Life Is Stressful! Here Are 17 Ways to Relax and Reduce Stress at Home That Anyone Can Use.

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30sec Tip: Never Look Down on Anyone

Never look down on anyone, unless you are helping them up.

We make commitments to others and ourselves all the time. The question is: Do we keep them?

When we fail to keep a promise, it communicates to the other person that we don’t value him or her. We have elected to place something else ahead of our commitment. This can result in an erosion of trust in our relationships.

More importantly, we are telling ourselves that we don’t value our own word. Not keeping a promise to yourself is the same as disrespecting yourself. Eventually, it can harm our self-esteem, confidence, and experience of life.

5 Tips to Help You Keep Your Promises

Featured photo credit: snowboarder via Shutterstock Brian is a Lifehacker who covers all sorts of tips for life. He is also fascinated with new technology. Contact Brian at brian@lifehack.org, Google+

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5 Steps to Instantly Connect More Deeply with Anyone and Everyone

Connection with other people is one of the most important aspects of life, but when you’re not connecting, it can be hard to figure out what’s going wrong. Whether it’s with friends, family members, co-workers, or kids, the following five steps will help you quickly move from feeling isolated and disconnected to being able to create deep and meaningful connections no matter who’s in front of you.

One of the things I notice when I’m feeling disconnected from others is that I’m usually also feeling sad, anxious, or angry. The reason I’m disconnected is because I’ve been avoiding the natural connection that is easily available when I’m present and enjoying life.

So, the first thing to do when you find yourself out of sorts is to stop, take some deep breaths, and notice what’s going on inside of you. When we can tune in to our own emotional world, or physical sensations in our bodies, or anxiety-producing thoughts that keep swirling in our minds, we’re much better able to put those thoughts, feelings or sensations into perspective. Rather than determining our experience, these things are simply a part of our experience and can be either dealt with in the moment or put aside until later, allowing us to be more present and available for connection.

After tuning in, it’s much easier to “find your center” or discover your unmoving sense of self. For instance, when I’m feeling sad, I disconnect and sulk, but when I notice I’m feeling sad, I’m able to say to myself, “I’m feeling sad right now, but I am not my sadness. I am generally a joyful person who cares a lot about others. My kind and loving heart is the core of who I am.” Ahhh, that feels MUCH better.

Now that you’ve discovered what’s happening with you that has been keeping you away from connection with others, it’s time to make yourself more available by making eye contact. When we avoid connection, we often avoid eye contact. That’s because the eyes really are like windows to the soul.

When we make eye contact, a LOT of information is transmitted from one person to another. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of looking into someone’s eyes and suddenly thinking, “I know exactly how this person is feeling.” Sometimes we’re right and sometimes we’re wrong, but by making eye contact we make our selves vulnerable and available in a way that we just aren’t when we look down or away.

If you find extended eye contact difficult, go back to step one, breathe, relax, and tune in to your own thoughts and feelings and then when you’re ready to connect again, resume eye contact. Sometimes just taking a deep breath is enough to help me relax enough to maintain eye contact.

One more thing about eye contact: don’t try to look at both eyes at once or to give each eye equal time. Instead, just decide to look into one eye without shifting your gaze. I usually use the left eye, but that’s just my personal preference. By choosing one eye and maintaining steady but relaxed eye contact, the other person knows that you’re available and ready to connect.

Now put your attention on the other person. Really take a moment to stop thinking about what you’re about to say or where you’re headed next, or what the other person is thinking about you and actually pay attention to the person across from you. Get curious about what the other person is experiencing. Is she feeling sad, hurt, or happy? Is he distracted by the television in the room? Does the energy of the conversation seem to change when he talks about his dad?

By noticing some of the subtle shifts in the conversation and then checking in about them, you can quickly move from small talk into a deeper connection. For example, perhaps you and a co-worker are talking about the weather:

Y: “Wow, it’s freezing out there! The wind is really blowing!”

T: “I know! I almost slipped on some ice on my way to work this morning. It’s a good thing my mom isn’t planning on running any errands today. She broke her hip last winter.”

Y: “You know, I could really feel how much you care about and want to protect your mom when you shared that. Was it a bad break?”

T: “Yeah, it took months to heal and definitely took a toll on the whole family. We’re used to Mom taking care of us, not the other way around.”

Y: “I bet it’s scary to see the tables turning as your parents get older. I’m going through that too, and it’s so disconcerting to see my parents need more and more help as they age. I wish they could stay young and healthy forever.”

Now that you’ve connected and empathized, make sure to keep things moving in a positive direction. You want to connect, but you don’t want to see this person in the hall a few days later and think about what a dark, heavy conversation you had. Instead, you want to leave the other person feeling appreciated and remembering what an enjoyable conversation it was.

Even dark or heavy topics can still feel enjoyable if you practice appreciation during the conversation. Take the above example, can you see where Y was appreciating and enjoying T’s love for his mom?

When we can genuinely appreciate and enjoy the person we’re connecting with, they feel seen and accepted and want to continue to connect further.

If you’re having trouble enjoying a particular person, just try to find one thing to appreciate about them in that moment. Maybe their hair smells nice, or you like their smile, or the sound of their voice reminds you of your favorite uncle. By focusing on the thing you enjoy, your appreciation will come through naturally without additional effort on your part.

One of the pitfalls of wanting deeper connection with people is that we can get stuck in a mode of thinking that “deeper connection” has to look and feel a certain way. Let me assure you, it doesn’t. When we can let go of any attachments we might have to a conversation going a certain way, and simply enjoy where it’s going organically, we take the pressure off and allow for much more fun and connection.

And, by showing that you’re not dead set on discovering their deepest darkest secret or uncovering some childhood trauma, you’re inviting a level of openness and vulnerability that the other person is comfortable with. That will ultimately lead to more spontaneous sharing that is much more likely to result to an ongoing deepening of connection.

Having fun is a great way to connect with others and it’s a wonderful indicator of whether you’ll want to continue this connection into the future. If it’s no fun, you probably won’t want to do it again.

So, those are my five steps to connect more deeply with anyone and everyone. I would love to know your thoughts, please share a story or comment below.

And have a fabulous day, Shelly

How you can add a significant amount of depth, and thus strength, to your relationships: 5 Ways to Build Stronger Relationships

Featured photo credit: Beautiful butterfly sitting on the girl hand via Shutterstock

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Flowing with the Stresses of Kids (or anyone else)

Parenting can be stressful. That’s probably one of my bigger understatements, but as the father of 6 kids, I’ve learned a little about handling these stresses so that it’s not such a big deal anymore.

Kids throw tantrums, demand to have their way, don’t see anything but their own point of view, break things, always need something, get hurt, fight with each other, start to rebel and become disrespectful as teen-agers, and so on.

But there are good bits too.

The truth is, dealing with the stresses of kids is the same as dealing with the stresses of anyone else. The stress is just magnified because 1) we are responsible for their lives, education, values and everything else, and 2) we are more emotionally involved with them than we are with most other people. Still, the basics of dealing with the stresses of others apply, and what we’ll talk about here can apply to anyone, not just someone with kids.

OK, let’s tackle this problem … we’re going to look at two areas: 1) how to deal with the stresses of others, and 2) how to make managing kids easier.

In her book Everyday Zen, Charlotte Joko Beck tells a story that I’ll paraphrase here:

Imagine you’re rowing a boat on a foggy lake, and out of the fog comes another boat that crashes into you! At first you’re angry at the fool who crashed into you — what was he thinking! You just painted the boat. But then you notice the boat is empty, and the anger leaves … you’ll have to repaint the boat, that’s all, and you just row around the empty boat. But if there were a person steering the boat, we’d be angry!

Here’s the thing: the boat is always empty. Whenever we interact with other people who might “do something to us” (be rude, ignore us, be too demanding, break our favorite coffee cup, etc.), we’re bumping into an empty boat. We just think there’s some fool in that boat who should have known better, but really it’s just a boat bumping into us, no harm intended by the boat.

That’s a hard lesson to learn, because we tend to imbue the actions of others with a story of their intentions, and how they should have acted instead. We think they’re out to get us, or they should base their lives around being considerate to us and not offending us. But really they’re just doing their thing, without bad intent, and the boat just happens to bump into us.

When we see things with this lens, they suddenly become emptied of anger and stress. Our boss was rude? Empty boat, just respond appropriately, don’t imbue with a story. Kid throws a tantrum? Empty boat, just breathe and find the appropriate, non-angry response.

This is detachment. It’s seeing the actions and words of others as just phenomena happening outside of us, like a leaf falling or the wind blowing. We don’t get angry at the wind for blowing, and yet the blowing does affect us. Let the actions of your kid be the wind blowing — you just need to find an appropriate response, rather than being stressed that this phenomenon is happening.

So when your kid is doing something other than what you’d like, let go of that desired outcome that’s stressing you out, and let go of the story you’ve imbued into their actions. Just think, “Empty boat, wind blowing.”

And then give them a hug. Let love guide your actions. Teach, don’t control. Set an example of how they should behave with your compassionate response. They’re watching you, not listening to your words, and that’s how they learn.

The skills above take practice, and I’m still learning them myself. I don’t claim to be the best at them, but the learning itself is a good process to go through.

With all of that said, there are some things you can do to make managing kids easier and less stressful:

Teach them to be self-sufficient. Each step along the way, teach them to take care of themselves according to their ability to learn new skills. If they learn to brush their teeth, shower, fix their breakfast, wash their dishes, and eventually cook and clean and wash their own clothes, life becomes much easier.Set boundaries. There are certain lines they shouldn’t cross for safety reasons, and the earlier you can teach these lines, the better. Then there are softer lines that are inappropriate to cross — being disrespectful of others, damaging property, etc. — and for these lines, it’s good to teach them as early as possible why it’s bad to cross the lines. Repetition is key, and eventually they learn and things are easier for all concerned.Give them responsibility. Older kids can watch younger kids. Kids can pitch in with family chores, like sweeping and washing dishes and wiping counters and cleaning bathrooms. This is good for them, as it teaches them to be a part of a team and take pride in their work, while it reduces the load for you.Don’t schedule too much. Many parents overbook their kids, with practices and lessons and clubs and playdates and sports and recitals and much more. This gives the kids no time to play and invent on their own, and makes life much more stressful for the parent. Schedule as little as possible, and let them figure out how to use their time.Relax your expectations. Parents tend to expect the world of their kids, from how successful they’ll be to how perfect they’ll be at skills to how little they’ll mess up with things around the house to how perfect they’ll behave. Of course, none of these expectations is realistic, nor fair to the kid. Let them go. Accept them for who they are, and just have a good time with them.

I say all these things like I’ve perfected them, but of course I haven’t. I have a wonderful set of kids, and I know I’m lucky. I’m also lucky to have an amazing wife, Eva, who bears the brunt of the stress and makes things so much easier for me. But when the things above work, they work great.

Parenting can be stressful, but it can also be joyful. I choose joyful.

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10 places where anyone can learn to code

Technology TEDx Teens, tweens and kids are often referred to as “digital natives.” Having grown up with the Internet, smartphones and tablets, they’re often extraordinarily adept at interacting with digital technology. But Mitch Resnick, who spoke at TEDxBeaconStreet in November, is skeptical of this descriptor. Sure, young people can text and chat and play games, he says, “but that doesn’t really make you fluent.”

Fluency, Resnick proposes in today’s talk, comes not through interacting with new technologies, but through creating them. The former is like reading, while the latter is like writing. He means this figuratively — that creating new technologies, like writing a book, requires creative expression — but also literally: to make new computer programs, you actually must write the code.

The point isn’t to create a generation of programmers, Resnick argues. Rather, it’s that coding is a gateway to broader learning. “When you learn to read, you can then read to learn. And it’s the same thing with coding: If you learn to code, you can code to learn,” he says. Learning to code means learning how to think creatively, reason systematically and work collaboratively. And these skills are applicable to any profession — as well as to expressing yourself in your personal life, too.

In his talk, Resnick describes Scratch, the programming software that he and a research group at MIT Media Lab developed to allow people to easily create and share their own interactive games and animations. Below, find 10 more places you can learn to code, incorporating Resnick’s suggestions and our own.

At Codecademy, you can take lessons on writing simple commands in JavaScript, HTML and CSS, Python and Ruby. (See this New York Times piece from last March, on Codecademy and other code-teaching sites, for a sense of the landscape.)
.One of many programs geared toward females who want to code, Girl Develop It is an international nonprofit that provides mentorship and instruction. “We are committed to making sure women of all ages, races, education levels, income, and upbringing can build confidence in their skill set to develop web and mobile applications,” their website reads. “By teaching women around the world from diverse backgrounds to learn software development, we can help women improve their careers and confidence in their everyday lives.”
.Stanford University’s Udacity is one of many sites that make college courses—including Introduction to Computer Science—available online for free. (See our post on free online courses for more ideas.)
.If college courses seem a little slow, consider Code Racer, a “multi-player live coding game.” Newbies can learn to build a website using HTML and CSS, while the more experienced can test their adeptness at coding.
.The Computer Clubhouse, which Resnick co-founded, works to “help young people from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies,” as he describes. According to Clubhouse estimates, more than 25,000 kids work with mentors through the program every year.
.Through CoderDojo’s volunteer-led sessions, young people can learn to code, go on tours of tech companies and hear guest speakers. (Know how to code? You can set up your own CoderDojo!)
.Code School offers online courses in a wide range of programming languages, design and web tools.
.Similarly, Treehouse (the parent site of Code Racer) provides online video courses and exercises to help you learn technology skills.
.Girls Who Code, geared specifically toward 13- to 17-year-old girls, pairs instruction and mentorship to “educate, inspire and equip” students to pursue their engineering and tech dreams. “Today, just 3.6% of Fortune 500 companies are led by women, and less than 10% of venture capital-backed companies have female founders. Yet females use the internet 17% more than their male counterparts,” the website notes.
.Through workshops for young girls of color, Black Girls Code aims to help address the “dearth of African-American women in science, technology, engineering and math professions,” founder Kimberly Bryant writes, and build “a new generation of coders, coders who will become builders of technological innovation and of their own futures.”

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3 Windows Shortcuts Anyone Can Use

I’m going to make a prediction here without a crystal ball, or a 900 psychic friend’s number. I predict that the majority of you are Windows users, correct?

Eat that Dionne Warwick!

Am I really a psychic? Heck no, but I’ll bet I’m more accurate than that Rapture guy! But I digress. Truth is, it doesn’t take the knowledge of splitting an atom to discern that Windows still holds the market on the PC OS.

Being a likely Windows user (Macs are out of luck on this one), there is a good chance you’ll want to know how to tweak Windows to suit your style, run faster, and/or make you more productive (i.e. do things faster and better). If this is you, then do I have a trick for you?

Buckle in and prepare to learn some sweet tweaks you can use to customize Windows.

If you hate the Windows XP, or Vista shutdown menu – and I’ll bet you do – this is something you are definitely interested in. Windows 7 users probably aren’t as inclined, but may want it as well.  In order to make this happen:

1. Right click on an open area of the desktop Select New/Shortcut. Enter in ”shutdown -r -t 00? (no quotes)

2. Select “Next” and enter Reboot or anything you like as a name.

3. Click Finish.

The lock feature is a feature that is used a lot; especially in an office setting. When you leave your office – to go mind your own business somewhere else, you don’t need the cubicle gossip snooping in your stuff, or worse the office jester sending out prank emails offering to by everyone in the office lunch from your logged in account (Yes, I hate that guy too).

Of course you can always use CRTL-ALT-DEL, a screensaver, or even WIN+L from your keyboard – but if none of those corn your fritter, then maybe an icon on your desktop will. Here’s how it’s done:

1. From the desktop “Right Click”, select “New” then select “Shortcut”

2.  Type “rundll32.exe user32.dll” (no quotes)

3. Select “Next” and enter “Lock PC” or anything you like as a name.

4. Right click new shortcut and select “Properties”

5. Select “Change Icon”

6. Explore shell32.dll in the System32 directory and find a lock icon you like

7. Click “Apply” and “Ok”

Now you can walk up; give Clyde “the Gossip” the finger and slap Lucien “The Jester” upside the head, as you’re on your way to mind your own business.

Note: Use that last tip at your own discretion…

Easily, the Start Menu is one of the more useful features in the Windows platform. It’s a central hub for searching you PC’s contents, but what about when you want to search the Internet? Wouldn’t it be more productive to add an Internet search option directly to your Start Menu? This way, you can bypass the browser, and search the net right from the start menu. Here’s the skinny:

1. Click “Start” then “Run” (For Vista or Windows 7 user’s, click “Start” and proceed to step 2 typing in the search box)

2.  Type “gpedit.msc” (no quotes) and press Enter

3. Using the left panel explore to “User Configuration>Administrative Templates> Start Menu & Taskbar”

4. Double-click “Add Search Internet link to Start Menu,” and select “Enable” (May not be available in XP)

5. Click “Apply” and “Ok”

Now when you search for something in the Start Menu, a “Search the Internet” link will appear above the search box!

There you have it; regardless of whether you are a seasoned Windows Pro, the most “green” of beginners, or anything in between these tips and tricks will prove to be useful. Feel free to print this out, write it down or share these tips with a friend; I am only here to help.

Know some other tips or tricks suitable for the entire range of Windows users? Drop a line in the comments section and share – the more the merrier.

Ray Pevley (Danville, KY) comes to us from the Tech Corner Blog http://techcornerit.wordpress.com and is also the host of Tech Corner Radio, which airs every Tuesday Morning @ 8:10 am on "The Charlie Perry Show" AM 1230 WHIR Danville, KY. You can also follow Ray on Twitter @Ray_TechCorner

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