Let’s talk about 2023 and happiness.

It’s been a year! Right? If it could happen, it did happen – and not always in ways you wanted to celebrate.

In fact, for many of you, this has been a year in which you’ve felt a bit stuck – financially, career wise, and maybe even in life.

It’s been a time of reflection, better understanding what you want, and learning what you do NOT want to bring into 2024. All while working at a pace that is not sustainable and likely left you with little time to breathe and even less time to actually connect with those humans you call friends.

(Friends are people you enjoy having meals with, sometimes get together with face to face, and create space to grow with in life. They are the people you used to spend Friday nights and weekends with, maybe even going as far as having Girls’ Nights and Friendsgiving celebrations with. Now you look around and feel like you’ve forgotten how to embody the word. It’s okay, you can get back to you if you keep reading!)

With all that has transpired this year that contributes to the overwhelm, happiness has become a fleeting feeling for most.

The more people I talk to, the more I realize that happiness has been elusive for many this year because of the way life has hit extra hard between the economy, the media outlets, personal loss, the housing crisis, feeling unsure about the future, and more.

It’s been a year where many of us are screaming:

The amount of information and life we are all dealing with is overwhelming. And when we are overwhelmed, happiness becomes a feeling we long for and miss.

BUT THERE IS HOPE!!

Hope for Happiness at Work

I’d like to talk to you today as a human with your professional hat.

Not just as Demetria, but as Demetria who goes into work and leads a team who is struggling the same way you are but won’t talk about it because you have the ability to fire them.

Not just as Alejandro, but as Alejandro who works alongside colleagues who are all just barely holding it together in a workspace that feels toxic or struggles with showing appreciation.

Not as Nichole, but as Nichole who sees her team fading slowly and “quit quitting” because the workload is a bit unbearable lately and you have no way of slowing that down since you’re serving as middle management and have to answer to your higher ups who don’t get how overworked the folks on the frontline are.

I want to speak to the professional side of you that is feeling overwhelmed and realizes that it isn’t only in your personal life that you feel this way. It’s at work too!

In the workplace, it often feels like leaders don’t remember they are human too. It feels as if they have forgotten that life doesn’t stop when employees walk through the door or log into the computer for the day. Life is the noise in the background of their heads throughout the day that affects how they interact with others, how they perform their work, and how they feel about themselves. Yet, most employees do their best to move it out of the way so they can show up and focus on work before life takes center stage again.

That action causes a disconnect and is a contributor to why employees start to feel as if they have to have work lives and personal lives that are completely separate from one another, ensuring their personal lives don’t show up at work.

We expect our employees to be “workers” all day and then humans outside of the workplace. That’s a culture thing we can’t fix that in a day. BUT, I CAN offer you the gift of learning about workshop that can equip your team with what it needs to show up in a way that allows them to acknowledge life AND do a great job at work even when life isn’t going well.

Work of Happiness Workshop

My friend Yermi Kurkus has a program that has changed my way of looking at life and being happy despite all that is going on around me. And he hasn’t just affected my life… many others who have taken the time to invest in themselves and in their team to take the full Work of Happiness Workshop have shared how it’s helped them as well.

Yermi’s Work of Happiness Workshop empowers you and your team with the skills and tools needed to find happiness EVEN IN THE MIDST OF UNHAPPY TIMES. He equips you with the ability to dig down to those places we forget we bring to work – or worse, those we tell our team not to bring. He shows you how to do it in a way that people show up happier, more productive, and with the tools to find more enjoyment in their work, which makes the whole team operate more effectively and efficiently.

I encourage this workshop as a solution for any of you who have been looking around and seeing declining productivity, unhappy faces, stressed out colleagues or employees, or an overall feeling of toxicity in the air that you don’t feel empowered to remove right away but need to address before you don’t have a team working for or with you any longer.

Most of us have heard various quotes over the years about how we can’t change others but we can change ourselves. After you are done rolling your eyes (yes, I saw), I want you to really think about how it could change your work and your team if each person felt like they were properly equipped at the beginning and end of each day to release feelings of overwhelm and frustration and step into and out of the workplace feeling happy?

As a leader in the workplace, it is your job to create an atmosphere that encourages employees to be their best. Leaders who fail to do so aren’t really leaders, are they? You can admit it even if it’s you I am talking about. It’s never too late to change!

When you can’t fix the atmosphere, such as when you work in a larger corporation or for a manager who doesn’t know how to lead, you can support your team by showing that YOU understand them. To me, that’s what Work of Happiness is.

It’s a chance, whether you have a great environment but see your employees and colleagues facing stressful life situations or truly have a toxic culture that needs to be changed from the top down and feel powerless to make changes. You can bring in solutions that empower your team at the human level so they can feel that much more capable while the change in your overall environment gets worked out and occurs e v e r s o o o o o o o s l o w l y.

Work of Happiness Workshop Details

Here’s details about the program from Yermi’s brochure:

A Workplace Workshop with Personal Life Application

What I find most intriguing about the Work of Happiness Workshop is that you can encourage your team to stop fighting the work-life balance fight. We all know by now that there is no such thing as balance when it comes to working and living. Unless you get paid to be a parent, child, or sibling, you will never be able to be both a great employee and a great parent, child, or sibling. Your parents are going to have time you won’t be there for them. Your children are going to look out into the audience and see you missing from the seats or sit in the nurse’s office for an extra hour while you get the message that they need you. Your siblings are going to have to wait at times to solve their life problems. You are paid to work while at work. JUST LIKE work will have to wait when you are not working. Your boss WILL be told no at times because it’s more important to be at your child’s cheerleading competition or your nephew’s science fair. You will have times that you need to go to the doctor, take time off to see a therapist, or just say “no” to that extra project because you can’t do overtime this week. It is OKAY and acceptable to do so.

And that means the same for your team.

The Work of Happiness Workshop will empower your team with tools to release the stress momentarily as they walk through work doors. But NOT in a way that means they forget their humanity. Instead, it encourages them to enjoy the feeling of happiness in the midst of all that stress and look for how they can show up best DESPITE it.

I encourage everyone to register for this workshop. But most of all, I encourage those who are really struggling to keep their teams encouraged and moving forward in these times. I’d love to say it will be better next week, next month, or next year; but I don’t know when it will get better. What I DO know is that since taking Yermi’s program and practicing daily what I learned, I’ve been able to show up better at work and be better for my apprentices so they can learn more, do more, and be more fully themselves!

The tools Yermi taught me have allowed me to show up more for myself in both life and at work. I am feeling more like myself than I have all year and finally am taking the actions I need to take so I can be in a better place for 2024. He helped me acknowledge what I am facing while also knowing I have the power to change my mindset and how I approach the circumstances, without magical thinking or disregarding the reality of the pressure. It was truly life-changing, as you will see in how I show up in 2024 career and life wise!

Reach out to Yermi today to learn how you can bring the Work of Happiness Workshop to your workplace. His email is Yermi@YermiKurkus.com and his website is www.YermiKurkus.com if you want to learn more about him first.

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