Young mom car­ry­ing son

Core val­ues… we all have them, whether we acknowl­edge them or not.  So what are yours?  Can you eas­ily tell some­one what your core val­ues are?  Do you design your life around your core val­ues?  Do you live your core values?

Most of us would be able to say “Of course, I know my core val­ues.”  If that is true, then try writ­ing them down.  I think you will dis­cover that when you try to write your core val­ues, it is much harder than expected.  Try also writ­ing how a spe­cific core value man­i­fests in your daily life.  This is a great exer­cise.  How can we expect our chil­dren, spouses, rel­a­tives, employ­ers and friends to “get us” if we are not clear in our own minds about the guid­ing prin­ci­ples we draw upon to make deci­sions.  Think of how much eas­ier it would be to get your kids to under­stand your rules, if they knew your core val­ues.  Think how much eas­ier it would be to inter­act with your spouse or best friend if they knew your core val­ues.  This could be a great con­ver­sa­tion starter.

If you are look­ing for a resource to help you clar­ify your core val­ues, check out the Core Val­ues eCourse.  It is a good tool to get you started.

To add more har­mony to your life, reg­is­ter for a  Strengthen the Har­mony webinar.

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?

As I think about strength­en­ing the har­mony in my life (and in help­ing oth­ers) one of the first things that comes to mind is the mul­ti­ple “hats” we all wear.

In my life, I wear the hat of spouse, mother, grand­mother (of eight and it is the absolute blast), daugh­ter, sis­ter, busi­ness owner, friend, gar­dener, Great Dane and cat care­giver, bird feeder, vol­un­teer and per­pet­ual learner.  Try­ing to fill the role of each of these can be a daunt­ing task.  Main­tain­ing bal­ance across all of them is dif­fi­cult if not impossible.

The Jug­gling Act

If I try to bal­ance all of them, I find myself becom­ing mediocre at some.  Medi­oc­rity across all the roles does not work for me.   It only causes more stress.  What I’ve learned is there is an ebb and flow to the level of my involve­ment in all these roles.  When I have to focus on cer­tain roles, I  remind myself it is OK to put oth­ers “hats” on the shelf for a bit.  (Obvi­ously, you can­not do this with your chil­dren, although you may like to.)  I’ve also learned that there are ways that I can incor­po­rate just a bit of time in my day for cer­tain roles like life-long learner.  I’ve learned to make use of drive time to lis­ten to audio tapes of things that inter­est me.  My car has a trav­el­ing library of audio tapes that I have to move when I put on my “grandma hat” and trade car seats for audio tapes.  I fill my iPod with edu­ca­tional pro­grams, sub­lim­i­nal tapes and med­i­ta­tion pro­grams and lis­ten at night while falling asleep or while I’m trav­el­ing on a air­plane, or walk­ing the dog.

What “hats” do you wear?.  How do you man­age your “hats?’  What tips or tricks have you learned that could help oth­ers?  Please share your thoughts so we all can learn.

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.