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Greetings!
Welcome to LifeWork
Letter!
LifeWork Letter is a complimentary monthly
e-Newsletter from Connie Komack and LifeWork
Enterprises, with tips, quotes, and short articles
designed to enrich, empower, and forward the
growth of your life, career, or business.
Our theme this month is Celebration! This evolves
organically from the fact that within the first week of
September, and beginning with the Labor Day holiday,
which we all share, I also will be celebrating with
family and with friends my son's wedding, three family
birthdays, including my own, and the 50th wedding
anniversary of two dear friends. What an abundance of
opportunities for joy!
The theme of celebration also led me to think of the
other topics explored in this newsletter:
- Gail Sheehy's landmark book,
Passages
- The importance of accentuating the positive
- Celebrating our labors on Labor Day
As always, I invite you to visit my blog site
www.conniekomack.blogspot.com and to read
the articles on transition, change, and re-designing
your life that are posted there. Those of you who are
engaged in the process of setting new goals, as I
often do on my birthday each year, will find useful tips
in my recent blog article, How Do CRAMPS Relate
to Goal-Setting?
Feel free to share this newsletter with others.
It is easy to do by clicking on the forward
email link at the bottom of this newsletter.
Yours in Celebration,
Connie
| Theme Quotes |
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Celebrate the little things in life, appreciate
tomorrow, love your neighbor or don't, but never
condemn yourself to a life without cause to celebrate
and be thankful for what you have. Never forget the
people you love and love them whenever you have an
occasion to do so. Celebrate their life and celebrate
yours.
- Author unknown
The more you praise and celebrate your life, the
more there is in life to celebrate.
- Oprah Winfrey
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| On Celebrations - A Personal Take |
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In this next week, I am blessed with a
veritable feast of celebrations: my son's wedding,
three family birthdays (including mine), and the 50th
wedding anniversary blowout celebration for two old
and dear friends - not to mention the Labor Day
holiday. All this got me thinking about the nature,
meaning, and importance of celebrations and
celebrating.
First, there are the special milestone celebrations, like
birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, births,
christenings, dedications, bar mitzvah's and bat
mitzvah's, and even funerals (which at their best are
celebrations of a life well lived). All of these
celebrations mark important transitions or passages
in one's life. Getting to each of these milestones is a
journey - sometimes a tough one - and
acknowledgement, appreciation, gratitude, and
celebration of each milestone helps us to appreciate
what we have and supports us in moving on through
life to the next one.
Then, there are the holiday celebrations, both secular
and religious. Most are opportunities for gatherings of
families and friends, for feasting, for play and
relaxation, for reflection, for taking us out of the
ordinary moments of our lives and giving us a much-
needed break from the routine. These celebrations
can recharge our batteries and provide opportunities
for rest and renewal.
And finally, there are the smaller personal
celebrations - the special moments we take - either
alone or with a special other or others - to
acknowledge our accomplishments and successes
or to just celebrate Life!
All these celebrations are absolutely essential to our
emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being, for they
have the potential to bring us face-to-face with joy,
laughter, fun, relaxation, play, excitement, and
companionship.
As our first theme quote reminds us, "...never
condemn yourself to a life without cause to celebrate
and be thankful for what you have. Never forget the
people you love and love them whenever you have an
occasion to do so. Celebrate their life and celebrate
yours."
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| Accentuate the Positive |
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If you grew up in approximately the same era as I did -
give or take a few years - you might remember these
verses from an old Bing Crosby song that often played
on the radio or on our parents' record player:
You've got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between.
You've got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith, or pandemonium [is]
Liable to walk upon the scene.
If you think about it, the message in this song isn't
much different from what's being taught today in many
psychospiritual contexts. Consider, for example, the
Law of Attraction (aka The Secret), the use of
Affirmations, the the dharma of Happiness (Buddhist
teachings), the Tao te Ching (including, Wayne
Dyer's teachings on this text in his book/program
Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life: Living
the Wisdom of the Tao) - to name just a few.
Celebrations spread joy - at least that is the
intention. And we need joy! Celebrations are the
occasions in our lives when we
are most likely to accentuate the positive and
eliminate the negative. And we need more positive
and less negative in our lives!
We spend way too much of our lives struggling,
complaining, lamenting, resisting, hurting. One
antidote to this is celebration - expressed in every way
from private inner dialogue to mega blowout
celebrations, like weddings, New Year's Eve, and
Mardi Gras. So, celebrate something every day. Life is
too short to do anything else!
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| Passages - Revisiting a Classic |
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Thinking about celebrations brought to mind Gail
Sheehy's classic book, Passages: Predictable
Crises of Adult Life, first published in 1974 by E.P.
Dutton & Co. (re-released in 2006) - a book still
relevant to many of us, even 30 years later. I picked it
up recently and am re-reading it. This is my
recommended reading for this month.
Interesting choice of words in the subtitle: "predictable
crises" rather than, say, "predictable
stages".
Interesting that she saw our natural
life passages as crises.
Sheehy recognized this book as being an
incomplete resource on this topic, and she went on to
expand her exploration of various life passages in a
series of subsequent books, including her most
recent one - Sex and the Seasoned Woman:
Pursuing the Passionate Life.
But I digress. My point here is that our lives are made
up of many milestone moments, transitions, and
natural and normal life stages, or passages, which
we need to acknowledge and celebrate - in small
moments or in big hooplas - as often as possible.
What are you celebrating lately?
How about Labor day? Check out our next article.
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| Celebrating Labor Day |
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Labor Day is one of my favorite holidays, for several
reasons.
- It is a low-key, non-commercial holiday. No gifts or
fancy decorations are required.
- It's a summer holiday, involving casual dress, fun
activities, good weather (usually), and delicious but
not fancy food.
- Doing fun activities is part of the charm - cookouts,
picnics, fairs, fireworks, parades, concerts, races,
shows, powwows and all manner of similar
gatherings and entertainments are readily
available.
- You can wear sandals and shorts, and spit
watermelon seeds (if that floats your boat).
- It's a great time for gathering together with family
and friends.
- It's a time for rest and relaxation.
- And it's a celebration of all our labors - a
recognition of all the ways we labor for our livelihood
and for the good of others.
Americans first celebrated Labor Day in 1882. The
holiday was created to honor the "Working Man" -
especially blue-collar laborers - and was intended as
a day of rest for them. Today, people from all walks of
life use this holiday not only to rest and relax but also
to celebrate summer and to ease the transition from
summer back into the busier fall pace of work and
school.
As a Work/Life Coach, I am especially fond of Labor
Day, not only for all the reasons listed above, but also
as a way to celebrate and appreciate all the ways we
work to support ourselves, our families, and the
common good - paid or unpaid.
For many years now, I have spent Labor Day weekend
with a group of long-time friends who gather at the
rural homestead of one of our gang in the New
Hampshire woods. We share meals and chores,
stories and pastimes, fun and adventure, joys and
sorrows, laughter and tears. For me, Labor Day has
come
to be a celebration of the precious gifts of friendships
(including those that take work!). This
year, I will be celebrating the marriage of my son
instead and will not be joining them, except in my
imagination and memory. I will miss this special
gathering, even as I celebrate this exceedingly joyful
union - a celebration I wouldn't miss for anything!
Wherever you are this Labor Day weekend, dear
Readers, I wish you happy families, good friends,
good times, good weather, fun, rest, and, if you are
traveling, a safe return home.
Celebrate yourself! Celebrate your life's work!
Celebrate your loved ones! Celebrate Life!
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| How Do CRAMPS Relate to Goal-Setting? |
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Do you know how to set an effective goal that will
ensure success? For tips on how to make your goals
work for you, read the blog excerpts below and then
click on the link to read the complete blog article,
How Do CRAMPS Relate to Goal-Setting?.
In the world of goal-setting, it is important to
understand how to create an effective goal, a goal in
which Success is the end result.
The CRAMPS model is one that I developed a few
years ago for my goal-setting workshops. This model
incorporates all the qualities of SMART goals and
adds a few more that refine the goal-setting process
even more and build in an even higher probability for
success. Although the CRAMPS acronym is not nearly
as elegant or as sexy as the SMART one, it IS
memorable, and that is what is important.
So, a CRAMPS goal is ...
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I believe that true happiness and fulfillment comes to
us when we know who we are, when we are
comfortable and confident living in our own skin,
when we know what we want from Life, and when
we focus our best efforts on going for our dream -
whatever that may be. Whether you are an individual
or a business, I support you in this quest.
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