keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. keep your words positive because your words become your behaviors. keep your behaviors positive because your behaviors become your habits. keep your habits positive because your habits become your values. keep your values positive because your values become your destiny.
Since I realized I don't really like posting anything too substantive on Sundays, I'm going to make my Sunday posts a "random roundup" of interesting articles, stories, links, etc.
- NFLer Ricky Williams is preparing for a career as a spiritual healer? This is old news apparently, but I hadn't heard about it.
- Coffee has a bad rap, but it actually has some health benefits
- Beyonce has a lot of haters, but I'm a fan...especially after this cute interview
- I'm totally excited for NBC's new show...both the leads are mixed :-) And the woman is gorgeous!!!
- Smoking weed "nearly doubles a person's risk of developing future psychotic states including schizophrenia, and if someone smokes it before the age of 16, they are four times more at risk." (article)
- a real-life "sleeping beauty" - this girl sometimes sleeps for days at a time and can't be woken.
In other news, NO WORK TOMORROW because of the SNOW!!
My organization does whatever the Federal Government does and they are CLOSED babyyyyyy! Nixie's classes are also canceled so it's shaping up to be another fabulous day. Today was so great! We had a pretty lazy morning and spent another afternoon reading in Barnes and Noble. I'm a few chapters into my latest read, so tomorrow will give me a chance to finish it!
I LOVE spending a day reading! And this book just gives me so much to think about, inspires me, and generally puts me in a great mood.
After B&N, Nix and I went to TJ's (Trader Joe's) to do our weekly shopping. We usually buy and eat the SAME things every week, so this week we decided to change things up a bit. This morning we were browsing through another of my recent book purchases and they have a section on diagnosing your health/diet based on signs from your body. One of them was whether you have dark circles under your eyes. Well, I've never really noticed bags under my eyes, but today we both felt like we did...and the book says this may be a result of not enough variety in your diet...which we are very guilty of...it's all good, healthy food, but the SAME good healthy food day in and day out. So anyway, this week we basically only bought new foods! Tonight for dinner we had pan-seared tuna with asparagus and multigrain pilaf (the precooked one from TJ's which is THE BOMB). We also made two dishes for throughout the week: homemade cashew pesto with whole wheat spaghetti and a kielbasa sausage, green pepper, potato mishmash lol. Btw, the dark chocolate/cranberry/almond tart that I made came out AWESOME! It's already gone lolol. Also, Roomie made a quiche was was super yummy! I'm so looking forward to another day off tomorrow :-)
Today's *big chune* is Teedra Moses, Complex Simplicity. Enjoy!
Hey yall! I'm snowed in and don't have internet so I'm posting from my phone...not really conducive to writing anything substantial. But at least this means I still haven't lost my blog challenge :D
Hey hey hey ;-) Today is a great day yall! Due to the impending SUPER SNOW STORM, which is expected to bring 20-30 INCHES, I didn't go to work today :-D
Nix and I woke up around our usual early time, had our usual oatmeal breakfast, went to Trader Joe's to pick up a few things, and spent most of the morning reading in Barnes and Noble. So, already my day was off to a great start. Having an abundance of free time recently has really helped me realize how much I enjoy doing certain things. At the top of the list are reading and cooking.
As I mentioned in my post about goodreads.com, I've caught a serious reading bug and have been buying/reading books galore. I actually bought another today, even though I said I'd stop for a while. (Technically Nix bought it and plans to wrap it for me for our little Valentine's Day $5 gift exchange lol.)
This morning I finished The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, the debut book from Heidi Durrow. I was super excited to read this book because I had been following her personal blog and the blog she co-hosts, before I even knew she was writing the book. I came across her blog when I was on the hunt for blogs written by multiracial women, so I was especially happy that the main character in her book is mixed. I highly recommend this book!
Some people would be upset about being snowed in all weekend, but as a self-proclaimed homebody I am really looking forward to the time to read! Plus, I am in the process of making a dark chocolate-cashew tart as we speak! Which brings me to the next thing I've (re)discovered a love for. When I was little, my mom used to cook and bake ALL THE TIME. I absolutely loved baking with her! Certain smells and tastes actually take me back to those moments in the kitchen with her. Our go-to recipe was her version of chocolate chip cookies. Mom was way ahead of her time...we used whole wheat flour that she ground herself from wheat berries! We always used a little less sugar than the recipe called for. And we always added oat flakes and oat bran (or something like that). We always used to whine and complain that she couldn't just make "normal" cookies, but looking back I'm so glad she planted those ideas in us.
Funny aside: I used to want to impress my mom by baking without her. One time, I had made some bomb cookies - those jelly "thumbprint" ones I think - and I wanted her to see them. Meanwhile, one of my 3 brothers just wanted to eat them! And can you believe, we got in a physical fight over these silly cookies because I got so pissed that he was taking them! LOL. I got so mad I ripped up a do-rag of his, and he ripped (with some difficulty ha!) a shirt he had given me. Fun times.
Anywho, I didn't really cook much as I got older. I would cook every once in a while, but being in a dorm wasn't very conducive to legit cooking. Even when I had my own apartment, I just never felt inspired to actually throw down in the kitchen. And honestly a lot of the reason I avoid cooking super yummy stuff is because I would always end up having to eat it all and I was on a mission to lose weight (which I did - post for another day). But now that I have a good grasp on healthy cooking/eating, and live with Nix and Roomie, I don't worry about that so much. In the past couple weeks I've been experimenting more with dishes - including polenta casserole and cashew pesto pasta. Like I said, today is the dessert. I'll let yall know how it turns out ;-)
Other plans for the rest of the day: Prep for my first grad school interview, finish baking, start the next book on my reading list, and start Season 4 of The Wire!
And....I got invited to interview for another of the schools I applied to!! So that's 3/6 interviews and still waiting to hear back from the other 3.
Today's *big chune* is one that I've been hooked on for like the past month. I even got my youngest sis, Bex, hooked on it when i was home for christmas break and it was our go-to first song anytime we were in the car on our way somewhere. Enjoy!
(C) 2009 Universal Records, a Division of UMG Recordings, Inc. and SRC Records, Inc.
Music video by Melanie Fiona performing It Kills Me. (C) 2009 Universal Records, a Division of UMG Recordings, Inc. and SRC Records, Inc.
Today's post is the final follow-up to the last two posts I did about the decline in women's happiness and what happy/successful women do differently. In the article written about what happy women do, the author concludes with a discussion of what he calls "The Strong Life Test."
As he explains, "there are so many voices in your life demanding your attention, so many 'have-tos' and 'shoulds,' that it can be hard to hear the sound of your own voice." So, Buckingham designed the Strong Life Test "to help you cut through the clamor and find your strongest life."
It's described as an internal compass....measuring you on nine life roles-- Advisor, Caretaker, Creator, Equalizer, Influencer, Motivator, Pioneer, Teacher, and Weaver. While we may have to play each of the nine roles at different times, our personality doesn't entirely shift and morph per every unique situation. Rather, we have some consistent patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving...that are distinctive and that remain stable across time and situations. (Remember personality types and your individual type?) These patterns come together in a Lead Role, a role you return to time and again, a role that you and your closest family and friends recognize as the core of who you are. Your Lead Role will help you to know where to look, in any domain of your life (as a spouse, relative, mother, or employee), for the kind of moments that will strengthen you the most, invigorate you the most, bring you joy, excitement, and fun. The Strong Life Test doesn't give you all the answers, but it tells you where to start.
You can take the test right here. fyi, it's pretty heavily geared towards women.
I took it of course :-) And here are my results:
Lead Role:Teacher
You begin by asking:
'What can she learn from this?'
Your focus is instinctively toward the other person. Not her feelings, necessarily, but her understanding, her performance, her skills.
Your best quality: Your faith in the others’ potential
Always: Tailor your style to each student
Be careful you: Don’t come to believe that everyone is capable of everything
Your smartest career move: Any job where you’re paid to facilitate the success of others.
Supporting Role: Advisor
You begin by asking:
'What is the best thing to do?'
Your thrill comes from knowing that you are the person others turn to for the answer. You don’t necessarily want to be the person who actually makes the changes happen. Rather, what excites you is being valued by others for your insight and your judgment.
Your best quality: Your ability to find a solution
Always: Search for data to support your advice
Be careful you: Don’t get frustrated by other people’s failings
Your smartest career move: Any job where you’re paid to be opinionated
These seem pretty much on point to me. I love the idea of getting paid to facilitate the success of others. I originally balked at the fact that the results mention being paid to be opinionated (because I generally don't view myself as being strongly opinionated), but I think I can be opinionated about certain things...just not in the traditional sense of dichotomous this or that types of opinions. But, I do feel strongly about certain things, especially as I really continue to develop my passions. As I was reviewing my results I started to wonder to what degree these sorts of things are reflective of who i am versus who i want to be. In other words, am i truly someone who focuses on others, has faith in their potential, and wants to facilitate their success? Or, are these qualities that I value and not that I actually have? Food for thought for me on this Thursday afternoon...pre-Snowpocalypse Part II
As you can see, I love these sorts of quizzes....and i LOVE to hear your results. Please share in the comments, and let me know whether the results resonate with you.
today's *big chune* is "Can We Talk" by Tevin Campbell. I listen to Pandora during the day at work and this gem popped up in my mix today. One of my favs! Classic R&B right here!
Today's post builds on yesterday's, in which I discussed a series of Huffington Post articles concerning the decline in women's happiness over the past 40 years. In the third of the articles, Marcus Buckingham chose to focus on women who are indeed happy, as a way to glean insight as to the keys to happiness. In other words, he asked the following: If you could find the happiest and most successful women, women who had somehow bucked this downward trend in life satisfaction, women who had made life choices that strengthened them, who had become happier the older they got, if you could find these women and ask them questions and listen, what would you discover?
In actuality though, (similar to something Gretchin Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, often talks about) happiness doesn't come with a formula, so everyone's happiness secrets will be different. Nonetheless, looking for basic general patterns can be insightful. Buckingham asked: Despite all their differences--of style, age, career, wealth, value system--what if anything would they have in common? What would they share? Here is what was found:
What the Happiest Women Do:
1. Focus on moments, more than goals, plans or dreams. Certain moments in your life create in you strongly positive emotions--let's call these "strong-moments." Not all moments are strong-moments--some moments spark negative emotions, while some don't spark any emotions at all. But when you do experience a strong-moment, it is authentic. It is true, in the sense that the emotions you feel are true. You may not know exactly what you should do with your emotions, or what label you should give each emotion, but you know how a specific moment made you feel. You know this more certainly than you know virtually anything else in your life. (Miss A note: This makes me think of the concept of IMMD and the IMMD journal that I started with Nix.I talked about being mindful and how this helps me to take special notice of the little moments that add something small but significant to my days. Another benefit to this little email-chain-journal is that it will be cool to look back on later in time and remember the past in a different way...similar to a one-sentence journal)
2. Accept what they find. When you search your life for strong-moments, you don't always like what you find. In the words of one of the interviewees: "It's hard to admit, but I don't like playing with my kids. My daughter would come up to me and say 'Mom, you play the mommy, and I'll play the baby' and I would think 'Not again. I am the mommy, you are the baby.' The moments I love with my kids are when I'm teaching them something, helping them learn, but I'm bored silly by playing another game of dress up. I got my life back on track only when I rejected the idea of being the 'perfect' mother, and accepted the reality of which moments energized me and which didn't." Acceptance doesn't mean resignation, giving up on your dreams. In fact, more often than not, accepting which moments strengthen you and which don't reveals to you exactly how you can live out your dreams, whether at home or at work. It means not only being comfortable in your own skin, but also being creative in your own skin. (Miss A note:this goes back to the idea of "Be Anna." You can't really do too much to change your likes/dislikes or strong moments. My sister often has a difficult time when invited to parties because she knows deep down that they won't be that fun for her and she'd rather not go, but she often feels pressure to attend anyway. Recently she's been much more willing to pass up the parties for quiet nights at home. And I do believe she's happier when she does. So, her strong moments may not be the fun things that happened at the party last night, while her friends' strong moments may be. And that's perfectly fine!)
3. Strive for Imbalance. When someone tells you to try to have greater balance in your life, your immediate and appropriate reaction is a spasm of disbelief. "Balance?" you ask yourself. "How does that work? For every extra hour at work find another hour at home? For every extra kid at home, reduce my workload by exactly the amount my new child requires? For every school play I should attend, cut out a presentation on the road? For everything I say yes to, say no to something else? Is that it?" Not according to the people we interviewed. They didn't talk about balance much at all. They seemed to realize that not only was a perfect equilibrium nigh on impossible to achieve, but also that even if they did manage to achieve it, it wouldn't necessarily fulfill them anyway--when you are balanced, you are stationary, holding your breath, trying not to let any sudden twitch or jerk pull you too far one way or the other. You are at a standstill. Balance is the wrong life goal. Instead, do as these women did, and strive for imbalance. Pinpoint the strong-moments in each aspect of your life and then gradually target or tilt your life toward them. This means being as deliberate as you can about making them happen. It means investigating them when they do happen, looking at them from new perspectives, and celebrating them. Above all, it means giving them the power of your attention. (Miss A note: I admit, this one is hard to really process, because the search for balance is so ingrained in our society. The sentence about tilting your life towards strong moments puts it in a way that's much more real to me.)
4. Learn to say "Yes." So often you are told: "You must learn to say 'No.'" But, to live your strongest life, do the opposite. Learn to say, "Yes." Yes, to the strong-moments in each part of your life. Yes, to the people who help you create these moments. Yes, to your feelings as these moments happen. Say "Yes" with enough focus and force, and yours will not be a balanced life, but it will be a full life.
So, there you have it. These are four things that happy and successful women do. What do you think about this list. Do you excel/struggle with these? Anything in particular stand out to you?
Finally, because i LOVE music, I'm going to start ending each post with a song of the day. It may be a song I'm loving at the moment or a song that seems to fit well with whatever i'm writing about. I like to think that I have pretty eclectic taste in music...you'll see soon enough ;-) Today's song is one that was performed during the Grammys and I've been playing A LOT since. It's called "I Need You Now" by a group called Lady Antebellum...a lil country flavor for your day.
Last fall, the Huffington Post "Living" blog ran a series of articles about the decline in women's happiness over the last 40 years. Based on data--gathered and analyzed in the paper "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness"--Marcus Buckingham discussed the surprising fact that women's happiness has trended downward as compared to men's, despite gradual increases in power and prosperity. Here are the two principle findings:
1. Since 1972, women's overall level of happiness has dropped, both relative to where they were forty years ago, and relative to men. You find this drop in happiness in women regardless of whether they have kids, how many kids they have, how much money they make, how healthy they are, what job they hold, whether they are married, single or divorced, how old they are, or what race they are. (The one and only exception: African-American women are now slightly happier than they were back in 1972, although they remain less happy than African American men.)
2. Though women begin their lives more fulfilled than men, as they age, they gradually become less happy. Men, in contrast, get happier as they get older. By the time women reach age forty-seven, they are, overall, less happy with their life than men, and the trend continues on down from there.
Most people are-understandably-perplexed by this finding. You'd think that gender parity and increased quality of life would be leading to increased happiness, not the other way around. Buckingham puts it this way: "To use Thomas Jefferson's words, though women now have the liberty to choose whichever life they'd like, many are struggling in their pursuit of a happy life."
So, what's up with the findings?
The article asserts that these trends are not caused by women working longer hours than men. We know this because women don't work more hours than men. Nor are they caused by gender-based stereotyping. Nor, are they caused by women bearing a disproportionate burden of the workload at home, the 'second-shift' as some have labeled it. While women still do more cooking, cleaning and child-caring than men, the trend lines are actually all moving toward greater parity.
On the other hand, we seem to know what is causing men's slight increase in happiness...it's increased prosperity. Over the last 40 years, U.S. GDP has had climbed 3.1% per year...and increases in national GDP correlate to increases in national levels of happiness....which makes women's decline even more odd.
While the articles don't actually offer too much in the way of definitive explanation for this, the one thing noted for certain is that women are harder on themselves than men. In national polls, when women and men are asked the question, "Which do you think will help you be most successful in life, building on your strengths or fixing your weaknesses?" men split right down the middle, while 73% of women report they would focus on fixing their weaknesses. Based on this, the author concludes that since women have (over the past 40 years) gradually acquired more and more domains in which they are supposed to succeed, one would expect that women characterize themselves more and more by who they aren't. In turn, they may become more and more self-critical, and more aware of their flaws and failings...all of which might well accelerate these dissatisfaction trend-lines.
This last part about having more and more domains in which we are supposed to succeed is especially relevant to us as younger women. Women can do so much more today than in the past...and as such, we feel pressure to do much more than ever before.
Thoughts? Does this seem like a plausible correlation? Do you feel this pressure?
I'm usually not one for the Monday Blues, but I am super tired today for some reason and really would much rather be home. Soooo for today's post, I'm sharing the first two things that came to my mind as ways to inject some "happy" into my day.
First up, a video that cracks me up every time. I couldn't breathe i was laughing so hard the first time i saw this video:
There are more videos like this too, so just look up "autotune the news" on youtube.
Another go-to mood-booster is the set of pictures taken using Nixie's webcam program when my youngest sis was visiting over the summer. They'll prob be mad I put this up, but I look crazy too so oh well :-P
HAHAHAHAHA! If you're ever feeling down, and in need of a laugh....get someone to take pics like this with you!!
