Gratitude and compassion.

No matter how hard you try to live a more meaningful, less stressful life, your most effective go-to weapons are gratitude and compassion.

Gratitude changes the way you are — even in adverse situations.  Change your internal wiring now to focus on being grateful.  Especially for things that most of us would never be all that grateful for.

Like the flu.

The flu will pass after it makes us miserable for a week, but the cancer a young boy or woman must fight is so much more serious than the flu, as much as we hate it. Therefore we can even be grateful for the flu.

When we work hard to find something to be grateful for in almost every situation, we are transformed.

The other fail-safe weapon is compassion.

We have a choice.

We can overreact to the anxiety that others direct our way or we could take a second and channel some much-needed compassion.

“It must be awful for her to have to be so nasty to her friends – she must be hurting”.

This is everything.

Two strategies that you can rehearse over and over again in daily life that will never disappoint.

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Millennials, born 1977-1996, are the most stressed generation of all. 

On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s 5.4.

Baby Boomers, born from 1946 to 1964 are the least stressed but not by all that much.

The national average is 4.9 according to research from The American Psychological Association.

Our digital lifestyle and fast paced living helps contribute to stress and underemployment, unemployment, complicated relationships and anxiety over college loan debt.

Our bodies and minds are human, as Popeye used to say, “that’s all I can stands, I can’t stands no more” so we’re all looking for relief.

Here are the best and most solid ways to do more than just put a Band-Aid on stress:

• Gratitude – Constantly recognize in real time your gifts.  Don’t wait until you lose them.
• Let go of that which you cannot control – I find this the most freeing thing I can do.  Take the leap.  You’ll live — with less stress.
• See the big picture – The most that stress can do is distract us from that which really matters to our happiness.  Never take your eyes off of the big picture.  Doing this reduces the noise that results from the anxiety of others.
• Forgive your enemies – and avoid the useless drama that stresses us out.  Try to have compassion for people who have to always make it about them, but don’t play into it.

If you are serious about putting a stop-loss on stress, rotate the above four concepts and see the difference.

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1. All dinners are to be enjoyed with cellphones turned off – including yours.
2. The family eats at least one meal – preferably dinner – together every day.
3. For every update of a social media site such as Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, commit to some type of equal and opposite contact with a real live person in your life.
4. Replace connecting with nurturing – this is how the human spirit is raised and how we feel fulfilled in our relationships.  It’s not how many contacts we make, it’s how authentic they are.
5. Do not reject technology – use it as the great tool of our generation – but do not immerse yourself into a digital lifestyle at the expense of in person contact.
6. When you are in the presence of another person, give them 100% of your attention.

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The fastest and most effective way not to play in to someone else’s drama is to postpone judging what you hear when they are speaking (or overreacting).

People who obsessively focus on themselves and their wants, needs and lives react instead of respond and who incite that special part of our brain that makes us do the exact same thing.

We are then held hostage by a person who is out of control.

When someone challenges you, think to yourself “It must feel awful to be that unsure of yourself”.  Or if a person makes it all about them, think “This poor soul is really needy.  I don’t like it when I feel needy”.

That’s when freedom comes.

Freedom from the histrionics of others, from disturbing and hurtful exchanges of text messages, emails or thoughts. 

When the conversation is all about the other person, postpone judgment on what they are saying – even if only for one second if that is all you can muster – and decide to relate to what is making the other person beg for such attention.

Do this and you are less likely to be drawn into selfish exchanges that ruin relationships.

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The average teenager texts more than 3,400 times each month.

And that figure is from 2011.

Up 300 alone from 2010.

Parents can’t point the finger of blame because as with everything else, they are teaching their children by example how to abuse digital devices.  In fact, research shows more adults than teenagers text while driving– a bad example to set for sure.

The average time we spend on a website is 20 seconds and the average number of websites a day that we visit is 40.

We are all living drive-by lives.

Things are so bad that Dr. Amit Sood, the physician who runs the stress program at Mayo Clinic says he attended a conference of meditation instructors where more than half were scrolling through emails and surfing the web during presentations.

This is insane.

The solution is to focus attention on the now.

No one is going to give up their digital devices but making them tools instead of a destructive lifestyle is our present day challenge.

Commit to focusing attention on what you are doing presently without distraction.

It’s a good way to bring balance back to your life and to teach those around you how to participate in life not just skate past it.

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When you’re out of work, can’t find a new job and the prospects look slim, it is easy to give up hope.

When you are still searching for that one soulmate with whom to share your life but you keep meeting the same person again and again, it’s understandable to become discouraged.

If you’ve been disappointed by someone close to you and feel this type of thing is happening too much, it is perfectly normal to want to throw the towel in.

We become depressed, forlorn and disheartened for good reasons.

But before you give up, try this one last thing.

Think like a champion.

In sports, players never walk off the field and say, this is getting to be too much.  They persist even if the loss they are enduring is discouraging and embarrassing.

Sleep it off, learn from mistakes and try again tomorrow.

For how long should you keep coming back to try again?

For as long as it takes to attain what you are seeking.

I am always most motivated by the thought that we learn more from failure than success so when you are on a losing streak, try to remember that you are practicing for your next success which will come in time.

Like sports, success is a game of averages. 

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Some people are hard to forgive.

Others don’t deserve forgiveness. 

Nothing in life is so painful than people who hurt others and yet when this happens to us, we often hurt ourselves more by harboring this animosity for years and sometimes to our graves.

That’s why it is helpful to view forgiving others as a gift to you. 

Not an open invitation to allow the same abuses to happen again and again.  Forgiving is not forgetting.

Almost every dastardly deed that hurts can be forgiven and the number one beneficiary is the person doing the forgiving. 

The alternative is to live life holding grudges and hurt feelings. 

Forgiveness is a gift to you.

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Internet social media entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk makes it a practice to meet people and do something for them.

In his own words Vaynerchuk told The Wall Street Journal, “In my career there have been 500 to 1,000 times when I approached someone, done something for him or her and then figuratively walked away.”

He expected nothing in return and benefited from the interactions that have aided his career and benefited his companies.

And the 5 or ten times that Vaynerchuk said people did the same thing for him, it was the beginning of a great relationship.

Effective networking is about patience and buildup – to use his words – not the close.

The secret to more effective networking:  be the first person in a network relationship to provide value.

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My USC college students used to worry away their senior year by suddenly having to deal with the prospect of full-time employment.

Lately, that prospect isn’t good and many people find themselves underemployed or unemployed.

Years earlier in a better economy, I knew a student who insisted he would not work for less than $70,000 a year.  He remained unemployed until he got a job working for his father at way less.

Once, my students asked me for the secret to getting rich in the music industry.  I promised them an answer at the end of the semester (I’m no fool). 

When I told them the secret to getting rich is not trying, they were incredulous.

Don’t try to make a lot of money.

Try to be excellent at what you do.

If you do, you win in two ways.

You are on the best path to rapid salary growth, but just as important, by making your life about being the best that you can be instead of the richest, you have the only real chance to attain both.

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Surveys show that most people fear speaking more than their own death.

But what is a worse fate that never seems to get surveyed is not living the life you want to live.

If money and power isn’t enough for many, then what is?

Being trapped in a relationship, a job, a life that is not the one you were supposed to have – the one you dreamed about before settling to pay the bills and feed the family — is a slow death of the spirit.

It’s not always practical to walk into your employer’s office and up and quit nor is it easy to extricate yourself from long-term relationships that have turned negative. 

And sometimes we’re born into a family that we can’t easily escape.

What we can do – right now – is make a priority of reimaging the life we want to live now.  Without that, we have no roadmap, no plan – no way to live that life.

When you ask the question “What is the life I was meant to live?” over and over again, it transforms unhappiness into the joy of fulfillment.

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