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Surviving Explosion, Implosion, Meltdown and Other Personal Disasters of the Holidays

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Fine Memories or Forgettable Mess?

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On this busiest shopping weekend, phone purchasing something can be a fine memory in the making or a most forgettable mess. We change how folks act or what they do, but we get to choose how we think about it.

Surviving Disasters of the Holidays

Yes, Virginia, it can be done. We can get to the New Year with our Joyful Jolly still fully functioning. As usual as they might seem, personal disasters — explosion, implosion, and meltdowns — are not a necessary result of the Holiday Season.

Here’s how to avoid them entirely and maybe even have the energy to help others to do the same.

  1. Allow too much time for everything. When we’ve got more to do, we seem to think we can do more in less time. We hurry up. Everyone else is hurrying up too. Traffic jams, extra programs, sales at the mall, and holiday traditions pile on us all. We funnel in the same direction . . . bumping into one another. Accidents happen. Let the other guy go first because you left early.

  2. Make a list and check it twice. Other times of year, a list might be useful but during the holidays, a list is major stress relief. Get those details of what to do in one place on paper, where they’ stop mentally nagging you to remember them. The accomplishment of crossing off something that’s done is a feeling that will keep your good mood moving forward with you.

  3. Enjoy the view. Set aside time along the way to relax. Beautiful things happen this time of year. Let your eyes, your mind, and your spirit take them in. The time you take to do that with folks you love will refuel you. You’ll come back ready to do more than you might have had you kept chugging ahead. You’ll be brilliant and appreciated. A little appreciate — of the world and of you — does a lot to keep a joyful, jolly mood in season.

  4. Realize that everyone is a person. The clerk at the store, the voice on the phone, the delivery man or woman at your door, the folks walking around you on the street . . . they all have thoughts, feelings, and the same sorts of stresses as you. . . . maybe more. See them. Smile. The smiles they return will make you smile even more.

  5. Be a person too. It’s easy to start attempting superhuman feats during this season of generosity. Set kind and generous priorities. Know that to give well also means taking care of yourself for your family and friends. All of us can only do what is humanly possible. The world won’t end if you decide not to make cookies this year.

Follow these simple ideas and you just might find that you enjoy the holidays. Decide from this moment what you care about and let that be your guide when you feel yourself starting to falter.

Besides, when the cranky folks decide to explode all over us for their own unpleasantness, nothing beats a smile and an answer like, “Hey, I’m sorry that’s how you feel. . . . I’m finding everyone is so generous and joyful!”

How will you manage yourself this holiday season?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Change the World: Think Our Way Out of the Box

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We Make Our Reality

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It’s only sensible that we make our reality. What we perceive comes through the filter of what we have experienced before.

When I used go home to visit my family for holidays, every trip was a stress. I felt they didn’t see me.

Families have a way of bringing us back to our “role” in the group dynamic. I would return telling people how my siblings thought I was still 12 years old. I thought they were self-centered in doing this.

Couldn’t have been me? Could it?

Silly me. It sure was all my own doing. I thought they put me in a box, but I was finding that box and crawling right into all by myself. Sometimes the roles we play in a group dynamic are so comfortable, so much easier than being fully present. We gravitate to old roles without being aware that we’re choosing them, and then we decide that it’s something that other folks are deciding for us.

Head and heart, when all of our parts are connected together. That’s when we really have a soul. That’s when we know how to listen — to ourselves and others. Our cells resonate with the sound of life like drops in that pool.

We imagine other people in our own image and likeness. When we guess what they’re thinking we’re really imagining what we, ourselves, might think were we them.

So why not imagine them thinking we’re a fabulous success? It’s within our power to think our way out of that old box.

We can change the world — just like that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Generosity and Gratitude

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NIX photo of Star

In this universe

so much larger,

infinite and spectacular,

filled with wisdom.

filled with wonder . . .

beautiful tulips

We want,

we worry,

wander searching

for meaning,

for beauty and for connection.

flowers from the heartflowers from the soul

We reach. We find our hearts, ourselves, each other.

Our lives are connected by beauty, meaning, and generosity.

Generosity and Gratitude

beautiful flowers and a bee in the sunlight

are inseparable, as lifelong friends are.

We cannot offer one without the other.
They are brave and vulnerable.
They are magnetic power.

They make us better forever.

All of me thanks all of you
for every word and every space.

I am one lucky girl.

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Working Smart or Working Away the Time of Your Life?

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Whoa! Look around us!

Everyone is so . . . busy. We’re almost can’t see each other.

We’re juggling, talking, typing, scanning instead of reading, talking instead of thinking, putting off time with our family and friends. We all know so much about productivity, goals, keeping connected, and following our passion to build the business that we love. It’s enough to make a brain shut down into auto-mode.

I know I occasionally find myself staring out from a glazed look, walking into walls. How about you?

Being determined, motivated, set on a path with a laser beam focus is a good thing. . . . right? It is, if every now and then, we check that our destination is still where we want to go and that we’re enjoying the ride on the way.

The Going Not the Getting There

I see it in clients. I’ve felt it in my friends. I’ve done it myself. It’s a heads down sort of thing that takes over our thinking. We become so aware of time, so time-managing, that we manage to set aside anything that might, even possibly from far off, appear to be construed as doing nothing.

What’s wrong with doing nothing or better yet doing something just for fun — not balance . . . F-U-N? What’s wrong with enjoying the folks we care about as we move through our lives?

Nature has no straight lines.

Our priorities can get so straight that they become twisted and upside-down. We can get so focused on our destination that we forget to pay attention to the journey and the people who make living our lives magical, meaningful, and worth living.

Way, way back in the olden days, Harry Chapin sang this in a song.

It’s got to be the getting there, not the going that’s good. –Heads and Tales, Greyhound

We’ll never get this moment back . . . oops, it’s already gone!

At the end of my days will I regret the work I didn’t do or the time I didn’t spend with my husband, my son, my dad, my mom, my brothers, my nieces and nephews, my lifelong friends, the new exciting people I’ve just met?

If you knew that your time left was only tonight, what would you do then?

I’m going with Bruce Cockburn’s answer . . .

If it was the last night of the world, I’d have champagne with you. –Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu, Last Night of the World

Yep, that’s what I’d do.

I’m making a sign and putting up right above my monitor.

Will you make a sign too? It’s the time of your life.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

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Change the World: It’s Millionaire Day!

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Feel Rich and Appreciated

changetheworld8

When I lived in Austin, I worked for a company that had a strict matrix for how merit performance increases were allowed. To say that in plain English, in an effort to be fair — or was it to control the budget? — the company had a chart showing how monetary increases would be “done fairly.”

I don’t remember the exact merit increase chart, but the matrix chart only allowed for 10% of the staff to receive increases above the rising cost of inflation.

This chart was problem.

Editors had a lot to say about the words chosen to describe performance — outstanding, good, adequate, and poor. Even more, though, was the problem of an entire team that was performing in an outstanding fashion all being limited to a raise of about 4-5%, when inflation was at least half of that.

So I did what I could to provide other incentives. . . . tweaked the atmosphere, found days they might take off . . . to pay them in other ways.

About a mile from our office was a small store with a glass counter. Behind the glass, the shelves displayed expensive Belgian chocolates. If you’ve a taste for chocolate, if you’re a connoisseur — read that as a chocolate snob — as I am, this 6 foot counter could entertain and amaze for well into an hour. One chocolate, in particular, became a favorite with my team.

This delicacy was made both in milk chocolate and dark chocolate versions, each filled with praline. One piece was 1.25 x .5 x .5 in size and was shaped like a US Dollar sign — $ . That was the hit! A single chocolate dollar sign sold at an exchange rate equivalent to that of the Australian dollar at the time.

I would buy those chocolate dollar signs, and we’d have an emergerency team meeting. An official announcement would state that we had once again become millionaires in the chocolate lottery. Then we’d spend 30 minutes or so eating one luxury chocolate a piece.

It was a ritual. It was a game. It was the best time and a way of saying what needed saying.

And our moods and minds changed. We stood taller, smiled more, and were more generous toward each other We also laughed. We were millionaires for the day. One piece of chocolate made that difference.

I can’t give you the chocolate. So I told you the story.

I hope you can imagine it, because I’m declaring, “We’re All Millionaires Today!”

We have a million in the bank and a few million invested. Millions of friends love each of us, and millions of readers and customers love what we do.

A little millionaire thinking really can make a difference. . . . Will you be a millionaire today?

We can change the world — just like that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Blogger Relationships: A Meeting of the Minds

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I've been thinking . . .

about how our minds meet.

This week I met a blogger friend at an event in Chicago. We have a common geography. His thoughts live in places where my thoughts had once had a home, and he went to the same high school my brothers’ kids did. We are the same kind of shy, but I might have talked too much for him to notice.

He told me he tended not to mix at a gathering of strangers. I told him that I usually had the same response and how I found ways to get by. We talked about how meeting folks online was different.

Since that night, I’ve been thinking the bloggers i meet every day in my mind.

I used to be ponder and be relieved by how efficient it is online. I can listen in and if I didn’t fit, I can click away — no one is embarrassed; no painful small talk is required. It’s so much less stressful, so much more efficient, the way we meet and connect with folks of like-mind.

But that’s only the beginning.

We might move up into our heads thinking, as we do any other time. The larger difference comes when, rather than thinking, listening, and speaking simultaneously, we focus on taking thoughts in and moving thoughts out via the keyboard one direction at a time.

The thoughts we exchange are in smaller packages. People are shy about holding the comment box for too many paragraphs. It would be a feat to step on the words while we type. It’s nearly impossible not to attend to the ideas someone offers — we have to read what they write to know what we want to say. Besides, we understand that we have time after we read to compose a thoughtful response.

It’s a respectful way of communicating. No wonder we find our a meaningful conversation right away.

What if we brought that same approach to the listening and speaking we do in the real world, in real time?

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