If you’re anything like me, anytime you hear a No Doubt song come up on your Pandora feed, you heave a little sigh that working in the corporate world you can’t have bright pink hair a la Gwen Stefani (or even a few neon highlights). Not anymore! Now you can have work appropriate hair Monday through Friday, and let your inner rock star out on the weekends. Hair Flairs color rub created brightly hued powders. You rub them in to give yourself ombre tips, strips of highlights, or all over color. Then spray on some hair spray to seal it in, and you’re good to go. They wash out in 1-2 washes. For $13 a tub, you’ve bought your freedom.
Fact. People are staying longer in jobs they don’t like, or don’t want than they would in previous decades. Blame it on the crappy economy all you want, but that doesn’t change the truth that there are more people in the workforce who aren’t necessarily in a position they want to be in. Does that mean the entire workforce should be going around grumbling and moping about their poor life outcomes? Nope!
Shawn Achor discusses this very subject his TED Talk, “The Happy Secret to Better Work,” see previous post. He says happiness is not dependent on achieving life goals. As you’ll have noticed in your own life, it’s human nature that once you’ve achieved one goal, to simply set another milestone. If you get a good job, then you want a promotion so it’s a better job–meaning you’ll never be happy on your little hamster wheel if your happiness is totally measured by external goal posts. If happiness =success (in career or otherwise) you’ll never get there because your brain is constantly pushing what success means “over the cognitive horizon” with the next marker to meet.
So, happiness cannot be predicted (entirely, or even mostly) by external circumstances. Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, posits that happiness is 50% determined by genetics. Life circumstances (age, gender, marital status, income, occupation, etc.) make up about 10-20%. The remaining30-40% is how a person thinks and acts. For her, everyone has a tendency to be pretty happy or less happy, but they can actively try to push themselves to the top or bottom of their genetic spectrum.
According to Shawn, 10% of happiness is determined by the world around us, 90% by how our brain processes the world. Luckily for us, he and Gretchen agree that you can train your own brain to process the world in a happier way by changing the lens through which it views the world to change your educational, and business outcomes. Gretchen chronicles how to make your life generally happier here.
Shawn looks specifically at how to improve your work outcomes by being happier, flipping the formula that if you do better at work, it follows that you will be happy. Instead, be happy, and work success will follow. He affirms the belief that happy employees are more productive employees, and shows through studies that if you raise your level of positivity, the brain releases dopamine which turns on the learning centers of the brain improving every single business outcome. Happy employees are 30% more productive and 37% better at sales.
Here’s his prescription to turning your work happiness around in just 2 minutes a day for 21 days.
Write down 3 new things you are grateful for every day for 21 days
Journal 1 positive experience you had in the last 24 hours to help your brain relive the experience
Meditate to let your brain get over the learned ADHD of multi-tasking
Send one positive email praising or thanking someone in your social support network to practice conscious acts of kindness
At the end of this period, your brain is rewired to work more successfully and optimistically, no longer scanning for the negative, but looking for the positive, and in turn activating your capabilities to use your full learning and performance potential, and allowing people to be more effective and happier employees.
Why have regular household gardgets when you can have adorable household gadgets in the shape of cute little animals? A question I ask myself now every time I look at my boring, white handled utilitarian can opener. Why, when this toucan can opener (get it? the toucan can?) is just so darn cute.
This week design sponge rounded up the most adorable animal shaped everyday items you can find. There’s panda shaped speakers, an owl cooking timer, and a mouse shaped like a whale. Check them out here, read the full article on Life Scoop, and cute-up your daily routines.
Spray on sunscreen has revolutionized my life at the beach. I always had good intentions about reapplying, but the cycle went something like this: I’m laying in the sun; I notice I’m hot; I remember I should reapply, but I also want to go for a swim. I don’t want to wash all the sunscreen off, so I wait until after my swim. I lay in the sun to dry off, all cooled down, feel refreshed and forget to reapply. Repeat until skin has reached lobster levels of red.
Not anymore. Spray on sunscreen is such a breeze to put on that I do a full body spritz whenever I think of it. It takes less than 5 minutes, you don’t have to rub it in if you’re half covered in sand, and you can spray it on right after you get out of the water while your skin is wet. Since I started using it, I haven’t gotten a sun burn (quite the miracle for someone with skin as fair as mine). But, that’s when I’m at the beach, and I don’t mind coating myself in a cloud of shiny sunblock.
In everyday life, reapplying my sunscreen is much trickier. Even though we all know that the SPF in our morning moisturizer isn’t enough protection for a full day, after applying makeup, and doing my hair before work, I’m not likely to remove it, put on more sunscreen, and re-do halfway through the day. The fact remains that sunscreen loses its effectiveness after 90 minutes in the sun, and my unwillingness to reapply over my morning makeup foundation may have opened me up to risk of overexposure.
Finally the beauty industry has come up with a solution: powder sunscreens that provide broad-spectrum protection through micronized zinc oxide and titanium dioxide that layer on INVISIBLY over your make-up. You can even purchase some with a hint of bronzer for a little faux-tan glow with your sunscreen. The powders contain ingredients like silica and cornstarch to combat summer sweaty face, and have a matte finish similar to what you’d achieve with a midday blotting paper.
So far I’ve seen tubes from Bare Minerals, Jane Iredale, Innovative Skincare, Peter Thomas Roth, and Colorescience Sunforgettable. More and more are popping up all over the market. They come with a built in brush to toss in your purse-no extra tools needed. Now reapplying is a cinch, on and off the beach.
I have a terrible passport picture. The day I had my pictures taken, I had braces, a tan from a tanning booth, and bright pink lip gloss. My hair may have been a little overly highlighted. I decided it would be a good idea to wear a bright pink turtle neck sweater for the occasion, not thinking this picture would be with me for, oh, about the next 10 years of my life. Then, when I arrived at CVS, the guy taking my picture informed me that I could not smile in the picture. He claimed (though a tiny part of me still thinks this was just a mean joke by him) that you are not allowed to smile in official passport pictures. Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t do serious face well. My natural inclination is to smile for a photo. I like to call the whole end result serial killer Barbie.
Here’s why it’s not really all that big a deal:
You reach a certain point in life where it’s fun to compare id’s and make fun of each other’s pictures
Most people don’t think pictures of you are half as bad as you do
Who do you really have to show it to anyhow? Bouncers? Grumpy customs officials? It’s not like it has to be your profile picture for your online dating website.
I find the best way to deal is to turn the whole situation into a funny story (see above). Now, whenever I see my passport picture, I don’t think OMIGOD I LOOK LIKE I’m GOING TO MURDER SOMONE, I chuckle about the series of bad decisions that brought me there in the first place.
For my next passport picture? I plan to pick out an outfit in my color wheel, and for the DMV, I’ve found being friendly to the person in control of your destiny is going to guarantee you a much more flattering photo than being a meanie. See a lesson in life (and getting the coffee you want) for details
Everyday in the window between 2 and 4PM, I start to crave a little siesta. Blame it on my time spent living in Madrid, but I find myself in need of a pick me up around the same time every day. Sometimes I grab a latte or a soda. Sometimes I pick up a snack or some candy.
Enter The Daily Kitten. They post a new kitten reliably at 3:07pm, that time when everyone needs a little extra push to make it through the day. This one’s name is Fred. If you think your kitten is adorable enough to make the cut, you can submit a photo for review to be featured on the site. Just be sure to explain why he’s the cutest little thing in the world. It’s very important.
Glass Half Full 