Right Attitudes » Ideas for Impact
» by Nagesh Belludi

The turn of the year brings about a plethora of advice on the ritual of New Year’s resolutions. Articles in magazines and websites and features in the media might interest most of us in pursuing this advice. However, change is rarely as effortless as we assume it will be. Only those of us who are committed and consistent enough to maintain our regimens do actually stick to our resolutions.

I would like to reiterate one particular aspect of healthy eating and dieting. Many discussions on New Year’s resolutions tend to overlook this important consequence.

Deprivation, Guilt and Indulgence

An all too common mistake that people commit when dieting, especially in the first few weeks, is that they tend to be overambitious and force themselves to do everything right from the get go. At once, they drive themselves to cut out everything unhealthy, take up green vegetables, flaxseeds, and other wholesome foods they hitherto resisted and exercise aggressively.

Alas, their optimism subsides quickly. They relax and begin to compromise on their goals. They make excuses, revert to their former habits, crave for their guilty pleasures, and tend to overindulge on impulse. They lose sight of their New Year’s resolutions. Consequently, they feel sorry for themselves, renounce their goals, and assume they could never embrace lasting change.

Here are three suggestions for dieting success.

• Cut back, do not cut out. Food is one of the basic pleasures of life. Cutting out some guilty pleasure does not mean depriving yourself of something you like. Treat yourself on occasion, but limit yourself to smaller servings. This will help you resist the urge to splurge.
• Target small, incremental goals that can lead you to lasting change. Realizing your New Year’s resolutions is part of your long-term commitments. Therefore, in goal setting, less can be adequate. Be realistic in what you can expect of yourself. Adjust your expectations and try not to overwhelm yourself. Pace yourself for success over the long term.
• Do not feel guilty if you fall off your plan. Guilt is counterproductive to health and well-being. Get over your lapses and simply begin pursuing your goals again. Ask yourself, “What can I do differently? How can I improve?”

Personal Story

Over the years, chocolate milk had become an obsession of mine, thanks to ads of chocolate drinks featuring my favorite cricket sportsmen in India and a seemingly limitless supply of milk and Hershey’s chocolate syrup at my dorm during graduate school.

One of my goals for year 2009 was to cut down on chocolate and chocolate milk. During the course of the year, I have to admit, I often caught myself overindulging in Hershey’s Miniatures chocolate bars and such from candy jars at work.

Recommended Reading

• How to work exercise into a busy day
• Health and fitness for the sedentary professional
• How to renewing physical energy
• How Mahatma Gandhi kicked the habit of eating a lot of sugar (A fable)
• Meal manners: pace yourself to others

***See other articles related to dieting, eating healthy, health and well-being, food habits, wellness, fitness, goals

1. Divide and conquer. Break up large projects into smaller tasks. If you think a task will take less than five minutes, get it done right away. If you can reply to an email in less than two minutes, reply immediately and file or delete the incoming email.
2. Fight procrastination. One of the easiest ways to fight procrastination is to focus on starting your task. Commit to your task for just ten minutes. Avoid distractions and interruptions and continue to work for just ten minutes. By the end of the ten minutes, you probably get absorbed in the tasks, build momentum and can choose to continue working towards completion.
3. Put things in their place. Designate a place at your home and office for everything — your keys, wallet, watch, clothes, electronic gadgets and all personal effects. Always put each item in its proper place. Being orderly prevents you from anxiously searching for these belongings the next time you want to use them.
4. Create checklists for all tasks. Consider preparing checklists for everything from cleaning the home to packing for travel. Checklists help you remember everything critical and thus reduce the persistent worry of forgetting something important.
5. Start planning your day on the prior day. Before you leave office or before you go to bed, plan the next day and prepare a ‘To Do’ list. Check your calendar for meetings, deadlines and commitments. In addition, put out everything you need the night before. Planning ahead not only helps you start the next day with purpose, but also gets things off your mind. You can thus enjoy your time away or sleep better.
6. Pick up after yourself and clean your home and workspace. From time to time, glance through all areas of your home and office for things that are out of place. Tidy up before the clutter gets out of hand. Use the wastebasket liberally. Realize that mess leads to stress.
7. Maintain a ‘On-The-Go’ folder. When you receive your copy of a subscription magazine, tear out all the articles that interest you and dispose of the rest of the magazine. Maintain an “on-the-go” folder and file such articles. Take this folder wherever you go and read these articles during transition times — when you wait for a doctor’s appointment or when your flight is delayed at an airport. Review this folder frequently and toss out everything that is older than six months.

Recommended Reading

• Self-assessment Quiz: how stressed are you?
• The “10-minute Dash” technique to overcoming procrastination
• You have a pile of reading material at your desk?
• Everyday reflections for effective time management
• Seven habits to beat Monday morning blues

***See other articles related to time management, personal organization, productivity, stress management, getting things done, work-life balance

The first step to overcome the causes and effects of stress is to acknowledge stress and become aware of its symptoms. By identifying the following telltale signs of stress, you can take steps to manage them.

Evaluate your level of stress by taking a simple quiz that I developed recently. Rate your experience against each category of stress symptoms in the following list. Score 1 for “Rarely”, 2 for “On occasion lately”, 3 for “Often” and 4 for “A lot lately.”

• Irritability, nervous temperament, moodiness, short temper, aggressiveness
• Lack of enthusiasm, neglect of responsibilities
• Inability to relax, concentrate, focus, or remember
• Poor health, body aches, pains, indigestion, constipation, nausea, etc.
• Eating and sleeping more or less, poor hygiene, substance abuse
• Nervous habits: fidgeting, foot tapping, nail biting, giggling, etc.
• Excessive frustration, cynicism, paranoia, distrust or worry
• Feeling of loneliness, withdrawal from friends and family
• Reluctance to express opinions, feeling of being “used” by others
• Excessive sensitivity, feeling of being overwhelmed
• Indecisiveness, poor judgment, unwillingness to take risks, impatience
• Blaming self for problems, evoking past distresses or sorrow demanding attention, aggressiveness
• Feeling of lack of control and authority, pressure to yield to demands

Assess Your Level of Stress

Tally up your scores and rate yourself on the following scale. The more symptoms you observe in your everyday life, the more stressed you are.

• 18 or lesser indicates a normal level of stress. Stress is an essential part of existence.
• 19 to 25 indicates that you may be facing a brown-out. The temporary hardships you are experiencing may intensify your level of stress if you do not address their causes immediately.
• 26 to 34 indicates acute level of stress. Carefully address everything that bothers you and consider changes to your lifestyle. Seek therapy.
• 35 or greater indicates potentially serious consequences to your wellbeing. Seek medicinal or therapeutic help.

Recommended Reading

• Budget your time by your values and priorities
• Fight clutter and simplify life
• Health and fitness for the sedentary professional
• Working exercise into a busy day
• Make your weekends feel longer

Brad Feld on Work-Life Balance

Here is an excellent podcast (summary here) where Venture Capitalist Brad Feld discusses his thoughts on the concept of work-life balance. He also shares the changes he implemented to achieve more balance in his life. Also, see a previous article by Brad on this very topic. Here are key takeaways:

• The sense of busyness is not the same as the sense of achievement.
• Balance is an important issue to consider at all ages, as many make the mistake in believing they will “get the balance on the back half of life” and find it shorter than they hoped (”you don’t know when the lights are going to go out (when you are going to die.)”)
• Work-life balance is an important issue to everyone, yet each person’s approach will be different. There is no one-size fits all approach.

Work-Life Balance is an Individual Choice

Balancing the various demands on our time is by no means easy. It is unrealistic to establish a ratio between ‘work’ and ‘play’ time to pursue the sense of balance.

Balance is an individual choice you have to make based on your personal and professional values and associate relative priorities between these values. Here are five essential guidelines to make such choices.

• Don’t become a slave to your work. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Work is a means of living, it is not life itself.”
• Slow down your life and develop mindfulness. Simplify your life and inculcate discipline. Focus on the simple things. Control your wants and meet your core needs.
• Talk to your family and friends and explore ways to introduce more fun into your daily routine.
• Sleep more. Help around the home. Go on more vacations. Cultivate a hobby or two. Volunteer for a good cause. Do something meaningful with your spare time.
• Learn to control how you react to other people and their demands on your time, money, or both. Consider the cost on your own resources and become skilled at how to refuse unimportant demands.

Realizing the balance in your life is your prerogative.

Recommended Reading

• My three-step process for better time management: time logging, time analysis and time budgeting.
• Fighting Procrastination: ‘Ten-Minute Dash’ technique
• Working exercise into a busy day

***See other articles related to happiness, time management, managing priorities, effectiveness, personal organization, getting things done, execution, work-life balance

Busy professionals tend to live a deskbound lifestyle. Their hectic schedules develop into easy excuses for abandoning regular exercise patterns. Consequently, their sedentary lifestyles, when combined with insufficient sleep, a disregard for healthful eating and drinking habits and the greater levels of stress in the modern workplace, can lead to fatigue and ill health over time.

Here are nine simple suggestions to encourage the busy professional lead a healthier lifestyle at work.

Practice Simple Workouts

• Consider a healthier commute. Bike or walk to work at least once a week. If you ride a bus or train, get off a prior stop and walk the remainder.
• Take stairs instead of elevators. Research suggests that climbing stairs can burn as much as seven times the calories burned when using an elevator.
• Seek out opportunities to stand or walk. Walk up to colleague’s desks instead of instant messaging, emailing, or calling them. Take longer routes to restrooms, water fountains, meetings rooms, and others’ desks.
• Take walks during breaks or after lunch. Consider starting a lunchtime walking group with like-minded coworkers. Walk for twenty minutes at a nearby park, around your office building or in the hallways. Better yet, take the stairs to walk up a few flights. Doing exercises in a group is more enjoyable and helps sustain the habit.
• Stretch at your desk. Adopt a handful of simple exercises to stretch your fingers, wrists, arms, shoulders, chest, neck, back, and legs. Although these activities do not contribute to any form of serious aerobic exercise, they are nevertheless advantageous to promote fitness and reduce anxiety.

Eat and Drink Healthier

• Eat healthy. Do not skip breakfast or lunch. Favor full-service salad bars or healthy choice menus at company cafeterias. Better yet, pack your lunch — it is economical too. Regulate your eating when dining-out with customers, visitors or management — studies suggest that we tend to overindulge in social settings or while on expense accounts.
• Keep a supply of low-calorie, nutritious snacks, raw vegetables and fruits at your desk. These serve as healthier choices to snack food usually stocked in office vending machines.
• Avoid indulging in sugar- and calorie-laden pastries, pies, cakes, cookies doled out on birthdays and anniversaries, or spread out in break rooms.
• Drink more water. Try to limit carbonated beverages and fruit juices to one can/bottle a day. Avoid caffeine in the evenings to prevent sleep deprivation at night — the half-life of caffeine is about six hours.

Recommended Resources

• Stretches you can do in your office (Slide Show from Mayo Clinic)
• Google blog on ergonomics, posture, tendonitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other repetitive stress injuries (RSI.)
• 20 simple at-your-desk exercises
• Reasons to drink more water and how much
• Ibrahim’s Spring Fitness Challenge

***See other articles related to wellness, health, well-being, fitness

The benefits of physical activity and exercise are well known: reduced risk of chronic diseases, lower stresses, increased physical fitness, improved sleep, greater self-confidence, etc. However, incorporating physical activity into our demanding schedules can be very challenging.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal offered five great guidelines to help include exercise into a busy day. See the full article here.

1. Exercise early in the morning. Typically, after work, you’re hungry, exhausted and you have family obligations. Exercising early in the morning can give a great energy boost.
2. Stay close to home or office for convenience. If possible, possess exercise equipment at home.
3. Mix exercise with family time. For instance, ask family or friends to join you in the morning-walks; this will help you stay motivated.
4. Do a weekend workout. The weekend offers two days of opportunity.
5. Stay active during the day. Mix exercise into your daily activities.

Call for Action

With the help of a physician or a personal trainer, choose activities that are appropriate for your fitness level and your goals. Be realistic in what you can achieve. Schedule exercise in your calendar.

Make the most of small bits of time that become available during the day. Take the stairs instead of an elevator; park your car as far as possible in the parking lot and walk into your office; take a quick walk around your office building when you need a break from work.

Take time out–do not exercise every day. Regular breaks allow for recovery and return to exercise with renewed vigour.

***See other articles related to recharging, re-energizing, energy management, relaxation, work-life, stress management, health, well-being, exercising

In an article entitled “The Making of a Corporate Athlete” in the January, 2001, issue of the Harvard Business Review, authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz describe executives as “corporate athletes.” They explain the concept of recovering energy to bring the body, emotions, mind and spirit to a peak form and thus sustain high performance over the long haul.

Practices for Renewing Physical Energy

The authors consider physical well-being as fundamental to the high performance state of an executive. Here is a (paraphrased) list of six healthy practices they recommend for renewing physical energy.

1. Eat multiple small-meals a day. Eating just one or two meals a day with long periods in between may slowdown metabolism.
2. Never skip breakfast. Eating breakfast early in the morning helps maintain metabolism during the morning.
3. Eat a balanced diet.
4. Reduce the consumption of sugars. Sugars represent empty calories and cause “energy-depleting spikes in blood glucose levels.”
5. Drink at least 1.5 litres (four 12-ounce glasses) of water every day, even if you do not feel thirsty.
6. Exercise regularly. The authors recommend “three to four 20- to 30-minute cardiovascular workouts a week, including at least two sessions of intervals—short bursts of intense exertion followed by brief recovery periods.”

Call for Action

In the face of ever-increasing demands to perform, deliver and excel, both at work and outside, it is easy for us to ignore our physical well-being; most of us do.

Critically examine your current lifestyle and fitness level: your eating and sleeping habits, your relaxation and entertainment choices, and, your commitment to physical and brain exercises. In consultation with people around you, viz., family, friends, bosses and physicians make the right choices to adopt a healthy lifestyle. Pick physical activities that work for you and you will enjoy. Get to and stay in the ‘Zone’.

***See other articles related to recharging, re-energizing, energy management, relaxation, work-life, stress management, health, well-being, exercising