A friend’s son recently moved back home so that he could afford to go back to school. He would often leave the kitchen a mess after making a meal. Once they had a conversation about the importance of cleaning up after yourself so everyone could enjoy the space, they have been able to enjoy time together with few disagreements. He recognizes the importance of cleaning up after himself and keeping the shared space enjoyable!

Kathy Watson

The post Enjoy your living space appeared first on Your Better Life.

It started as a typical day of plans, then later, checked to see about some company to a musical event. In this, I failed to connect with that person.

Then I tried to go to dinner at a friend’s restaurant and catch up on news, only to find debris stacked in the parking lot as major renovations were taking shape. I again had failed to connect with that person.

I decided after two no-go initiatives, to dine at a bistro that I had not frequented for a few months and, in a “meant to be” serendipitous moment, ended up sitting at a table next to Tom and Kathy Watson. How cool is that?

My intent here is to explain that while people recognize this type of occurrence as lucky or by chance. I believe that we came together because we all have an unseen connection in the natural order.

Another example is, as Canadians, we like to think of ourselves as automatically connected to the outdoors because of its abundance and beauty.

Even as massive shifts are happening in our lives and the world order, we, the people, flock to oceans, lakes, forests, mountains, green spaces, campgrounds and gardens at every available moment as we all feel the connection to nature and the need to relax.

When we come back to our daily lives, we often look to relax with technology, a far cry from the call of a loon on a calm lake and the smell of the forest.

The good news here is that thanks to the work of Tom, Kathy and some incredibly connected people, we can all learn how to use simple basic tools to bring the natural connection into our everyday lives, even while at work.

These tools help us build resiliency, handle rapid change, and show us how to relax under pressure. Of course, some lush green plants give us a focal point that can be enjoyed all day.

The net result is that with these connections, our entire outlook begins to improve, and we are happier by nature.

Gerald Austin

The post Everything is Connected – Naturally appeared first on Your Better Life.

If you’ve seen the movie “Semi-Pro,” you’ll know that everyone on the “Flint Tropics” basketball team doesn’t get along. So what does the main character Jackie Moon come up with? “Everybody Love Everybody!” Comedy or not, what a great slogan that we should all implement into our lives.

Daniela Butcura

The post everybody love everybody appeared first on Your Better Life.

Buy a favourite beverage for someone in your life, offer to help someone in need or volunteer somewhere that you can share your skills.

Kathy Watson

The post Contribute to those around you appeared first on Your Better Life.

Do you know where this line came from? “You have chosen wisely.”

If you are over 40 and consider yourself a movie buff, you are proudly answering that it came from the movie, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

In it, the adventure-seeking hero, Indiana, had come to a climactic, life-and-death moment and had to make a choice. Fans breathed a sigh of relief when he was told by the guardian of the Holy Grail that he had chosen wisely – and consequently lived.

As our children enter into the teen years they begin a rite of passage that should include making more decisions. Thankfully, most of them are not life-and-death, but they are important, nonetheless.

This is a season of life marked with many moments of thinking-for-oneself and is a normal part of maturing and gaining healthy independence.

Often times the process of learning how to make good decisions is as critical to growth as the actual resolutions that are reached.

Here are 3 important factors to consider when helping your teen navigate through a decision-making process.

You will notice that the first two steps help in determining what is the best choice in a given scenario.

The third is a necessary quality for all competent decision-makers.

1) Assess and Adjust

Before you can guide your teen, it is helpful to assess the degree to which they are willing to make a choice and then adjust any barriers that might be present.

In the case of a strong-willed kid, the desire to choose is not usually the problem – that fact has probably been evident since birth.

If this describes your child, it is crucial to give them the freedom to make choices. However, if they have a track record of making crazy ones, you might need to reign them in a bit by narrowing their selections down to a few acceptable options.

Other teens may lack the courage to make a choice, and instead, tend to rely on parents to make all their decisions.

These kids need to be pushed a bit out of their comfort zone. The more they practice weighing the pros and cons and choosing a direction, the more comfortable they will become with making their own decisions.

In either extreme – and every case in between – teens should feel safe to make mistakes and should be encouraged to learn from them.

2) Ask and Listen

One of the best ways to establish a learning mindset in regards to making decisions is to ask effective questions and of course, listen to the answers.

Although you might feel there aren’t any questions that are off-limits when it comes to your kids, there are definitely better ways to word them.

For example, some questions that would tend to stifle good, open, communication might be:

●      Why are you so far behind the others?

●      What’s your problem?

●      Why did you do that?

●      Who made that decision?

●      Don’t you know better than that?

Each of these injects judgment rather quickly. This will make your child very hesitant to seek your wisdom.

More effective ways to word these same ideas that instill confidence and ignite conversation are:

●      How do you feel about your progress so far?

●      What’s working well with it? What is not working well with it?

●      Why do you think that?

●      What kind of support do you need to achieve success?

●      What will the benefits be for you?

These latter questions promote a healthier conversation and can point your child in the direction of autonomy.

3) Accept and Avoid

Have you ever been surprised by a person’s willingness to accept ownership of their decisions – regardless of whether it was a good or not-so-good choice?

It’s a rare quality in our culture.

Avoiding the blame-game is hard to do – even for mature adults – but is a critical part of being a competent decision-maker.

Teaching your teens to do this starts in your own backyard. As with many other important lessons, they need to see and experience you practicing what you preach.

Typically, if your child is producing excuses every time they make a decision, it may stem from one of two places – fear or pride.

For instance, if you often hear, “I didn’t know” or “I tried, but I couldn’t do it” your child may feel that they are not able to make the right decision. Fear of making a mistake may prevent them from choosing, or cause them to give excuses when things go wrong.

If your child says things like, “Well it wasn’t my fault” or “He made me do it,” pride may be getting in the way of owning up to his choices. He might feel that he always has to be perfect. If his performance isn’t flawless each time he might be inclined to play the blame game to maintain the illusion of being perfect.

Take Away

Learning to “choose wisely,” is a life-long journey.

The teen years are a great time for our kids to practice the art of making decisions. It is a responsibility that can feel heavy for some and perhaps taken too lightly by others.

Encourage your children to approach decision-making in a positive way by asking effective questions that stimulate thinking and healthy conversations.

Teach them that owning their choices is not only an attractive quality but will help them to earn respect with their family, friends, and teammates.

Michelle Wells

The post Confident Kids Make Competent Decisions appeared first on Your Better Life.

Carefully listen to what others are saying before you speak. Hear their full thought without interrupting.

Kathy Watson

The post hush & listen appeared first on Your Better Life.

Tired of the whiners, complainers, gripers and groaners in your workplace? Negative employees are an all-too-common anchor around the neck of too many work teams. 

Some studies suggest that about 70% of all conflicts in the workplace are based not on what people are saying, but how they say things. Moreover, it is estimated that in the typical workplace there are ten negative (“squawking seagull language”) comments to every one positive comment.

And it gets worse! Negative comments are thought to have five times the power of every positive comment – their impact is felt even more potently.

After a decade of research on high and low performing teams, Marcial Losada found that 2.9013 is the ratio of positive to negative emotions necessary to make a corporate team successful.  (Now that’s a rather specific number…you’re probably safe to round it off to three!)  This 3:1 ratio of positive to negative comments is known as the “Losada line.” And, ideally, Losada’s research found, if your workplace can boost the ratio to 6:1, the likelihood of greater team successes will follow, and you’ll have a far better chance of creating a truly inspiring workplace culture.

Of course, it’s not necessarily a simple shift to make. Negative energy begets more negative energy.  And don’t discount the notion that it’s fun to gripe! We all do it, and there are times when there’s nothing more fun than participating in a good mutual “rant-in” over a steaming cup of coffee.

So what can you do?

Start simply by raising awareness. Remind people of the power of the language they use in the workplace and to be aware of how they are coming across, including their body language, facial expressions, and overall energy level. Remind people that how they say things matters—a lot! 

A giant mascot, fun signs, and reminder messages throughout your office can help people think twice before they speak and encourage them to be aware of how they might be perceived.

To help your team become more conscious of its attitudes and language, try distributing some handheld counters, the kind museum attendants use to measure the number of people attending an exhibit. Then have everyone tally up the number of negative comments they either speak themselves or hear over the course of a week. Now unless you also tally the positives you won’t have a sense of the ratio, but at least you’ll raise awareness of the language being used on your team.

You also can try some other tricks, at least until you and your team are more aware of the language.  Snapping an elastic band on your wrist every time you say something negative, or having people pay a quarter into the social fund each time they use a “seagull comment,” are a little gimmicky, but they can be fun, help raise awareness and, at least at the start, help you raise loads of money!

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you also need to consider that the seagulls might just have something important to say, they just don’t know how to express it in a positive way.

Open and honest communication, including direct feedback and honest criticism, is a hallmark characteristic of any successful organization. After all, not every idea is a great idea! As draining as non-constructive negative energy is on a workplace, there’s also the danger of falling into “group think” mode, where teams that are too focused on putting on a warm and fuzzy happy face to avoid conflict at all costs end up ignoring the proverbial elephant in the room, wasting time and expending energy on truly bad, even dangerous ideas. When not all the voices get heard on a team, for fear of coming across as a seagull or fear of retaliation, then mistakes, sometimes critical ones, can happen and the best ideas don’t necessarily win the day.

Great workplaces create an environment where all ideas are open to inquiry and honest debate. 

Keep in mind, the reason employees sometimes resort to seagull behavior is because they haven’t been given all of the information, they feel excluded, or they feel like they haven’t  been heard and given a proper voice at the table. To build a great workplace culture, you need to differentiate between honest, open and constructive debate and criticism vs. draining, energy-sucking, destructive language.

And it’s not enough to simply tell people to, “Quit being seagulls!”

One of the keys to great communication success is to train, mentor and coach team members on how to give constructive criticism and express concerns in a more positive manner. You must show people how to move from destructive communication to constructive communication. From being a seagull, to well, becoming a dove. From complaining to explaining.

Think about the simple mindset shift when moving from a “complaining mode” to “explaining mode.” Explaining a position, explaining a perspective, explaining a concern suggests a more neutral, positive tone that encourages a dialogue, as opposed to a complaining mindset that conjures up the image of a drive-by rant.

Michael Kerr travels the world researching, writing, and speaking about inspiring workplace cultures. He is an international Hall of Fame business speaker, trainer, and the author of seven books, including The Humor Advantage and Hire, Inspire and Fuel Their Fire.  www.Mikekerr.com

Michael Kerr

The post Curtailing the Constant Complainers in Your Life: How to Turn Complainers Into Explainers appeared first on Your Better Life.

To all the amazing women out there, you truly make the world go round. We wouldn’t know what to do with out you, who you are makes a difference!

Daniela Butcura

The post women’s day appeared first on Your Better Life.

Your coworkers benefit from the attitudes of those around them. Share a positive attitude with your coworkers. Having a more positive attitude can help you and others feel better about whatever is going on in life at the time.

Kathy Watson

The post Uplift your coworkers appeared first on Your Better Life.

I’ve got good news for you. 15 per cent of your success is based on your skill set. The bad news is no one sees your knowledge, skills and abilities when you walk through the door. What are you doing to maximize the 85 per cent of your success that is based on your presence?

Perhaps this isn’t something you’ve considered. Perhaps you struggle with the idea that your appearance could, would or should have any bearing at all on your success. I know I did when I first got into the image industry and I initially actively rebelled, wearing things that were very unique, unstructured and frankly, a little sloppy. I believed that I would attract business from people who were rebels, who didn’t want to care about what other people thought and who were most interested in showing their true selves to the world.

While I did do a fair amount of business working with these wonderful and unique individuals and getting great results for them around their self-expression and showing up as who they really were, I wasn’t really acknowledging one of the most important facts about the way our world (and our brain) works.

We don’t live in a vacuum

People, whether they’re meeting us for the first time or the hundredth time, have expectations of what we will look like based on what they know about us. If you’re a banker and show up to a multimillion-dollar meeting in sweats and trainers, you’re causing the people in the room to stop and wonder why it is you don’t show up the way they expected. While they’re spending all that time wondering, they’re not listening to you.

It’s not their fault. We’re all wired to make quick decisions, it’s what keeps us alive. Even if our rational frontal cortex is busy saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, the limbic brain is busy making decisions and slotting all the people we meet into the boxes framed up by our previous experience and education. Everyone’s boxes are unique, but not so much that you can appear way out of them and expect to be taken seriously.

Whether it’s for a promotion, a product sale, a career change or a date, whether you like it or not, your appearance matters. Here’s how to leverage yours:

1. Fit it and forget it. Make sure that what you’re putting on fits you on every level (physically, emotionally, spiritually, socially) and then you won’t have to worry about it. How you show up will make sense to people and they’ll have way more brain space to listen to your great ideas, thoughts and comments.

2. Care for yourself, care for others. Though many people eschew personal care, not believing its value, the recent research shows that what you put on your body affects the way you think. You are deserving of detailed care of every inch of your valuable self and caring for your appearance reflects how you might care for others. It’s also a subconscious confidence boost, which supercharges your social interactions.

3. Get honest, get feedback. We will never experience ourselves the way others see us. Even when we see ourselves on video or hear ourselves on a recording, our energy and essence is still being translated through a digital medium. The only way for us to gauge how our presence is coming across is to evaluate the results. How are our interactions going? Are we well-received or not?

Personally, getting help from a colleague was one of the best things I could have done when I got stuck in an overly casual, overly comfortable, somewhat messy look. She helped me see that by staying so comfortable and conforming a bit to Vancouver’s casual look, I was denying the part of myself that loves to look great and be creative with my style, the part that likes things to be finished, with a high level of attention to detail. Her feedback helped me see my blind spot and over the next year or so, I adjusted my course and sleeked up. I feel powerful, courageous and fierce, in a way that I never could have before. And my business has doubled.

What comes up for you when you read this? Stunned? Shocked? Annoyed? Excited? Let’s hear it in the comments.

Katherine Lazaruk

The post Your Appearance Matters – How to Make the Most of Your Executive Presence appeared first on Your Better Life.