No one wants to wish it on others. One of the hardest thing anyone has to go through is loss. But at one point in our lives, we all have experienced loss. It could be the death of a loved one, the loss of a friend, or the end of an important relationship. When something we hold dear is ended or taken away, we experience grief.

Grief comes in many forms. Each person has a different way of grieving and each experience is as different as we are unique. There is one universal pattern though and we know all too well the five stages of grief.

The five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are mechanisms that help us remember, learn, and move on from what we’ve lost.

These stages are NOT a linear progression of emotions that people go through one after the other to be able to get grief over and done with. Sometimes, we spend time circling over 2 or 3 of the stages or sometimes we get stuck on one stage, all with the goal of getting to that stage called acceptance.

After a loss, we all need to go through grieving. It is a necessary process that can’t be abbreviated. Life has it’s own timeline and, though we often don’t agree with it, we have to respect it. Experts say grieving is often a many-year process. But let’s face it, a lot of us don’t have the luxury of waiting years to return to work, school, or the rest of our lives. So we’re forced to jump back into life well before we’re emotionally ready.

But we have to do it, eventually. The world doesn’t stop for us even after it has taken away what we love. It will continue spinning and moving along – with or without us. So we would have to learn to get back on it and join the rest.

We can’t all afford the luxury of taking unlimited time to grief and most often, work restrictions would only grant is a couple of days off of leave, paid leave if you’re lucky.

So listen. And listen well. Listen to your body. Listen to your heart. Don’t suppress your emotions. Many people throw themselves right back to work in the hopes of speeding up the grieving process.

Don’t just throw yourself back into work and hope that it gives you some semblance of normalcy fast. There is a right way and right time to grieve and only you can figure out how and when that is.

Don’t spread yourself too thin. Someday, even the smallest tasks can be overwhelming. You are going to need the help of family, friends, and co-workers.

Just remember, be kind. To yourself, to others… kindness in general will help with grief. Let other people help you. Let them rally around you in your time of need. Consequently, when you know someone who is going through grief, rally around them for support.

After everything has settled, there will still be bills to pay, deadlines to meet, people to call, stuff to do. No one can operate on robot mode for the rest of their lives. We would have to pull ourselves up.

In the end, we all want to get to that golden gate of acceptance where we can finally be at peace and start to move on. As always, remember to: Stay Humble, Hustle Hard. Good luck!

Written by Jaie O. – The Help

Personal Development

We should never stop finding our own way. This is how we grow and develop into the person we hope to becoming. Learning should not stop after leaving school and life teaches us so much more than what we could learn in the confines of the four walls of a classroom.

Planning a career is usually the next in our to-do list after leaving the learning institution. We frequently forget about career planning once we have secured work or begin a job. But career planning is something that should be done on a regular basis. Whatever point you are in your career, just starting out or established, it is never too late to start or revisit career planning.

Career Planning is not something to be dreaded and is really not a hard activity. It should actually give you a sense of fulfillment and direction and add a little bit of structure to your life.

1. Make it a regular event – best if you can do it annually. Look at old goals and stack them against your current accomplishments. Cross off all those you’ve achieved and plan on how to achieve those goals that you haven’t gotten around to doing yet. We do a number of things on a regular basis, dentist check ups, tax filing, general house cleaning. Why don’t we do that for our careers? Start a habit of revisiting your previous plans and making this a regular annual event.
2. Map it out – When you first plan out your career, either in your mind or more formally, on paper, you map out the job and the steps you need to take to be successful at it. Say you want to be a writer. You carry out the steps by taking classes in order to learn about writing or to improve your writing skills. Next step is to intern for a publication. Next Step is to acquire a job and so on and so forth. This exercise doesn’t stop once you’ve secured that writing job. You should ask yourself: what is the next step? How do I get better? Map out the next step and adjust accordingly.
3. Look at your current skill set – sometimes, the need for Career Planning arises because we feel burned out due to our current workload. Or maybe, things at work become so stressful that we think of looking for another job. Every job requires certain skills but everyone’s skill set is unique. To successfully plan for Career Growth, you would have to look into your arsenal of transferable skills or skills that you can use to gain entry into another career. Skills like editing, researching, translating etc. are extremely useful killer skills that can be useful in any industry. Work on acquiring skills that are universally useful alongside specialized ones.
4. Set Goals – Goal Setting is the most important part of professional growth. Without a goal you will be as lost as when you first stepped out of school and had no idea where to begin. Can you be successful without them? Sure. But it’ll be a whole lot easier if you had them in the first place. Career Goals are the anchor with which you base all career paths and decision making so make them count.
5. Start now – what’s stopping you? Don’t wait too long. Take a quiet day off, sit down with good music and your favorite drink and contemplate your career growth. Are you where you want to be right now? What else can you do? What else can you achieve? Don’t just keep those thoughts to yourself, write them down on paper. Finished? There you go – a Career Plan, a road map to professional growth. Revisit that document often when needed and get on track to career success and remember to: Stay Humble, Hustle Hard. Good luck!

Written by Jaie O. – The Help

How do you know if you’re stressed? Most of us have a “tell” – that’s poker speak for signals that disclose your cards. In this case, a Do you sweat a lot? Is your heart racing, like you just ran up a flight of stairs? Do you feel an itch at the back of your throat signalling an impending illness?

When we’re stressed, hormones like cortisol flood our systems, producing the “fight or flight response” making our heart rate goes up, and forcing us to breathe more heavily since we require more oxygen as our blood vessels constrict. This is our stress response.

Alternatively, we have a relaxation response which is the reverse of the uncomfortable things listed above: our heart rate goes back to normal and our breathing slows down as we use less oxygen. Our blood pressure decreases too.

We don’t really have a choice over what triggers our stress response but there are ways to manage and undo it’s effects. Here are five ways that you can decompress and get your stress levels down:

Take a big breath and repeat:

Yes, simple as that. However, there is a proper way to do it. Yogis and Yoginis swear by a deep breathing technique to help clear the mind and calm the body down. I have discussed some meditation techniques earlier in the article “A Mind Full of Light”. The article broadly discusses some tips on how you can start meditating.

Need another reason to get started on meditation? Deep breathing exercises help reduce stress and relieve tension just by giving you an extra boost of oxygen.

Take a walk:

Walking clears your head by putting your body into a state of meditation, specifically via a phenomenon known as “involuntary attention”. This is the act of engaging in an activity that allows for reflection all while doing something that holds our attention. Walking also gives you a boost of endorphins, you know those feel good hormones released when you exercise.

Day dreaming Day dreamer:

Try this while sitting at your desk, waiting for your food, hiding in an empty conference room – or wherever you feel less self conscious: visualize a calming scene in your mind’s eye. Picture the scene vividly and in the most accurate detail you can picture. Try these as visualization prompts:

• A sunny day at the beach with clear blue skies and clear waters.
• A fun future vacation with family or friends.
• A mountainside getaway with lush forests and hot cocoa.
• Going on a movie and dinner date with your celebrity crush.
• Completing a pet project.

Now, once you’re done doing that, don’t you feel so much better? Visualizing happy scenes recognizes the power of “guided imagery” to bring on a relaxation response. Simply put, dreaming about something happy makes you happier and therefore, less stressed.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation
The Huffington Post outlines the steps to Progressive Muscle Relaxation with this: “Start with your toes and work your way up: tighten your foot muscles as much as you can, then relax them. Make your way up, tightening and relaxing each muscle until you’ve finished with your face. It may seem silly, but this practice can help reduce anxiety and stress and is often recommended to patients who suffer from depression and anxiety disorders”.

And last but not least…

Finding the Funnies:
A good laugh is the most awesome ever relaxation technique. The Mayo Clinic explains that “Laughter enhances your intake of oxygen-rich air, stimulates your heart, lungs and muscles, and increases the endorphins that are released by your brain”.

Counter intuitively, laughter first activates your stress response and then deactivates it, creating a kind of “roller coaster” that leads to a feeling of relaxation and boosts your endorphin. We love endorphin!

So go ahead, watch those viral funny cat videos. Read the newspaper funnies. Pick up a funny book or comic. You’ll feel so much better after a good hearty laugh. As always, remember to: Stay Humble, Hustle Hard. Good luck!

Written by Jaie O. – The Help

During olden times, businesses were a family affair. The business is usually run by the patriarch and he trains his sons and daughters to take over the business someday – thus, they are passed from generation to generation.

This business model has been successful for some, especially small businesses and family enterprises. But for a big majority of Medium to Large Businesses, owners are always advised against hiring family members. 

There are a lot of benefits to hiring family members especially when a business is just starting out. Lower salaries and hiring people you can trust are among them. Also, for family enterprises, keeping things in the family is a big plus because family members are easier to manage.

Things get trickier as the business grows larger as hiring family members for big businesses could raise a lot of red flags. Owners could be accused of favoritism or nepotism. And there’s also the danger that the relative could be under performing or slacking off because they know they would never be reprimanded or fired.

Working with family members could be an awesome experience and if you lay the ground rules early on, there will be little danger that this could turn into a messy family affair.

The most important thing to establish when working with family members is open and honest communication. As with any relationship, this is a very significant aspect. During assessment period good employers are ready to give honest feedback based on metrics and performance. They don’t skirt around issues of less than par performance and often give credit where credit is due.

This should be the case for all employees, even relatives. Employers should be able to give honest assessments and not worry about hurting a relative’s feelings. Alternately, a relative should be able to take feedback without making it a personal issue.

It would be best if employers keep their personal and work life separate. This can be done a number of ways. Physical separation, for one, could be helpful. Having a different office or workspace from a spouse, can send the message to employees that you are both working on your own thing and not just canoodling around. You may also have a relative report to someone else, other than yourself. That way you can work freely without anybody being accused of “hovering” over the other.

Agree before hand not to discuss work during family time and vice versa. Establish boundaries like not allowing your son to call you “Dad” at work – and especially no terms of endearment like “Hun” or “Honey” from a your spouse. You can ask them to  call you by your first name, or whatever the rest of the employees call you.

Build trust and always be respectable. You would want others to see the talent and skills you see in your relative so don’t be overly critical or too fawning. Lastly, be honest with other employees about your familial relationships. This builds trust not just with other employees, but strengthens your relationships as well. As always, remember to: Stay Humble, Hustle Hard. Good luck!

Written by Jaie O. – The Help

We all know that securing our future is important. To be able to take care of ourselves and our families in our old age, we should have savings, investments, or a retirement plan. But if we all know that, why aren’t we doing it yet? Too many of us aren’t putting as much effort into securing these as much as we should. Heck, not too many of us are making the effort at all!

You would think that with all the fiscal crises going on all around the world, everyone would go “I should save up for retirement or make an investment and secure my future!”

But not everyone is saving up. Not everyone is investing. Not everyone has a retirement plan. Not everyone is feeling the urgency. What’s going on?

There is this survey from Charles Schwab that could maybe explain this.

“Out of the 1,000 adults ages 25-70 who responded to the Schwab poll, a full third said they weren’t saving enough for retirement because they didn’t want to make lifestyle sacrifices today.”  

One third! Whew! That’s a large percent. That’s 33% of adults saying that they’d rather live it up right now and worry about the future…in the future.

Like that old adage says, “it’s never too late to start.” If you start now, you’ll hopefully have enough to retire comfortably. Don’t think about it as one great big house all at once. You build it over time brick by brick. It’s more like a marathon than a sprint.

So we go to the big question, how do I get started? The easiest way is to take advantage of work sponsored retirement plan contributions. This is such an easy kickoff point to building a retirement fund because a portion of your salary gets automatically deducted. Your contributions are automatically deducted from your paycheck and matched by your employer. It’s so easy, you don’t even have to think about it. So, if you have something like this being offered by your employer – take advantage of it.

Next, you can go find investment opportunities. Unlike the automatic retirement fund, this one takes more work. You can do the research yourself or you can find a financial planner to help you decide on which investments are worth checking out and getting into.

I am not a financial planner, so I won’t go into the details of bonds and stocks and hedge funds. I’ve watched too much “Suits” to try to explain that. But you might want to consider easy long term investments. This is making the most out of money – investing is kind of letting your money work for you and not the other way around. If you’re savvy enough to do it yourself, then by all means do so. But start now! If you need a little help, find a financial planner that can help you build a portfolio.

You have to be prudent though, if you are to engage in this long term investment thing, the money you invest should be money you won’t be needing for a while. Shannon McLay, financial planner from FinancialGym.net says a good rule to follow is this “If you won’t need the money for a long time, then pick a later target date fund or a more aggressive asset allocation fund. If you need the money sooner, then pick an earlier target date fund or a conservative asset allocation fund.”

At the end of the day, we all think we deserve to spend our hard earned money on making our lives more fun and comfortable and we all rightfully deserve to do that. But we all rightfully deserve a secure future too. So maybe if we make concessions to save a little for the future, we won’t end up living from paycheck to paycheck or working well until our twilight years.

As always, remember to: Stay Humble, Hustle Hard. Good luck!

Written by Jaie O. – The Help