Amateur Eye: August 2011

http://tinybuddha.com/blog/40-ways-to-let-go-and-feel-less-pain/

There will never be a time when life is simple. There will always be time to practice accepting that. Every moment is a chance to let go and feel peaceful. Here are 40 ideas to get started:

Let Go Of Frustration with Yourself/Your Life

1. Learn a new skill instead of dwelling on the skills you never mastered.

2. Change your perception—see the root cause as a blessing in disguise.

3. Cry it out. According to Dr. William Frey II, PH.D., biochemist at the Ramset Medical Center in Minneapolis crying away your negative feelings releases harmful chemicals that build up in your body due to stress.

4. Channel your discontent into an immediate positive action—make some calls about new job opportunities, or walk to the community center to volunteer.

5. Use meditation or yoga to bring you into the present moment (instead of dwelling on the past or worrying about the future.)

6. Make a list of your accomplishments—even the small ones— and add to it daily.You’ll have to let go of a little discontentment to make space for this self satisfaction.

7. Visualize a box in your head labeled “Expectations.” Whenever you start dwelling on how things should be or should have been, mentally shelve the thoughts in this box.

8. Engage in a physical activity. Exercise decreases stress hormones and increases endorphins, chemicals that improve your state of mind.

9. Focus all your energy on something you can actually control, instead of dwelling on things you can’t.

10. Express your feelings through a creative outlet, like blogging or painting. Add this to your to-do list and cross it off when you’re done. This will be a visual reminder that you have actively chosen to release these feelings.

Let go of Anger and Bitterness

11. Feel it fully. If you stifle your feelings, they may leak out and affect everyone around you—not just the person who inspired your anger. Before you can let go of any emotion you have to feel it fully.

12. Give yourself a rant window. Let yourself vent for a day before confronting the person who troubled you. This may diffuse the hostility and give you time to plan a rational confrontation.

13. Remind yourself that anger hurts you more than the person who upset you, and visualize it melting away as an act of kindness to yourself.

14. If possible, express your anger to the person who offended you. Communicating how you feel may help you move on. Keep in mind that you can’t control how to offender responds; you can only control how clearly and kindly you express yourself.

15. Take responsibility. Many times when you’re angry, you focus on what someone else did that was wrong—which essentially gives away your power. When you focus on what you could have done better, you often feel empowered and less bitter.

16. Put yourself in the offender’s shoes. We all make mistakes; and odds are you could have easily slipped up just like your husband, father, or friend did. Compassion dissolves anger.

17. Metaphorically throw it away; i.e., jog with a backpack full of tennis balls. After you’ve built up a bit of rush, toss the balls one by one, labeling each as a part of your anger. (You’ll need to retrieve these—litter angers the earth!)

18. Use a stress ball, and express your anger physically and vocally when you use it.Make a scrunched up face or grunt. You may feel silly, but this allows you to actually express what you’re feeling inside.

19. Wear a rubber band on your wrist, and gently flick it when you start obsessing on angry thoughts. This trains your mind to associate that type of persistent negativity with something unpleasant.

20. Remind yourself these are your only three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it. These acts create happiness; holding onto bitterness never does.

Let Go Of Past Relationships

21. Identify what the experience taught you to help develop a sense of closure.

22. Write everything you want to express in a letter. Even if you choose not to send it, clarifying your feelings will help you come to terms with reality as it is now.

23. Remember both the good and the bad. Even if appears this way now, the past was not perfect. Acknowledging this may minimize your sense of loss. As Laura Oliver says, “It’s easier to let go of a human than a hero.”

24. Un-romanticize the way you view love. Of course you’ll feel devastated if you believe you lost your soul mate. If you think you can find a love that amazing or better again it will be easier to move on.

25. Visualize an empowered single you—the person you were before meeting your last love. That person was pretty awesome, and now you have the chance to be him or her again.

26. Create a space that reflects your present reality. Take down his pictures; delete her emails from your saved folder.

27. Reward yourself for small acts of acceptance. Get a facial after you delete his number from your phone, or head out with friends after putting all her things in a box.

28. Hang this statement somewhere you can see it. “Loving myself means letting go.”

29. Replace your emotional thoughts with facts. When you think, “I’ll never feel loved again!” don’t resist that feeling. Instead, move on to another thought, like “I learned a new song for karaoke tonight.”

30. Use the silly voice technique. According to Russ Harris, author of The Happiness Trap, swapping the voice in your head with a cartoon voice will help take back power from the troubling thought.

Let Go Of Stress

31. Use a deep breathing technique, like ujayii, to soothe yourself and seep into the present moment.

32. Immerse yourself in a group activity. Enjoying the people in your life may help put your problems in perspective.

33. Consider this quotation by Eckhart Tolle: “Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose.” Questioning how your stress serves you may help you let it go.

34. Metaphorically release it. Write down all your stresses and toss the paper into your fireplace.

35. Replace your thoughts. Notice when you begin thinking about something that stresses you so you can shift your thought process to something more pleasant—like your passion for your hobby.

36. Take a sauna break. Studies reveal that people who go to sauna at least twice a week for 10-30 minutes are less stressed after work than others with similar jobs who don’t.

37. Imagine your life 10 years from now. Then look 20 years into the future, and then 30. Realize that many of the things you’re worrying about don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.

38. Organize your desk. According to Georgia Witkin, assistant director of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, completing a small task increases your sense of control and decreases your stress level.

39. Use it up. Make two lists: one with the root causes of your stress, and one with actions to address them. As you complete these tasks, visualize yourself utilizing and depleting your “stress supply.”

40. Laugh it out. Research shows that laughter soothes tension, improves your immune system, and even eases pain. If you can’t relax for long, start with just ten minutes watching a funny video on YouTube.

It’s a long list, but there’s much left to be said! Can you think of anything to add to this list—other areas of life where we need to practice letting go, and other techniques to start doing it right now?

WHAT MAKES AN ENGINEER SUCCESSFUL?
Walter W. Frey

After working as an engineer for over 35 years, I now conclude that successful career depends on understanding what engineering is, academic performance and personality. And these considerations are not all important for the right reasons.

ENGINEERING IS THE ART OF APPLYING SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLES TO SOLVE A PROBLEM. It is not a separate area of science such as physics. Engineering projects are bound by 3 variables: the number of problems to solve, the funds available to solve these problems and the delivery date of the finished items. The catch is you can fix two of the variables while the third is determined by the others.

Although a modicum of academic performance is necessary to graduate, a high GPA does not predicate a successful career. The real indicators for engineering performance reside in a person’s personality traits, ability to think innovatively and skill in interacting with others. Personnel departments (often for legal reasons) stay away from trying to rate easily qualified areas, i.e., “GPA, class standing, etc.” Thus, many potentially good engineers are turned away due to poor grades.

The following subjective areas are also necessary for a successful engineering career:

CURIOSITY – the desire to find out how things work, or why they don’t. The engineer notes the good and the bad approaches to the problem.

PERSEVERANCE – this trait is needed to stay with the problem eventhough the solution is not adequate or eludes or seems to fight the engineer. However, this must be not carried to an extreme, i.e. it becomes a futile obsession. Also, oftentimes a problem will have to be temporarily shelved to work on projects which will produce more immediate results.

SELF-CONFIDENCE – the engineer know his/her capabilities and problem areas. For example, he/she has a tendency to settle on the first solution that presents itself.

COMMON SENSE – the ability to make decisions on partial or contradictory informations. It is also used to balance perseverance against what’s best for the overall program.

SENSE OF HUMOR – this trait is necessary to keep from getting depressed when the solution has been elusive and all sorts of irrelevant problems are obscuring the answer. Humor is also very useful in handling personality problems with subordinates/superiors.

INGENUITY – this means the engineer is not limited to the “by the book” way of doing things. This person is open to unique or unproved solutions to difficult problems; he/she is willing to take a chance if the potential gains are great.

COMMUNICATION – engineering is an occupation that depends on the exchange and interpretation of ideas. An engineer must be aware of how others have tried to solve a problem this knowledge often presents itself when engineers get together and talk shop. Very often, the solution requires merging the best parts of competing solutions into a unified approach. However, this is not the same as when stuff is included just to keep everyone happy. This “team approach” typically results in mediocre products.

LUCK – it is always useful since no amount of planning will replace dumb luck. However, good planning and contingency planning often help or are confused with luck.

Altogether, these eight attributes will more greatly affect one’s performance as an engineer than his/her GPA.