Work has never been easy. Before the pandemic knocked us sideways, we were plenty busy managing stress, fear and frustration in the workplace. But the pandemic has taken these so-called “negative emotions” and doubled their potency.
Our work lives have been upended. Some of us have lost our jobs; others have been forced to go virtual where the boundaries between work and life have all but disappeared. A recent study from the Boston University School of Public Health found that the prevalence of depression symptoms in Americans is more than three times higher during the pandemic.
Anyone who has lived…
Finding your dream job is a daunting task under ordinary circumstances. Add in a global pandemic that has created record unemployment and upended industries overnight, and it becomes a seemingly impossible task. Stuck at home, social distancing from the world, your dream job likely feels a world away.
Daunting as it might be, it’s still possible to find the job you love or at least be on the path towards a more fulfilling career. As springtime transforms the earth from barren grays and browns into tapestries of green and carpets of wild flowers, we are reminded that life is about…
More than 33 million Americans have lost their jobs to the Coronavirus pandemic. Thousands more have been furloughed. Many of those who have kept their jobs now work from home, forced in short order to carve out whole new roles and methods for doing work. This is one reason why the pandemic has been so emotionally, mentally, and physically challenging.
As a leadership coach, I hear stories every day of people trying to balance parenthood and work; of juggling toddlers in their arms while fielding important work calls. Some clients feel unmoored in the absence of former routines. Some feel…
It is mind-boggling how much the coronavirus has changed our lives in such a short period of time. Many of us have gone from regular interaction with others to complete isolation, from exercising in gyms to working out in bedrooms, from kids in school to kids at home, from running meetings in offices to having virtual freak-outs on Zoom. Some of us have gone from healthy to sick and employed to jobless. All of us have gone from routine to uncertainty.
No wonder anxiety is running amok across America and around the world. These are very strange, very scary, very…
Resilience, over time, can become our own personal super power. Once created, it lives deep within us and supplies us with the necessary grit, determination, and self-compassion to handle setbacks and thrive in the face of adversity. The more we build resilience in times of relative calm, the stronger it will be in our moments of greatest need.
And yet most of us don’t think about how we can make building resilience a part of our daily routine. When it comes to establishing good habits, we pay attention to the healthy food we should eat, the mindfulness practices that ground…
Six years ago my parents retired to Kangaroo Valley, a luscious wilderness two hours southwest of Sydney. The home they found was their own Shangri-La, nestled in the bushland amongst an array of wildlife so abundant it felt like we were guests in their world, rather than the other way around. Whenever I visited from New York, I would wake to a symphony of birdsong — magpies and parrots and mischievous lyrebirds that would mimic the sounds they heard around them.
Throughout the day the parrots would hang out at my parent’s bird feeders. We would have drinks with them…
Practicing a mindset of Stoic Empathy allows you to endure hardship gracefully while maintaining healthy emotional connections with yourself and others.
When I was a young girl, my father used to read me the poem If by Rudyard Kipling, just as his father used to read it to him. The poem was framed above my little bed and was illustrated with all my favorite African animals — a giraffe, an elephant, a lion, a zebra.
After receiving heartbreaking news from the doctor a few weeks ago, I found myself Googling Kipling in need of his poem’s wisdom. The beginning of the second stanza stood out to me:
If you can dream — and not make dreams your master;
If you can…
A while back I went to hear a talk by the esteemed psychic Laura Day. She’s authored a legion of best-selling books, including Practical Intuition, and is employed by companies and governments around the world to help intuit the future. She’s tall and striking and has an unmistakable mystique about her. I was in awe of her energy.
After her talk concluded, she walked by me in the theater, stopped, put her hand on my forehead and said, “You my dear, you need to become more grounded.”
I was taken aback.
“Oh, okay, thank you,” I said.
She looked me…
Giving advice rarely helps people. Instead, we need to learn how to provide real support to those we care about.
Change is tough.
Life may be in a constant state of flux, but when it comes to ourselves, our lives, our relationships, and our habits, change can be one of the hardest things to pull off. Plenty of people out there — spouses especially — will tell you that humans fundamentally can’t change or at least won’t change. As the old adage goes, “A leopard can’t change his spots.”
I, for one, don’t subscribe to this logic. As a life and leadership coach I see people change all the time, often in profound ways. They embark on new careers. They…
Stop dealing with stress through control and start reducing it through connecting to your authentic self.
Nothing lasts forever — not even stress. No matter how intense a problem or how significant a challenge, life moves on eventually. This too shall pass, as the Sufi poets taught us.
Of course, understanding the inherent ephemerality of life does little for us when we’re in the thick of a problem. All things may be temporary, but stress sure does feel permanent when it sinks its teeth in. It doesn’t matter what we do or how hard we try, we can’t seem to shake it. The stress, the challenge, the problem sticks around.
Humans have a default response in…
Amelia Kruse
Leadership Coach transforming creative professionals and entrepreneurs into flourishing leaders in work and life. Scholar of emotional intelligence.
