Ways To Live A Happy, Positive, More Fulfilling Life

Hello from a small writing nook in Kalamazoo where all the walls are wood and there is a small beam of light shining through the windows. This is an introduction to the rest of your life. This is for you – the dreamer, artist, old soul, entrepreneur, creative who wants to do more with their life. And not because someone else is telling you to be better but because there is something inside of you keeping you up at night and resurfacing every single morning when you wake.

I have such a good feeling about your life. I completely believe that this year you will do something incredible. I believe in you. I believe that right now, in this moment, you have infinite amounts of potential. I think we are all so much more powerful than we realize. All change starts with an idea, a thought, and the determination and passion to keep the spirit alive. It won’t ever be without self-doubt, complications, failure, and heartache, but that’s okay – those are all things that make us grow into better, stronger people. We don’t have to do this alone. E-mail me koty@thoughtcatalog.com. We can face our fears together.

---

1. The hardest part is always getting started but we have to start somewhere. It begins with a simple step, a sentence, a brush stroke, an email, a phone call. Life moves at you fast, so give yourself the chance to start something new. That’s all any of us need – a chance to shine.

2. Get rid of the things that fail to bring any value or meaning in your life.Minimize old possessions that mean nothing, rid yourself of one-sided relationships. Create room for space to grow in every area.

3. Concentrate on what you want. Visualize it. Consider the steps needed to take to get there. Accept the fact that things take time.

4. Connect with someone you’ve always admired. Send an e-mail to an author that gave you a new perspective or made you feel so completely understood in a way you never experienced before. Send gratitude to the people who have inspired you. Every connection you make can come up later in surprising ways.

5. Get out of your head. Take a walk, visit a museum, watch a movie, strike up a conversation. Let the world inspire you in the different formats that surround us every day.

6. Take note of the things that help you recover – meditation, comfort foods, best friends, live music. Take care of yourself when the time comes. Self-care is critical in the process of becoming.

7. Stop waiting for things to happen to you. So many people spend their entire lives waiting – waiting for the right person, the right job, the right time to do whatever it is they want to do. Stop waiting for other people to take notice. Find your voice and use it to get what you want.

8. Dedicate yourself to the things that move you. Give yourself a time frame for working on something – six months, one year, 14 months. Every single day remind yourself you have a purpose.

9. Give yourself the permission to say “no thank you.” Remember you don’t have to say yes to everything. This is your life, right? Stop saying yes to the things that don’t excite you, to the things you don’t want to do.

10. Focus on the things you love about your life. Think about how you can take small steps to make each of those things flourish in their own way.

11. If you’re in a dead-end relationship – leave. If you have a job you can’t stand – quit. If you hate your roommate – move out. It’s not that easy, you say, and trust me, I know. There are always reasons to stay a little bit longer, to prolong the inevitable. Find a way out. If you don’t fight for your own life, who will?

12. What’s your dream job? What do you hope to do some day? Find someone in the field and connect with them. Ask them if they need an assistant or if they could use a volunteer or intern in their office. Create opportunities for yourself.

13. Don’t worry too much about what other people think. Other people being your parents, your peers, your friends, randoms on the internet. Don’t get caught up in hive mind. Abandon other people’s expectations for your life. Forget what other people your age or in your profession are doing. It doesn’t matter what other people are doing. It only matters what you are doing.

14. Rid yourself of other people’s negativity.. It’s so easy to succumb to other people’s bad moods, to get caught up in the negative emotions we each face every day. Don’t let it. Help your friends when they need a pick me up but don’t let them bring you down to the sadness well they can’t escape from.

15. Give compliments freely and without the expectation of return. Love people for who they are now, in this moment, flaws and all. Practice unconditional love.

16. Get lost. In busy city streets, on abandoned country roads, in the vibrations of your favorite songs, in the warmth of someone’s lips. Become unnerved once in awhile.

17. Be proactive in managing your moods. Take note of the things that piss you off, of the sadness you can’t come back from, of moments that make you deliriously happy. Figure out how to weave your way in and out of your emotions to overcome the thoughts that self-sabotage you.

18. You will never be as young as you are right now. You will not be the same person tomorrow that you were today. Lose yourself in enthusiasm and passion and the drive to make your life exactly the way you want it. 

Koty Neelis

3 Ways to Simplify Your Company Culture and Build Trust

The 2015 books are closed and the 2016 kickoff meetings have concluded. Now is the perfect time to take one final look at what went well last year and what we could have done better. It’s also a great time to review our 2016 priorities. Which areas demand better performance? Which programs will we emphasize in the coming months?

Simplification is a major initiative for many organizations, including SAP. By reducing complexity and striving for simplicity, we know that companies can develop new opportunities for competitive advantage. In contrast, firms that cling to complex processes, structures, and tools hold themselves back. In a recent Knowledge@Wharton study, 74 percent of respondents said that complexity hurts their ability to meet goals.

And the cost of complexity is significant. Authors Simon Collinson and Melvin Jay characterize complexity as one of the biggest challenges facing modern business. They write that complexity “is slowing companies down, costing them on average 10 percent of their profits and harming employee morale.”

Complexity also has a negative impact on employees. Studies have shown that trust, diversity, and innovation suffer when employees are overwhelmed by complexity. In contrast, trusted leaders experience greater innovation and better performance. Yet only four in 10 employees trust their boss. I view this as a huge gap that can potentially shrink when we reduce complexity.

Leading by example.

Some leading executives of highly innovative companies clearly understand the need to share their authentic selves as a way to build trust. In 2014, Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly came out in an opinion piece published in Bloomberg Businessweek. In an essay advocating for human rights, Cook said he set aside his privacy and publicly declared that he is gay in the hopes that he could help others who might be struggling.

Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg wrote movingly about her grief over the death of her husband Dave last year. In discussing her painful loss, she talked about how she decided to be open about her feelings with employees. “I realized that to restore that closeness with my colleagues that has always been so important to me, I needed to let them in,” Sandberg wrote on Facebook. “And that meant being more open and vulnerable than I ever wanted to be. I told those I work with most closely that they could ask me their honest questions and I would answer. I also said it was okay for them to talk about how they felt.”

Closer to home, our own SAP CEO Bill McDermott recently suffered an injury that led to the loss of his left eye. He reached out to SAP employees and spoke from the heart about the accident, his gratitude to family and colleagues and his optimism about the future. SAP employees responded with heartfelt wishes for his recovery, many inspired by his willingness to be so open about such a tragic accident. The tragedy inspired him to increase his focus on individualized healthcare and the role SAP might play in making it better -- and simpler -- for people around the world.

Getting started on simplification.

These executives turned difficult situations into opportunities to build trust. But you don’t need a tragedy to begin simplifying your company culture. Why not consider ways to begin simplifying your corporate culture as one of your key 2016 initiatives?

Let’s define our terms. A simplified corporate culture strives to:

• Do things in the way that creates the most value and engagement for all, with the least effort for all
• Make it easier for people to be their best and do great work

According to a report by The Jensen Group, a simpler environment gives employees the power to get their work done, to make a difference, and to control their own destiny. Simpler workplace cultures also make it easier for employees to do their best and be their best selves. But how can you create an ideal balance of deep trust, real inclusion and maximum engagement within your organization?

There are three key steps that can help you simplify the company culture:

1. Develop senior executive alignment and commitment to the cause. Business leaders need to embrace the idea that ease of use and ease of effort can help create corporate return on investment. For example, at SAP, we have a shared aspiration to "make the world run better and improve people's lives." This is a bold but simple statement - and a sincere goal -- that is at the heart of everything we do and every business decision we make. Our executives and leaders are unified behind this goal. It is repeated and shared often so there is no doubt about our commitment.
2. Train mid-level managers to make simplicity for all a priority. Ensuring that managers on the frontline understand their role in simplifying, communicating, and exemplifying the organization’s messages and goals is critical. At SAP, we are proud of the training we offer to address the needs of those colleagues. There is often no greater representative of a group’s goals than the mid-level manager with whom you interact on a day-to-day basis.
3. Design work tools, communication, training, and development using simplicity criteria. SAP’s own CEO, Bill McDermott, sets the tone for simplified communication -- starting with our internal communication and meetings. He rarely relies on typical tools such as PowerPoint to share a message. Instead, Bill prefers to speak directly to audiences when possible (often via global broadcasts), engage in open Q&A sessions, or to send a simple one-paragraph mail -- no “bells and whistles.” We offer programs to help colleagues break messaging down to its most basic components, conduct “design thinking” training to enable out-of-the-box approaches to innovation and encourage simple storytelling whenever possible. While there’s still work to be done, I’m proud of my company’s commitment to be more engaged “human to human” -- and less reliant on slides or fancy presentations that can often complicate things.

Simplification won’t happen overnight, but with proper planning and commitment, you can begin moving your organization in the right direction. Resolving to simplify your company culture is a great first step toward meeting your 2016 goals.

Anka Wittenberg

These Mindset Shifts Will Transform Your Life Forever

As the saying goes, football is a game of inches. For all of you football fans, you know exactly what I mean by this. Some of the biggest and most painful losses throughout the course of my football career came directly from either being a second too late, a second too soon or an inch away from a favorable outcome of the game.

Just as football is a game of inches, so is winning in life and in business. If you want to start living life on a new level, then you will need to make some crucial mindset shifts. How we think largely determines our destiny. 

The quality of our relationships, business success and happiness among so many other things boils down to our mindset. We are all talented at something, and while I think there are quite a few different variables as to why others are more successful than the next person, I strongly believe that mindset ultimately separates the best of the best from everyone else.

Here are three mindset shifts that will transform your life forever.

1. Grow through the tough times instead of just going through them.

One of the most important mindset shifts that could instantly open your life and business up to new possibilities is to grow through the tough and discouraging times of life instead of just going through them. There is nothing easy about this mindset shift, and it will take a lot of intentional effort on your part to fully execute this, but the results will end up changing your life.

I talk about this mindset shift a lot in my upcoming book, Winning Plays: A Top Athlete’s Advice For Tackling Adversity and Achieving Success, and how it completely changed my life forever. Some of the biggest failures and adversities in my life ended up becoming some of the biggest blessings and opportunities -- all because I chose to intentionally grow through them instead of just casually go through them.

2. Fuel your faith, not your fear.

We all have faith and fear to some degree, however, where it becomes a major stumbling block for most is when you fuel your fears more than they fuel your faith. Fear is normal, and even the best of the best experience it from time to time, but what they do differently is they re-channel it. When they feel fear, they face it head on by acknowledging it, and then shift their mindset to instead fuel their faith.

What you give energy to will likely manifest. When I refer to fueling your faith, I am referring to seeing yourself beyond your current circumstances and flirting with all of the possibilities for what could go right instead of paying attention to what could go wrong.

This small and simple mindset shift will not only help you get to where you want to go, but it will ignite a fire deep inside of you and help you to push through all of the discomfort you will experience along your journey. There is absolutely nothing positive that could come out of fueling your fears rather than your faith.

3. Love the process more than the outcome.

I have never met an incredibly successful entrepreneur, athlete, business executive or any other high achiever who has reached a level of greatness in their life that didn’t love the process. So many people would rather focus on the desired outcome and destination instead of savoring the process that will get them to that destination.

The obstacles, the challenges, the sleepless nights. That pathway to success is what builds champions. You don’t just put together a football team and go out on Sunday’s and win a Super Bowl. You don’t just hire employees and expect to have a thriving organization right from the get go. You don’t just come up with an idea one day and fall into fame and fortune. In all three of these scenarios, a process is required.

The best of the best absolutely love the process and journey no matter how difficult it may be at times, because they know that’s where the real value is at. Of course, you are going to get inspired, motivated and excited about the destination or end result of something that you are deeply passionate about, but believe it or not, the value is minimal there.

The growth, strength, perseverance, skill set and courage that is instilled in the greatest men and women in the world all came from the savoring the process, not from the destination or end result. If you can learn to love the process, you will give yourself a competitive advantage in life and in business, that does a whole lot more than pay you monetarily.

Matt Mayberry