If you keep on procrastinating nothing will ever happen January 18, 2014 Your dream matters.

It matters because it s yours. It wasn t given to anybody else, it was entrusted esp ecially to you. Too often we delay pursuing our dreams because we believe that we re not ready or that the time is not yet right. This is simply our fears sabotaging our dreams. Remember that tomorrow is always tomorrow and that if you keep on procrastinatin g, nothing will ever happen. Don t wait any longer, the best time to begin is right now. 8 Ways to Find Real Happiness at Work By THERESE J. BORCHARD Associate Editor 8 Ways to Find Real Happiness at WorkMost adults spend more waking hours at work than anywhere else. If you are unhappy there, you are unhappy a major chunk of the time. Sharon Salzberg, renowned meditation teacher and cofounder, with Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein, of the Insight Meditation Society, has just released an in valuable resource on finding happiness at work. Real Happiness at Work includes practical techniques and practices for people who hate their jobs, love their jo bs, or don t care enough to belong to either group. Her pages speak to folks seeking meaning and fulfillment in their occupations, e ven if their responsibilities consist of scrubbing down toilets. Here s what she f ound and how you can find real happiness at work. After listening to the gripes and frustrations of her students and friends as we ll as reviewing what researchers had to say on the subject of work Salzberg arri ved at a few themes of unhappiness: Burnout and the need for greater resilience Questionable moral practices or challenges to personal integrity Feelings of losing a sense of purpose and the need for deeper, more durable mean ing Condescension by superiors who do not listen and show a lack of compassion in de cision-making Boredom, distraction, and ineffectual multitasking due to a lack of concentratio n The longing for creativity, surprise, variety, and a more open awareness fosteri ng flexibility and change The desire to understand the work environment from a more open perspective How do you go about resolving these issues? How do you prevent them from happeni ng in the first place? In answering these questions, Salzberg identified what sh e calls the Eight Pillars of Happiness in the Workplace. Balance: the ability to differentiate between who you are and what your job is. Finding balance requires setting priorities and building appropriate boundaries: taking the half-hour lunch that you are allotted and focusing on the responsibi

lities that fall under your job description, not those of your entire team. Bala nce is placing a higher value on self-care than boss-pleasing, connecting to the truth of your own worth, and loosening the trip of overidentification with your job. Concentration: being able to focus without being swayed by distraction. Distraction wastes our energy, writes Salzberg, concentration restores it. Concentra tion is especially crucial in our digital age because the human brain has been a sked to process an immense amount of information. Workers are expected to write a report while tracking incoming data, answering email, and texting a spouse abo ut dinner. We may think we are successful at all the juggling; however, research indicates that the more we multitask, the more mistakes we make, affecting our overall job performance and self-esteem. Per Salzberg: When we slow down and concentrate on doing just what is before us to be done now, we become the masters of our own en vironment rather than its frantic slaves. Compassion: being aware of and sympathetic to the humanity of ourselves and othe rs. To cultivate compassion, we shift the emphasis from me to we, a challenging task in work settings that are driven by competition, conflict, pressure, and stress . Equally difficult is offering ourselves the same kindness and compassion we ex tend to others, to believe in our self-worth independent of the blame and critic ism of others. Real Happiness at Work_HighRes 3D Resilience: the ability to recover from defeat, frustration, or failure. Resilience lies at the heart of the greatest lesson of meditation and mindfulnes s: to begin again without rumination or regret. That no matter what the circumsta nces, we are always able to begin again in a new moment, Salzberg writes. This is what we mean by resilience. No matter what happens to us at work (or elsewhere), we can use challenges as opportunities to grow, increase our awareness, and lea rn methods for making future challenges more tolerable. Communication and Connection: understanding that everything we do and say can fu rther connection or take it away. Salzberg offers three criteria to help with skillful communication. First, is th e information true? Truthfulness is most important when considering what and wha t not to say to our colleagues. Second, is this communication useful? Be sure to consider context, timing, and the type of person you are communicating with. Fi nally, will your message be delivered in a kind way polite, nonaggressive, and n onconfrontational? Integrity: bringing your deepest ethical values to the workplace. Integrity is linked to authenticity, a fundamental proclamation that who we are a nd where we are arises from an original authority that makes us decent, intellig ent, and profoundly resourceful. It means sitting with our conflicts and dilemmas in open awareness, trying to find a way to integrate our inner concerns and fee lings with our outer circumstances. Meaning: infusing the work you do with relevance for your own personal goals. Salzberg believes some sense of meaning is vital to being happy at work, but tha

t doesn t mean we have to love our jobs. We could find meaning simply in being emp loyed, in providing for a family or for ourselves. We may find meaning in the fr iendships we have at work. In cases where your job does not easily align with mea ningful purpose, it s still possible to use work as an opportunity for doing good, she writes. Any job can be meaningful, or meaningless, depending on how we look a t it. Open Awareness: the ability to see the big picture and not be held back by selfimposed limitations. Writes Salzberg: Open awareness refers to our ability to observe conditions as th ey are without feeling the need to change them. While this may sound passive to our action-oriented ears, the ability to rest comfortably in the present moment regardless of its imperfections is the foundation of all true happiness.