Sunday is a good day for a little reflection, a little relaxation, and a whole lot of being nice to yourself. Smile. Breathe. Take a minute to recharge and get ready for the week ahead. Remember, studies show that the brain on positive is over 30% more effective than on stressed, or even neutral.
How to get and stay positive: Be Nice…to YOU! Take some time to do at least one thing each day that is just for you. Even if that one thing is only 5 minutes in your day!
“More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails.” D. Coutu, Harvard Business Review, 2002.
This is very true. It’s all about resilience. Resilience is the key to success in academics, in the professional world, and in life in general. You have to have the grit to get back up, every time someone, or something, knocks you down.
Because, it’s also true that you are going to fail. At some point in life, you are going to be the one that doesn’t make the team, or forgot to print an assignment that was due, or missed out on the promotion. It will happen and at that moment, you have that choice. To stay down. Where things are easy…or to get back up where it’s messy and hard. Get up, each and every time. Get up, and find a way.
That takes some courage. And I’m not saying that it’s always easy. But you just do it. You get back up. And each time, it gets a little easier. That’s what resilience is all about.
Simple ways to be resilient: Talk to your career counselors, tutorial center, mentors, friends, even parents, and find out strategies you can use this year when things get tough and sleeping in sounds so much better than going to class. Remember too, Michael Jordan’s words, “If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.”
“It’s Like My Whole World is Coming Undone, but When I Write, my Pencil is a Needle and Thread, and I’m Stitching the Scraps Back Together.” –Julia Alvarez
Hope you’re able to enjoy some time outside this weekend.
Thinking: Optional. Relaxing: Mandatory.
There are a lot of amazing hiking trails nearby where I go to reconnect and recharge. The great outdoors requires very little of us, other than showing up. I feel a little lighter and stay in the moment a little longer when I’m among the trees & sunshine.
How about you? Does nature help you feel replenished & refreshed? What’s your favorite way to recharge on the weekends?
Type “Ray Bradbury and quotes” into any search engine and what you’ll get is pure inspiration. From the famous sci-fi author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, you’ll find quotes about love and reading and living and rebellion and getting on with things. Quotes about imagination and exploration and dreaming. Quotes that bring tears to the eyes with their genuine enthusiasm for life and literature.
Try these on for size:
“You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
and
“Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The word is love. You…
I start with this quote on day one of my classes. Great advice from one of the best in his profession, and it never fails to inspire.
College Ready 