High 5 Weekly Career Transitions Roundup: How to Balance Work and the Holidays

This is our weekly roundup of some of the best career-related articles, interviews, blogs, etc., we've read during the week. We share them so you have some great resources to prepare you for the coming week. Enjoy!

• How to Balance Work and the Holidays: "Check if your company offers an employee assistance program. If you need to take time off to just recalibrate, that is perfectly okay."

• 10 Commitments to Live a Truly Accountable Life: "If you develop a strong personal belief in the importance of these commitments, and if you begin acting on those beliefs, you will benefit from them."

• 11 Ways to Be More Productive: "The restaurant business can be unrelenting, especially when you’re shuttling between five of them. Nonetheless, the chef, restaurant owner, and cookbook author says that the experience has an upside: It makes you an excellent problem solver."

• 7 Tips for Successful Delegating: "View it as a means to free up valuable time -- more hours you can use to act on your big ideas, grow your business and achieve greater success."
• 5 Steps to Turn Experience (and Failure) Into Wisdom:"They recognize that by knowing what they did to produce a great outcome, they can repeat the actions and duplicate the result. That’s wisdom too."

Daily Leap Career Video of the Week: Career Wisdom from Successful Women

Each week we present our Daily Leap Career Video of the Week. The video we share presents news or advice related to career development, searching for a job, the economy and employment, and other career-related topics.

In the video below, four successful women share some of the best advice they received related to work and career.

The Four Agreements at Work - Final in a Series

This post is the final in a series of posts pertaining to the book The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz and how it relates in a career context. Click to read the first, second, and third posts.

What is your "best?" We have been told throughout our lives to "do our best" without a real understanding of what that means. Ruiz brings together the previous three agreements into this powerful and evocative fourth agreement.

The fourth agreement: Always do your bestWhen I was working with a personal trainer, he described to me what I should experience while stretching: "it should be uncomfortable, but not painful." This statement reflects the operationalization of the fourth agreement: doing your best should make you uncomfortable, but it should not tax you beyond your limit.

Ruiz writes that your best is different moment to moment. Some days you feel (and you are) unstoppable: you got a good night's sleep, you have made healthy eating and drinking choices, you are physically active and are honoring the other three agreements. Other days, you simply are not: your body isn't well-rested, you have been eating and drinking harmful substances, you have not been active, and you are not honoring the previous three agreements.

The ramifications of your choices are palpable regarding this agreement.  Would you recommend to someone before a big work presentation to go out clubbing the night before? If someone had an important job interview, should they spend their time taking personally all of the negative things said about them? Is it right to lash out in verbal retaliation against a work colleague who has criticized you?

The reason why always do your best is the fourth agreement is because it is a reminder to practice loving mindfulness in what you do and how you act. None of the previous three agreements can be realized without intentional effort towards them. When you are mindful, you keep the ideals and principles of the agreements in mind and focus on achieving them, directing your intentional effort. But, inevitably, you are going to fail. Fail over and over and over again. Fail before you get out of bed in the morning, perhaps. This speaks to the importance of being loving with yourself and others...but especially yourself. When you fail, get back up and continue to try. With patience and persistence, you will notice a change coming about, a change that will eventually permeate itself into your inner being. And as you change, you will begin to experience a change in your career. Calls will be returned, opportunities will open up, and experiences will be presented to you.

The Four Agreements are a powerful means of career transformation. Being impeccable with your word will show that you are trusted, reliable, and impervious to office politics. By not taking anything personally you are committing to loving yourself and taking information in objectively and for the benefit of your career. Through not making assumptions you escape the poison created by assuming negative and dangerous perspectives on neutral events or occurrences. And by always doing your best you recognize your humanity and strive to continue your development regardless of your inevitable failures.

Agree to following the Four Agreements for the benefit of your career...and yourself!

Challenge: commit to one of the four agreements this week, and write about your experience committing to it below.

The Four Agreements at Work - Third in a Series

This post is the third in a series of posts pertaining to the book The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz and how it relates in a career context. Click to read the first post and second post.

"I have applied for over a hundred jobs, but I have yet to hear back from any of them. What is wrong with them? They must be bad companies, or else I would have heard something. Or maybe my application materials are terrible; I knew I should have rewritten my resume again before I applied!"

Perhaps you have a friend who has made a comment similar to the above. Or perhaps you have made it yourself. No matter the circumstance, one thing is clear: an assumption has been made, one that sends the assumer into a downward spiral of negative feelings and internal poison.

The third agreement: Don't make assumptions
Making assumptions works hand-in-hand with the second agreement, don't take anything personally. In fact, Ruiz points out that all of life's drama centers around these two agreements. If you don't make assumptions there is nothing to take personally, and if you take nothing personally you are - by and large - not making assumptions.

But when we make assumptions and we take things personally, Ruiz writes, we feel compelled to defend ourselves, to stick up for what we believe. We make people wrong by trying to make ourselves right. This creates poison in the workplace and within ourselves.

Think back to things that have caused you offense in your professional life: the job application that you never heard back from, being left out of a meeting that you felt you should be a part of, not receiving an invitation to a post-work gathering, or not receiving the praise you felt was deserved after completing a big project. The assumptions we make about these things negatively paint our reality, impairing our objectivity and ability to act rationally. It's not uncommon that we then gossip about these assumptions - this "dream reality" we have created - in order to make ourselves feel better about ourselves. Thus, we then violate the first agreement.

When we are able to free ourselves from making assumptions, we remove the baggage of the negativity we create. It encourages us, too, to confront situations compassionately and directly. We can contact a company and ask them about our application materials, or have a heart-to-heart with our supervisor about the meeting we were not invited to. By asking more questions to find out the reason why certain situations played out, we can counter our assumptions and work more peacefully.

Challenge: reflect on the assumptions that you make in your professional life and how those assumptions have negatively affected your work performance or career. What is a new agreement that you want to make with yourself? Post what you have learned in the comments below.

The Four Agreements at Work - Second in a Series

This post is the second in a series of posts pertaining to the book The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz and how it relates in a career context. Click to read the first post.

A disparaging comment from a co-worker. A terse email from your supervisor. A lack of acknowledgement from a higher-up, or a tone of voice that you don't appreciate. What do all of these things have in common? They are all opportunities for you to violate the second agreement: taking things personally.

The second agreement: don't take anything personally
According to Ruiz, when we take things personally we do so out of an innate selfishness: we think that it's all about us. Me, me, me...all of the time.

But as crazed with ourselves as we are, we are also fragile. We are very susceptible to fear and jealousy. So when someone in the workplace does something that we feel is insulting or hurtful, we choose to take in "the poison" of their actions.

Here's the thing, though: we don't have to do this.

Ruiz advocates a different path, one where it is not all about us. The two-month long gap before we hear from (or don't hear from) a recruiter about a position is not about us. Getting chewed out for submitting a less-than-satisfactory project proposal is not about us. Any situation where we perceive ourselves to be put-off, let down, hurt, or anything of the like isn't about us. It is about that person who is living in his own world with his own beliefs and his own programming.

You don't have to let what he says in. It's entirely a choice you make.

The first agreement is designed to keep us from injecting poison; the second agreement is designed to keep poison from infecting us. And we can see what happens when let that poison in, from certain incidents of workplace violence to the more creative ways workers react to stress and leave their positions. These people have accepted the poison of others, and the results were extreme.

But this isn't to say that the poison let in comes from negative reactions to us. Ruiz is clear to say that anytime we let something to to our heads - good or bad -  we are infecting ourselves with poison. Internalizing the praise of others can have the same damaging effect on us and our way of being. You only need look as far as out-of-control celebrities or egocentric professional athletes to see the effect of accepting this poison.

As with the first agreement, the second agreement is best countered by becoming conscious of the ways it manifests itself in your life. How do you react when you are insulted or treated unfairly by coworkers? What do you do when coworkers heap praise upon you? Because both are poison that can affect your well-being. If you had nothing to fear and were full of love for yourself, either one would gently float by you like a breeze.

What people think about you is none of your business: this is a bold and powerful concept. Focus your energy on being true to your ethics, values, and sense of love for those you work with. The rest will come together.

Challenge: spend the next week being mindful of how you react to others. Post in the comments what you learned.

The Four Agreements at Work - First in a Series

I believe that we are all striving to be better: better professionals, better spouses, better board members, better parents, better people. And - given recent events in our country (especially Connecticut) - we are given over to a period of reflection and search for a deeper meaning.

Driven personally by this desire for improvement and meaning, I recently picked up the book The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz; a book that, dare I say, has sat on my bookshelf for years. I found the simple wisdom he professes profound...and entirely applicable to navigating one's career.

In this series I will expound on the four agreements contained within the book and how they pertain to your job search and/or your professional life. It is no substitute for reading the book yourself (and please do. It's the size of a postcard and a mere 138 pages) but puts a career context around his writing.

The first agreement: Be impeccable with your word
Being impeccable with your word is the practice of being mindful of what you say to yourself and what you say about others. Words - according to Ruiz - have a power we do not comprehend, influencing our inner being and environment. Your word is a force for manifestation.

And he's right. When you are feeling hurt or unconfident - in your job, while looking for a job, or anywhere else in your life - you tend to say negative things about yourself: I'll never excel at this. I'm unemployable. I'm stupid. When you say these things - putting them out into the universe - they not only become a self-fulfilling prophesy but a stain on your being.

The same can be said for what you say about others. Your words have the ability to convey love and empowerment or to damage people to their core. It seems that a single negative comment can undo the professionalism you spent an immeasurable amount of time creating. A prime example of this is office gossip. What purpose does this serve but to divide, ostracize, and hurt?

This agreement is more than just talking humanely to ourselves and refraining from gossiping: it is about embracing the opposite of a state of being that has been instilled in us from when we were very young. It means keeping negative ideas from influencing you and divorcing yourself from the need to be right. It is also an acknowledgement that the world is as you see it and not more important than the view of another.

Being impeccable with your word - says Ruiz - is the most important agreement, and the hardest one to fulfill.

Challenge: spend the next seven days being mindful of what you say to yourself, what you say to others, and ensuring that what flows through you embodies kindness and integrity. Post in the comments what you learned.