DayShift: Start Where You Are

Introduction

Recharge: A Year of DayShifts

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

101 102 103 104

Boosters: Bonus DayShifts to Keep You on Track

B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 B6 B7

B8 B9 B10 B11 B12 B13

Who Are They?

Acknowledgments

Afterword

Introduction

Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.

— Aldous Huxley

What we see depends mainly on what we look for.

— John Lubbock

Perception Shift

What does it take to increase personal happiness, work productivity, and career satisfaction? The key rests in an ability to shift our perceptions of the people, situations, and events in our life. Changing the people and events around us is not usually an option, but choosing to shift our perception of them can literally change our experience and transform our life. That shift guides our subsequent actions and is our only point of power.

Start Where You Are

The shifts in this book deal with life’s common themes: self-care, love, forgiveness, gratitude, and living in the present. The best time to start working with this book is now – and wherever you are. There is a big push to make resolutions at the beginning of the year or at the time of major events, and all of us have experienced the sense of loss that comes with the realization that days and weeks have gone by without our getting started on working toward carrying out those resolutions.

We set ourselves up for failure by magically thinking that we need a particular time to make a change in life: January 1. Spring. A birthday. You name it.... Yet every day offers an opportunity for new beginnings. All that is needed is a little willingness to shift perception. That willingness to look at life in a new way is just the boost needed to recharge one’s life.

If you choose, this book offers a chance to make a shift each day. There are two shifts for each week in the year, for a total of 104 shifts. You decide when to move on to the next one. A group of bonus shifts at the back of the book are useful for the times when you want an extra boost.

The beauty of these shifts is that every time you read one, you can see it in a different way. You create the energy of newness. It’s like watching a favorite movie or reading a book more than once: each time, you gain insights and perspectives unnoticed the time before.

DayShift

Take a few minutes each day to read one shift. Whichever one you’ve chosen, reread it for a couple of days before moving on to a new one. Devote a few minutes each day to being aware of the thoughts and feelings that surface concerning what you’ve read. Have you ever driven somewhere and not remembered how you got there? You were lost in your thoughts. This book is an invitation to live consciously.

Tip: Keep a journal of the insights that arise as you read. They may suggest possible steps or actions to take. Oftentimes, it is not that good things fail to happen or that we fail to grow emotionally. It is that we’ve failed to notice the good things happening or the changes taking place within us. When we combine awareness with a willingness to take action, growth happens. A journal can help to chart that progress. Every day is an opportunity to renew.

Recharge: A Year of DayShifts

1

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

— William Shakespeare

We all know the expression about how optimists see a half-filled glass and pessimists see a half-empty one.

There is another way to look at that glass. Sometimes the half-filled glass can keep us stuck in complacency, in a comfortable rut, and sometimes the vision of the half-empty glass is just what we need to have the glass filled.

Each day over the next few days, consider how your perception creates what you see and experience in life.

2

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

— Thomas A. Edison

I remember the very first article I sold to a major newspaper. The first time I submitted it, the editor was lukewarm. Yes, it had merits, but he emphasized the missing content and made suggestions for change. The second time, he made even more suggestions for change, and I now knew what was happening: he wanted to let me down easily and was trying to get rid of me. Taking the hint, I put my writing aside.

Weeks later a friend asked me how the article was coming along, and I explained that the editor wasn’t interested. She laughed and said that his comments meant that he had done half the work for me already. Now that was a shift in perception!

I resubmitted the article with the recommended changes, the editor bought it, and I’ve been writing ever since.

What ideas have you abandoned?

Over the next few days, keep an open mind on things that you’ve put on the back burner. Can you now move them to the front?

3

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

— Anaïs Nin

I must confess that I’ve done a fairly good job of remaining in a bud for long stretches of time. However, I’ve gradually become better at allowing myself to blossom in various situations.

What has helped? The certain knowledge that sticking with what is familiar – out of fear – will eventually cost me more. It may feel easier to stick with the known, but down the road, we may realize that we’ve surrendered ourselves along the way.

Over the next few days, discover new ways to blossom. What works for you? I’d love to hear your insights!

4

But mostly, given another shot at life, I would seize every minute ... look at it and really see it. Live it and never give it back.

— Erma Bombeck

A friend recently admitted to me that she was good at doing pain and grieving. From childhood, she had been aware of the emotional hurts in her life.

She went on to say that her most challenging lessons in life have had to do with joy: I just don’t do joy well. Time and time again, she has had to work to allow the joy that is present in her life to surface.

It may seem much easier to keep joy buried and unacknowledged. But there is a price to pay for doing so.

One of my favorite authors, the late Erma Bombeck, ended her book If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? by panicking over a morning that was going right.

It seemed that all she had received that morning was good news. At first she was happy, but then she started to worry. She was able to relax only when her son returned home and accidentally drove through the garage door!

Finally life was back to normal. Doing joy is indeed stressful!

When Erma found out she was dying, she wrote "If I Had My Life To Live Over," a poignant poem that deals with all the joys she would have allowed into her life if she had known how quickly the time would pass.

We can learn from Erma and enjoy the moment.

5

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.

— Carl Jung

It’s easy to get caught in the trap of searching for someone to love instead of realizing that we must first become someone worthy of being loved. And the only way to escape the trap is to love oneself. That’s a tough goal, because we can always find areas for personal improvement. Welcome to the human condition!

The challenge in learning to love is to love oneself warts and all. That is the only way to be open and ready to love anyone else. And that goes for all our relationships. I know I’m most critical of my kids when I have been critical of myself. My approach is more loving once I stop the self-criticism.

When it comes to romantic relationships, we have a tendency to put the cart before the horse. We say, I’ll start feeling good about myself, start taking care of myself, start enjoying my life when I find someone to love me. Oh, and I don’t want to be with someone who is a ‘downer,’ and so that person needs to high sense of self-esteem, be physically fit, and have a zest for life.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Make a list of what you want in a healthy relationship. Then, checkmark the items on the list that you fulfill for yourself. Now is a good time to start becoming the love you want!

6

The inner corrosion caused by hanging onto grievances destroys us and contaminates our relationships.

— Dawn Brown

Lack of forgiveness is the chief source of emotional pain. Forgiveness is not an event; it is an ongoing process.

A wise friend once described forgiveness as a continuous act of hygiene. We wash our hands when they are dirty. We don’t say, I washed my hands yesterday, and so I won’t bother to wash them for the next week or two. So it is with forgiveness. Whenever emotional pain arises, we have an opportunity to practice forgiveness.

We often think of forgiveness as an act involving others. However, I have found that much of the work of forgiveness involves forgiving ourselves. We’re often not aware that much of the anger and blame we project on others originates in judgments made against ourselves.

Forgiveness allows us to open our hearts, releasing pain, resentment, outrage, guilt, blame, shame, anger, and other toxins that poison us. And we then have the choice to substitute compassion for ourselves and others.

7

Nearly everyone who develops an idea works at it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then gets discouraged. That’s not the place to become discouraged.

— Thomas A. Edison

There are so many lessons to be learnt from the majestic Grand Canyon. We are familiar with the expression solid as a rock, and we have also experienced trying to grasp water, only to watch it slip between our fingers. And yet, over time, the water of the Colorado River has slowly carved away at layers of rock, leaving us with the magnificent Grand Canyon. The millions of years that this process took is more time than we have to devote to any project, but it offers us a lesson about persistence.

We can also learn a great deal about persistence from children. I’ve always been in awe at the tenaciousness of toddlers learning to walk, feed themselves, or acquire new skills. They just don’t give up!

And I have watched determined kids wear their parents down until, in utter exhaustion, the parents gave in to their demands – a new toy, an outfit, having a friend over, staying up late.... The idea of strength is very relative!

As adults we tend to underestimate our own talents, abilities, and strength. Is there a dream, a project, that you’ve put aside because it doesn’t seem feasible? Give yourself permission to take another look. Oh, and remember to have fun in the process!

8

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

— Confucius

One of the messages I like to share – because it helps others and is a reminder to me – is that everyone falls. Life’s lessons are about getting up. Our work is not to avoid falling; it is to shorten