Two articles that I read recently, one at ZenHabits and a speech shared with me by a fellow Volunteer Alison, showed me that I'm definitely not facing that challenge alone. All of us have the challenge of work in front of us everyday. We get to decide our attitude and perspective every moment, every week, and it's important to face that consciously.
In Leo's article on Work-Life Balance, he makes some good suggestions and my favorite two are: build your skills to prepare for leaving work and remember you are not your work. The first one requires daily attention to the fact that we should always be learning, growing and changing as our world and the job market changes. As we expand our abilities and skills, we become more valuable to our current job and future work as well. What are you doing and learning today that helps you be where you want to be in the future?
The second revolves around the idea that our job is what we do, but not who we are. We are family members, friends, people. Those roles require a lot of attention too, exercise, good nutrition, time alone together with people we love. That's easy to lose sight of.
In fact, it wasn't until a few days ago after I read the commencement speech that Alison shared with me that I realized I had already drifted too far myself. I had started to look at work, walking in the cold, and many other things as sources of stress rather than incredible opportunities to do things that I love to do. The speech doesn't really have a title, but I like calling it This is Water and you can read it in full here.
It's easy to lose focus, but I'm very grateful to friends and resources that allow me to stay positive and centered every day. Thank you all very much, I hope these reminders might be helpful to you as well.
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