Tag Archives: mood

Health

Low Energy and Burnout – Part 2

By Jim Selman | Bio

When we know that there is an end to a particularly strenuous period of work, we can feel energized and become even more productive. When we think that the flow of work is endless or that we have no choice in the matter, then we may begin to break down, feel disempowered, become tired. Life begins to feel like a burden.

I have found that resolving these kinds of chronic negative moods about workload and feeling overwhelmed begins by reconnecting with the fact that we always have a choice, even when part of our story is that we do not. When we can ‘own’ that our work is our choice (even if we don’t particularly like what we are doing), then we have taken the first step toward changing how we relate to it. It is OUR job.

The second step is to learn to ‘be present’ when we are working.

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Wisdom in Action

Moods

By Jim Selman | Bio

Perhaps the most pervasive and omnipresent aspect of being alive is our moods. We are always in one mood or another. Moods are either positive or negative and they ‘color’ our experience of living, affect how we relate to others and our circumstances, and have extraordinary power to open or close possibilities. If we examine this phenomenon, we can see that our moods are portable—we take them with us wherever we go. I can be angry at home and find that mood affecting me at work or even on the golf course.

Moods are also contagious. Have you ever been in a meeting where everyone is in a good mood and then the boss or someone enters the room in a different, perhaps negative, mood and it isn’t long before everyone has ‘caught’ the new mood?

Moods constitute the contexts in which we normally live and experience our lives. But most importantly, they are almost always involuntary—they happen to us. We rarely choose what mood we will be in, especially when we get our ‘buttons

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Wisdom in Action

What To Choose After This Bad Week

By Jim Selman | Bio

Last week was not a good week for the planet and I’ve been taking it personally. Aside from the Iran Crisis and North Korea, we had the usual games being played in Europe, South America and Southeast Asia. At some moment, I realized that I had once again drifted into a spectator role. I was trying to sort out the good insurgents from the bad insurgents, the real terrorists from the "revolutionaries", and I was finding that the conservative/liberal divide seems to be a universal constant everywhere we look.

As President Obama is declaring the possibility of mutual respect and tolerance between religions and all people, we see Iran’s "Supreme Leader" declaring ‘death’ to all who oppose the current regime and the North Korean guy promising to drop the big one if anyone screws around with his boatload of nuclear armaments going to the Middle East.

I am of two minds here. On one side, I am tired of playing good guys and bad guys and want to just scream…"STOP!

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Wisdom in Action

Resentment and Disappointment

By Jim Selman | Bio

It occurs to me that in less than 36 hours about half of the nation and a good percentage of folks around the world will be disappointed and resentful that their candidate for the US Presidency will have lost. These are two of the most unproductive, in fact counter-productive moods we can have—especially resentment.

Resentment kills relationship. It is a mood that has embedded in it an accusatory frame of mind that someone or something is ‘against’ what we believe or want and will continue to be a threat in the future. Resentment is a mixture of fear, anger, lack of responsibility and entitlement that the world be the way we want it to be. Disappointment is pretty much the same, without the anger and accusation. In both cases, we’re relating to the world as if the circumstance is

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Personal Empowerment

Guilt

I was speaking with a friend recently about age in general, how we ‘remember’ our lives and the power of memories to affect our day-to-day experience. From one perspective, I think that living in the present is the point of living—experientially at least. When we are present, our memories are just memories and don’t affect us either positively or negatively. Our memories are our ‘story’, and we can relate to our past as just that—a story. On the other hand, our moods and our memories

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News

Wired to Connect

How many people in a day do you see treat other people as objects, as a
means to an end? From ignoring those we are in the room with while
tensely thumbing a Blackberry to yelling impatience at a store clerk,
many relate to others as if they are simply there to give them
something. Unfortunately, our moods are more infectious than we may
realize.

Recent advances in neuroscience have discovered that our brains are
wired to be social, and that our inner states affect those around us.
Daniel

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Personal Empowerment

Keeping Score

It’s been said a lot of different ways that life is not a destination, but a journey. A lot of homespun wisdom and formal philosophy attempts to clarify ‘the purpose of life’ or various other questions about what we’re doing with our lives and why we do it. A good friend was recently seeking my advice about his relationship to money. He was somewhere between perplexed and depressed that he hasn’t been able to produce the financial results in his business that he wanted. This man is a

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Personal Empowerment

Funk

I was having a cup of coffee with a very good friend of mine the other morning. He was feeling down—actually, he said he was feeling a little ‘crazy’. On one level, his life has never been better, his work is satisfying and, best of all, according to him, he has a new Porsche that is requiring he move to the next level of performance in driving. Life is good.

Yet, amidst all his success (which includes a loving, happy marriage and new grandkids), he was in a deep ‘funk’. I say funk because

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Personal Empowerment

Angst

I like this word. I don’t know why…perhaps because it is one of those words that seems to express itself in speaking of it. The word means ‘anxiety’—a kind of generalized anxiety with being alive.
 
The existential philosophers talked a lot about angst. In fact, we normally associate angst with existentialism—existential angst. The word is usually associated with a negative mood such as depression or what Thomas Merton characterized as "the dark night

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Fearless Aging

Fun

I had a lot of fun yesterday and last night. It was so much fun, I
wonder why I don’t have this kind of fun all the time. I am
distinguishing between happy and fun here. I am happy most of the time
and enjoy what I am doing, but fun is somehow different. The day was
spent playing golf with my buddies and then we all went to an Italian
cooking school and spent the evening laughing and eating an incredible
dinner.  

But
what we did isn’t the source of ‘why’ it was fun. I’ve

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