One Snarky Chica with Issues

Last week I mentioned that I was giving myself a bit of a mini challenge. The challenge? To try to go an entire week maintaining a positive outlook - no matter what.

I started this little challenge on Monday. One of my main reasons for doing it was because I was seeing a productivity decrease in myself and had pinpointed the cause of that to moments of annoyance, anger and frustration. And if you are anything like me, once you are in the middle of something and get upset in any way there is no going back to that productivity level.

If you have been reading this site, then you know that I have been unemployed for a couple of months. During that time I have been trying to make some money online until I can get myself into a job that is a good fit. Well, thanks to the recent and overdue pagerank update I ended up having all of the sites that I tinker with get a page rank this time around. That means more money making opportunities. So, I wanted to take advantage of that but was having productivity problems.

One of the first things that I learned was that it’s hard to keep up a positive attitude when you have people around you that do not have a positive attitude. It is too easy to adopt the mood of the person that you are with. So, to combat this I had to always be aware of my mood, especially when I was around others. I noticed that when I was not as aware of it I was picking up others moods and attitudes.  This was really the main hurdle of the week.

I also noticed that my energy level was related to my attitude. On the days that I did not get enough sleep, I was more apt to get down or cranky than on days when I got enough sleep. And if I got to feeling run down in the afternoon I saw the same thing happening.

Maintaining a positive outlook can be pretty tough, but is well worth it. My productivity this past week has been amazing. I also noticed that I got less stressed when driving or dealing with long lines at the grocery store.

There were some things that I did that made keeping a positive outlook a bit easier.

• Positive affirmations - I wrote some down on index cards put them up in my work area
• Meditation breaks - even if I stayed in my chair this helped keep me focused
• Yoga - just a little gentle yoga help keep the spirits up when I thought I was losing it
• Music - I made a playlist of tunes that keep me pumped, like “So Young” by The Corrs,  and played it a lot
• Eating healthy - I know I always feel better when I am eating healthy so I made sure not to eat junk

Overall I think it was a successful little challenge. I do not know how easy it would be to do for a longer period of time though. But I plan on taking what I have learned and trying to use it all of the time.