Margie Warrell

Times are tough and many people are struggling to stay optimistic given the state of the economy, the insecurity of their jobs (if they have one), the size of their mortgage and the strain that puts on relationships at home. Maybe you are one of them or maybe you know someone else who is having it tough.

But just because we can find lots of reasons for feeling down and becoming a bona fide pessimist doesn’t mean that we should. The fact is, optimism creates opportunity and pessimism kills it. Expecting good things to happen will lead to taking actions that produce positive results. Expecting only more bad stuff to come your way will keep you from doing the very things that might have minimized or avoided just that!

The word “optimism” actually derives from the Latin word “optima,” meaning the best outcome or belief in the greatest good. As I said during my recent interview on the TODAY SHOW, while some people are naturally more optimistic than others, ultimately we all get to wake up every day and choose whether we are going to be a glass half-full, or a glass half-empty person.

Below are 7 strategies for filling up your cup of optimism. My challenge to you is to try at least one of these and notice the difference it makes to your outlook and your life.

1.  SET YOUR INTENTION

 Before you step out of bed (and if you forget, before you leave your home) take one minute to set your intention for the day by coming up with one word that resonates with you about the attitude or spirit you want to bring to the day. Being intentional acts like a compass and helps you better focus your time and energy. For instance, if you’ve been looking for work but have found yourself stuck in a rut and procrastinating, you might choose to be proactive and set yourself a goal of making at least 5 calls/emails today to follow up on job leads and opportunities. The intention you choose will vary according to the challenges you are facing.

QUESTION: What is your intention for the rest of today? To be more assertive, organized, focused, tenacious, self-reliant, resourceful, determined, persistent or patient?

2. PERFORM AN ACT OF COURAGE

Often the very thing we need to improve our circumstances requires courage. That is, closing the gap between where you are now and where you would like to be in life will require stepping outside your comfort zone and doing something that scares you in some way. It could be picking up the phone to invite someone to dinner, attending an exercise class or having a conversation with your boss about an issue that’s been upsetting you. There is no better way to build self-confidence than doing something that stretches you as it teaches you that you are capable of more than you thought you were.

QUESTION: What would you do today if you had no fear of failing or looking foolish? [...]

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My brother, Peter, with my kids

Forgive me if this post is a little raw. Life has been raw for me these last couple weeks.

My youngest brother Peter died just over two weeks ago and I’ve been living life at its rawest ever since.

Pete, who was 31, suffered from schizophrenia for the last ten years. All mental illnesses cause enormous suffering for those who have them and incredible heartache and angst for those who love them. Peter, number 6 of the 7 kids in my family, was very loved by our family and we all did the very best we could, each in our own way, to help him. Over the last decade, as Pete returned to hospital again and again, his dreams crashed to earth, his enjoyment of life disappeared and his hopes of ever living a fulfilling life gave way to severe paranoia, to ceaseless torment, to despair and, on Good Friday, to death.

As I type these words I am sitting on a plane high above the Pacific returning back to America from Australia where I’ve shed more tears with my family than I thought were possible. But in the midst of our sorrow, we have laughed at the fun times we shared with Peter — his boyish pranks, his humor, his brilliant athleticism and charm. We have been lifted up by the extraordinary outpouring of love from friends, family and community, near and far. We have savored the rich bonds of love that come to the fore during times of heartache. It has been a deeply moving, and extremely touching, two weeks. 

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Apparently Thomas Jefferson and George Washington experienced a blizzard of similar magnitude to the one we did in Washinton D.C. area last weekend but certainly, it was the biggest recorded dump of snow since official records began.  Having come from a place where even a thin layer of ice on a puddle mid-winter was cause for great excitement, I find having the landscape transformed to pure white quite magnificent.

What I have not found quite as magnificent is having my life interrupted. My four children have been home from school since Thursday and, alas, with another snow storm due to arrive tomorrow, they may well be off all week.  Ukurumba…there goes those plans of mine!

Yet as I sit here with my homemade latte beside my keyboard (the esspresso machine I gave Andrew for Christmas has been worth its weight in gold these last few housebound days!), I can’t help but think about how this storm, with all the interruptions and inconveniences it has brought with it, is a valuable analogy for the bigger storms that come our way through life.

The problem isn’t that things happen in life that completely throw us off our plans, it is that we expect anything otherwise.  Many years ago, midway through the second trimester of pregnancy with my first child, I discovered that it had died. It was New Year’s Eve 1996. To me that baby was already born. I was already a proud mother. But then, in the span of several minutes, without any signs to warn me, I discovered I wasn’t pregnant. I wasn’t going to have that cherished baby. That this new little life inside me [...]

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There are currently more Americans who have been unemployed for more than 6 months than any other time in U.S. history (6.1 million according to the latest figures). And while we hear reports that things are looking up for job seekers, we also have leading economists predicting that the job market may not improve much until 2012.

For those who have find themselves out of work, staying positive and proactive in their job hunt can be a lot easier said than done. Rejection after rejection can take a toll on self-confidence, and with that, the motivation needed to keep trying to find work.  But does being unemployed have to mean being miserable? Of course not.

Last week, I appeared on Let’s Talk Live here in D.C. to share some thoughts on how to stay positive when looking for work.

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If you’re out of work (or fear you may be soon), here are six strategies that will help you differentiate yourself from other job seekers, build your resume outside the workplace and land work despite the odds. [...]

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Of course it doesn’t take the beginning of a new year to make a decision to start something new, make changes in how we are living our life or turn over a new leaf. We can do that any day of the year. But there is something about January 1st that makes it feel like a good time for new beginnings.

While reflecting on what I wanted to do in the year ahead, I found myself feeling a bit anxious. As someone who writes and speaks on living courageously, I wanted to come up with some really big, bold and audacious goals. Yet as I began to do so, I found myself feeling simultaneously overwhelmed by the thought that it was very likely I would fail to achieve them.

Which is when it occurred to me how important it is to make the distinction between a commitment (which any resolution or goal is) and an attachment.

Hopefully you are committed to achieving something(s) that is meaningful to you in 2010. Some of your goals may be very do-able (like my goal to try one new recipe each week). Others may be more of a stretch. What matters most though is not whether or not you achieve each of your goals (or resolutions), but that you give them your very best shot.

As I’m sure you well know, often life can get in the way of following through on what you’ve set out to do. Job loss, illness, market crashes, relocation, children… stuff like that. 2009 was a hard year for many, a cautious year for most, and an unpredictable year for all. And frankly I’m not sure that 2010 will offer any respite when it comes to living with uncertainty. But that doesn’t mean we should hang up the towel and declare 2010 the year of “getting by.” It just means that we need to be willing to adapt them to new circumstances as they arise and let go of our attachment that everything should happen just as we think it should.

So, let me ask you, if you weren’t afraid of failing at achieving your goal and instead threw caution to the wind, what is one thing you would dearly love to accomplish (change, do, create…) between now and the clock striking midnight next New Year’s Eve? What one thing would give you [...]

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No doubt you haven’t escaped the Tiger Woods headlines this past week. As far as I’m concerned this isn’t a story about money. It isn’t a story about whether he broke the law. It isn’t even a story about badly managed PR.  It’s a story about integrity. Or, sadly, the lack thereof.  (I actually spoke about this during a TV interview I did earlier today.)

Our society loves to put high-performing athletes up on pedestals according them, in the process, a semi-God like status.  With that we give them enormous influence on us, and more importantly, on our kids who rank elite athletes second only to parents (92%) and on par with teachers (72%) in terms of influence.  But of course, with great influence, comes great power and (to quote from the Karate Kid) with great power comes great responsibility.

I don’t know much  about Tiger Woods’ private life apart from the salacious news I’ve heard in the media this last week.  What I do know is that we should all be very careful in putting anyone up on a pedestal or expecting any individual to be infallible across the board.  Just because someone is a brilliant athlete (or actor or singer or politician) doesn’t mean they are always going to be a great role model.  Masterful skill in one area of life doesn’t automatically equate to robust integrity or even to plain old common sense.  If there’s any lesson in this whole sad Tiger Woods affair, it is this: beware of putting any individual up on a pedestal just because they are good at a sport!

Time and time again we’ve witnessed athletes, celebrities and people in positions of high office suddenly fall from grace.  Time and time again we’ve felt like they let us down.  We’d trusted them to do the right thing and they blew it.  Surely they should have known better, done better, been better than that. What the hell were they thinking?! It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to have millions of people in awe of you, but it seems as though they become drunk on their own fame, fortune and power.  Without something or someone to keep them well grounded, they lose their way and become lost in the public persona their publicists create for them. Viewing themselves as almost omnipotent, they delude themselves into thinking their behavior is immune to the consequences the rest of us face.  [...]

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The shootings at the military base in Fort Hood last week were tragic. There is no upside. Twelve good men and women now lie dead. Thirty others are still recovering from injuries. Countless more are still weighted down with incredible grief and shock and anger as they come to terms with the loss of those they loved and served their country with.

No doubt in the weeks ahead we will hear a lot about the possible motivations and warped thinking of Nidal Hassan, the man accused of murdering these people. This psychiatrist will find himself being psycho-analyzed again and again and again. And at the end of it all, we will still be left with more questions than answers. We will also be left wondering, is there anywhere that we can feel safe anymore? Who can we really trust? How could the warning signs from such an unstable person been missed?

I do not want to focus this newsletter on why Nidal Hassan did what he did. Nor on who he is. Nor on what systemic malfunction permitted him to be in the role he was. Lord knows the media are working overtime doing that. Rather I think it is of more value to you (and me) to explore how we, in the face of such an event which has triggered such intense horror and grief, can continue to move forward as wholehearted, trusting, compassionate and courageous people?

Sadness, horror, grief, anger, disillusionment – all of these are normal and healthy emotions which help us navigate our way through life and point us to what matters most to us. The well-being of those we love, our own safety and security and the importance of loyalty . . . to our friends, to our colleagues, to our country.

If we don’t own our emotions, they own us. Acknowledging our emotions is crucial if we are not to be consumed by them. Every emotion you feel is legitimate. It is also constructive. . . to a point. If your anger motivates you to address a perceived injustice then that is a good thing. If your fear motivates you to do get out of harm’s way then that is also a good thing. Likewise if your sadness helps you realize how much you care about something (or someone) then that is a good thing too. However there is an important difference between emotions that positively motivate us and those that control us. Sadly, all too often emotions like anger and fear take such a firm hold on our psyche that they cloud our thinking and drive us to to act in ways that sabotage our relationships, suck the joy out of our lives and create profound suffering.

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Life doesn’t always go to plan. Sometimes things don’t work out as we want. Sometimes people let us down. Sometimes our hopes, dreams and expectations crash to the ground with a thud. Over the years I’ve felt disappointed more times than I care to count. An opportunity that looked promising fell through. A person I thought highly of acted poorly. A job I wanted went to someone else. Just last weekend, I felt a stab of vicarious disappointment as my oldest son Lachlan missed out on making the select basketball team. He’d had his heart set on it and when my husband told him the news, I found myself struggling in vain to hold back the tears for the sharp disappointment Lachlan felt. (Oh how we parents hate to see our children in pain.) I am sure that you have had your own share of disappointments. Perhaps you are working through one (or several) right now.

Disappointment is an emotion we feel when we don’t get the outcome we want or expect. When reality fails to conform to what we think it should be, disappointment (often combined with resentment or frustration) rises up within us, sometimes with an intensity that knocks us down hard. As human beings wired to become attached to certain outcomes, we are destined to experience it throughout the course of our lives. Having just spent two days last week with the Dalai Llama, I now know that even the most enlightened among us are not immune to emotions such as disappointment. Rather they have just learnt how not to let those emotions take hold. But I believe deeply that if we only ever had things work out the way we wanted, we would never value success and we’d never develop the resilience or wisdom God (or the universe or whatever you choose to call it) intended us to.

It’s the knocks in life, the setbacks and disappointments that allow us to savor and fully appreciate the wins and successes. As I work through disappointment I am called to deepen my faith — in the belief that everything is exactly as it should be (even though that’s not always how I want it to be), in myself and in my own resourcefulness. It also calls me to listen more closely to my own intuition and to trust that within every disappointment lies the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit. I just have to find it. You just have to find it. Does that lessen the blow for Lachlan as he comes to accept a reality that is different from the one he’d attached himself to? Nope. Not much. But I have great faith that his character, in his resilience and in his ability to deal with other disappointments that may line his path through life will be strengthened because of it. [...]

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Yesterday a friend emailed me to say that after years of trying to make it as a freelance writer she’s admitted defeat and is now trying to find a paying job. I replied to her that she needed to drop the ‘defeated’ talk and instead re-frame her situation more positively. That is, that she enjoys freelance writing and while she will continue to write she is pursuing work that provides a more reliable source of income. She quickly replied that she felt far better (and I’m guessing, more powerful) putting it that way.

And last week, after my interview on the TODAY SHOW, I was inundated with emails and blog comments from people saying how much my words resonated. Of the many things I said during the interview was that we each need to make a powerful choice not to be defeated, nor succumb to fear, nor to take life’s inevitable rejections and setbacks too personally. Put another way, we need to have our own unique Emotional Stimulus Plan that will enable us to ride out the bumps, weather the setbacks and rise to the challenge that comes our way.

Right now there are millions of people having to deal with significant changes and challenges in their lives due to the economic crisis that has rippled out from the burst of the housing bubble. People are needing to cut back on all sorts of things they’d previously taken for granted. Suddenly their financial security isn’t so secure and their lifestyle is being trimmed in ways they’d never foreseen. Without warning they are finding themselves wrestling with an identity crisis because so much of their identity has been tied to their job, their income, their McMansion and the list goes on.

So just as the Federal Government has taken it upon itself to launch an Economic Stimulus Plan, so too will you benefit from creating your own plan to weather whatever storms are blowing over you. Sure, many people are suffering hardship that is beyond their control, but if you take a step back from all the fear mongering and dooms-daying and look heavenward you will notice that the SKY IS NOT FALLING and that, while times are tough, times have been tough before (actually, far tougher!) and humanity has not come to a crashing halt. The reality is that in the US and other developed countries, we are living way better than any time over the course of human history. So you have to give up your spa trips for awhile? Come on! Just as losing your job or downsizing your home doesn’t mean you are a failure, neither does unmanicured feet render you unlovable (“And thank goodness for that!” cry my neglected toenails!). [...]

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Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-guns. . . I grew up with them!  Going rabbit shooting on my parents’ farm in rural Australia was a regular (and favorite) pastime (sorry rabbit lovers — that was just the way it was growing up in the Aussie bush).  But last week I heard a very tragic story that has compelled me to get on my soap box on the issue of gun control. It seems that with all the focus on things like swine flu and recession, we missed the recent 10-year anniversary of the Columbine massacre along with the progress (or rather, lack thereof) on the gun control issue.

The topic of gun control creates a lot of conflict and incites a lot of fear. Much of the fear is driven, in my humble opinion, by the pro-gun movements’ belief that restricting the availability of guns is an infringement on one’s individual freedom limiting our ability to protect ourselves.  But their equation that gun access equals safety and freedom quickly proves itself false when you look at the facts and take the rhetoric out of it. For instance, did you know that the United States has, as a percentage of population, 32 times more gun homicides than the UK each year and that Americans are over four times more likely to die of gun death than Canadians? How can anyone say guns create safety and freedom with statistics like that.

Here’s a few more to  (sourced from Coalition to Stop Gun Violence):

• With every day that passes, 8 children and more than 70 adults in America die from gun violence
• In 2004, guns murdered 37 in Sweden, 56 in Australia, 73 in England & Wales, 184 in Canada and a staggering 11,344 in the United States
• A 1998 report found that the rate of firearm homicide in the U.S. is nineteen times higher than that of 35 other high-income countries combined
• American children (age 14 and below) are sixteen times more likely than children in other industrialized nations to be murdered with a gun, eleven times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and nine times more likely to die from firearms accidents
• To top it all off, 40% of gun sales nationwide take place without a criminal background check

Can the current status quo continue at the cost of human lives for the sake of “guaranteeing freedom” as the pro-gun lobby maintains?

The story I mentioned involved an Easter egg hunt gone tragically wrong. A three-year old boy in Texas searching for Easter eggs in his parents’ bedroom inadvertently triggered the loaded gun his dad kept under his pillow! His parents rushed to the bedroom when they heard a gunshot after the young boy put the gun to his head and fatally shot himself. I’m sorry and maybe it’s just me who is scratching my head bewildered, but have people completely lost the plot? How can anyone think that keeping a loaded gun under their pillow, particularly when they have young kids (and what kids don’t love jump on their parents bed?!) is a good idea?! Puhleease.

Which brings me back to my point. Guns are dangerous. They kill people. Big people, little people, and way too often, innocent people.  Every day and far too regularly by people who, quite frankly, shouldn’t even have access to a bread knife.

So I’m not calling for a ban on guns. I’m just calling for some common sense. Surely it is past time for a national and rational debate that examines the issue objectively, and weighs up the “right to bear arms” versus the cost to every person living in America of millions of people walking around with loaded guns in their pockets, in their cars, in their homes and  under their pillows.

I know I talk a lot about living with courage. Let me just say, when it comes to Americans and their obsession with guns, it scares the hell out of me.

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