Everyone faces adversity in the workplace and at home. Whether it’s a co-worker who is jealous of your accomplishments, a vindictive supervisor, an unhappy employee whose daily goal is to make everyone else have a lousy day or a teenager at home who has questionable friends, every day presents a new challenge. When I face daily challenges, I follow a few simple rules that can make the most difficult day an enjoyable one.
Spirituality/Prayer
Spirituality and prayer can be a powerful force for stress relief. Every day before I go to work and on my way home, I pray for my co-workers, family and friends. Many of them are facing their own sets of challenges with sick or elderly parents, kids who are in trouble, an abusive spouse, financial stress and the list goes on. If you think about it, by the time you get to work, there is an incredible dynamic of people of all different backgrounds and experiences, coming to one place to accomplish a goal of making your company perform like a well-oiled machine bringing their own experiences both negative and positive to the workplace. If that’s not a recipe for prayer, I don’t know what is. To learn more about the power of prayer and spirituality and how it relates to stress relief, check out this Mayo Clinic article.
Attitude
I have found that attitude has a lot to do with how I react to different experiences throughout the day. When I go to work with issues and concerns about things happening elsewhere, I find myself bringing baggage with me at work. It’s like going on a flight. Check your bags and forget about them until you arrive at your destination.
Let your positive attitude be contagious. People like being around positive-minded people. When you surround yourself with people who are negative and every goal is impossible to achieve, you will fail. Oftentimes, I have found that my attitude and not my co-workers is the thing that is holding back our success. Don’t let your attitude be the reason why goals aren’t accomplished or why your co-workers are having a bad day.
Give
You’ve heard the old saying “it’s better to give than receive.” It’s true. Go to a soup kitchen and help feed the homeless or go to an organization like Habitat for Humanity or the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts of America and work on a community service project. Reaching out to injured military service personnel like Wounded Warriors or being a volunteer for newly settled Syrian refugees will quickly put things back in perspective.
What does this have to do with adversity at work or home? Everything. Organizing a community service project with your co-workers, enables you to build a stronger community both outside your workplace and within your office.
Communicate
Communication within your workplace and at home is very important. Many misunderstandings stem from miscommunication. Email is easily misinterpreted. How many times have you sent what you thought was a clear message only to get responses back that totally misconstrued your original message?
It might make sense to get up from behind your desk, walk over to the person you were sending an email to and have a conversation. In a world of texts, SnapChat, and online messaging, it’s refreshing to have an “old-fashioned” face-to-face conversation.
Conclusion
Whether you are at work or at home, I recommend starting and ending your day with prayer (sometime you need to keep praying throughout the day especially when it’s an overly challenging one), have a positive attitude, have a charitable heart giving back to your community whenever you can and keep your lines of communication open and clear. Using these simple guidelines can help anyone successfully deal with adversity.
If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.
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