Ways to Stay Positive

Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

  • You are a business owner wondering wether your marketing efforts are worth it since your client list is not growing
  • You are in a career transition yet still uncertain as to your direction so you feel stuck
  • You are trying to get ahead in your career with only marginal success
  • You are seeking greater passion in your life but not finding it anywhere

We all have goals we want to achieve, yet along our path we are often met with challenges that keep our goals just out of reach.   What do you do?  You choose to stay positive and in action.

Here are a few ways to stay positive:

  • Get very clear on what it is you actually do want.  Not what you should want or what you don’t want.  You’ll know when you are clear when you are able to envision it in your mind and formulate a plan to achieve it.
  • Understand why you want what you want.  The stronger your connection to what you want, the more willing you will be to do what it takes to achieve it
  • Believe that you can achieve what you want.  The greater your belief, the more creative you will become in achieving it.
  • Focus on activity, not outcomes.  Activity includes choices you make each day to consistently chip away at your goals.  It is the small and consistent actions that eventually yield results.  When you measure and celebrate how much you did, you are setting yourself up for success.

These are but a few ways to stay positive when reaching for your goals.  For more personal focus on this subject, schedule a free 30-minute coaching consultation with me (stefanie@stefaniezizzo.com).

Knowing When You Found the Right Choice

It was time to change the environment of my home office.  I had an idea of what I wanted my office to feel like – warm, bright, sunny, vibrant yet peaceful at the same time and thought that lime green was just the color.  Boy was I wrong!

While the color itself was beautiful, it felt like I had placed grown up furniture into a baby’s room.  Not the feeling I was going for.  I had to live with it for a few days until I could repaint, but more than that I had to find the right color. I did and here is the result:

This process made me think about how we make all kinds of decisions, especially career decisions.  We may have an idea of what we want, yet need to try several things until we finally “feel” that it’s the right choice.  We often don’t know if something is right just by looking at it (in my case on a paint chip or even half a wall!) and instead need to dive in to test it out.

Paint is easy, we choose a color and if we don’t like it we paint another color over it – sometimes twice in the same week 🙂

With our careers it’s not as simple, but here are some ways you can try a new career on for size to see if it “feels” right:

  •  Shadowing – find someone who is in a career that you are considering and ask if you can spend a day (or half a day) with them in their environment
  • Volunteer in a new role – find an organization that needs the type of role you are considering and offer your services to them.
  • Volunteer in a new environment – Even if you are engaged in a different role than you would like, placing yourself in the new environment will allow you to assess how it feels to be there
  •  Pro bono work – if you are considering offering a service, whether on your own or through an organization, try offering it pro bono to a couple of people to see what it feels like to be delivering it.
I would love to hear from you.  What other ways have you found that have helped you know you have found the right choice for you?

 

Seeing Yourself in a Mirror

In a recent phone conversation with a family member, I was being baraged by questions about a joint issue we were discussing.   A string of What, How, When and Where questions that came one after the other.

My responses?  Most of them were “I don’t know” and I found myself getting uncomfortable – it felt like an interrigation.   Then suddenly I had one of those ahha moments of clarity.  It was as if I was looking in a mirror hearing/seeing myself do the very same thing to my husband!

Wow! I had a new understanding of what it felt like to be on the receiving end of a string of questions that can’t be answered in the moment, questions that require more investigation or preplanning.

The best part?  My husband was in the room while I was on the phone so he heard my end of the conversation.  When I got off the phone I immediately shared my revelation and he said “Yes!  I was thinking that the whole time you were on the phone!”

What behaviors of yours do you notice mirrored back to you?

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