Hello, my Chickadees! You're all as dear to me as a mother hen with her peeps and I hope you're faring well. Things are beautiful in Boston and going well at the hospital where I have my current RN contract. I love being able to care for patients and have the kind of schedule that also allows me to be available to support others on whatever journey they're embarking. I've recently joined a new group to help me develop even more along those lines -- Something big is coming! Diving in to more from the MQ this week ... do you ever find yourself looking forward to talking with someone or getting together with friends or coworkers so you can "vent"? I know I've had full conversations in my head w

Once you’ve broken the negativity habit and replaced it with positive and encouraging behavior, it becomes normal fairly quickly. You may have never realized how much negativity was impacting you until you felt the absence of the stress that comes with it. Before long, you’re going to want everyone to experience the power of positivity! The best thing you can do to win friends and influence others is continue to be positive… especially with negative people. Being positive in front of negative people can help them see there is more to a situation than they may realize. You may recall what it was like to act negatively and know that sometimes people have blinders to what is positive. Your posi

So far, in this series about overcoming negativity we've seen how pessimism doesn't serve us. We've learned that being negative is a pattern that develops over time. Also, at some point, being negative may have served a purpose - but over the long haul, it is only destructive. One thing to remember though is most of us have a mixture of negative and positive thinking ... even negative people sometimes have happy thoughts! However, they might be few and far between. Going from negative to positive will take some time, but it isn’t that hard. Making a change requires a willingness to plug into the positive thoughts that are already there, but not being expressed. Take a look at these three sma

Credit: @Artfully79 Continually reacting negatively to situations can be exhausting! It’s like living in a state of perpetual eye-rolling with the phrase here we go again banging away with a heavy metal band in the background. If your go-to response in life is negative, your actions might look like this: Always blaming others when things go wrong Loudly verbalizing your displeasure with circumstances Being critical even when good things are happening too Not going for optimism when things are up in the air Negative forecasting -- do you have a crystal ball? This can be draining, to put it mildly. Living in a perpetual state of annoyance and focusing on negative things can cause your mind, bo

Photo: @wanaktek via Twenty20 Negativity becomes a habit and like any habit - good or bad - it can be broken. All you need is the same thing that contributed to its formation -- repetition. The more you do something, anything… consciously or not… the more likely you are to keep doing it. Luckily, you can stop a habit that isn't serving you by becoming aware and replacing it with a new, more welcome behavior. Breaking the negativity habit begins with self-awareness. Is it your go-to reaction in life? Ask yourself these questions to see: Question? When things go wrong, do you automatically blame someone for the failure? Question? Do you find yourself often being judgemental? Do you tend to see

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, ..." A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens These words were written in 1859, yet they have a familiar ring, don't they? This virus has brought out both the best and the worst in all of us. For the next five days you'll be receiving what I hope will be interesting and perhaps enlightening and hopefully useful as we navigate these strange waters. Do you

Hello, hello, hello! How is it going? I'd love to hear from you if you have any new insights that COVID has stimulated. I decided to experiment with a vegan food plan and it's going pretty well. I'll keep you in the loop. This week's Monday Quote (MQ) was a little preachy ... "When you're looking to get lucky, I suggest you look for grace and blessings instead." It's not so much that I'm telling you what to do -- I'm offering some guidance based on where I've been at times and what I've learned that doesn't work. The definition of luck is "success or failure brought about by chance rather than through one's own actions". In other words, there's little to no effort involved. There's an elemen