April 2012

I have been listening to political radio during my commutes for a while. I figured that as a responsible American, I should be well informed as to what is going on inside the Beltway and find out who is vying for the big chair in the Oval Office during the 2012 presidential elections.

I have decided that this contributed to what I now call “My Winter of Darkness”. Now granted, Earl and I had some stuff going on this past winter with the death of our fathers and I needed time to grieve properly and find my way through all of that. And heaping the chaos of Washington into the mix certainly didn’t help matters. At all.

So this morning I decided to go back to what I used to do, and that’s find a great song on the radio and to crank it up as I drove along the back roads to the office. My father never listened to talk radio. He read the newspaper, he watched news broadcasts, but he wasn’t a talk radio kind of guy. Before we had our first FM radio in the family vehicle, we listened to 62 WHEN, a Top 40 station out of Syracuse. Mom occasionally listened the local pickin’ and grinnin’ country station, but Dad always had WHEN turned on whenever he drove somewhere. It was a good radio station and listening to songs that I remember from that station remind me of sitting in the back seat of the ’71 Heavy Chevy we had. I think listening to radio back and forth to work, and everywhere else we went, contributed to my dad’s seemingly constant happiness.

I need to remember that.

So I listened to 70s on 7 on my way into work this morning and so far it has been a stellar day. I’m smiling, I’m trying to make the smile infectious and quite frankly, it feels much better than worrying about what political idiot is doing something politically asinine today.

A couple of days ago, my internet friend Séan tweeted about an article that talked about 15 things you should do to make your life happier (or something like that). Here’s a link to the article.

The basic gist of the article is that we should stop worrying about what others think about us. Much of what we do that results in stressing ourselves out involves doing something that doesn’t resonate quite right because we are doing whatever we’re doing in order to make someone else happy because we are worried about what they think about us. (As a quick aside, I apologize to all of my English teachers in high school for the hideous syntax I just used to construct that sentence. I don’t think I left anything dangling but sometimes I write the way my brain processes something and we all know about the organized chaos I have up there).

Anyways, since reading that article, thinking about it and having a good discussion about it with Earl, I have come to the realization that it’s absolutely on target. I have made a conscious effort to not worry about what others may think about me in a variety of situations and it has markedly lowered my stress level. So I got a little more ‘ranty’ than usual on a conference call yesterday. I got my point across (using sentence construction much like that paragraph that precedes this one) and things are happening that need to be happening now on one of my work projects.

In all honesty, I wouldn’t be walking around with a mustache the size of a small country if I truly cared what people think about me, but there are some things here and there that I am self-conscious about and this has slowed me down and deterred my original path in the past. Dropping the charade of trying to impress and just doing my thing because it’s true to me has lowered my blood pressure and put a bigger smile on my face.

And if people notice a bigger smile, then they can share the happiness I’m feeling. And that’s always a good thing.

So in an email exchange with Earl today I mentioned that the world feels like a better place when you smile and deliberately seek out a positive attitude. This has been my approach to the chaos littering my day today and so far it has been working brilliantly. Let’s hope this trend continues.

At work we have basically replaced all the tools that the technicians need to do their job. New phones, new monitoring systems, new ticketing system, all of it is new. It’s as if you picked up a 30 year veteran that ran the same cash register system at Ames for all those years and plopped behind a completely different cash register at Sears and told them to do their job. People are feeling disoriented and this makes them a little cranky.

Smile and the world smiles with you. Take it with a grain of salt. Frustration leads to folks saying things in the heat of the moment. Once you remember that, you can continue with your day and find a way to solve the problem at hand. This approach has been working for me.

I just keep smiling.