To all of you that have left the encour­ag­ing sup­port­ive comments,

“Thank You.”

When I launched Strengthen the Har­mony between Your Life, Fam­ily and Work my instinct and con­sult­ing work with busi­nesses and non­profit orga­ni­za­tions told me there was a need for peo­ple to look at their life from a holis­tic per­spec­tive.  But I had no idea if this would res­onate with read­ers.  Thank you so much for your encourge­ment.  I will con­tinue to write from my heart and hope that the top­ics res­onate with you.

Please feel free to sug­gest ideas for top­ics from your own life.

Thanks again for your sup­port­ive comments

If you are an employee, do you know the core val­ues of the busi­ness or orga­ni­za­tion that you work for?  Do you know the core val­ues of your super­vi­sor?  Of your colleagues?

If you are a busi­ness owner, have you clearly iden­ti­fied the core val­ues of your busi­ness? Have you artic­u­lated them to your employ­ees? And do you insist that the com­pany cul­ture and code of behav­ior reflect those values?

Core val­ues help you get to the root cause of dis­agree­ments and issues that cause stress, con­flict and anx­i­ety in the work­place.  Core val­ues address the root cause instead of solv­ing a symptom.

In my strat­egy con­sult­ing busi­ness, I see lots of peo­ple in orga­ni­za­tions solv­ing symp­toms instead of resolv­ing root causes. The trou­ble with solv­ing a symp­tom is another symp­tom will just sur­face to take its place because the root cause has not been addressed.  This causes more time to be spent on solv­ing another symp­tom tak­ing time away from work­ing on the work of the orga­ni­za­tion.  It also causes more stress, anx­i­ety and dis­sat­is­fac­tion in the work­place. Who needs that?

So if you are feel­ing stress, anx­i­ety or dis­sat­is­fac­tion in the work­place, check in with your core values.

Here’s a lit­tle activ­ity to help you deter­mine if you core val­ues are a good fit with your employer’s.  On a piece of paper, 1.write down your core val­ues. (See post in Your Life.)  2. Write down exam­ples of how each core value is “drawn into play” in your work­place.  3. Write the core val­ues of your employer.  (If you don’t know the core val­ues, check if any are pub­lished on the company’s web­site.  Or ask some­one who might know.)  Then com­pare your core val­ues to the those of the orga­ni­za­tion.  Are they aligned? Are there areas of conflict?

Know­ing if there is align­ment or dif­fer­ences will help you deter­mine if you need to take action to make changes — In your own life or in your workplace.

And if you need a resource to help you clar­ify your core val­ues, check out the Core Val­ues eCourse.  It is a good tool to get you started.

Visit www.StrengthenTheHarmony.com to reg­is­ter for a webi­nar. Or give the Gift of Webi­nar to some­one you care about.

Learn­ing a new skill

In this econ­omy it is more impor­tant than ever to keep your skills up-to-date.  It also is impor­tant to keep learn­ing new skills to keep your­self valu­able and able to han­dle new tasks.

I’ve been expe­ri­enc­ing the roller coaster of learn­ing new skills for the last sev­eral months.  I’m try­ing to become adept at the tech­nol­ogy involved in cre­at­ing and run­ning an online busi­ness.  There have been moments of sheer frus­tra­tion.  And there have been moments of sheer exhil­a­ra­tion.  I’ve learned to insert prod­ucts in my shop­ping cart.  I finally fig­ured out how to cre­ate my own web­site tem­plates.  The long hours of try­ing to under­stand Joomla, Word­Press, Dreamweaver, blogs, squidoos, arti­cle mar­ket­ing, link­ing and much more is finally start­ing to make sense.  I feel like I’m try­ing to learn a for­eign lan­guage and liv­ing in a for­eign coun­try.  I’ve had major melt­downs. I’ve had to walk away from it all to regain my per­spec­tive.  I’ve had cel­e­bra­tions to acknowl­edge mas­ter­ing a task.  I’ve got­ten excited to see arti­cles I’ve sub­mit­ted to direc­to­ries being viewed by web­site and blog editors.

And to my sur­prise, I kept com­ing back to try again and again.  There were many times I thought about just walk­ing away from the frus­tra­tion and expense.  But every time I walk away, I come back, try it again, and make small gains.

So what’s the les­son in this?  Per­sis­tence?  Try and try again?  Don’t give up?  If it is your pas­sion, you will prevail?

What do you think?  What expe­ri­ences have you had as you try to learn a new skill or job? How does the “try­ing” affect the har­mony in your life?

Work­places today are filled with stress. Employ­ers are stressed because of the econ­omy, for­eign com­pe­ti­tion and gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions. Employ­ees are stressed because of the fear of down­siz­ing, com­pe­ti­tion, the loss of their ben­e­fits, inter­ac­tion with their boss and co-workers, or increased workloads.

If stress is intrud­ing on you at work it can:

• Reduce your pro­duc­tiv­ity (which can cause more stress as your boss and co-workers rec­og­nize you are not hold­ing up your end of the job)
• Impact your health in both the short-term (colds, flu, headaches, stom­ach aches etc.)  and long-term if you don’t resolve the stress (car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease, mus­cu­loskele­tal prob­lems, psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­ders, etc.)
• Cause you to be less sat­is­fied with your job
• Affect your rela­tion­ship with your co-workers
• Affect your rela­tion­ships with your family

The first step toward deal­ing with work­place stress is to iden­tify what is caus­ing the stress.  Once know what is caus­ing the stress, you can then work on find­ing a way to resolve it. For me, one thing that causes stress is when I don’t know how to do some­thing.  Usu­ally it involves tech­nol­ogy in some way, shape or form.  One trick I’ve learned is to step away from the task that is stress­ing me.  The sim­ple act of walk­ing away for a few min­utes calms me down and helps me to reframe my mind.  Some­times I have to leave it overnight.

Another trick I’ve learned is to check my “self talk.”  Usu­ally when I’m frus­trated and stressed, I have this unhealthy self ‘talk going on.  “I don’t know why this has to be so hard.”  “How come every­one else gets this and I don’t.”  “I just don’t get it.”  Rec­og­niz­ing the lim­it­ing self-talk and chang­ing it to:  “I can fig­ure this out.”  “I just know I can do this.” or “This is easy and fun.  I can find the infor­ma­tion I need to fig­ure it out.”  has proven over and over that I can con­trol my emo­tions and my stress.

What causes you stress in your work­place?  What tips or tricks have you used to reduce the stress and strengthen the har­mony in your life, fam­ily and work?

Well, the cat is out of the bag.  I know I should be pro­ject­ing this air of pure con­fi­dence, but I think it is impor­tant for the integrity of this blog to reflect what I am actu­ally feel­ing.  Trep­i­da­tion.  Excite­ment.  Amaze­ment that I’ve got­ten this far.

Cross­ing my fingers

Ques­tion­ing why I am not fur­ther. And much, much more. And cross­ing my fingers.

You see, I’m no dif­fer­ent than every­one else who is work­ing on achiev­ing their goals, build­ing the life they desire, and fam­ily har­mony. We all want to reach our goals.  We all want to have the life we dream about.  But I know from my own life that some­times it just feels like “I’m the only one strug­gling with this.” or “Why is this so hard?  Every­one else seems to get it so eas­ily.” or ” How come I am not get­ting what I want as fast as oth­ers get what they want? or “Why do fam­ily or work needs keep tak­ing pri­or­ity over what I want to accomplish?”

Being Authen­tic is Important

I want this blog to be authen­tic and a place where read­ers can find resources that help them on their jour­ney to strength­en­ing the har­mony in their life, fam­ily and work.

You see, I believe that the peo­ple we believe are suc­cess­ful — busi­ness owner, celebri­ties, hap­pily mar­ried folks, etc.  — have all expe­ri­enced their own per­sonal demons and dif­fi­cult times.  They just stuck with it and fig­ured out how to get through and get bet­ter.  That is what this blog is all about.  Help­ing you to get through what­ever is hold­ing you back and get bet­ter at strength­en­ing the har­mony in your life, fam­ily and work.

I don’t know where this jour­ney is tak­ing me.  I only know that I was given the idea — some­how it floated into my head and at least I was wise enough to “hear it.”  Up until now, I have been reluc­tant to truly embrace it and take action to take the idea to the world.

But now I am tak­ing action.  I hope “the world” will wel­come the idea and use the resources to take action in their own lives.

The topic of my sec­ond post (Yea!!  Feel­ing really expe­ri­enced now…) is to explain the pur­pose of this blog.

The  pur­pose  of this blog (StrengthenTheHarmonyBlog.com) is to

Strengthen the Har­mony Workbook

pro­vide arti­cles, resources and of course com­ments from the read­ers about top­ics and ideas that strengthen the har­mony in your life, fam­ily and work.

We all have many things that can cause stress in our lives.  It could be our kids, aging par­ents, work­loads that are increas­ing, finances, rela­tion­ships with our spouse, per­sonal goals that seem to always be out of reach or put on the back burner.  It could be try­ing to revamp our lifestyle to be health­ier or try­ing to learn a new skill (like blog­ging) or set­tling into or out of a job.

Any one of these things can add stress to our life.  Any one of these things can cause us to lose focus. Any one of these things can be the last straw that sends us over the edge. That’s why I finally took the leap.  I finally decided it was time that I put this idea out there.

So what you will find on this blog are arti­cles, ideas, tips and even humor to help you strengthen the har­mony in your life, fam­ily and work. I don’t have the answers.  But I do believe that as we share our thoughts, ideas and sup­port one another, we will dis­cover and uncover answers that will help us strengthen the har­mony in our lives.

I know I sure need more har­mony — espe­cially in the finan­cial area.  Devel­op­ing StrengthenTheHarmony.com, ShopliftingIsStealing.com, Whalen.com and ItStartsWithUs.com has def­i­nitely drained my resources.

I  am cer­tain that by pro­vid­ing qual­ity infor­ma­tion and serv­ing oth­ers, it will be replen­ished.  I’m still look­ing for­ward to the adventure.

This is my very first post on my very first blog.   Wel­come to  StrengthenTheHarmonyBlog.com

Judy Whalen

I finally took the leap, mas­tered the tech­nol­ogy (well, almost mas­tered) and launched this blog.  Let me tell you, it was a leap.   I hear so many peo­ple talk­ing about how they write, read and com­ment on blogs.  I’ve had inter­net mar­ket­ing coaches tell me to just put up a blog and start inter­act­ing with peo­ple.  Well, it seemed to take me more time than most peo­ple.  You see, I needed to develop the strat­egy of how the Strengthen the Har­mony webi­nar and this blog and fit into my over­all busi­ness.  In my offline world (whalen.com), I am a con­sul­tant work­ing with busi­nesses and non­prof­its to help them develop strate­gies to be suc­cess­ful.  So I needed time to get the strat­egy piece to come together.  But I also needed time to con­vince myself that I could mas­ter the tech­nol­ogy and learn the inter­ac­tion piece. You see I am “old school.”   My pro­fes­sional life started long before com­put­ers were on every desk or before you could research your mar­ket­place or get feed­back from your cus­tomer by “tweet­ing.”   Back in those days we devel­oped elab­o­rate plans about get­ting feed­back.  Today you get feed­back instan­ta­neously.  So that is the leap!   I am jump­ing off the “old school bus” and hop­ping on the “new school bus.”   I’m open­ing myself and my ideas up for com­ments and instan­ta­neous response.   I have to be hon­est, I have a bit of trep­i­da­tion.  But noth­ing ven­tured, noth­ing gained.  So here I go.…. Wel­come to the Strengthen the Har­mony blog.  I look for­ward to this adventure.