What is it about friendships that is so great?

Great conversations; an easy sense of belonging without having to try so hard; mutual self-discovery after many years; being liked for who we are.

I could go on but I’d rather hear from you, so I’d love to see your comments about what friendships mean to you.

Why am I devoting time to this?

Because I’m all about conducting our businesses in a way that fulfills our lives, and making time for friends is a big part of that.

A “lay person’s” definition, according to “thefreedictionary.com” is:

“The tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity”, or “The inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society”

Ok, so…how is that relevant to your business and daily life?

Here’s how: Your business and your life will go to pot unless you give them suitable attention.

For example, your marriage will cool off, your clients will be less loyal, your body will deteriorate, your desk will drown in paper, etc.

You knew that through your life experience and common sense.

So did I. But the thing is, I often forget that I knew it. Meaning that I sometimes don’t give enough attention to what I say really matters to me.

For example, until recently, I’ve been starting my day with “getting rid of” e-mails so that I could clear my slate. The problem is, not only did I spend way too much time doing this, it was the wrong “tone” for the start of my day.

Now, I make sure I first do some Qigong, spend some time in spiritual reflection and play with the cats. That is a much truer reflection of who I am.

How about your life? Do you devote time to what is important to you?

And is your business day spent on relatively unimportant administrative tasks instead of strategizing, marketing and client care?

That’s pretty obvious. What’s less obvious is what to do about it.

Most of us feel like there is little we can realistically do in our current circumstances.

We’ll get relief only when those change; when our sales reach a certain level; when we can hire another person; when the kids are older; when the economy gets better; when the economy slows down.

It’s true that things would be easier to manage if our lives were simpler, if the pace of change was slower and we had fewer choices to make all the time.

But there are things you can do to reduce your overwhelm. Here are a few suggestions:

• Reduce your expectations about how much you can do. Thinking you can/should/need to handle everything only puts more pressure on you, which backfires by reducing your effectiveness. Have you ever mentally worked yourself into a frenzy about a deadline and realized that you spent the last hour fretting but accomplishing nothing that you can use?

• Stop thinking that you can control things, or that you need to in order to be safe. It’s impossible to cover every eventuality. Some pre-vacation preparation and planning is wise, too much and you end up being more stressed than if you hadn’t gone at all.

• Keep your goals in mind and not because they will motivate you to work harder, but because they will help you decide what you really need to do and what can wait or be eliminated from your list.

• If you find yourself running short of time, take extra time to think about how to spend your time. Instead of running around trying to get all the items on your to-do list done, you’d be better off taking a mental break to assess what you really need to do next and focus just on that.

• This brings me to multi-tasking. It can really contribute both to overwhelm and to low effectiveness. If you multi-task make sure that all but one of the tasks can be done automatically without giving them your attention.

• Finally, the energy of overwhelm feeds on itself and can send you spinning. It’s essential to break the cycle, take a breath, and ground yourself. That alone will dramatically increase your level of energy, your presence of mind and the quality of your decisions.

What this post is really about is how being present and aware dramatically changes the quality of our life.

And the kind of weeds I’m referring to is…garlic mustard (a plant that’s not native to this region and is very pretty but destroys the habitat if you let it proliferate).

Believe it or not, today I had a great time weeding my woodsy back yard. It took hours and doesn’t sound like fun, until you take a closer look:

• The cats were able to safely enjoy romping around in the “wild”, making me laugh as they pounced on bugs
• My neighbor and I were able to enjoy our first outdoor chat of the year as we weeded in parallel trajectories
• I could feel the sun since the leaves aren’t big enough to block it. For those of you from warm climates, that may not be such a great thing but for those of us that endure months of winter, it is!
• My mind relaxed with the simple rhythm of scanning for the plants, pulling them and moving on to the next patch
• Squirrels were chasing each other giving the cats even more of a thrill

Now don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want to do this every day, but today was perfect. Even if I did step on deer dung (oh well, those shoes were on their last legs).

If I can have such fun weeding and stepping into dung, surely I can also enjoy other mundane tasks including those relating to business.

True it’s easier being on an awareness “high” in novel circumstances (like experience nature after a long, long winter), but I can make a greater effort to put myself in the mindset of a “beginner” when I deal with, for example, blog posting.

What about you; do you have a similar story to share? Let me know in a comment!

Now some of those are real addictions and my intention in this post is not to talk about the causes and remedies for addictions. For one thing, I couldn’t even graze the surface of the subject.

Let’s talk about things we do that we could resist if we tried, or at worst might be mild addictions. Some of the behaviors mentioned above might fit, but also others like:

• Spending too much time on administrative tasks when we know out time would be better spent on product development or marketing
• Accumulating a mess of papers on our desks when we know clutter is a drain on our energy
• Spreading negative news or gossip
• Cutting it too close by leaving at the last minute for appointments

And the list goes on and on.

Most of us have heard that fear and the instinct for survival is at the root of most of our automatic behaviors. We could spend countless hours exploring what we are afraid of, and why we do what we do.

But even though that’s the title of my post, I don’t intend to go down that road.

Why? Because I’m more interested in how we can change.

Yes, sometimes, finding the root cause helps us choose otherwise, but often, we don’t need to go there. Not only that, we can get stuck in our story since drama is so interesting, especially when we’re starring in it.

So back to the list: we do these things because they make us feel better in the short term even if they backfire in the long term.

Short term satisfaction or relief of tension even to the detriment of long term well-being. That kind of summarizes what created our environmental and monetary crises, doesn’t it?

How can we stop doing things that we know are bad for us?

Four keys:

• Awareness of what we’re doing (realizing what we are doing)
• Deciding what would be better (knowing what else we should be doing)
• Having another way of releasing the tension otherwise our primal instincts will overrule our decisions
• Having a system to keep us on track to prevent us going back to old habits

Amazing how once again, the answer lies in us harnessing the power of our attention and learning to be present and aware!

One of main things that will block our creativity is fear (or any other negative emotion). Why is that?

For one thing, a mind in the throws of fear is like a cow chewing on cud, except not as peaceful. It will ruminate over the story that generated the emotion, the people involved, what was said or not said, what might happen, what could or could not be done, etc. That doesn’t leave much room for inspiration.

A second reason is that tension always stops flow. It does in the physical world; tense and rigid arteries cause high blood pressure, for example.

Flow is essential to creativity, as being creative involves tapping into the world of ideas beyond everyday consciousness. That’s what Einstein said he did when he came up with his strokes of genius, and that’s what we all do in our own way when we feel inspired.

One of the reasons tension stops flow is the existence of our innate warning mechanisms whose job it is to spot danger and steer us away from it. They will certainly be triggered by fear and they are not likely to allow your attention to drift into the semi daydreaming state necessary for inspiration. Not on their hyper-vigilant watch!

Yes, some famous novelists or artists with tortured souls were able to create amazing works despite their emotional state, but most of us will find it hard to do. Best for us to deal with our emotions, both for our creativity and our happiness.

Learn how to deal with fear and you’ll be able handle all negative emotions, because fear is the root cause of them all. It’s of course a lifelong process, but you should find it useful to get the free course offered on this site: “How to Stop Fear From Ruining Your Day…and Your Business”.

There is a jar full of sand and various-sized rocks. Your task if to figure out how to put several larger rocks in the jar without throwing away its content.

The larger rocks represent your latest important projects

The ones that should improve your health, your profit, your relationships, your business direction, or your life. Of course, the more important they are, the more they tend to:

• Require sustained creative effort
• Bring up fear of failure or rejection
• Take time
• Generate internal resistance

Besides, most of you is telling the part of your brain that cooked up the project that you have no extra time and are in overwhelm already; your jar is full!

How to get the large rocks in the jar

Put them in first!!!

The smaller rocks and then the sand, will find their way and settle themselves in whatever small openings they find, and you will be amazed at how much more the jar could hold.

An embarrassing example

I normally never bother with New Year’s resolutions, but this year I made the highly predictable one, pledging that I will exercise on a daily basis. I let my gym membership lapse 4 months ago and have been sitting in front of my computer ever since (or so it feels like). Needless to say, my body is feeling the new lifestyle and will start showing it pretty soon if I don’t “shape up”, pun intended.

My record so far:

Day 1: Good start
Day 2: Already off the wagon, which is embarrassing for someone who teaches other people how to make changes successfully. Here’s what happened:

I felt mentally productive and decided to delay my workout, which I was sure I would do later since I was looking forward to it. Later became later still, which became never. Inertia had set in.

Day 3: I learned my lesson and worked out before turning on the computer.

When to deal with priorities

It may not always be first thing in the day; your past behavior will tell you when you need to deal with your high priorities. Just make sure you’re honest with yourself about it.

After all, we have to first tend to the basics: earning a living or keeping the business afloat.

Doesn’t Maslow’s hierarchy of needs tell us that survival has to be met first, personal growth being only the icing on the cake when everything else is looked after?

Let’s say for the sake of this argument, that we believe that the coming year will be a tough go.

What could bring us pleasure when things are grim?

We won’t get the buzz that we used to find in making the big sale or getting the big promotion. Yes of course, there always was more to life than work, but we spend a lot of time at it and that’s where most people derive their sense of accomplishment.

Where is it going to come from instead?

The biggest achievement of all

Self mastery.

Isn’t that more important than whether we have the corner office? Yet few of us act as if it is. Probably because it’s easier to negotiate deals than it is to build our character and be a more open, more genuine, and deeper person.

You don’t need a hot market to work on self mastery

When things are good, us humans can let ourselves be distracted by all the fast and fancy stuff. If business is a little slow, maybe we’ll find time to observe how we think and act, connect with others in new ways, and listen to our souls.

The bonus

Improving ourselves has the nice side effect of making us more attractive to others, including prospective clients.

So personal growth, instead of being an indulgence in hard times, may just be the best business building strategy we could use.

A whole industry’s been built around time management, and even though it gives quite valid advice, it never really seems to help. We delegate, prioritize, eliminate…and before you know it, we’re back to feeling under the gun.

It’s a war

It’s gotten to the point where most of us have a running battle with time. What can I offer to help? Rather than talking about my (great) tips on how to handle time stress, I’d like to go a bit esoteric on you.

What if we made peace with time, with the fact that we can’t fit everything into our available hours, minutes and seconds?

How can we make peace with time?

It starts with a decision, a change in attitude. Somehow we need to stop feeling like time is scarce, that’s it’s a relentless task master, and that it paints us into a corner of fewer choices left.

But isn’t that reality? Wouldn’t thinking otherwise be just pointless denial? Well, yes…and no.

True I can’t deny that I am getting older, or that there are fewer days left before the next loan payment is due. But that doesn’t matter when I get into the mind-space of “no time”.

No Time

When I focus entirely on the present moment, “ticking time” disappears. And then I stop worrying and start getting things done. I’m sure you’ve experienced the incredible surge of productivity that comes with having laser focus.

That increased productivity, in turn, allows me to make a good dent on my to-do list, which reduces my time-stress.

Sounds good in theory, but how do we place ourselves in the “no time” zone?

Like I said above, first we have to decide that we want to stop worrying about how little time we have left, and to start focusing instead on what we can control.

Then we have to decide what now deserves our full attention, our next priority.

Finally we may need to be prepared for repeated worry attacks. The best way for me is to remind myself of past experiences: worrying about looming deadlines have always backfired; concentrating on getting my priority done is what got me much further ahead.

But I felt like a slacker for not posting, which of course is ridiculous. It’s just another example of how we let electronics keep us on a leash: checking our e-mails and bringing our blackberries and laptops on our trips.

Yes, if we don’t deal with them the e-mail volume gets ridiculous; and there may be a deal going down. But by being so available, we trained people to get us involved rather than deal with matters themselves. And taking an electro-break is absolutely essential to our wellbeing and future performance.

Did you know that our brain recharges best when we give it a change of pace? It wants us to do something different and checking messages on our blackberry while we’re on the beach spoils the whole thing. Sort of like looking at our watch when on a romantic date.