By Mark Kaplan / March 4, 2020
Work life balance can be enhanced when we feel we are leading purposeful and meaningful lives. Growth is key to optimism, self-esteem, and gratitude. These feelings are indications we have stimulated happiness brain chemicals of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and maybe endorphins if we are exercising.
Career growth is rarely just knowledge based. We advance by improving what we know, our level of creativity, our emotional intelligence, our ability to collaborate and share, and our level of energy.
Taking the Long-Term View
“The most straight forward path to happiness and satisfaction in life comes from pursuing a significant long-term goal or objective: a ‘quest’. We’re far more likely to be happy while working to achieve something great than after we’ve accomplished it.”- Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit
You can have much greater influence on the world and your life by focusing on the long-term growth you could achieve by creating more focused daily habits. I’m not talking about the daily routines and “to do lists”. I’m talking about skills, passions, health, contribution, caring and sharing.
Almost every expert or psychologist in the field of happiness declare that having a purpose that contributes to the world at large or to something bigger than ourselves is key to feeling fulfillment and purpose.
Taking the Daily View
Long-term fulfillment is built with positive daily habits. Let’s combine growth with happiness. Happiness is stimulated by growth of all skills or habits that would lead to Nature’s view of “survival opportunities”. Happiness is Nature’s gift for enhancing our abilities to create better genes. Happiness is Nature’s gift for contributing to our species, henceforth, society.
Three great ways to accomplish each of these objectives is to learn, spend time being creative, working to improve the bigger picture, and building our health principally through exercise. Exercise automatically begins to affect other health habits.
Our Personal Perspective and Careers are Interlinked
When we feel our personal development and our ability to help others are linked, we feel more connected, more empathetic, more passionate, and more valuable. Personal growth makes us more valuable to our families and our workplace.
It would be difficult to find someone successful that had not been thinking of making a bigger impact. The path to impact is development of personal skills but also creating a following or developing leadership. Creating skills and developing leadership require a commitment to the investment of time.
Time Management and Personal Development
There is little personal or career growth gained in completing “to do lists” or engaging in distractions. We waste valuable time for potential if we are not prioritizing specific behaviors of growth. The best behaviors are learning, creating, contributing, health, and fitness. These are the behaviors of growth and work life balance.
Look at your day. Can you see the time you schedule for growth or is it a maddening list of meetings, to dos, and tasks? Are you often feeling victimized by your circumstances, obligations, or other’s expectations? Yes, you need to break out!
If you are going to grow, improve your career, enhance your life, feel gratitude, and be happy, you have to take control of your habits and time. Time and habits are the foundations of progress. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos certainly have big goals and they can’t let their progress get buried in inconsequential tasks. Either can you.
Read Habits of a Happy Brain by Loretta Graziano Breuning Ph.D
Read The Good Life Plan by Mark Kaplan See Excerpts
Read Creating Your Own Happiness- Lifestyle Self-Coaching Course by Mark Kaplan See Excerpts
Return to the Home Page (see all the posts at the bottom of landing page)
See Post Happiness, Fitness, and Mindfulness
See Post How We Enjoy Intensity without Stress
See Post Life Style and Work Life Balance
See Post Creativity Can Be Career Changing
See Post Increasing the Flow in Your Life
See Post Fitness Nutrition and Weight Management
See Excerpts for my Book “The Good Life Plan”
