Detox For Your Life

You’ve heard the expression, your energy introduces you before you even speak. What energy do you give off? How do people feel when they are around you? When people walk away from meeting with you or talking with you, do they feel like they had an “experience” – a good one?

I want to share with you eight ways to make sure you are giving people an awesome experience when they encounter you:

1. Connect with your inner positive vibes – meaning identifying your best qualities and project them to the world. The more positive energy you give off, the more positive energy you will receive.
2. Display positive body language. 55% of communication is body language. Negative body language, such as crossing your arms, putting your hands in your pockets or slouching, can make you seem closed off or withdrawn. Make sure you are standing with your shoulders back, your arms are not crossed, and make you are making eye contact.
3. Be aware of your color choices. Don’t underestimate the power of colors.  The colors you wear make people feel a certain way. Certain colors say that you are friendly and engaging.
4. You’ve seen the meme that says, if someone doesn’t have a smile, give them yours. This is so true. SMILING is kinda like yawning, it’s contagious.
5. Do your words smile when you speak? Now, this is different from the previous one. You’ve heard the expression, it’s not what you say, but how you say it. When you say hello, does it sound like it took every ounce of energy to speak or does your hello say H E L L O it’s a beautiful day and I’m glad to see you?
6. Give compliments. Yes, you want to make sure your compliments are genuine. I’m really good at this. If I like someone’s dress or tie or hairstyle or think they did an excellent job on something or see they really tried (even if they failed), and the list goes on, I make sure I compliment them.
7. Stay in the moment. If you are like me, you can tell when someone is distracted, whether it be in person or on the phone. Not giving someone your FULL attention sends out a negative vibe, and honestly, it’s borderline disrespectful. It makes people less likely to want to engage with you.
8. Practice daily gratitude. When you focus on the positives in your life, your energy and your vibe will be positive.

If you practice these on a regular, your energy will have the Wegmans’ effect. 

Some tell-tale signs of a bad organizational culture that can be spotted during the job interview

• Body Language: Is the interviewer constantly shifting in his/her chair? Is the interviewer  paying more attention to his/her phone than the interviewee? Is the interviewer avoiding eye contact? Is the interviewer  rifling through papers when the interviewee is talking?
• They put a lot of pressure on you to take the position. They are trying too hard to close the deal. The more the interviewee questions about the potential job (once an offer has been made), the more irritated they become, and they force the selectee to make a quick decision.
• The interviewer is late. The interviewer doesn’t respect the interviewee's time to show up on time, and then when he/she sits down to conduct the interview, it appears he/she hasn’t even looked at the interviewee's resume.
• Word Choice: When they ask the interviewee a question, do they begin the sentence with a negative message? Are the scenarios they ask the interviewee to answer all negative scenarios?
• The company has a history of high turnover. Make sure you do research in advance. There are several sites where you can find out information on a company, sites such as Indeed and Glassdoor. You can also go to various sites to see if the company has been sued by employees and why, sites such as Justia, Lexis Academic, EDGAR (SEC filings).
• Extreme Friendliness: Sometimes the potential supervisor who appears to be extremely nice will end up being one of the worse bosses ever.
• Self-Absorption: Does the interviewer appear to be more concerned with telling you about him/her than hearing about you, your experiences, and your skills? Does he/she question the answer you provided for a particular question, as if to indicate your answer was wrong?
• Trust Your Gut: If something doesn't feel right to you about the job, more times than not, your gut is right.  

LOVE IS AN ACTION 

I once read a quote that says, "We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.” Do you make it a point to show your mate loving feelings through loving actions? Sadly, all too often the ones to whom many people give the fewest appreciative words and kindly actions are their loved ones.

20 ways to show love as an action

1. Share your fears and vulnerabilities with your mate
2. Pay attention to your mate
3. Be emotionally and physically faithful to your mate
4. Accept and celebrate your mate's uniqueness and differences
5. Love without strings attached
6. COMMUNICATE!!!!!!!!
7. Work on your goals and dreams together
8. Forgive
9. Apologize when you are in the wrong or have offended your mate
10. If you have kids, don't forget to schedule alone time and date nights
11. Encourage your mate to be the best person they can be
12. Laugh and enjoy your mate
13. Be open and honest with your mate
14. Give more than you take in the relationship
15. Before your point the finger at your mate, examine your actions first
16. Do sweet, little gestures to show appreciation - don't wait till a special occasion 
17. Show affection
18. Give your mate space when he/she needs it
19. Say, "Thank You"
20. Compromise, be flexible 

Eight Tips to Help You Be More Consistent

1. Start with a morning routine. It has been said that the way you start your morning sets the tone for your entire day. When I read articles that ask people the keys to their success, many of them say they have a morning ritual. The morning ritual may be meditation, reading the Bible, working out, eating a healthy breakfast, or doing all of those things.
2. Set an alarm or a calendar reminder on your phone. Until something becomes habit for you, it’s not a bad idea to set a reminder on your phone. These daily reminders will either annoy you or motivate you. Hopefully, they will motivate you.
3. Be present. Quiet your mind. Be fully engaged.  Being present means you must minimize distractions.  You may have to go on “do not disturb”, do a digital detox (no social media or surfing the internet). If you have a family, you may have to get up earlier than everyone else so you will have time to yourself.
4. Forgive yourself. There will be moments when you fail to follow through on your plans. Don’t beat yourself up. Don’t let the failure cause you to give up. Setbacks and missteps are part of the process.  Forgive yourself and keep moving.
5. Go slow. People tend to set gigantic goals and instantly jump right in instead of taking baby steps. We live in a time where people have a microwave mentality. They want things to happen quickly and when they don’t, they get discouraged and give up.  Things aren’t going to be perfect, and you shouldn’t expect them to be. 
6. Get an accountability partner. We all need someone who is going to hold us accountable and help us stay on track. When we are the only ones holding us accountable, we don’t always do a good job pushing ourselves. Find one or two people you trust, tell them your goals and your timeline and ask them to hold you accountable.
7. Plan ahead. You’ve heard the expression, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Planning helps to eliminate obstacles that may derail you.  What’s your desired outcome? Why is this outcome important to you? What goals do you need to meet along the way to ensure you reach your objective? What’s your process to accomplish those goals?
8. Do it anyway. You may feel uninspired but do it anyway. Push your way through. The more you “do it anyway”, the more inspired you will eventually become.

Seven steps to develop greater emotional awareness and help you effectively manage your feelings.

• Don’t react right away. Reacting immediately to emotional triggers can be a big mistake. You’ll more likely say or do something you’ll later regret. Before refuting the trigger with your emotional argument, take a deep breath and stabilize the overwhelming impulse.
• Be Conscious of Your Thoughts. Thoughts are habitual and it can be quite difficult at first to consciously be aware of every thought that passes through your head. Before you change them for the better you must be aware of exactly what you are thinking.
• Discover the ‘why’ of your emotions. Once you are aware of your thoughts, ask yourself what is causing this feeling inside you?
• Change the way you think about a situation. Once you know the root of the problem, you can change the way you think about it. Your thoughts and beliefs shape your feelings. So, consider your thoughts. Are they based on truth? Are they logical? Are your beliefs true?
• Choose how you want to react. This is the hardest part. The way that we react and manage our emotions is habit. Do you control your emotions, or do they really control and direct you? Once you are able to control your emotions, you will feel more in control of your life.
• Modify your expectations. Take a look at your expectations. If they are not realistic, you are bound to be disappointed or stressed.
• Avoid negative thinking. When you are in emotional turmoil, it’s easy to get caught in a negative thought pattern. You tend to replay the situation and experience the feelings again. Break out of negative thinking.

Seeking perfection stifles your progress:

• It leads to self-criticism.When you fall short of a goal, the battle in your mind begins and you beat yourself up over it instead of looking at the goals you did reach, you are focused on the goals you didn’t or instead of focusing on the things you did right, you are focused on the things you fell short on.
• It prevents you from being open to new ideas. Have you ever noticed those people on your job who say, we do it this way because we’ve always done it this way? They had “perfected” that one way, and that leads to fear of trying something new – being open to new ideas. You have a difficult time adapting to change.
• It keeps you stagnate. It prevents you from moving forward. Seeking perfection is just like analysis by paralysis. You become so obsessed with doing things perfect until you are literally not moving forward.
• It makes you concerned with what others think of you. People who constantly seek perfection often worry about what others think of them. They are seeking recognition and approval from others. Steve Jobs once said, “Your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” I believe the significance of this quote is that it is important to be true to yourself. As long as you are trying to live a life to get the approval of others, you are never really progressing.

Now that I’ve shared ways how seeking perfection is stifling your progress, I want to give you tips to overcome that.

1. Practice self-compassion. People tend to have more compassion for others than they do themselves. We all make mistakes. Mistakes are part of the journey.  Don’t beat yourself up over it.
2. Stop thinking it has to be all or nothing. The opposite of perfect is not failure. I often say, even if you are taking baby steps, forward motion is forward motion. Never disregard small forward movement. Celebrate the small wins. 
3. Change your mindset. The first step to feeling like you’re enough is changing your mindset and negative beliefs you have about yourself. Creating a mindset that isn’t filled with unrealistic expectations will help you cultivate a sense of well-being.
4. Learn to let go. Try to let go of whatever it is that’s holding you back from accepting who you are. People who seek perfection are often trying to silence those voices from people who told them they weren’t good enough either through their words or their actions. You are not defined by what others say about you. Yes, those things were painful, but don’t let your pain, your past, or your emotions lead you to negative ideas about yourself and push you to never make any mistakes.
5. Tell yourself something wonderful about you every day. The more you start to see that you are progressing in life, even with your missteps and mistakes, you will start to see that it is about making progress, not about trying to be perfect. NO ONE IS PERFECT!

Multipotentialite: A multipotentialite is someone with many interests and creative pursuits. Multipotentialites have no one true calling the way specialists do.

Multi-passionate/multipotentialite/multi-faceted are all interchangeable terms.

It’s okay to be a multi-passionate person in a niche’ happy world. Many people say, focus on ONE thing and be the expert in that one thing. Yes, that’s great advice for some, but not for all – not for those of us who are multi-passionate.  Up until recently, I was very frustrated, and actually felt like a failure because everyone kept encouraging me to follow ONE course until successful, and my brain just could not focus on one thing because my interests and talents weren’t in just one thing. So to my fellow multipassionate/multi-faceted/multipotentialites out there I want to say to you, “You don’t have to choose just one because you were never meant to.” I want to offer some tips for the multipotentialites like me:

1. Stop trying to pick that one thing. You have many passions – you just need to find a conveyance to deliver your multi passions.
2. If you’re like me, when you start with one idea, you may eventually get bored with it and move on to something else. How do you help yourself with this problem? First, you must accept that there’s a bigger calling. The things you are multi passionate about server a bigger purpose. How do you know? Well, you start by identifying:

• Your purpose
• Your values
• Your SELF
• Your Core Message

1. Your cause List your passions. List all the things you are interested in and then think about what problem (or multiple problems) do they solve?
2. You need a confluence or convergence – it’s that things that bring all of your passions under one umbrella. For example, my confluence happened when I created the trademark, Detox Strategist. Not the problem was when most people hear the word Detox, they think of weight loss or drugs and alcohol detox. Detox or detoxify means to rid of poison or the effect of poison. Poison is something that is harmful to our happiness or well-being or causing harm or ruin or hurtful.  
3. Multipassionate people tend to over thing – suffer from paralysis by analysis. So, I encourage you to stop think and start doing. Clarity comes from engagement, not thought.
4. Your journey is just that – YOUR journey. Don’t compare your path to others. Enjoy YOUR journey and trust in the destination.
5. Don’t be hard on yourself, and make self-care a priority. We multipotentialites tend to be hard on ourselves and because of our varied interests, we sometimes over do it, and fail to incorporate rest and self-care into process.

A plot twist can happen at any time in your life.

When you get a new cell phone, tablet, or computer, do you stick with the default settings or do you change the settings to your personal preferences? Most people change the settings. When you live a life by default, you are basically accepting what’s already been selected for you. We all know people who seem to experience the same set of challenges or obstacles over and over again, or who have the same or similar negative life events happen to them, regardless of where they are or what they are doing. You are a co-creator of your experiences and when you have internal stress, frantic pressure, and a doom or gloom mentality, your life reflects that back to you.

Here are some ways to tell if you are living life by default: (1) Do you constantly have a feeling that something is missing? (2) Are major aspects of your life decided by happenstance – things like your what you do on a daily basis, your career, your friends, your dating life, etc.? (3) Do you wake up each day and feel like you are simply reacting to what life is throwing at you? (4) You have no idea of what will truly make you happy. If you answered yes, you may be living a life by default.

Here are five tips to help you live a life by design instead of living a life by default:

• Get clear about what you really want out of life. That means defining what makes YOU happy.
• Now that you are clear about what you really want out of life, create a life plan. That means setting goals and achieving them. They don’t have to be big audacious goals. People think that their goals have to be something big to make a difference, and when they don’t reach the big goal, they feel unhappy, stressed, depressed or out of alignment. Small goals are just as important. It’s that practice of achieving the small goals that lead to even bigger goals. Achieving small goals build confidence to aim higher.
• You need purpose. Your purpose is your why. It’s that “thing” that makes your life fulfilling. It’s something that resonates deeply within your heart.
• Learn to be in the moment. According to a Harvard University study, almost half of our waking hours are spent NOT living in the moment. Half! Living in the moment is also associated with mindfulness. Mindfulness is the ability to be fully present, aware of where you are and what you’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around you.
• Live a life of gratitude. I will ALWAYS emphasize the importance of being grateful. Gratitude makes us happier. Research shows that gratitude increases mental strength, strengthens our emotions, increases our self-esteem, reduces aggression, improves psychological health, and improves physical health.