The Art of Hartful Living
Embrace Imbalance
March 21, 2007 | Posted in Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
I know I’m supposed to be living a balanced life, as I walk my talk showing others how to lead more simplified, balanced lives and prioritize the things that matter. I find myself inundated lately with a symphony of things that seem to command my attention all at once. It’s at this time that I believe we need to embrace imbalance and go with the flow while letting go of some things for the time being.
Perhaps we can’t balance on a daily schedule, maybe it needs to happen over a span of a week or a month. When you know you need to gut through things or a plethora of projects for a month or two, then you brace yourself for a little imbalance during that time, as long as you can reward yourself with new balance at the end of the sprint. Having balance is all good and well, but sometimes it just isn’t possible and we need to get clear and what to do and what to drop.
What do you need to do and what do you need to drop today or this week in order to come back to center, regroup, re-charge and re-energize yourself. Get fiercely focused, get ready for a sprint and then find some fierce fun at the end of it all and reward yourself for your accomplishments. My reward for these past 2 months is a cruise and a trip to Cabo to mix some fun and effectiveness. What’s your reward?
Take the Tingle Test – Career Choices and Dynamic Decisions
March 20, 2007 | Posted in Leading Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
When you’re in the midst of making career choices or other decisions about your job, your lifestyle, your surroundings or other business decision; of course you can write out the pros and cons and do a comparative analysis. I’m all for the using a visual to help sort out thoughts and see them in writing. It may make your clear choice jump out at you.
Trying what I like to call The Tingle Test is what really cuts to the chase and gets down to how you feel about a decision. Saying your decision out loud or just holding that vision clearly in your mind should give you a gut check and either make you tingle with excitement or leave you lack-luster. It’s truly getting quiet and listening to your body and how it reacts to a decision as if you already made that decision. After you visualize your decision or say it, how do you feel? Does your hair stand up, do you get tingles down your spine, does a smile appear on your face, do your eyes light up, do you stand taller? All these are signs that your gut says yes to that decision.
If your body doesn’t react positively, then maybe you need to tweak your decision – figure out what isn’t exactly feeling right about it an make some adjustments in order to pass The Tingle Test with flying colors. Stress is what happens when your mouth says ‘OK’ and your gut says ‘No Way’ – that’s when you know you need to regroup and feel energized with a better decision.
Make your decisions dynamic and involve all aspects of yourself to know if you’re OK with that decision. Take The Tingle Test on your next decision and see what happens.
Now I’ve got goose bumps just thinking about my future and opportunities coming into my world…..how about you?
Corporate Kindness: A Competitive Edge
March 19, 2007 | Posted in Leading Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
There are a couple books out on the topic of corporate kindness and how being nice can actually be a competitive advantage. In The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, they explain how friendliness and common courtesy along with how you look affects people’s moods and attitudes towards you. Cheerfulness and being polite and respectful spreads more easily than irritability and facial expressions and body language convey more relevant information than a sales pitch.
It’s all about the notion of consequences and karma – people may forget what you say, but they never forget how you made them feel. They remember acts of kindness as well as rudeness. After all, isn’t business and all of the world about relationships and how we connect with others be it inside or outside our organization?
Another book, The Kindness Revolution: The Company-Wide Culture Shift That Inspires Phenomenal Customer Service by Ed Horrell identifies how companies with stellar street reps for service excellence practice extreme kindness, respect, fairness and genuine niceties. He notes that the opposite of kindness isn’t being mean, it’s indifference. When indifference sets in, then it gives people a bad experience and in a world of choices, the customer (internal or external) chooses to walk. In fact, you can say that about any relationship – when indifference and disrespect and unkindness sets in, most people walk.
With a little more corporate kindness and consideration, I would argue that we would have many more gruntled workers than disgruntled workers. And we could actually save lives…one statistic form the Department of Labor cites that the #2 killer of workers on the job is homicide by a disgruntled colleague or customer. What are you doing to impart kindness in your daily activities? What are you doing to add light to the world? What are you doing to save a life today?
You can find these books at the link to Amazon in this publication.
Planning Playtime to Increase Your Energy
March 16, 2007 | Posted in Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Geeze, where has the time gone? I didn’t abandon you – just been up to my eyeballs in deadlines, projects and building a new house. In the midst of it all, I guess there was a slow news day or something, but Stephen Covey’s people notified me that I would be the cover girl for one of their other magazines in the Executive Excellence Publishing family of publications: Health & Fitness Excellence. Visit http://www.EEP.com. For a copy of the article on Planning Playtime to Organize and Energize Your Life, send me an email to Gail@GailHahn.com.
Other news is that this blog will be moving in the near future to another site. I plan on revamping my current website and making the front page a blog so you only need to visit one place.
Here’s a question for you: if you could plan a girlfriend getaway as part of your playtime planning, or just a personal escape to refresh, renew and recharge your batteries; what would be some of the things you would like in your escape haven? What types of activities would you like to do? What types of food? What types of environments? Would you want any guided facilitation or just to “be” in an inspirational place? Let me know your thoughts of what you would like for a FUNomenal Woman Weekend or an Energize Your Life Retreat and I will send you a free report on energy gains and drains.
Thanks for your insight!
Energizing Your Service Experience
January 7, 2007 | Posted in Leading Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Happy New Year to everybody. I’m thrilled to be able to share another article on Customer Service that was published in the December Parks and Recreation Magazine; called Bringing Customers Back. The article was based on the experience that my friends Dr. Diane Blankenship and her family and I had dogsledding in Wyoming. About our adventures and mis-adventures with services that were lacking and how it could have been better to make it a more positive once in a lifestime experience. Those who are members of The National Recreation and Park Association can read it in their magazine and others can visit http://www.NRPA.org and look under publications.
Take a look at the article if you want to learn more about facilitating the 6 phases of the customer experience.
To Your FUNominal Success!
Happy Herd or Mad Cows at Work
December 15, 2006 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully, Wealthy Woman | By Gaia Hart
Happy Holidays!
I hope this finds you well and enjoying the wind-down of the season and the many festive office parties that are sure to abound. In appreciation for your support and adding light to my world, I wanted to share this pdf version of the new issue of Stephen Covey’s Sales and Service Excellence magazine that features Fun*cilitators and our article on Contented Cows – How to Create a Happy Herd at Work through mixing fun and effectiveness. It hits the bookshelves in January and I wanted you to have a sneak peek – I thought you might like to get a jump on your competition and be the first on your block to get the inside scoop on building a better team.
If you want a copy of the magazine article in a pdf version, send me an email at Gaia@gaiahart.com to get your own copy and share it with others who may be just chewing their cud at work.
We’ve stocked up on our 52 Ways to Have Fun at Work card deck to prepare for the upcoming publication date. If you want 52 more ways to have more fun at work in addition to the article, send me an email or give me a call to order your own card deck chalked full of ideas, tips and tidbits to practice safe stress at work. 866.Fun.at.Work or Gaia@gaiahart.com.
To Your FUNominal Success!
Gail
Change Your Mind, Change Your Energy, Change Your Life
November 28, 2006 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
When you change your mind, you change your energy and when you change your energy, you change your life. As we enter the holiday season and I see all kinds of news stories about the stresses of the holidays, it reminds me that much of the energy drain and stress is something we create for ourselves. When we change our mind about something and made a decision to think or not thing about it in a certain way, our entire energy about that thing changes. We can also change the energy of the people around us. After all, we are part of other people’s environments.
Make some decisions about salvaging your energy this holiday season and set guidelines for yourself that make sense to you and your family. It’s too late to make a decision not to cook a huge Thanksgiving meal, but not too late to make a decision about how to handle holiday parties, family, gift giving or experience giving, new traditions you can start, old traditions you can change or ditch all together and how you can improve your situation, your sanity and your energy in the coming year.
Try making a written 120-day plan and then keep it handy to keep you focused on what you want to be doing with you life, then celebrate when you see all the checkmarks after 4 months. It will certainly change your mind about what you decide to do with your time. If something isn’t serving you well, make a decision to change it for the better and keep moving forward.
Cheers!
Gail
Energize Your Holiday Card Sending System
November 21, 2006 | Posted in Living Hartfully, Wealthy Woman | By Gaia Hart
I wanted to share this amazing new system with you for sending out your holiday cards, keeping in contact with clients or just remembering friends and family. Check out http://www.BizBuilderCards.com to take a look at the thousands of cards you can send using your computer. Somebody else in Utah prints your card, yep, it’s a full-fledged card-stock card you can hold in your hand, stuffs the envelope, seals it, stamps it and drives it to the mailbox to send to your client or loved one.
There’s no other system out there like it. You can create your own customized card, even put your own photo on the front, write your own message inside and include more photos or even a check or a gift card inside the card and the best part is that you can have your own handwriting font installed and your own signature so the cards are all very personalized. What’s even better is that you can customize the card and have it merged with your database so that every person gets their own card and it takes you only a couple minutes to send thousands of cards. Forget post office lines, office store runs to buy labels and hours of licking stamps, printing labels and signing cards. You can have your cards done in less than 5 minutes. What’s even better is that you can make money by sharing this awesome system with others.
As your holiday gift, I will offer our readers their own gift account to test-drive the system and send out some cards on my dime. I will pay for the cards and the postage so you can see how fun it is to energize somebody’s day. The Send Out Cards system even imports your database and sends you an email reminding you of that special date.
Send me an email at Gail@GailHahn.com to set up your account. It will take about 15 minutes to set up your account. Go to www.BizBuilderCards.com to send some cards youself, my treat. It’s fun and easy to create custom cards. While you’re online, check out this video on the power of gratitude and sending to give: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQqtVobx1oI&list=PLtUVv9eXCdIKmF4MMCOVMBuzeZ1nrrUQF
Gaia
