生活并不总是一成不变的，失去工作、结婚、生孩子、搬家、退休、失去亲人…我们总是面临各种各样的冲击。如何在适应变化，将其对生活的影响降到最低，下面是一些建议：
接受现实。不要总是想“怎么才能恢复正常生活？”，将它看作一次让你有崭新生活的机遇。
给自己一些安静适应的时间。在这种时候，不用为休假而感到内疚。
做一些有建设性的事情。
问问自己到底害怕什么？
试一些以前没有尝试过的事情。
锻炼锻炼身体。
卸掉一些义务和责任，给自己一些独处的时间。
整理整理凌乱的房间。
8 Strategies to get the most from painful or awkward life transitions
Given my current state of flux (4 days till baby is due and counting!), in this month's ezine, I thought I would share some tips for getting through the rough, uncomfortable part of major life transitions. It can be a disorienting time, but it has its upsides too!
Here is the article:
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These days, life doesn't stay static for very long. It seems like as soon as you get comfortable with where you are that things change and you are forced to adapt your schedule, your finances or your emotions.
But there are some life transitions that are truly life-altering, and put you in a state of extended discomfort, unease, awkwardness or even depression. These can be things like:
Losing your job
Getting married
Having a baby
Moving
Retiring
Death of a loved one
Leaving a long-term relationship
Seeing your last kid off to college
Going from employee to entrepreneur
Some of you may have chuckled as you saw I included "positive" events like marriage and the birth of children as having awkward, painful or even depressive emotional side effects. The interesting thing is that no matter what the ultimate benefit of a change, going from "what was" to "what will be" can be very unsettling.
One of the utmost authorities on change and transition, William Bridges, in his book Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes refers to the period between "endings" (your old life) and "beginnings" (your new life) as The Neutral Zone. This term was first coined over 75 years ago by Dutch anthropologist Arnold van Gennep who noticed that in most traditional societies, all ceremonies marking change involved separation, transition (which he called the neutral zone) and incorporation.
If you find yourself in this transition period, or neutral zone, you may notice the following symptoms:
Physical:
Low energy
Increased awareness of aches and pains
Heaviness in chest or pit in stomach
Light headedness
Inability to concentrate
Emotional:
Sadness
Anxiety
Restlessness
Fluctuating emotions: happy and positive one day, negative and depressed the next
"Spaciness"
Crankiness (just ask my husband about this, when the transition is pregnancy, and you have the added benefit of raging hormones in a time of great personal transition)
To this day, many traditional societies mark significant changes with rituals that help with the transition process. In my husband's Navajo culture, for example, male and female puberty ceremonies are marked by four days of isolated reflection, sharing of wisdom between the young and elderly, time in nature, and disconnection from "modern conveniences" including electronics and all forms of media.
In today's society, if we get slowed down by a significant life transition and can't keep up a frantic level of activity and output, we ask ourselves:
What is wrong with me?
Why can't I just get it together and move on?
Why is it so hard to get things done right now?
Will I ever go back to feeling like my "old self?"
The reality is, being in this awkward state of transition is an extremely creative and ripe period. Here are eight strategies for getting the most out of this juicy time:
Embrace it. Instead of asking yourself "When am I going to get back to normal?", be thankful that you are given an opportunity to reflect on your life and possibly come out with a new, improved, emotionally healthier you. You may not want to do this in public, but repeat the mantra "uncertainty is powerful and liberating!" as often as you can, and you may just begin to believe it.
Carve out quiet, reflective time. I find that people who are in the midst of a career change feel extremely guilty for taking any time off between the "old gig" and the new. But in fact, if you don't take some time off between endeavors, you are much more likely to either choose the wrong vocation, or find yourself just as frustrated in your new situation as you were in your old one. So don't beat yourself up if you feel the need to just space out, take long walks, or cook good meals.
Do something creative. If you are a frustrated artist, now is the perfect time to break out your paints, or clay, or camera, and engage your creative senses. You want to be more in a state of feeling rather than thinking, and creative pursuits are great for that.
Ask yourself "What am I afraid of?" Your fears hold lots of information which can shape your new life. If you are getting married, you may fear losing your independence, or your prized Hot Car collection, or your sense of spontaneous passion. Don't choke down these fears, look at them closely and use them as the basis for good, healthy discussion with your spouse-to-be about how you can design a life to incorporate the things that are important to both of you.
"Try on" different scenarios that don't fit the "old" you. When you are working full-time as an employee, or raising teenagers, or whatever your "old life" consisted of, you can get set in a certain persona. As you leave your familiar role ("I am the ultimate mother figure to my kids whose primary goal is to support and nurture") and move towards your uncertain future role, try on some new, totally different scenarios ("I am a wanderlust-filled traveller whose only thought is how to indulge my every whim, dance on tabletops and eat exotic food.") You may just find that the person you once were, or always wanted to be, is just waiting for you to step into her shoes.
Tune up your health. When I went through a slow period in my consulting business a couple of years ago, I used the free time as a way to get back into working out. I took up yoga, pilates and kickboxing, dropped 20 pounds and found that my overall emotional well-being skyrocketed. A time of great personal transition is NOT the time to indulge in drugs or alcohol as it will only drown out your creative voice and reinforce feelings of fear and anxiety when you wake up next to your empty tequila bottle. Instead, eat healthily, exercise and breathe in as much clean air as you can and you will find that peace and clarity emerges from deep within.
Cut back on obligations to ensure alone time. You want to reduce as many obligations as you can so that your primary focus is yourself. So just because you don't have a "day job" anymore, don't volunteer to chair the holiday food drive at your local shelter, or to watch the neighbor's 3-year old quadruplets. Once you are clear and moving in your new life, you can train for sainthood on earth again. For now, clean out the lint from your own bellybutton.
Clear out clutter. A period of transition is a great time to clear out junk, boxes, papers, pictures, old clothes, moldy food from the back of your refrigerator and expired cans from the pantry. A clean environment really does contribute to a clean mind. I am also a big fan of rearranging furniture since it will get you comfortable with seeing familiar things in a new and different way.
The last thought I want to leave you with is don't rush through the neutral zone. If you utilize some of these strategies and engage your creativity, you will know when it is time to stop navel-gazing and get busy with your new plans. Your "new improved you" will thank yourself for it!
Please share what you have learned about slowing down and savoring your changes!
如何不让你的生活变得一团糟
总有些时候，生活好像陷入低谷，事事不顺，下面的方法也许不能彻底帮你解决问题，但也许可以帮助你轻装前进：
不要再日记里记太多自己的感受。
不要担心，担心与事无补。
宽待自己。
宽待别人。
抛弃内疚的感觉。
不要管别人怎么看自己。
不在乎得分。
如果你的事业发展没有随你所愿，不要太在意。
不要让自己成为别人逃避责任的借口。
别太在乎自己的个性，你未必真的有。
10 simple ways to save yourself from messing up your life
Stop taking so much notice of how you feel. How you feel is how you feel. It’ll pass soon. What you’re thinking is what you’re thinking. It’ll go too. Tell yourself that whatever you feel, you feel; whatever you think, you think. Since you can’t stop yourself thinking, or prevent emotions from arising in your mind, it makes no sense to be proud or ashamed of either. You didn’t cause them. Only your actions are directly under your control. They’re the only proper cause of pleasure or shame.
Let go of worrying. It often makes things worse. The more you think about something bad, the more likely it is to happen. When you’re hair-trigger primed to notice the first sign of trouble, you’ll surely find something close enough to convince yourself it’s come.
Ease up on the internal life commentary. If you want to be happy, stop telling yourself you’re miserable. People are always telling themselves how they feel, what they’re thinking, what others feel about them, what this or that event really means. Most of it’s imagination. The rest is equal parts lies and misunderstandings. You have only the most limited understanding of what others feel about you. Usually they’re no better informed on the subject; and they care about it far less than you do. You have no way of knowing what this or that event really means. Whatever you tell yourself will be make-believe.
Take no notice of your inner critic. Judging yourself is pointless. Judging others is half-witted. Whatever you achieve, someone else will always do better. However bad you are, others are worse. Since you can tell neither what’s best nor what’s worst, how can you place yourself correctly between them? Judging others is foolish since you cannot know all the facts, cannot create a reliable or objective scale, have no means of knowing whether your criteria match anyone else’s, and cannot have more than a limited and extremely partial view of the other person. Who cares about your opinion anyway?
Give up on feeling guilty. Guilt changes nothing. It may make you feel you’re accepting responsibility, but it can’t produce anything new in your life. If you feel guilty about something you’ve done, either do something to put it right or accept you screwed up and try not to do so again. Then let it go. If you’re feeling guilty about what someone else did, see a psychiatrist. That’s insane.
Stop being concerned what the rest of the world says about you. Nasty people can’t make you mad. Nice people can’t make you happy. Events or people are simply events or people. They can’t make you anything. You have to do that for yourself. Whatever emotions arise in you as a result of external events, they’re powerless until you pick them up and decide to act on them. Besides, most people are far too busy thinking about themselves (and worry what you are are thinking and saying about them) to be concerned about you.
Stop keeping score. Numbers are just numbers. They don’t have mystical powers. Because something is expressed as a number, a ratio or any other numerical pattern doesn’t mean it’s true. Plenty of lovingly calculated business indicators are irrelevant, gibberish, nonsensical, or just plain wrong. If you don’t understand it, or it’s telling you something bizarre, ignore it. There’s nothing scientific about relying on false data. Nor anything useful about charting your life by numbers that were silly in the first place.
Don’t be concerned that your life and career aren’t working out the way you planned. The closer you stick to any plan, the quicker you’ll go wrong. The world changes constantly. However carefully you analyzed the situation when you made the plan, if it’s more than a few days old, things will already be different. After a month, they’ll be very different. After a year, virtually nothing will be the same as it was when you started. Planning is only useful as a discipline to force people to think carefully about what they know and what they don’t. Once you start, throw the plan away and keep your eyes on reality.
Don’t let others use you to avoid being responsible for their own decisions. To hold yourself responsible for someone else’s success and happiness demeans them and proves you’ve lost the plot. It’s their life. They have to live it. You can’t do it for them; nor can you stop them from messing it up if they’re determined to do so. The job of a supervisor is to help and supervise. Only control-freaks and some others with a less serious mental disability fail to understand this.
Don’t worry about about your personality. You don’t really have one. Personality, like ego, is a concept invented by your mind. It doesn’t exist in the real world. Personality is a word for the general impression that you give through your words and actions. If your personality isn’t likeable today, don’t worry. You can always change it, so long as you allow yourself to do so. What fixes someone’s personality in one place is a determined effort on their part—usually through continually telling themselves they’re this or that kind of person and acting on what they say. If you don’t like the way you are, make yourself different. You’re the only person who’s standing in your way.
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