Daily Stress Of Police Work

Check out my latest article I wrote for Behind the Badge talking about the daily stress of police work and the hidden health costs.

http://behindthebadgeoc.com/opinion/von-luft-daily-stress-policing-takes-toll/

Can a minimalist have a jacuzzi?

Like mindfulness, minimalism gets a bad wrap sometimes.  Both are often misunderstood, misquoted and often get people from western culture thinking that you have to sit cross-legged humming with incense burning to practice it.  Also like mindfulness, minimalism is catching fire in our western culture, and mindfulness concepts and practices are making a huge difference with people suffering from depression, anxiety and PTSD.  They are being integrated more and more into traditional Western medicine practices, this is a good thing.   

Get tactical with your awareness

While developing a workshop about coping with stress in our lives I wanted to use concepts found in many different areas of psychology including mindfulness, psychological flexibility, acceptance/commitment therapy and others.  I started to pull from different areas and developed a definition that I now use coming from my law enforcement background, and called it “Tactical Awareness”. 

Very often the process of change for a person starts with just awareness.  The old adage “stop and smell the roses” is truer today than we all realize. 

What do happy people do different?

Do “happy” people do things differently? Did they attend some secret meeting where they were told the secrets to happiness?  There are thousands of books, websites, and blogs dedicated to the topic of being happy.  However, the best way that I have found to learn something new is to model those that are already doing it well.  Working with clients, talking with colleagues and friends, and also reading a lot of those books, blogs and websites, I wanted to see if I could come up with an answer to the question, do happy people do things differently. Looking at people that report being consistently happy on psychological surveys, it turns out there are things we can identify they do on a consistent basis that points to then being “happy”.  Putting all the research and information together, here are the tops things we can identify that “happy” people do on a consistent basis:

Quit your job

We are all in love with the idea of walking in one day to our job and proclaiming “I quit”!  At last we will be free to finally pursue our real passion in life, our true hopes and dreams.  We won't have that nasty time consuming life sucking cubicle dwelling nightmare that you call your day job.  The reality is that Chase bank still wants your mortgage payment, the grocery store doesn’t take monopoly money yet, and your six-year-olds broken arm needs real x-rays and a real cast.  Quitter by Jon Acuff can help do just that, quit.

Addicted to insight

The concept of insight was fairly foreign to me a couple years ago.  It was not something I thought of at all.  I am not sure if I even really knew what it meant or if I would have even recognized it when I saw it.  That changed for me significantly about a year or so ago.  Without going into too much detail right now, in a nutshell, I realized I had a desire to take my life in a different direction professionally, however I had no idea where it was I wanted to go, and to some degree I still don’t.  Through a sometimes difficult and not even close to finished look at my life, I discovered the concept of insight and how important it can be. Really, what is insight?  Looking it up in a dictionary it says

Laws of Performance

How do we improve our performance in work and in life?  This question is at the backbone of a billion dollar industry.  We desperately want the answer to his question.  There are people in our lives that we think, "have it figured out", and we want what they have.  In Dave Logan's and Steve Zaffron's book, The Three Laws of Performance, I think they have found one of the keys to the treasure chest:

First Law of Performance:
How people perform correlates to how a situation occurs to them.

Second Law of Performance
How a situation occurs arises in language 

Third Law of Performance
Future-baed language transforms how a situation occurs to people 

Just reading those will not necessarily make sense to you, and there is enough there with just those three statements to teach a three day course.  I hope it sparks some interest in learning about these concepts and becoming aware to how we see things around us, the language we choose to use and the actions we take from that language can make a huge impact on our performance.  I highly suggest reading their book and see if it makes an impact on your performance at work and at home.