Hasta La Gadget!

By Jan Bruce

Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy season. But you knew that already. The work that you do all year long to build your resilience and battle your stress is doubly important now that the pressure is on. This is when that strong foundation really supports you.

So much gets heaped into the end of the year: parties, shopping, deadlines, school performances, high expectations, emotional triggers and food, so much food. The piles of cookies! The drifts of sweet breads! For certain parts of the country, it’s also miserably and record-breakingly cold — which can be physically and spiritually paralyzing. But that doesn’t mean your holiday season is doomed.

Here are a few key ways to flex your resilience and continue to strengthen it so that you can keep yourself physically and mentally whole for the next few weeks.

Check the mind reading at the door.

Your family ought to know you well enough to be able to tell what you’re feeling and thinking, right? Well, no. That oh-so-tempting assumption is especially false when you’re with extended family whom you love but don’t interact with regularly any more. Time with these relatives might trigger old childhood beliefs and struggles that feel enormous and obvious to you but are utterly invisible to everyone else.

Take for instance, this situation, which a friend of mine experienced firsthand: Imagine you were good friends with your cousin when you were teenagers, but you had a falling out when she ditched you more than once for her other friends at a vulnerable and lonely time in your life. So when she decides to go for a walk with your siblings after the Thanksgiving meal, you lose it. All that buried hurt and resentment — over some little thing that happened so long ago you can’t believe it still causes you pain — comes bubbling up and you fume (or worse) in the kitchen, cutting yourself off from the group, while your cousin and siblings bundle up for a stroll.

You’re caught in a mind reading trap. If you piped up and said you’d really like to come along, or took 10 minutes to process your feelings with a trusted friend or family member and then soothed yourself with a cup of tea or some impromptu dancing (whatever works!), you’d avoid a soup tureen of stress.

Catch yourself when you begin to fume at someone who doesn’t know what you need, especially if you haven’t voiced it. Instead, find a way to ask for what you need, even if it’s just a hug, in that moment. There are no prizes for holiday suffering, and you may well free yourself of some ancient hurt in the process.

(Learn more about mind reading and thinking traps.)

Set expectations to a low simmer.

Sometimes the longing for a certain kind of holiday season bleeds into outright expectation: you ought to make a perfect meal. You ought to get the shopping done early. You ought to get along with your family. You ought to have more family!

Lowering expectations doesn’t mean settling for an unhappy or stressful experience. When you get real about what you can expect, you say to yourself, these are the honest boundaries of my time, my energy, my budget, my relationships. Within those limits, decide what you want to do or who you want to see mindfully and intentionally. Maybe you choose one or two parties to attend. Maybe you take a walk with your favorite neighbor. Maybe you realize that, yes, you’ll be shopping on Dec. 23 and so you’ll bring your camera along to take pictures of the human drama of the holidays while you buy that last pair of earrings. When you can do that, the holidays feel different, because you’re always where you’re supposed to be.

(3 more ways expectations are driving you crazy — and how to stop them.)

Think sprints, not marathon.

If you find yourself thinking, “I just need to get through this,” chances are you’re approaching the holidays as a long stretch designed to drain you of joy. The holidays aren’t meant to be a boot camp; the emotional core is really more about buoying our spirits during a dark time of year. When it all gets lumped into one miserable slog, you’re probably falling into another thinking trap: maximizing and minimizing. This is when you play up all the horrid, draining things that happen and skip over any moments of sweetness or fun.

You’ve got to hit the brakes in two ways. First, when you feel the slog coming on, stop and write down three good things that have happened in the last day or so. Redirecting your thought for just a minute or two can break the spell and help you tap into new energy. Second, look at the next six weeks as a series of peaks and valleys, or inhalations and exhalations. Where are the busy moments? Where will you need to sprint? And where can you slow down, walk, stop, seek support, soak in the fun stuff? You can’t run all the time, and you won’t, because you will be perceiving the reality of the situation, that it speeds up and slows down every day.

Making the experience of the holidays different starts with an intention — the decision to approach it differently. This year, you and your resiliency are at the wheel.

Jan Bruce is CEO and co-founder of meQuilibrium, the new digital coaching system for stress, which helps both individuals and corporations achieve measurable results in stress management and wellness.

For more by meQuilibrium, click here.

For more on stress, click here.

I was delighted to have life and business strategist (and New York Times’ bestselling author) Tony Robbins join me as my guest on Mondays with Marlo! Tony answered all of your questions, from how to overcome failure, ways to be more successful, and more. Watch our full interview to hear all of his insightful advice!

Get Tony’s latest book, Master The Money Game: 7 Steps To Financial Freedom.

For more inspiring advice from Tony Robbins, view the slideshow below:

See more clips

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As the world awaits the outcome of the nuclear negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran due on November 24th in Vienna, Austria, what is one to make out of Russia’s decision to build two further nuclear reactors at the Bushehr in Iran with the possibility of six more in the future? The answer lies in Russia’s determination to challenge the United States leadership and counter Western’s efforts to isolate the Iranian regime.

The agreement between Iran and Russia came at a critical time as the West debates two key provisions: (a) what options the West has in case negotiations with Iran fail, and (b) whether the West will move forward with imposing additional sanctions on Russia. The West argues that Iran is working toward building a nuclear bomb, while Iran is challenging this assertion claiming its nuclear program, including the uranium enrichment activities, is intended for energy and medical sectors. What is at the heart of the matter is that the West wants Iran to limit its enriched uranium threshold below the level that allows it to produce a nuclear bomb. And that is exactly where the impasse between the West and Iran stands.

While the main objective of the West is not to allow the emergence of another nuclear state in the Middle East besides Israel, my analysis suggests these efforts might not yield the desired results the West and the United States — for that matter — hopes for. In light of the ongoing U.S. tense diplomatic relations with Russia over its annexation of Crimea, conventional wisdom suggests that the West’s ongoing negotiations with Iran over its nuclear pogrom provides the perfect political, diplomatic, and economic opportunity for Russia to further its geopolitical aspirations. President Vladimir Putin’s vision includes (a) ability to reclaim lost territories following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991; (b) revival of the bipolar world order in which the USA and Russia played the dominant role on world stage; (c) Russia’s ability to, once again, expand its sphere of influence in the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America; and (d) the call by Mr. Putin for rearmament and reorganization of the Russian military apparatus. While this might seem too ambitious and over optimistic on part of Mr. Putin, we should neither be naïve nor underestimate his determination to keep marching forward toward achieving his objectives.

I strongly believe the latest economic and diplomatic rapprochement between China and Russia is not only a response, at least from Putin’s perspective, to sanctions the West continues to impose on Russia, but also a direct challenge to the United States leadership in the region. The $400 billion deal in natural gas both countries signed is a clear indication how Russia wants to avoid Western sanctions and save its economy from collapsing. The issue, however, goes beyond that. The reference is to the possibility of a military cooperation between the emerging China and the well established Russia which, I’ll argue, will undermine America’s leadership in Asia. Both countries understand that the U.S. entanglement in the Middle East provides an opportunity to strengthen their political, economic, and military alliance as America’s credibility and global leadership is declining. What makes the matter even more challenging is that previous U.S. administrations have been warned not to antagonize emerging powers such as China and Russia. I could not agree more with former national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s, assertion in which he warned against such undertaking to avoid the outcome we are currently witnessing: A Chinese-Russian-Iranian alliance.

These dynamics suggest that the world has not reached the end of its history of conflicts, thus challenging American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s famous theory. Two decades ago he predicted that the rise of liberal democracies in which we the people played key roles in vigorous Western-styled capitalism would bring us enduring stability. Who 20 years ago could imagine what we see today? Fukuyama and others who concluded that Western liberal democracy triumphed following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and disintegration of the former Soviet Union in 1991 were wrong. The rise of China; the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States; the invasion of Iraq; the war in Afghanistan; the financial crisis of 2008; the Arab Spring; the civil war in Syria; the fall out of the military coup in Egypt; the seemingly eternal Arab-Israeli conflict; and the turmoil in Libya all prove Fukuyama and others were way too optimistic.

It is time for the United States to engage in an honest debate and assess how it conducts its foreign policy as international dynamics have fundamentally changed. What I found perplexing and alarming is how the United States chose to turn a blind eye on the military coup in Egypt that ousted the only democratically elected president, but decided to apply sanctions on Russia when it annexed Crimea. There might not be a parallel comparison between the two illustrations, but they certainly share a commonality: U.S. foreign policy double standards.

Never get into an eating contest with a golden retriever.

As this German shepherd quickly realized, the odds will never be in your favor unless you’re another golden retriever, or perhaps famed competitive eater Takeru Kobayashi. Even for Kobayashi, nothing is certain.

So what’s the takeaway here? If you’re ever planning to recreate the classic spaghetti-eating scene from “Lady And The Tramp,” maybe don’t invite a golden retriever.

Unlike chocolate and caffeine, foods like spaghetti and white rice are perfectly OK for dogs to eat, though you may not want to eat them in these quantities on a daily basis.

WATCH the golden retriever scarf spaghetti, above.

H/T Viral Viral Videos

This “holiday week-end” you’ll be able to see a trailer for Star Wars The Force Awakens, aka Star Wars 7, in select theaters throughout the United States. A limited number of theaters are said to be participating in this “preview” for the film – though we’re not entirely sure why our source uses that word. One worker for a theater … Continue reading