Emptiness or a hurting heart

You can never have too many tools at your disposal. Positive reinforcement Tell me she isn't giving herself some R-E-S-P-E-C-T! When I was a little girl, every day after school my neighbor and I made believe we were famous chefs. My favorite food back then was pizza, so we invented little superspecial, secret-sauce replications of what we'd seen thrown together down at the local pizzeria. We mixed together the perfect amount of ketchup, garlic, oregano, and salt and pepper for a surprisingly delicious sauce, slathered it on an English muffin, and topped it with the essential ingredients. Our tasty mini pizza pie rivaled anything made by the pros--at least in our minds! Thirty years later, after I read Under the Tuscan Sun --a captivating article about an American woman's soulful, life-changing adventure moving into and refurbishing an aging villa in Tuscany, Italy--I wanted so badly to pick up and travel to the Italian countryside to experience all that I had read, but that wasn't possible. So I reactivated my make-believe skills and, for an entire summer, acted as if I were a fresh transplant in my new home away from home--Italia! My physical body was living responsibly in Maryland, but my mind and heart were otherwise happily Italian. Over the course of several months, I learned to make all sorts of pastas and bruschettas, and immersed myself in the historical stories behind the recipes when I could find them. I discovered (and drank a few glasses of) Italian wines--the point was having fun, no? Yet, if the organization follows a fundamental premise that people are more important than processes, it can compensate for lost manpower through developing the full potential of those who remain to do the work. Theory Y-oriented managers would be able to move forward with strategic initiatives in an ever-more competitive business environment, and empowered, dedicated, and motivated employees make a regular and significant contribution to existing operations. Case Example of Theory X and Theory Y Values: The Company That Eliminated Time Cards A manufacturing firm based in midwestern Connecticut had a large, non-union blue-collar work force, most of whom had considerable longevity and seniority with the firm. A new Human Resources director is hired from out of town. This man, an energetic and dynamic agent for change, convinces senior management to eliminate the requirement that employees punch in every morning for work, which had always been the basis for the employees' pay, documenting the time employees arrived for duty and left at the end of the day. Senior management is highly resistant to the idea, at first. Aren't we setting up a situation in which employees will start arriving late for work, and leaving early?

Aren't we setting ourselves up for conflicts about whether an employee was on duty at all on a certain day, if their supervisor is out of the office for some reason? These and many more logistic questions need to be answered by the new HR director. One of the most common complaints of a new meditator is I am having too many thoughts. Thoughts are a part of meditation and you cannot force your mind to stop thinking. Just let the thoughts come and go and before long you will find your mind quieting. When you first begin meditation, you will experience relaxation while sitting with your eyes closed, but may revert to your typical stressful reactions when resuming your usual activities. Over time, more of the restful awareness gained in meditation will carry over into your life. As you face the daily challenges of being human, you'll find it easier to maintain your calm center. As you learn to avoid unnecessary and overreactive stress responses, you'll slow the aging process. The restful alertness response reverses the aging process. In addition to restful awareness, you need a minimum of six to eight hours of restful sleep each night. Restful sleep means that you drift off easily once you turn off the light and sleep soundly through the night. In psychology there's something called positive reprogramming, which means rewiring your brain and changing the way you think. The aim of positive reinforcement is essentially the same. However, I think the latter sounds friendlier and less like you're a piece of computer software that's about to be plugged in and rebooted! Positive reinforcement is simply the act of consciously seeking out positive thoughts over and over again until you change on a neurological level the patterns in your brain (the reprogramming element). Numerous studies have shown that using positive affirmations regularly (listening to or reading positive statements) or engaging in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is effective and changes the way your brain lights up and processes information in your subconscious mind. Amazing stuff. When it comes to birth, lots of women - and men - feel terrified. No doubt a lot of that fear is down to the media, what we see on TV and the horror stories we hear.

However, through positive reinforcement it's possible to replace our negative associations with birth with more positive ones, and, as a result, feel more positive and confident when thinking about birth. Easy ways that you can start using positive reinforcement to change your mindset include: I visited local vineyards to continue my Italian-style reverie. Friends and family asked me about my sudden interest in opera and Italian films, and enjoyed the adventure I provided in the many Italian meals I cooked and wines I served. My journey became their journey, too, and all of our lives were enriched. We weren't anywhere near Europe, but it was great fun just the same! Had Grandma Moses been a lousy painter, she still would have been driven to express herself in pictures. Artists and authors don't create just because somebody tells them they should, or because they receive stellar reviews. Something inside makes them do it. The novelist Don DeLillo has a great line: I write so that I can know what I'm thinking. In this way, these gifted few are exactly like the rest of us: they wish to express themselves through acts of creation, and they feel better--more alive, more in touch with themselves and the world--when they do so. A concerto is a cake is a sculpture is a scraparticle is a sonnet is a sweater. The answers he gives to the executives at this company are steeped in Theory Y management values. If managers give the message to individuals that they can be trusted to come to work on time, leave on time, and document their time accurately on weekly time sheets that they filled out, submitted, and verified with their signature, the entire process becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Further, he emphasizes that teams need to begin self-policing any absenteeism or lateness problems within their groups to which team members were mutually reliant. And most importantly, the new system moves the relationship between employees and supervisor from one of suspicious oversight, one that needs a punch-in clock to document time spent at work, to one that was more engaged, more trusting, and more relationship-based. This, the new HR manager insists, will lead to very positive labor relations and improved productivity outcomes as employees perceive that their supervisors value their trustworthiness and commitment to the enterprise. What really happened? What was the result of this initiative? After a year, the punch-in clock--left in the HR office like a museum piece, as a symbolic reminder of old thinking that needed to be changed, is finally trashed, never to be used again.

The new relationship and team-driven system becomes well integrated in the personnel administration and leadership value set at the company. The Case for Theory Y in Management Science If you have to get up to go to the bathroom during the night, you are able to easily get back to sleep. You will know you have had restful sleep if upon awakening you feel energetic, alert, and vibrant. If you feel tired and unenthusiastic when you wake up in the morning, you have not had a night of restful sleep. Restful sleep provides the foundation for your mental and physical well-being. Millions of people suffer with some form of insomnia, resulting in fatigue, lack of mental alertness, and weakened physical and mental health. It also contributes to both minor and major injury accidents. Studies have shown that if you wake up at three in the morning and do not get back to sleep, your immune cells do not work as well for the next twenty-four hours. Once you have a full night of sound sleep, they regain their disease-fighting abilities. Like the rest of you, your immune cells get tired and need their rest. It takes just a small shift in your attention and behavior to have sound, restful sleep each night. Here are some positive affirmations to get you started. Repeat them to yourself as often as possible. There are also loads more great resources at the back of the article, so make sure to check them out too. Positive affirmations I make decisions that feel right for me and my baby I love and respect my pregnant body Giving birth is the most wonderful and empowering experience I feel calm, relaxed and at ease

My body knows how to nourish and grow my baby I trust my body is perfectly designed to birth my baby There is no difference between the human impulses behind one act of creation and another. The distinctions between good and bad quality or high and low art don't really exist. There's only creation, and the joy that comes with it. We've all become indoctrinated into thinking that only the artist has the right to create. But you don't need a special license or a diploma hanging on your wall in order to express yourself. This artificial divide between artists and the rest of us may have always existed, to an extent, but I feel that it has gotten bigger in recent years--and at a cost. It hurts us as individuals and as a society when this misperception intimidates us into silence. In spite of this, however, millions of people today are reaching for creative outlets. All over the country, groups of women are assembling to crochet and knit together, to quilt, read, kick back, let their hair down (or pull it up so they can get down to business), talk, and just be. There are women meeting each week to make music, create scraparticles, start a business, cook meals, and build community gardens. Dr Abraham Maslow, a pioneer in the study of organizational behavior, the developer of the famous Hierarchy of Needs Theory7 and, incidentally, a key contributor to McGregor's thinking as he developed his Theory X and Theory Y approaches to management, performed extensive research on the relationship between effective leadership and psychological health. In reviewing his and others' relevant research, Dr Maslow found that if a list of psychological health characteristics is made, each of these characteristics is predicted to be found in a greater degree in better managers than in poorer managers. Further, and quite importantly, this more effective manager is less likely to get a kick out of being able to order people around or to act bossy with them. Doing so just does not give them gratification, Maslow suggests. This is a crucial point to emphasize. Maslow is not only connecting the traits consistent with superior psychological health with effective management, he is also addressing issues about managers' internal psychological processes involving the need to exercise power and control over subordinates. Successful and more psychologically healthy managers are comfortable with interpersonal negotiation, mediation, teamwork, and staff empowerment. Tyrannical, dictatorial, and abusive managers, the types who appear to gain enjoyment from the exercise of unchallenged authority, are less effective in their leadership roles.