3 Ways to Add More Awesomeness to Your Day

Sometimes, when your job is terrible, your boss is crazy or your co-workers display the emotional maturity of 12-year-olds, it’s time to think about making a significant career change. But sometimes none of these things are true and you’re simply bored and burnt out. There’s nothing really wrong with your job, but nonetheless it’s decidedly lacking in awesomeness. What do you do?

Blogger Tim Tyrell-Smith knows something about turning lemons into lemonade. He used being laid off as the occasion to take a deep breath and really consider the course of his life. Now he shares his optimistic perspective via regular posts, including a recent one that aims to help those that don’t need a major life revamp, but simply an injection of happiness and accomplishment into their daily routines. Tyrell-Smith offers three tricks to up your daily awesomeness quotient:

• Expose A Great (But Less Known) Person To A Lot Of New People. This is a way to use your influence (and we all have some influence) to help out someone younger or less exposed. It feels great to receive this kind of a gift. The CEO who hears about a client service person going out of their way to help a customer. And highlighting that person in front of the entire company. The social media superstar with billions of followers who re-tweets a great post by a little known writer. The restaurant customer who so appreciates a server or chef that they tip big and go online to tell the world of their amazing experience.

• Take Action On Your Ideas And Pay Attention To Your Inner Voice. I spoke today to a person I met at a recent presentation. She was calling to get a few leads for her target companies. But our call ended up focusing on her real passion. A former dietitian, she… has a specific plan to use her joy of cooking to build a business. And I told her my story of taking action on my ideas. That I never truly knew what to do until I took action. And paid attention to how it felt to do so. What’s awesome is the real you. Instead of the one that followed the pack out of college. The world needs more people doing what they are meant to do. You’ll be happier at work as a result.

• When You Are Somewhere, Be There 100 percent. You can’t be awesome if you are not giving yourself fully. Now I will tell you that I am still “becoming” in this one. It is hard to focus when your head won’t stop swimming with ideas. But the people who I find awesome? They capture my attention by giving me theirs. Real eye contact, super active listening, a good smile and an obvious interest in my answers to their questions.

How to Tell if You Have Work-Life Balance

On first impression, this post might have a stupid headline. Whether you have achieved work-life balance doesn’t seem like such a difficult question — all the people you need to consult are nearby, all the necessary data is at hand and there isn’t any fancy math involved in reaching a decision. But as Pamela Slim, blogger and author of Escape from Cubicle Nation, recently pointed out, in the midst of the whirlwind of modern life it can be difficult to separate occasional exhaustion and normal anxieties from real warning signs that your work-life balance is out of whack.


If you want to know how you’re really doing, Slim suggests you stop comparing your life to some mythical state of perfect balance (or your co-workers or friends). Instead, try pondering the following questions:

• Do I enjoy my life while I am living it? When you step outside in the morning, do you take a deep breath and marvel at the wonder that the sun keeps coming up each day? Do you watch your kids (or pets!) intently and notice how perfect they are in their own quirky way? If you hate most of what you are doing most of the time, and miss the beauty of a full moon or the smile of a stranger because you are so busy rushing around, you may want to slow down and pay attention.

• Do I have a very short list of people I make a priority, without exception? The more our friend count stacks up on social media sites, and the more our client base grows, the harder it becomes to give sustained, quality support to those in your network. Emails linger in the inbox, and @ replies go unanswered on Twitter. But some relationships need to be nurtured every day, without exception.

• Do I “stay on my own yoga mat” as yoginis say, and not compare myself to others who are smarter, more productive, more witty, more sexy and more funny? I am lucky enough to hang out with some pretty smart and accomplished people. At times, their level of productivity overwhelms me. They negotiate great book deals, furiously write blog posts, close new business deals, and make time to eat right and work out. When I have a moment of compare and despair, as my friend Martha Beck says, I immediately step back and revisit my own vision of success.

• Do I wield a “No Axe” with great gusto, cutting unenergizing, unprofitable and unstrategic activities from my calendar? Charlie Gilkey wrote a great post explaining the criteria of Opportunity, Visibility and Cash Flow. If your daily activities do not fall into these three areas (including nurturing critical relationships), it is time to raise your no axe and whack them off.

• Are things a bit better today than they were yesterday? I have a lot of big personal and work development projects: a healthier and more fit body, a new book, a new body of speaking work… The big list is overwhelming. But each day, I take a small step toward completing it.