August 2013, TRUE LIVELIHOOD NEWSLETTER

 

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This newsletter is intended to support the work of people who are engaged in developing the careers, vocations, livelihoods, jobs and/or work of other individuals. It is our belief that everyone's work life can and should be molded and crafted to be the expression of our finest gifts and a source of great joy. Towards this end, we hope that the content of these newsletters will support you with both practical tools and inspirational ideas.
 
Welcome to our August 2013 edition!
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10th Anniversary: Four Favorites

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

It just came to my attention this week that this is the 10th anniversary year of my newsletter.  I have taken great pleasure in perusing the archives as I revisit the themes and return to the issues that have engaged my imagination and captured my heartfelt attention throughout the years.  While they all continue to hold meaning for me, I came upon particular articles that I would characterize as my personal favorites, those that were a joy to write but also received enthusiastic response from my readers.  In celebration of this anniversary year, I have decided to select four articles from over the last ten years to highlight in this newsletter, for the remaining months of 2013.  I hope you enjoy my selections!

Rethinking Happiness: How We Choose To Be Content

With almost a hundred articles to choose from, I'd like to share with you why I made this article one of my top 4 selections.  To begin with, if there is one thing we have in common with each other and with every person we come into contact with through our work, it is this: we all just want to be happy.  While it is not news that as human beings we naturally aspire to happiness, I believe now as strongly as I did when I wrote this article in 2006, that we are prone to some pretty misguided notions about how to achieve it, and could benefit enormously by reexamining our understanding, approach and relationship to happiness, and most importantly, the extent to which we can commit to our own joy.

It was both humbling and surprising to me as I revisited the tenets put forth in that article to assess the extent to which I have practiced or failed to practice each of them in my professional and personal life in the past seven years.  Most importantly, I hope that you, like me, will find value in returning to many of the essential questions raised in the article, questions like: How do you define happiness and what, for you, constitutes contentment?  How do you rein in your standards for happiness by discerning "what is enough"? How can we intentionally steer our focus in the direction of our joy?  How do we approach happiness more as a by-product than a goal to pursue, treating it more as a cause rather than an effect? How do we accept the bitter with the sweet

As I say in the article, "Committing to our joy means making the nonnegotiable choice to pursue the greatest passions of our minds and hearts, making that which pleases, nourishes and refreshes us central rather than peripheral to our life experience. By committing to do what energizes us and makes us sparkle, we commit to showing up in the world with the best we have to offer. There is a wisdom and a fierceness to making one's sense of joy a priority in one's life but it is not an easy thing to do."  Not easy, but oh so essential.  Happy reading!

~ Denise

You can read Denise’s new article, in PDF format:
Rethinking Happiness


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