Best Posts to Support You During the Holidays (Productive Flourishing Pulse #460)
As the year winds down, cozy up with these favorite reads from years past
The team and I have been encouraging you (and ourselves) to slow down during the holiday season, to balance that last push of work with the additional responsibilities of holiday events and family gatherings (plus all the preparation!). A few years back we did a “best of” post collection to help you through the holidays and now seemed like a good time to do it again.
How to Be Intentional During the Holidays: Let’s start with a podcast episode from Angela and me — about values and expectations, priorities, and boundaries — and how to amp up your holidays without amping up your stress.
Give Yourself the Love You'd Give a Child: There is a wonder and magic to the holiday season that as adults we miss in the rush and “busy-ness.” Angela reminds us of the pretenses and expectations that don’t tend to exist for children — and that we as adults can recapture that freedom when we allow ourselves to simply be.
5 Questions You Need to Ask to Create Space for Joy: Angela reminds us to stay present to the joy of what is, not what “should be,” and gives us five questions to ask ourselves to reclaim that joy of the moment.
Enjoyment in Every Moment: Angela suggests practicing how to “be in joy” and gives us some tips on how to feel a shift toward joy and lightness and ease any time we want or need it.
Core Conversations on Start Finishing: Curiosity Fuels the Five Key Virtues for Doing Our Best Work: One of the challenges of the holiday can be engaging meaningfully —and one of the best ways to solve for that is with curiosity. Danielle LaSusa explores the power of curiosity to build intention, awareness, boundaries, courage, and discipline. Relationships and family can be your best work, too.
Core Conversations on Start Finishing: The Practical Magic of Rewriting Our Stories:
calls us to rethink the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about how we use our time, about how we define success, and how each of our stories flow into “the story of us.” What are the stories we want to write?* One of the things I like best about this list: all are written by powerhouse women, who don’t just encourage inner reflection but recommend action based on that inner learning. Sure, there’s the podcast episode, but that’s as much or more the Angela show than it is mine. ;)
Other News & Features
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Reads and Seeds
It turns out that giving does make us happier. The article "Better to give? A systematic review of prosocial spending and happiness" presents evidence that spending on others, through gifts or donations, consistently enhances personal happiness, transcending cultural and demographic boundaries.
In “Collective Failure”,
asks a lot of good questions, but the opening question is “What if our economy no longer supports small businesses?” Small businesses make up the fabric of our communities and it’s easy to take them for granted until they’re gone or you go to a place where all that’s left is McKenTacoHuts, Wal-Mart, and Starbucks. We should be concerned when the only businesses that can survive are the publicly-traded companies that can cover externalized costs, given the power that those same companies have to influence politics and choices to ensure that those costs remain externalized.While we’re talking about reflecting and visualizing, the “What’s Your Best?” question from Michael Bungay Stanier’s fantastic book How to Work with (Almost) Anyone is a great one to ask loved ones. The peaks people tell you about don’t just tell you about their experience — it tells you what matters to them.