As the CEO (Chief Energizing Officer) at Hartful Living including GaiaHart.com and BizBuilderCards.com; I’m a Messenger and Mentor for women entrepreneurs, connecting them to their capacity to energize their work and their lives in the art of living Hartfully. At BizBuilderCards.com, you can make a living through giving with greeting cards and gifts to build your network net worth as an additive to your current business or an easy way to send gratitude and kindness to the world.
% What Percentage of Your Life is Spent in a State of Freedom?
September 4, 2015 | Posted in Leading Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Freedom is enlightening and is there to be savored for all it is worth. It truly is energizing when you have the freedom to be yourself. Proclaim your independence and vow to live your life freely starting today. Think about how heavy and draining our lives would be if we didn’t have freedom of choice, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to choose where we live, shop, work, play, and freedom to choose our life partner. How fabulous to have such freedoms!
After living overseas for 10 years without all these freedoms, I came to realize their profound significance and impact on my energy and my ability to choose the life I wanted to live without the constraints of not having all the freedom I was used to having.
Take a look at the personal constraints you put on yourself by your beliefs or outdated rules. What other restraints can you break free of that you place on yourself or that others place on you. Did you once need such guidelines and rules and now they are pinning your down? Some of my associates have found their freedom by sending their shirts out to be laundered and ironed, or by hiring others to do their yard work or house chores. Others have found their freedom by going back to college in their 40’s to learn a new skill or earn a degree in a new field.
Still others have found their freedom after the kids finished college or when they decided they didn’t have to make their bed every day. There are some who have found the freedom of their right livelihood and shed the shackles of a job that they never really wanted to do in the first place. Or those people who have been living a lie or keeping a secret for many years who finally come to grips with their past and now exalt in the freedom of living the truth and speaking their truth.
As the statement goes, the truth will set you free. What would it take for you to feel your full freedom and to feel your full energy without constraints? What is holding you back from the freedom of fear and the freedom to be yourself? Is it you or somebody or something else that is your biggest barrier to freedom? What tools do you need to tear down the wall or scale over it? Take a look at your freedom pie chart and figure out what percentage of your life is lived in freedom.
Listening on Demand in a Demanding Generation of Workers
August 23, 2015 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Living up to our capacity at all levels includes our communication styles and ensuring they are up to snuff. Especially with the new brand of employees now in the workforce and those entering in the coming years, Generation Z. The research shows that Millennials now have an attention span of 12 seconds living in a constant state of partial distraction. Once the workers of Generations Z enter the workforce, they bring with them an 8-second attention span living in a state of partial attention.
What that means for us as team players and leaders is that we need to hone our communication styles, our leadership styles, the way we interact with the new breed of workers in much faster paced, on-demand type of environment. These workers are used to finding answers to problems on demand in the palms of their hands on mobile devices. They may not have the answers in their heads, but they have it in their hands. Our way of giving direction must be quick and agile, our listening also needs to be honed to their brief sound-bite type of 140-character Twitter-type of quips. No long conversations expected.
Solid relationships help us gain the respect and trust of others, our clients and our colleagues. It is important to be easy to work with, to have productive working relationships. People must sense that we genuinely care about them; this is how they feel inspired to work with and even follow us and to endear that trust and inspiration, we need to behave and communicate how others needs us to in order to feel heard. After all, sharing experiences with the world and having the world hear their stories is what Millennials and Gen Z are all about – just check out Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and the flavor-of-the-month site to upload stories and pictures.
Here are a few helpful practices to becoming an accomplished listener:
- First, our attitude: We must commit to listen to understand and learn.
- Put the other person at ease, maybe by sitting side by side rather than across a desk.
- Lean forward, comfortable eye contact, a slight smile.
- Quiet our mind — and stay fully present!
- Give affirmations: “OK,” “I see,” “Makes sense.”
- Ask clarifying questions.
- Maybe ask if we may repeat what we’ve heard to assure we have it right.
- Use silence, don’t rush to fill the space, likely the person will then continue, and we’ll deepen our learning. It is said, “Let silence do the heavy lifting.”
- Take notes, it will help us remember, and even more important, it is a sign of respect to the other person and will be appreciated.
It all begins with our willingness to understand and learn, and our effort to be patient and fully present. Conscious listening is difficult, especially in our crazy busy world today with so many urgencies and distractions. Keep in mind that we all want our stories to be heard and try to keep your distractions at bay while you lend an ear.
ALT – Alternatives, You Have Them
August 4, 2015 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
You have a choice to either panic and stress out, or hit Any Key to open your windows to better options. Choose positive options that make you happy and add joy to your life. Are you truly doing what you want or are there alternatives? Realize you have a choice of alternatives in any situation to help you become unstuck. It’s your decision how to react to situations. Choose the alternative that will move you closer to what is truly important.
It’s our decisions that shape our destiny and our character. Are you choosing short-term gratification or long term satisfaction alternatives? Where are your decisions taking you? Even not choosing an alternative is making a decision to act in one way or another. Waiting to take no action forces the decision or alternative upon us. Be pro-active and research your alternatives to make the best decision for you at that time. Sometimes none of our alternatives seem like a good choice, but at least we do have alternatives, choices, and options. Take charge of yours and be in the driver’s seat of your emotional energy.
Employee Health & Well-Being Programs Need a Check-up
July 23, 2015 | Posted in Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
With 85% of U.S. companies employing 1,000 people or more offering some sort of workplace wellness program; you would think that Americans would be getting healthier. Yet merely offering a wellness program is no guarantee that employees know about it, take advantage of it, or improve from it. Gallup research shows that only 60% of U.S. employees are aware that their company offers a wellness program — and only 40% of those who are aware of the program say they actually participate in it.
Gallup’s research shows a clear link between employee engagement and well-being, with managers serving as the liaison between the two. Managers account for at least 70% of team variation on employee engagement. And engaging employees is vital to getting them involved in company-sponsored initiatives, because engaged workers are 28% more likely to participate in a wellness program
It takes great managers to engage employees. Over the past decade, Gallup has worked with hundreds of organizations to help their managers create engagement and boost employees’ well-being. To measure engagement, they ask employees to respond to 12 statements, including whether their supervisor (or someone at work) seems to care about them as a person. This statement in particular reveals whether workers feel that their manager truly cares about their well-being. Those who agree with it are more likely to be top performers and to produce higher quality work, and they are less likely to get sick, change jobs, or be injured at work. Trust is the biggest indicator of all that managers can have a positive impact and influence on employees.
Too many company wellness programs focus solely on Physical Well-Being. It needs to be a holistic approach to well-being and resilience and not just a weight-loss or smoking cessation program. Managers who engage their employees have an edge when it comes to boosting workplace well-being, though. Engaged employees are more than two times as likely as actively disengaged employees to say they are very or somewhat comfortable discussing their well-being with their manager.
Here are the Gallup-Healthways Well-being Five names such for the five parts that make up well-being.
Gallup and Healthways have developed a comprehensive, definitive source of well-being measurement, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being 5. This scientific survey instrument and reporting experience measures, tracks, and reports on the well-being of individuals and organizations. The five essential elements of well-being are:
- Purpose: liking what you do each day and being motivated to achieve your goals
- Social: having supportive relationships and love in your life
- Financial: managing your economic life to reduce stress and increase security
- Community: liking where you live, feeling safe, and having pride in your community
- Physical: having good health and enough energy to get things done daily
What are you doing personally to improve these five areas of your life? Don’t wait for your employer to take the initiative. Your health and life are waiting for you. Start today to change old habits that aren’t working for you and do a personal check-up on your own health and well-being using these five areas. Cheers to a healthy, wealthy life!
@ EASE – Ideas to Organize, Recognize, and Energize
July 4, 2015 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Quick and easy ideas for you to optimize your work and your life to live and lead Hartfully.
1. Skip lunch at your desk and take a walk outside to munch lunch while sitting in the fresh air. Start a walking club and pick your dream vacation spot and walk the mileage it takes to get there.
2. Replace your stuffy plaques with photos or posters which inspire you or afford a mental get-away.
3. Take turns bringing in creative treats to work on Friday.
4. If you have flextime, change your schedule according to the season for a change of pace.
5. Have a staff baby photo contest – the winner gets to leave an hour early.
6. Schedule more 3-day weekends to give yourself a break instead of putting all your vacation time in one spot. Our energy soars as we look forward to something special. Plan special things on Mondays to start your week out with higher energy.
7. Send thank-you notes to staff or customers who were particularly helpful or kind. Send notes home to staff spouses or parents telling them how terrific their partner or child is and thank them for their support.
8. Schedule a massage therapist to visit your office for seated massages during a particularly stressful time (budgeting cycles, end-of-month inventory) to decrease stress and increase productivity and well-being.
9. Conduct fewer meetings, remove the chairs to ensure they will be shorter, use email or conference calling, make meetings more fun and personable with surprises to keep people interested. People learn more when they are having fun.
10. Listen to books on tape, soothing music, or motivational tapes as you drive to work to make use of commuting time. Residents around the Washington DC area spend an average of 82 hours per year stuck in traffic…what are you doing to help increase your energy as you drive?
@: Move Forward From Where You are @
June 23, 2015 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
No excuses for where you have been. Start from where you are right now and make positive changes toward increased energy. Select a few strategies that seem most workable for your lifestyle and make adjustments from there. It’s never too late to make a difference in somebody’s life – even your own. You don’t have to wait for that proverbial wake-up call such as a heart attack, cancer, a stroke, termination, divorce, children going off to college, or death of a loved one; you can decide to change now.
We either take what we get or ask for what we want and have some influence over what we want. Waiting around for fate to make our decisions doesn’t give us much of a back-up plan or wiggle room to move towards what we want. So what are you waiting for?
Where do you want to go? What steps do you have to take to move forward in the direction and the end state that was mentioned earlier? Each day is the dawn of a new beginning and a chance for each of us to start fresh and use our past experience as feedback and not an excuse.
Start today to create what you need to energize yourself and your life. Don’t drown yourself in the negative energy of what happened to you in your past or the energy drain of feeling like a victim from your past experiences.
Quit the bad habits that are draining the life out of you, or may have been holding you back, or may have lead you to a negative place in the past. No excuses. Just do it because you know what these habits are and you know it’s the right thing to do. I know it’s hard; but the benefits of long-term satisfaction will far outweigh the short-term gratification.
Get yourself together, get your partner, get a friend, or get professional assistance to help you quit the bad stuff for the long haul. Just do it. While you’re at it, quit procrastinating and move on to newer and better things. Getting the inertia moving in the right direction towards more positive things helps bring energy into our lives.
Take a fresh look at what you have today and where or who you want to be tomorrow and focus on what you need to do right now to start down that new path. Just do it.
Mindful Meditation Made Easy
June 4, 2015 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully, Wealthy Woman | By Gaia Hart
Have you been looking for a proven way to relax, refresh, and renew yourself? Now there is a way to effortlessly meditate more deeply than a Zen monk, dramatically accelerating the meditation process and create profound changes in your mental, emotional, and spiritual health. The Holosync Solution ™ aides in increasing your mind-power and dramatically raises your threshold for stress. You can try this incredible system for an amazing one-year, no-questions asked, money-back guarantee. Check out this dynamic product by Bill Harris. I was in a conference session with the makers of the Holosync system and I was blown away by their research and successful results and you will be too. Backed by a mountain of scientific research—and proven results for thousands of users, our proprietary Holosync audio technology placed on CD’s beneath soothing music and environmental sounds will help you get results faster and with less effort than you ever dreamed possible and it’s all guaranteed.
Here are some of the ways you’ll benefit:
- Stimulate the creation of new neural pathways between the right and left hemispheres of your brain, balancing your brain and leading you to a high-performance state scientists call “whole brain functioning”.
- Dramatically improve your learning ability, memory, intuition, creativity, and your ability to focus, concentrate and think more clearly.
- Create true quantum leaps in your personal self-awareness.
- Significantly lower your stress levels and lower your levels of harmful brain chemicals related to stress.
- Create remarkable improvements in your mental and emotional health—even in areas that have stubbornly resisted change with other approaches.
- Dramatically increase your production of vital (and very pleasurable) brain chemicals related to your longevity, well-being, and quality of life.
- Test drive it yourself, you’ve got nothing to lose, except some stress….
!: Live Your Life as an Exclamation!
May 23, 2015 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Remember Helen Keller’s statement, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.”? Live your life out loud, as if you didn’t have much more to live . . . because you never know what the future holds. It takes concentrated effort to avoid being lulled into our secure patterns. How would you change your behavior if you knew you would live to be 100, or for only a few more years, or months?
Because our life can change dramatically in a matter of moments, live and laugh loudly now. What have you been excited about lately? Make dates with yourself to stretch your comfort zone. By taking calculated and thoughtful risks, we put ourselves out there to trust our intuition and to go with our gut instincts. As we grow older, we tend to risk less and live more quietly. Be daring and buck this trend by learning a new sport, a new language, a new art form, or renting a Porsche 911 and driving the autobahns of Germany.
A trend sweeping the nation lately is the Red Hat Society where women of a certain age (mid-centurions) don purple outfits with red hats and get together to test drive new experiences, kick up their heels, or just have a fun outing. Check out www.redhatsociety.com for more information on these wild and crazy women and their forays into living life as an exclamation. Word has it that if you are under the age requirement, you can join in the festivities, but you must wear lavender apparel with a pink hat until you have earned your stripes and are old enough to be promoted to the proper colors.
Adventure gets your adrenaline pumping and charges you up. There’s nothing like a good adventure to narrowly focus on the task at hand and take your mind off trivialities. Excitement builds commensurate to the physical, emotional, intellectual, or financial risks being addressed. Push yourself to taste adventure more often as it will boost your energy and make you feel alive.
Adventures come in all shapes and sizes from taking a new route to work, to learning a new computer program, taking a cooking class, or walking into a singles bar alone. What constitutes an adventure is really in the eye and the attitude of the beholder. Wearing a bikini might be common practice for some, but for others it might be an adventure, or perhaps a misadventure. It doesn’t have to be exotic or life threatening to be an adventure.
Deciding to have an attitude of an adventurer and being open to what comes your way will help you deflect some of the stress that may come your way when things don’t work out as planned. At least you will have an adventure to tell friends and family about later. What have you done lately that could be considered an adventure? Why not plan for some adventures on your own as well as with friends or family? You never know where your next adventure will take you.
I have a ritual that I need to try at least one new big adventure each year such as hang gliding, sky diving, helicopter skiing, or dog sledding. It keeps my energy up just looking forward to the thrill. What is your next big adventure?
Keeping our sense of adventure and discovery in tact helps keep us on track. Cultivating our sense of delight and honing it by introducing new and enjoyable experiences into our lives helps to keep us feeling vital. Children are naturally adept at these traits since their lives are filled with copious amounts of discovery and delight because they have not yet discovered many life experiences and everything is still new and exciting.
As adults we tend to stay with what we know and our discovery cycle diminishes with age. To keep ourselves young, try doing what the young people do and make new adventures and discoveries a part of your lifestyle. Keep your curiosity up about how things work, why things are the way they are, and what happens if. . . By putting yourself in the position of life-long learner, your energy will be renewed with each aha moment or new discovery.
Risk Taking and stretching out of our comfort zone physically, mentally, or emotionally keeps us on our toes and gets our adrenaline and our energy surging. They key is to move that energy towards the excitement end of the continuum versus the nervous and “scaredy cat” end of the continuum. Whether it’s embarking on a new career, asking for a raise, auditioning for a spot in a theatre production, walking into an adult education class, or a weight room; the act of going beyond our normal limits expands our world and expands our possibilities while it expands our energy level. Without such regular expansions, we cease to be vital in our lives and begin to live the same day over and over again. Open yourself to new discoveries and see what new energy reserves are released.
It is often uncomfortable to try new things and risk feeling foolish or not being good at a new sport or artistic endeavor or even test driving a new recipe. When we put ourselves out there to try new things and take a risk, we increase our energy and our thirst for exploring new things and trying new ways of being or behaving. Try planning for small, medium, and larger risks each year to keep your life more interesting and see where in the world it takes you.
Taking calculated risks and not throwing all caution to the wind and taking stupid risks whether it’s physical, financial, emotional, or intellectual is probably a good idea. Only you know your risk tolerance in each of these areas and only you know how much of a nudge you need to expand your tolerance. So go ahead and take a leap of faith, I dare ya.