Your Happiness Factor

Building a relationship is a learning process.  I've been thinking about relationships and how they are all about learning. Building a relationship is a learning process.  You learn about yourself in the relationship and you learn about the other person. And most of that learning is done by listening. That means listening to the other person but also listening to yourself and your own heart, and your head reflecting your own values. And you must try to be very honest.  In any good relationship it is about being true to yourself, as well as being true to someone else. And it is not making promises you know in your heart, you may not keep, Promising things that in the moment feel ok. Even if you think you know yourself very well, you will change as you learn this other person, if the relationship lasts. You'll  be influenced by who they are, what they believe and how they behave. Learning who they are can be quite a challenge. What you learn, if you listen...

On writing poetry and perceiving the world I've written poetry for most of my life. I'm not sure whether it is any good. But clearly some people like some of my work. For me, though, whether the poems are good or not isn't the point. For me me they are a way of recording feelings and impressions of something I see, hear or feel. Describing how something was for me is something like adding another dimension to a photograph.  Every experience is unique Sharing is interesting because I think every experience we have is really unique to us. That is because we will bring to it our interpretation of an event. That interpretation will be flavoured by all that's gone before; all that we are, all we know and all that we are. Some of our responses will come from deep inside us. We won't know how they came to be. And in childhood particular ways of viewing things and judging them were passed on to us by our parents and others. We were encouraged to share a view of what was...

How not to lose your temper! Do you sometimes feel on the brink of losing your temper? You hold it in and bite your tongue, but it doesn’t make you feel good. The other person wonders what just happened and you certainly don’t perform at your best for a while afterwards. It happens to everyone. We all encounter experiences that test our patience. There are times when you are more likely to lose your temper. You are more likely to feel wound-up when you have too much to do and too little energy with which to do it. Add to a busy agenda, already feeling tired when you woke up in the morning and you are all set for anger. Often, really, we are annoyed with someone else or about something other than the immediate “provocation.” Unfortunately, the person around us at the time is the most accessible target for displaced anger. Sometimes, we have unrealistic expectations of ourselves, the team or our family and friends. What we plan doesn’t take into account the unpredictabilit...

Master the Art of Active Listening ~ Levo League Great post from the Levo League - find out more at the link below "Ashamed as I am to admit it, I’ve always had a hard time listening well. My mind goes a mile a minute, and while I try to process the things being said to me in conversation as best I can, I don’t always catch everything. Maybe you remember when a former manager berated me for zoning out while we were in the middle of a conversation. Needless to say, being a good listener hasn’t always been my strong suit, and I’m not proud of that. But lucky for me, we aren’t born with active listening skills; we develop them by learning and then practicing them—so maybe there’s hope for me yet…! Levo spoke with Terri McCullough during yesterday’s Office Hours. While McCullough today holds the incredibly powerful position as Executive Director of the Tory Burch Foundation, she met playwright and activist Anna Deavere Smith years back, and helped her build her nonprofit, A...