When I Grow Up...Written by Myrtis Smith
One of my favorite commercials was an ad for Monster.com. It showed fresh-faced kids looking into camera and sharing their dreams for future. We're accustomed to kids saying they want to be a doctor, or an astronaut, or a ballerina, but instead these kids said, "When I grow up, I want to be a brown nose," and "When I grow up, I want to be in middle management" and "When I grow up, I want to be a yes-man." The kids are so cute and their answers are so absurd you can't help but laugh. But looking at your own life, can you still laugh? Or are you on verge of crying, because you are stuck in middle management, you have a brown nose, and you are definitely a yes-man (or woman). Kids have a distinct advantage over most adults: they are free to dream. If a 10 year old says "I want to be a doctor," everyone smiles and says "You can do it. You can be anything you want to be." If a 40 year old mother of three says "I want to be a doctor," most of people around her will likely say "Go back to school at your age? Where will you find money? Do you have any idea how long that will take?" What's wrong with that picture?
| | Destressing The StressWritten by Steve Pilkington
I want to say this up front and be emphatically clear. Stress is a self-induced state of mind and not brought on by external forces.Most of us believe that stress is created by negative outside stimuli, when in fact just opposite is true. Stress is brought on by how we think about forces we perceive to be acting upon our lives. For example, if you are thinking "I'll never get this report finished in time for deadline," "This job demands an ungodly amount of my time...", it becomes easy to believe that if we can just complete our "to-do" list then stress will be eliminated. Not true. Stress will always return as soon as "to-do" list gets full because of way we think about what we have "to-do." Stress is always generated by our thinking and not by external circumstances. It is actually a state of mind that we control. In order to de-stress one must learn to think differently. You see, as stressful thoughts escalate then entire stressful cycle escalates also. As stressful thoughts are allowed to linger in our minds our moods are affected. It stands to reason, then, if we learn to change our thinking we can change our moods. How do we do this? First we need to understand cycle of stress. If we think angry thoughts we are going to feel anger. If we think sad thoughts we feel sad. Emotional states of mind will always follow our thought patterns.
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