Motivation at Work

Whether your life is that you are in business for yourself, you work for someone else or you are a Domestic Engineer (a title often associated with those individuals who choose to stay at home with or without children) staying motivated can be difficult if not outright challenging. There are two aspects to motivation and your workplace scenario – one is from the perspective of management and the other is from the viewpoint of the employee. As part of the ongoing series focusing on Motivation, today we are concentrating on motivation on the job.

Have you identified your specific scenario yet? Most of what we will be sharing in this article you will be able to apply to your specific situation.

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Life Coach and Business Coach Karen Kleinwort is the founder Therapy in Transition and is a Certified Professional Coach specializing in the integration of her clients' mind, body and spirit into her Personal Empowerment Coaching practice. For more information, visit www.coachkarenk.com. www.therapyintransition.org, www.empowermentforme.com or contact her at success@coachkarenk.com.

Steering Yourself to Victory

The end of another year is just about to arrive, and you are most likely caught up with the excitement of the holidays, shopping and spending time with those you love. It's around now that you begin to set intentions and goals for the upcoming year.

In business you are establishing budgets, identifying sales goals, and trying to locate potential expenditures on which to cut back. In your personal life you're looking at your level of happiness with your work, where you are in life, what you might like to change about where you live, or (if you're like the majority of us) identifying personal health goals.

When we establish goals for ourselves personally or professionally, it can be overwhelming at times since we think we know ourselves and like to believe we can do more than what's realistic. This results in your being overconfident or unrealistically confident. When you become overconfident, as bold and brazen as it sounds, you're actually lacking a certain amount of confidence of a particular kind. I'm sure you're wondering what I mean when I refer to "kind of confidence."

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Employee Motivation: A Secret Society?

Motivation is a key ingredient to success. This is not a news flash by any means, and all managers and good leaders embrace some degree of motivational program for their employees; whether they do this consciously or subconsciously, they all do it. Motivation is not some secret society either, but the secret to motivation is the "what" behind it. So what is the "what" anyway?

It's a great question and one that every great leader seeks to answer—although the answer is never the same twice! So that is what makes motivation part of a secret society, remembering and understanding the same employee will have different motivators at different times of her life? And yes, different times can be as often as yearly, monthly or even daily. This is the "what" behind keeping your employees motivated and feeling empowered.

Now that you're a part of this secret motivational society and you’ve been let into the inner sanctum, you're reading this and still thinking, "What? That isn't a news flash, either!" And yes, you would be right—but the news flash is the remembering that translates into engaging in some form of communication with your employees regularly to ensure you're in the know of what their current motivator is or might be. Regular communication is the real secret ingredient to realizing your success as a great motivational leader.

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Meeting Needs with NVC

There’s no one on the planet who hasn’t been in a situation wherein tempers and/or emotions escalated – perhaps even dramatically – due to miscommunication or poor communication. When this has happened in your own life, you’ve likely looked back on it afterwards and wondered how things got so out of control. You might even have tried to determine who was to blame fr the bad communication , or perhaps you ended up pursuing avenues of explanation that resulted in self-doubt or justifications for the communication mishap and resulting behavior.

A colleague introduced me to three levels of communication that have served as a reminder that I shouldn’t automatically accept everything I hear at face value. Given that I’d had a lifetime of communication by the time the colleague pointed this out, it’s ironic that this idea actually sounded like a new piece of information to me. The three levels of communication explain even further why we shouldn’t accept everything we hear at face value. Those levels are:

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Test Your Intuition

You may have come across several articles, blogs and videos telling you to trust your intuition, but how exactly do you start trusting it if you aren’t even sure if such a thing as intuition exists? The answer lies in experimenting on your own and figuring out just how strong your intuitive powers are. I thought I would share a few simple “tests” or “experiments” to help you increase the trust you have in your own inner voice and wisdom.

Coin Flipping
This really is one of the simplest ways to build trust in your intuition. Flip a coin and try to guess its result. Go by your gut feeling and make a note of all the times you were right as well as…

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The Science of Intuition

Instinct, gut feeling, intuition: all of us have had moments when a hunch has proved correct, only to wonder later whether it really was intuitive brilliance on our part or just a lucky coincidence. After all, intuition is a just “acquisition of knowledge without using rational reasoning and logic,” right? Perhaps not!

If certain research studies are to be believed, intuition is probably an amalgamation of past data, increased sense of observations and a skill to look beyond the obvious and the reality.

According to research, intuition really is the result of our brain’s information processing mechanism. Several other research studies have also put forward similar theories.

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Interaction with Your Animal Totems

As a young child I always loved animals; dogs of course were my favorite, but any animal really fascinated me. This didn’t mean I wasn’t cautious or timid of certain animals, but I did have a healthy respect for them. There were times I thought I could understand them, but I always wrote it off as my being silly. Over time, though, I’ve come to realize that actually each interaction held a special gift—and if I was open enough to receiving it, I would. During my personal growth journey I’ve learned a little about animal totems and how they can be wonderful guides in your journey toward spiritual enlightenment. The following are six different approaches to learning how animals can support us and how we can, in turn, actually seek their guidance when we know how to interact with them. In previous blogs I’ve shared my experience of learning how to discern which animals are part of your totem, so this blog will focus on the available modalities we can use.

Totem Oracle Cards
There are several oracle cards available on the market to help you communicate with your totems. In most such decks each card has a picture of an animal and a small description of what the card means. The decks usually come with a booklet that contains detailed descriptions as well as spread suggestions.

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Bulletin Board Ideas

Remember back to your childhood and the first day back to school. Your new teacher for the year spent the month of August putting together her welcoming bulletin boards for you to see and hopefully build excitement about the upcoming school year. Bulletin boards are excellent tools for making learning fun! Not only do bulletin boards make the classroom look brighter, they can also serve as excellent platforms for students and teachers to work together and express their creativity.

As business professionals, can we tap into this same creative approach to get our employees excited about upcoming change and transition? I think so. Let’s take a few minutes to see how ideas that teachers embrace can easily be translated into a professional work environment.

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Team-Building Games: Not Just for Kids!

Lessons learned in childhood stay with us forever, so it is therefore important we teach children the important social skills they will need in order to grow and succeed as adults. Team spirit is one such essential skill. No matter what profession a person takes up, she will have to work as a part of a team at some point in her professional career as well as in her personal life—which is essentially in almost every experience. Team spirit, in fact, helps inculcate many other important values in an individual like discipline, dedication, consistency and flexibility, to name a few.

As much as we would like team-building games to be focused just on children during the middle school years, most of the following games can be adapted for adults to enjoy. The following team-building games can play an important part of any co-curricular activities to encourage students and employees to become better team players.

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Meeting Needs With NVC

There’s no one on the planet who hasn’t been in a situation wherein tempers and/or emotions escalated – perhaps even dramatically – due to miscommunication or poor communication. When this has happened in your own life, you’ve likely looked back on it afterwards and wondered how things got so out of control. You might even have tried to determine who was to blame for the bad communication , or perhaps you ended up pursuing avenues of explanation that resulted in self-doubt or justifications for the communication mishap and resulting behavior.

A colleague introduced me to three levels of communication that have served as a reminder that I shouldn’t automatically accept everything I hear at face value. Given that I’d had a lifetime of communication by the time the colleague pointed this out, it’s ironic that this idea actually sounded like a new piece of information to me. The three levels of communication explain even further why we shouldn’t accept everything we hear at face value. Those levels are…

Continue reading here.

Existence of the Divine

Why the Divine, a Greater Essence, Must Exist!

Is the belief in god, the Divine, or a greater essence merely a matter of faith, or is life in itself a proof of the existence of a supreme entity? The fact is if you examine life carefully, you will realize the entire fabric of our existence has the indelible mark of a greater consciousness that is found in every thread!

If you take off the glasses of cynicism and observe life with the innocence of a child, you will realize everything around you is nothing short of a miracle!

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Understanding the Energy of Your Aura

When you hear the word “energy,” the first thing you probably think of is gas, electricity, or something similar that produces change or movement. In truth, this definition is very similar to how practitioners like myself would describe energy from the perspective of our work with auras. “Aura” refers to the space surrounding your physical being that extends upward and outward in the basic reach of your arm span. People often think of their aura as being their “personal space” in which they determine what gets in and what’s excluded.

Human beings are living, breathing sources of energy. Think, for example, of the heat our bodies produce when we’re cold or the perspiration we produce when we’re hot. Similarly, our metabolism is another form of energy that converts our food from simple nourishment to fuel.

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Mentoring Effectively

The Art of Mentoring

Being a mentor is a role that comes with a lot of pride and responsibility. The pride lies in achieving a position from where you can help others with the hindsight of your experience, and the responsibility lies in the fact that you will be playing a vital role in the careers and lives of those you decide to help.

When you take on the role of a mentor, you may make the mistake of getting emotionally involved in the success of your protégés. That, however, is the biggest mistake a mentor can make! It may sound like an oxymoron, but mentorship is actually the art of detached involvement.

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Understanding Tarot

Are you curious about the history and use of tarot cards? Click here to go to our website to read our new article about understanding tarot.

Connecting With Angels

Seeking Guidance

Whatever a person’s belief system might be – whether it is formalized religion, a spiritual focus, or a combination of a few – each of us likes to feel connected to those who are supporting us from the other side, other realms, or even an alternate universe. One of the underlying commonalities is that there is something greater than ourselves from which we seek to hear, see and receive guidance. One thing I have come to know is true is that our guides and angels are always around us, and they are willing to gently guide us toward becoming better and happier human beings. All we need to do is to request them for help.


There are several ways to communicate with your angels. Some of the simplest and most common ones are...

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"Hurry Up and Eat!"

“Sit down!” “Sit up!” “Don’t play with your food!” “Three more…” Ah, the mantras of a parent at mealtimes. “I don’t like that” or “I don’t want that!” combined with gestural communication such as turning away, spitting out, mouth tightly closed: these are the mantras of children at mealtimes.

Does it have to be this way? Can kids learn good table manners and to eat a wide variety of foods? The answer is a resounding YES!

Continue reading guest blogger Krista Kleinwort's words of wisdom here.