Cultivate Community

Are you feeling down? Got the winter blahs? All of us have times where we get down on ourselves, and our confidence could use a little help. Kent Sayre has seven tips to help you boost your confidence. Because when you feel good about yourself, you're a much better spouse, parent, worker, and friend.

• Ask yourself, “What’s the worst that could happen?” Too often, we place excess importance on potential problems. We all have a certain amount of energy so let’s apply it to creating extraordinary relationships, advancing our careers and meeting our goals INSTEAD of wasting that energy worrying. Take action on what you have control over and minimize risks for what you don’t. Then invest your energy wisely.
• Find someone who is already confident in that area and copy them. Model as many of their behaviors, attitudes, values, and beliefs for the context you want to be confident in as you can. How can you do this? Talk with them if you have access to them. If you don’t have access to them, get as much exposure to them as you can. This could be talking to people who know the person and/or buying their products if they have some.

Do you feel like you're stuck in a rut? Do you do the same things, see the same people, day in and day out? 10 Old Ways to Learn Something New, not only will give you ideas for learning something new, but several ideas in this article involve meeting other people. Better yet, try one of these ideas with a family member or friend and learn something new about each other.

• Talk To Someone You Are Unfamiliar With. Most of our social circles are limited to people within our same age range or have similar interests. Interacting with these people will not bring you new experiences and opportunities. There are reasons why networking sessions are so strongly recommended. They bring diverse people together who are interested in meeting more people. Each participant gets multiple opportunities to learn something new, either from the speaker or their peers.
• Take a walk. In the absence of the danger of physical harm, try to take a walk around your neighbor hood. You might just discover something interesting that you have missed because you were driving too fast down the road. You might also rediscover neighbors whom who you forgotten exist!

Whether you're at work or home there is always something "urgent." There is normally a crisis—if not two or three—going on all around you. Your boss dumps a last minute project on you, or child failed to mention that the science fair is tomorrow and needs help starting the project. And if that's not enough, Bob Walsh shows where additional "urgency" comes from and why:

Then there’s Mainstream Media feeding on crises - large and small, real and contrived. From 9/11 to a car crash on the other side of the world, mainstream media will be there - if there’s video - to bring you the crises of the day, the hour, the news segment. Because while fearful people used to run away from their lords and masters into the forest, they now run to the mall or box store and go shopping. Fear sells. Fear and contrived urgency as recent history has shown makes it easy to get people to do things they don’t want to do for the benefit of the people controlling - managing - the fear.

Bob's advice is to learn how to pick which crises will be your urgency:

You could decide there’s more than a little wisdom in the saying “Your crisis doesn’t equal my urgency” and stop automatically buying into every crisis your boss, client, spouse or government offers.