on a sweet opportunity? Tell them the truth. Report on life, rather than whining about it. Deliver it with ease or with pride if you’re inclined. “Been in five cities in four weeks. The kids all had the flu. It’s tax season, you know.” Let people meet you in your clear truth rather than your apologetic panic.

And sometimes, many times, you don’t need to excuse yourself at all. Just show up. Present and accountable, full of life and its demands. We all understand.

CREATIVE PRODUCTIVITY THAT WORKS FOR BOTH ARTISTES & A-TYPE PERSONALITIES:

1. APPROACH EVERYTHING AS A CREATIVE OPPORTUNITY. There is no separation between life and work. The same opportunities to express yourself or get great ideas are at the dinner table, in the stock exchange, and on the subway. Put yourself out there.

2. OBSESSION IS ESSENTIAL. Know your art and your science. Immerse yourself in the cultures you love and work in: read industry news, the teachings of spiritual masters and successful entrepreneurs, listen to what the people you serve are longing for, asking for, and leaning toward.

To foster obsession:

3. Read a LOT of magazines. And then read some more – about things related and unrelated to your work, Scientific American and Vogue, Dwell and Rolling Stone. Magazines are intensified viewpoints that can expand your perspective in just a few pages.

4. Create a style file or inspiration box of stuff that you love. Photos, articles, fabric swatches, postcards. I have an antique sake box filled with strange and lovely stuff. Sometimes I close my eyes and reach in to see what comes up – an Elvis coaster, a Zen koan torn from a divinity school program, an old essay or concert ticket.

5. Watch dox. I’m a documentary-phile (always looking for versions of the truth,) which gives me all sorts of weird, tragic, breathtaking imagery, inspiration, and facts to work with.

6. Engage with people that you don’t hangout with. Ask them big questions. Ask the cab driver what crazy stuff he’s seen as a cab driver, ask your friend’s teenager what they think about the future, ask your bank teller what it’s like to work with money all day.

To keep moving forward:

7. GIVE UP QUICKLY. If something feels like a drag and is not generating the right response – drop it like a hot potato. As Seth Godin says in his book, The Dip, “Fail fast.”

In order to give up quickly, you have to…

8. COURAGEOUSLY EXPRESS YOUR FEELINGS. When something feels very wrong, totally uninspiring, say so – to yourself and your team. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you give up, it may spin you off into a better solution.

So that you can:

9. STICK WITH IT. If something feels fun, glimmering, exciting, and even one person has expressed wanting it from you – explore every angle about how to make it work.

And be assured that:

10. BACKWARDS IS FORWARDS. Know that there is no such thing as waste. A painted canvas that didn’t turn out, a pilot group that fizzled, it’s all useful. I trash stuff and start from scratch often. Sometimes, especially in terms of web development, you start knowing that you’ll have to scrap half of what you build down the road – starting over is never really starting over. It’s life.

Which allows you to:

11. CELEBRATE OTHER PEOPLE’S CREATIVITY AND PROSPERITY. Honoring other people’s creativity and success helps shake loose our own brilliance. Whether it’s a hot website, a terrific outfit on the street, or a well known author – go out of your way to say, “You’re great!” “Way to go!” “I love what you’ve created.”

And then keep on creating for yourself. Ever so productively.

It’s tricky stuff because I’m also deeply private. I ask more questions than I answer. I struggle with privacy issues and interruptions make me mental. Most of the time, I prefer to be invisible. And yet I’m very upfront about the fact that, vocationally speaking, I’ll be thrilled to be a household name someday. I consider contradictions a hobby.

When your persona starts to wag your person, you’ve got trouble.

So with all that introvert-extrovert creative tension I have to keep my persona in check. And it occurred to me that ever so subtly, I might be setting myself up to hide behind my brand. That I might be creating products and images that hemmed me in in the future. And while good branding makes for good commerce, it can be a real drag for freeing your art.

When I changed my Twitter name last week from @whitehottruth to @daniellelaporte I got some questions. (If you tweet, twit, twitter, then you know that your twitter handle is a very big deal.) @stephendavis02 wanted to know if my name was taken before and just got freed up? @ealvarezgibson wondered if my account had been hijacked. When @chrisguillebeau asked what was up, I told him I just got out of the witness protection program.

Names are hugely important. And yeah baby, White Hot Truth is damn sexy. That’s why I named my site that. But I’m not my site. Or my books. Or the stuff I make.

As Paula Cole puts it:

I am not the person who is singing
I am the silent one inside
I am not the one who laughs at people’s jokes, I just pacify their egos.
I am not my house, my car, my songs
those are only stops along they way
I am like the winter
I’m a dark cold female
with a golden ring of wisdom in my cave.

Okay, that’s a bit dramatic. But so am I. Stay with me.

3 KEYS TO GENUINE BRANDING…or UN-BRANDING. YOUR CHOICE.

1. Keep it pointed to where you want it to go. What do you want to be known for next year, and for years after that? If Twyla Tharp were on Twitter I think she’d go by twylatharp, not “creativehabit.” @EckhartTolle tweets, and he’s not “PowerOfNow”. Think like a legend.

2. Live artfully. I couldn’t bare to lock myself into a “brand” that I felt restricted by. I’ve done that and it hurts. A lot. I want to live like as an artist and it’s the “designer” kind of business model that works best for me. Donna Karan is “Donna Karan”. That leaves her free to do cashmere, fragrances, and Urban Zen. Keep your essence at the helm and you can’t go wrong.

3. Walk proud. Take deep breaths when you need to – it’s not always easy being authentic. Within a day of changing my Twitter name I got all strange and unsettled about it. Zoinks. Was that a bad move? Are my re-tweets going to plummet? I emailed my (amazing) virtual assistant and asked her if I’d screw up anything by reversing it…then quickly emailed her back and told her to ignore me.

Learning to trust that you’re enough, without a gimmick or a sidekick or a discount offering takes some faith and practice.

If you’re selling widgets or scaling a company that you want to sell off someday, then packaging is paramount. If you’re selling your soul – in the best possible way, remember that a little theatre goes a long way, but you still need to show up on stage as the real you. And when you do, applause will follow.

I am guilty of having been caught in the urgent versus important trap for many years, before I realized what an amazingly beguiling and addictive behavior this is and most importantly how completely useless and unproductive such an orientation can be.

Let me share this little secret and hope this helps you in your life and more importantly helps you in becoming more effective and successful.

Urgency is an emotion. The online MacMillan dictionary defines it as “the feeling of wanting something very much or wanting it immediately”. It can also be called as a pressure of necessity. But, is it usually a necessity? Urgency in most cases is externally driven and is a state of mind created by demands, pressures, timelines, etc. I am not saying that there is nothing called as urgent or that it is a mirage. When one is choking or someone is experiencing a heart attack, there can be no mistake, remedial measures are urgently required.

However, in most cases, the urgency one experiences or sees another person going through is externally induced and can definitely be handled more effectively if one weren’t responding blindly or in haste.

Importance on the other hand is an underlying fact. Usually it is long term and requires much thought and lot of effort to accomplish an important task or achievement. An obvious example is one’s health. We all know it is important and the bedrock of almost everything we do in life. Yet, the urgency of several external factors tends to make us neglect and ignore this important thing till it becomes a problem and turns into being urgent as well as important.

This brings me to the third dimension, urgent and important. Some things are such and usually require priority attention. Unfortunately most of us are never taught to understand this concept and apply appropriate responses. Therefore, our responses are usually prioritized based on external stimuli and therefore urgent things usually take front seat while some important things tend to get ignored till they either lose their relevance or become urgent and important.

I can go on and on about how this lack of clarity sabotages several facets of a persons life. Suffice to say that the sooner one learns to differentiate between urgent and important and prioritize accordingly, the better their lives would be.

A simple tool to do this is to plot urgency and importance on two sides of a table. One would get four quadrants –
Urgent but not Important
Urgent and Important
Important but not Urgent
Neither Urgent nor Important
Situations in quadrant 1 and 4 can easily distract a person, steal productive time, and end up creating larger problems over a period of time if given undue importance and focus. Unfortunately, this often happens because this is usually externally influenced and often by someone in a position of authority or power. Take a simple example. A student is writing an exam and the invigilator keeps shouting out that only so many minutes are left. This sense of urgency often leads the student to miss out on some important thing in the haste to complete. This happens quite often in most work situations. Over a period of time important things tends to get neglected as everyone keeps tackling urgent tasks and slips into being reactive instead of proactive.

So, next time someone comes up and tell you that something is urgent, pause and think before rushing off into action.

Anything that we do or embark upon is predicated on three elements: Time, Competency and Energy or Capability. For anyone to manage any task successfully these three elements should be aligned and balanced in such a way that there is no conflict and they seamlessly integrate to produce the desired results. In most cases one or more of these elements are either ignored or assumed to be adequate. Let me illustrate with a simple example. Supposing someone decided to travel between two cities in a car and agreed to complete the journey in an hour then he/she would require two other variables namely driving skills and a competency to navigate the journey as also the energy in terms of the driver’s energy and capability to drive as also the car’s capability to complete the journey within the said time.

Supposing the driver was not competent or did not know the road or perhaps the car was not in a good condition and would stop every so often, the objective of completing the journey in an hour becomes a burden. In this context, racing against the time limit of one hour becomes increasingly stressful till some of the existing capabilities or competency is also compromised. Under stress the driver takes a wrong turn or pushes the car too hard and it breaks down.

Regardless, one is always racing against a time limit and never against time. Time marches along in solitary splendor, gathering everyone’s efforts on the way and leaving behind the success or failures in its wake.

Is there a better way to manage this race?

Of course there is. The alternative is to be realistic in balancing the three variables mentioned above and ensuring that each of them is optimally poised to form perfect balance. But, first it starts with accepting realistic time limits. For that to happen, one needs to be aware of one’s capabilities, competencies, strengths and more importantly weaknesses. In other words, one needs to know his/her true self and not be carried away by the image one projects to the outside world.

When one balances these elements successfully and works towards maximizing each of these elements, then the whole thing works in perfect harmony. Time is utilized well. Competencies and capabilities are directed towards productive use. Energy is directed towards achieving success. One should not assume that I am advocating complacency. I am not. All I am saying is when one works with a well balanced mix towards an optimum time limit, success has a higher probability. Repeated success creates a success formula and then one tends to learn how to stretch themselves and grow.

Time management has more to do with managing one’s capabilities, competencies and expectations than managing time by itself. The best time management exercise is to be aware of time and respect its absoluteness and align other variables to better leverage this powerful factor.

Commandment One:   Live by the power of gratitude

Gratitude is one of the best ways to live a complete life. Gratitude is by far the most powerful positive emotion that is filled with energy to negate all ill & negative feelings in us. Just take a conscious effort to focus on filling our mind and heart with gratitude – there is no end to what we can be grateful for – you can be grateful to God, to nature, to our parents, our loving kids, our siblings, to our boss, our co-workers, to a handful of people who touched upon our life today, everyday, and possibly even in this very minute.

Think of what and who you can be grateful for, everyday when you wake up in the morning, and you will see the quality of the day improve. It is such a huge contrast to waking up grudgingly for some mean reason, or even no reason.

A thanksgiving state of mind gives you a rush of adrenalin for your mind and body! Make sure you practice conscious gratitude from now!, and you will have the most powerful fuel that will propel your life-rocket to happiness and success!

Commandment Two: Avidly visualize what you want from Life.

Imaging is the most powerful tool in creating a life of your choice. It has worked wonders to all those who have attained unparalleled success and happiness in any vocation they chose to be in! Imaging anything you chose to have and wish to be, and no sooner will you see your vision turning into reality! Sustained visualization gets etched in the subconscious after a certain period of time, and after that the power of the subconscious takes over the actual process of creation of reality as imaged.

Practice dynamic visualization – Imagine what you seek in all the color, shade, be in that situation which is the final outcome – be in the midst of your happy family, in that great getaway, in that CEO job – make the image as dynamic, interactive and colorful, and as real as it can get in your mind.  After time, you will see the same in absolute reality and even the colors and shades you created in mind will come to existence.

Combine imaging with gratitude well in advance – gratitude to the cosmic universe to giving all that your want – and you are in the pathway to a great, happy, and successful life – all of which as exactly as you wanted!

Commandment Three: Have you mission statement written.

It is a misplaced notion that only organizations and corporations of the world need to have mission statements written. Individuals – you and me – must write down mission statements for our life, and these statements must be the raison d etre of Life.

Writing down such a statement is not something that is done in a huff. A considerable amount of thought must go into the exercise, and the statement shall clearly articulate the prime intents of what we expect in the journey of life.

There is no age barrier for this – if you are twenty or fifty, such a mission statement brings in a huge sense of direction to what we do. It brings in a sense of purpose, and also makes us set goals towards achieving what is stated in the mission statement.

The mission statement is also dynamic, and can be worked on, after time frames – it can be modified with the times, as long as the core message is in tact – for example, if ‘providing everything for a happy family’ is the mission, the broader statement can encompass anything that serves this mission. The mission can be anything to do with various facets of life – personal, family, money, growing up children, running a business – anything that touches life, and living.

Commandment Four: Link your mission to Goals in Life

Goals are very important to keep life filled with positive action. Like the flowing water in the stream is fresh, the blood of life is fresh when you keep moving towards goals you set for yourself. And these goals are so potent when they are linked to the mission of our life.

Life is fun only when there are goals to it! Living without goals, is just vegetable existence, and it leads to boredom which takes the verve and fun out of life. Goals can be either qualitative or quantitative. And it is good to have a mix of qualitative and quantitative goals. Being happy and Staying positive is, for example qualitative, and reaching a professional position, earning x amount of money, is quantitative as well.

When there are written goals in place – be it personal, professional, monetary, family or whatever – we tend to work around those goals, which bring in so much of direction and power to our life.  It is important to have goals for all areas of life, and not just one part of life – that leads to imbalance, and creates pressure on only a few areas.

Life is all about being well-balanced, aimed at being happy, contended, and achieving a few things which we need to; goals facilitate that.

The happiest, contended and successful people are those who have written goals, and worked to make the goals come to reality.

A combination of having a purposeful mission, with goals, and avid imagination makes life so much purposeful and positive.

Commandment Five: Manage YOU well, and manage time well.

It is oft-stated: All of us have the same amount of time in disposal. Yet, we all keep blaming ‘not having enough time’ to do things that are most important. In reality, there is nothing like managing time – what we need to manage is ourselves, and the activity we do.

If we decide to do what is most important in getting to our goals and being happy, and staying positive all the time, the seemingly humongous task to managing the time-monster is so easy… Focus on accomplishment and not activity. Cut off all the time wasters from your schedule – needless talk, bickering, mindless TV watching, useless internet activity – just do a little analysis on how you spend time, and you will see so much time spent on ‘time-eaters’ in your life.

Packing the schedule full of work and no fun is no better self management.  To repeat, the goal of life is to be happy, joyful, and not to carry stress and sorrow to the grave. Sprinkle your schedule with a mix of work, fun, family time, social time- built around the broad goals of life.

Once this is done, managing YOU gets better, and managing time falls in place.

Commandment Six: Never spend a moment worrying.

It has been seen that the biggest time waster and the single most deterrent to a happy life is the worry habit – worrying about this thing or that thing, big or small, important or trivia, and sometimes even being worried about nothing at all..! So much time and energy is expended in this habit, knowing well that it is sheer waste of time and energy, and moreover, something that saps the positivity in each of us.

The easiest thing to kill this worry habit is action… when you start wasting even a minute worrying as a habit, just change the pattern and do something… Contrast the worry pattern by a loud laugh, a kick on the wall, a hit on the punch bag, or just something that sets you in motion.

Just resolve that you will never ever waste time by worrying. This is one of the most definitive things you can do to live a happy and successful life. And not just that – your family, friends, co-workers – anyone who is in your circle of influence and concern will feel joy and happiness radiating out of you.

Follow these 6 commandments, and you will see the difference in the quality of your life… now and always.

Writing and jamming all day, I need to to wrest my eyes from words and the screen. Even if I’m writing fluidly or fire starting with a fellow entrepreneur, I crave little bits of beauty like I crave milk chocolate at about 3:00 pm everyday. Visual beauty quenches and cools the part of my brain that is usually on warp drive. A luscious image makes my cells go “ahhhh.” We forget to brake for beauty. She’s rarely on our to-do list. But she makes all the difference in the day.

5 ON-LINE GORGEOUSNESS SNACKS. EAT SOME DAILY.

1. The flower mandalas by psychotherapist and photographer David J. Bookbinder make my heart still. Absolutely mesmerizing: flower mandala photos {be sure to click “color” on LEFT tool bar} Bookbinder’s blog on Beliefnet.
2. Coolhunter is so damn cool that I can hardly stand it.
3. My favourite new artist is Cheryl Sorg. I’m wild about text art, and butterflies, and neutral palettes. The preciousness and intensity of her work is staggering. I have two pieces of hers en route to me and I can’t wait to hang them above our mantle. She’s also allowing me to play with a fantastic line drawing of some flames for the cover of my book-in-progress (also called…yep…White Hot Truth.)
4. Impeccable Beyoncé, choreography by supreme Goddess attitude: Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) Video. When you’re this frickin’ hot you don’t need any props.
5. One of my favourite Canadian abstract painters: Patricia Larsen.
ahhhhh.

Ideally, like all wheels, the line joining all the rating points needs to form a circle. The smoother the circle, the more well balanced it is. The more jagged the outline is, the less of a balance is there in the work-life situation. Of course one could still have a balanced wheel but one which is small and might want to enlarge it. In other words, one might want to achieve more in all facets of life. However, care should be taken to ensure that there is overall progression otherwise the balance would be lost.

Once I finished explaining this, this person exclaimed that this method was used often to analyze issues in the office. This set me thinking. We all go through life learning new skills on a regular basis. Then for most, the learning falls by the wayside or is used only in certain instances. An obvious example is the vast number of people in management who learn and practice skills like time management, communication skills, team building, etc. on a daily basis. However, these are usually packed away safely in a briefcase or laptop bag the minute one leaves the office.

In their personal lives these skills are rarely used! I wonder why?

Is it because these are taught in the context of business and work and individuals are confused on how to apply them to their personal lives? Or is there an implied expectation that personal and family life would take care of itself, while work and colleagues need to be managed! Whatever be the reason, this is absurd. I have seen experienced finance professionals whose personal finances are in a mess, renowned leaders of large teams whose children don’t seem to find any common connect with them, and so on.

My view is that as individuals we need to access and inventory each skill that we have as an invaluable asset. Just like how no asset is left to idle and waste away but instead deployed to maximize returns, similarly each skill needs to be used extensively. A simple idea would be to prepare an inventory of skills/competencies and then prepare a listing of all possible areas to apply the same in personal and professional arenas. Once done, this inventory needs to be referred to regularly to ensure that each skill is being utilized in every possible situation and scenario. Needless to say, the inventory would require frequent review and updates.

My guess is that such an approach might not only help bring better balance and well-being in the varied facets of a person’s life, but actually help hone their skills and make them better for it! There are some who might say that this practice would rob personal relationships of their spontaneity and warmth. Maybe, maybe not. But, even that can be managed by using the right sets of skills.

1. What do people thank you for most often? What do they come to you for, or say about you most frequently {“positive” or “negative”}?

Gratitude leads you back to your strengths. The greatest leverage you have for a return on investment is by investing in your natural talents and using them generously.

2. When do you feel powerful, on fire, free, incredibly useful? What do you get excited by?

True and sustainable success is fueled by pure inspiration. Always.

3. When someone at a party asks you what you do, what do you say? {And how do you feel when you say it?}

With truth comes grace and healthy pride … and every entrepreneur needs a slam dunk cocktail line.

4. What do you think your form of genius is, what are you amazing at {work or life related?}

Everybody is amazing at something — whether it’s being a loyal friend, crunching numbers, motivating people or throwing great parties. {And your genius is a cousin to your joy.}

It was at that time that the industrial revolution took us from farms and craft work to “jobs” in the factory. It completely changed our daily lives. It made traditional crafts obsolete and undermined the time-honored ways of interweaving home and work life.

We are now facing another shift — just as transforming. With so much change in our economy and technology, old job descriptions are blurred and organizations must be able to adapt and change on a dime. Old style jobs get in the way of this new world of work in which temporary and contract jobs often make the most economic sense.

What’s happening as a result is that many people feel betrayed. No longer can you count on a job for life or a paternalistic relationship with your employers. Your sense of security has been shaken. So how can you best deal with this? Let’s just take a look at some of the possibilities of how your work may look in the future:

- you can start a business of your own
- you can become a consultant
- you can become an artist
- you can work part-time
- you can create a “portfolio” career performing two or more types of work
- you can work with organizations on a full-time basis under very fluid arrangements with your tasks and working hours and location changing with each project

There are plenty of opportunities that come with this societal change. There are many more career choices open to you. Many of you have shifted your priorities so that you now want more family time or flexibility in your time, the ability to make a difference in your community, the chance to be your authentic self in your work. These options are more available now.

To effectively manage your career you must:

(1) Embrace the concept that everyone is a contingent worker – your employment is contingent on the results the organization can achieve from your work.

(2) Develop a mindset, and way of managing your career, that is more like an external vendor than that of a traditional employee.

(3) Expect to move from organization to organization more frequently than in the past.

Have you experienced this in your own work life? Do you feel prepared for this change in our society and work? Is there any goal you’d like to set to be more prepared?

Know that you are truly in charge of your destiny – why not create a work life you can love?

Sri Paramahansa Yogananda, the author of ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’, aptly describes this balanced state as being “Actively Calm & Calmly Active”.

Some of the tell-tale signs of a rising stress level are:

• Local tensing of muscles,
• Shallow and rapid breathing with some rise in pulse rate,
• Decrease in focus,
• Reduction in happiness level,
• A nagging feeling of moodiness, grumpiness, negativity and hyper-criticism against others or life in general, etc.

Whenever these happen, we can do some of these:

1. Take a break for 5-10 minutes

This is investing time to eventually save time, because you will come back to work smarter  with more focus. Take deep breaths (abdominally i.e. diaphragmatically), stretch up, have a glass of water, or fruit juice or hot soup (avoid too much tea/coffee), tense all body muscles in a wave and then relax, etc.

2. Exercise every day

Before coming to office, exercise either intensely (heavy sweating) for 20 minutes, moderately (light sweating) for 30 minutes, or gently (series of light stretches) for 40 minutes. For people who have not had regular workouts, moderately is the best; for those who choose to exercise gently everyday, moderate to intense workout twice a week are desirable, but while we can customize our exercise, regularity is always the key.

3. Enjoy your work

Bring your whole heart to it. To work only for salary is a kind of slavery, we must also work for joy and with creativity. While working, be sincere but not serious. Keep smiling and do your best.

4. Manage your time well and prioritize

When with spouse/kids/parents, give your whole attention to them and while working in office, be focused on work, but have no resistance if you have to switch roles suddenly, say because of a phone call. This living in ‘now’, and acceptance-driven gliding between roles, will create a dynamic work-life balance. Mismanagement of time, work-life imbalance, and stress, feed on each other.

5. Mindful eating

We become what we eat and think, so let us choose carefully. Choosing thoughts takes a long practice; choosing foods also needs some mastery over habits hard-wired into our brains and the slavery to taste buds, but with a healthy self-love and care, it is do-able. Never skip your breakfast. Make your last meal of the day two hours before sleep. Eat fresh fruits, seasonal greens, sprouts, almonds, etc. Don’t drink too much water with/immediately after the meals, but any amount an hour later. Drink plenty of water the first thing in the morning.

6. Tame your ego

We all have ego, it is our body-identified lower self-awareness. One can never be completely free from awareness of the self, but it can evolve from the small ‘I’ which limits our consciousness to ‘me’ and ‘mine’, to the big ‘I’ which includes all. Taming ego smoothens relationships. We don’t need any self-mortification here, no need to give up our assertiveness – we don’t have to become a doormat or a vegetable, but we just need to respect others as we respect ourselves, and appreciate their point of view. Our behavior reflects our attitude; our attitude reflects in turn the centering of our consciousness.

7. Learn & practice yoga

Some pranayama (yogic breathing techniques to manage and balance the prana or life force) followed by meditation, will effectively manage stress like nothing else. Pray before and after meditation, and pray for others also.

–

Hans is a chemical engineer  who  worked in sales/marketing for 28 years.  Thereafter, for the last 8 years, he has been a motivational speaker, yoga coach and corporate trainer. In his personal life, he has been practicing yoga-meditation for close to 25 years.

To begin with, the expression itself is a misnomer. Work is a part of life, how can we balance a part with the whole and is it not vain and futile to even try to do that? What is actually aimed at is a work life-personal life balance.

But even that becomes unnecessary when we have the right attitudes, rooted in right values, which create right perceptions. We do not need to get the happy balance in our lives, we merely have to remove the unhappy imbalance that is there in our minds. Stephen Covey knows it when he says, ‘the way we look at the problems, is the problem’.

Imagine senior managers being taken out to some natural resort and made to play some childish games, to develop team-spirit; or people writing slogans to develop the so-called work-life balance! We should realize that so long as people do not get along with themselves (which they won’t until they take time to know and like themselves), they can never get along well with others.

It is all about self-awareness. It is also a major clue to the problem of rising attrition. Nor is this balance about distributing hours. With long working hours topped by an insane commuting time, how many hours can be spent with family anyway? But love and care are matters of hearts, not just hours; two people can stay together for a life time and remain strangers. The key is, where quantity is lacking, quality can surely compensate.

Let us remember that it is not how long we work that stresses us, it is the reluctance with which we look at it and our inability to enjoy it with a happy role-playing detachment. Like the ocean in turmoil at the surface but calm and serene deep down, our outer activity has to be anchored in an inner tranquillity. Our technology is giving us a crazy speed; the inner sense of direction has to keep pace with it.

Unless we learn to do that, even our personal life, which we are trying to side with, in the name of work-life balance, will be a stressor – like at workplace, we shall have conflicts in personal life as we already do. Then, where shall we go? Are we solutioning or escaping ? Unless we have balance in our values, balance in our mental attitudes, there can be no balance in our lives. We indeed become what we think. Unless we choose balance in our thoughts and aspirations, i.e. within us, how is there going to be one outside? We indeed live ‘inside out’.

Work, like love, is probably the most beautiful expression of life – rightly done, it can be liberating. That can happen only when we bring our heart to our work and enjoy what we do – no matter how modest it may be; that’s when the barriers between work and family will melt away; conflicts may occasionally surface but they will always be manageable for a mind that is anchored within.

Life, my master taught me, is a joyous battle of duty and at the same time a passing dream. We take our roles too seriously, with a crippling sense of doership, so we fail to play them well. To consider work and personal life as opposites, and then try to balance them out, is a fallacy. It defeats itself.

We must stop working like slaves merely slogging for livelihood, which will inevitably happen when we work just for money. Money is not evil, but to work for money alone, certainly is. With that attitude there can neither be happiness at workplace, nor in personal life, nor can there be any way for a balance between these two negativities.

Work life and personal life are complementary to each other, not opposites. We do not need to balance them; we need to balance our minds. Cheers!

–

Hans is a chemical engineer  who  worked in sales/marketing for 28 years.  Thereafter, for the last 8 years, he has been a motivational speaker, yoga coach and corporate trainer. In his personal life, he has been practicing yoga-meditation for close to 25 years.

Phew. Not that simple.

But you can make the concept of having an appropriate work/life balance a lot easier to get your hands around by asking yourself three simple questions:

1. What’s important to me in my life? A certain level of physical fitness is more important to some people than others, for example. A need for quality child care, or flexible works hours, may be crucial for working parents. We walk around with ideas about what’s important to us in our heads, but until we stop to put them down on paper, and get clear on our life priorities, assessing the current state of your work-life balance is difficult.

2. Does my current position meet my needs? It might – you may not have explored enough to know for sure. (Seriously. When’s the last time you really read through your company’s Employee Handbook? Like, never?) To go along with examples cited above, does your company (or its health plan) offer a gym membership benefit? Can you telecommute, get on-site child care, work 4/40 or 9/80 schedules, or start and end your days earlier?

3. What’s it worth to you? If your job can’t meet the needs you say are important, you need to ask yourself the hard questions, all of which boil down to the “What’s it worth?” idea. It’s a gut check – “Do I really need it? Do I need it so much that I’m willing to start a job search to find a company that can meet the need?”

Unfortunately, this isn’t easy for everyone, and people get tied up by the expectations the important people in their lives – whether those expectations are stated outright or just assumed.

But this is what it boils down to – get clear on what matters, and everything about your work situation comes into focus. And by default, everything about your life situation comes into focus, too.

And that’s “balance” for you.

————————

Allen Voivod is the Chief Blogger for ResumeMachine.com, the leading resume distribution resource for managers, executives, and professionals looking to accelerate their job search results. Get the attention of thousands of hiring agents with the largest and most frequently updated recruiter database on the web, and dive into a wealth of immediately useful career articles and blog posts – all at http://www.ResumeMachine.com !