Know somebody who’s just chronically disorganized, or can’t seem to juggle a schedule for the life of them? Not having enough time, or being chronically at the mercy of one’s schedule, makes for a pressurized life, not to mention all of that stress that keeps accruing and those relationships that wear thin.

I notice sometimes that people who are chronically managing their schedule (sometimes) tend to use their busy schedule as a way to avoid the other, deeper problems going on with them. You know how we tend to use others as excuses for the problems we encounter? We can just as surely use our schedules or our “busy lives” as an avoidance technique, a convenient way to avoid having to deal with the bigger issues, such as unhappiness, a bad marriage, a job we hate or, worst of all, negative feelings about ourselves.

Bad time management is a function of this. We incorporate so much into our lives, that it seems as if we are chained to our hectic lives and schedules. We get to a point where they control us, not the other way around. We learn to gradually neglect ourselves, and our needs, so that our schedules (and others) get our time and attention. But guess what? Those people and appointments never get the best of us; we are only giving them so much of us, because we’re not taking the time to take care of ourselves, or don’t know how to, or both. The latter problem is more difficult to deal with than the former, but are so mutally related to each other that people often experience both problems together.

When we neglect our values, we neglect what is truly important to us. With the limited time we have as a human being, on this Earth, we tend to get so caught up in the minutia of everyday life – the ads, the errands, the deadlines – that we forget to check in with the things and people that matter most to us. They get sidelined because “life” is happening, or the busy prison cells we call our schedules. We forget to check in with ourselves, and savor that which is most important to us, which is often people and relationships with others and with ourselves.

Creating more space in our lives is important to incorporate more quality time to do the things we really want to do, or need to do, to maintain what’s really necessary. If you’re not living a life aligned with your values, or if you don’t know what your values even are, it’s time to sit down and hammer out how to find them. They are what can guide of lives, create joy and meaning, and lessen stress and anger considerably.

Fields dominated by men are among those that have seen the biggest job losses in this downturn. Yet compared with years ago, many are taking their unemployment in stride.
By Catherine Holahan
MSN Money

There’s a gender gap in this recession, and this time men are on the losing side of it.
The unemployment rate for men is nearly 2 full percentage points higher, at 8.8%, than the rate for women. Before the recession, the jobless rate was virtually the same for both genders: 4.5% for men and 4.6% for women in November 2007.
But now, more than two-thirds of those looking for full-time work are men, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Nearly 70% of the extended layoffs in the final quarter of 2008 affected men.
Men have borne the brunt of job reductions because male-dominated industries are facing the severest contractions, according to the Labor Department.
Construction: One in five workers in this field is unemployed, and more than 95% of those out of work are men, according to the department’s March employment report.
Manufacturing: That same data show that manufacturing jobs — of which nearly 80% are held by men — declined 4.5% from the fourth quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of this year.
Finance: The largely male financial industry cut 260,110 jobs in 2008, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

And there are few signs that these industries are done shrinking: Just last week, banking giant UBS said it would lay off 500 financial advisers.
Meanwhile, industries with predominantly female work forces, such as health care and education, are growing. While nearly every other major industry was laying off workers, education and health services actually added about 8,000 jobs in February and March.
Reflections on the Depression era
The last time the U.S. dealt with such a large gender gap in unemployment was during the Great Depression. During that time, suicide rates for men hit an all-time high, as many unemployed men felt their sense of purpose and identity undermined by their inability to fulfill their traditional provider role. The suicide rate peaked at 17 per 100,000 population during the Depression. It is now around 11 per 100,000 and hasn’t increased in recent years.
But there’s reason to believe that men have become much more resilient about job losses. In the 70 years since the Depression, the male identity has become less tied to that of sole family provider. That’s partly due to the large number of women who help support their families. More than 40% of households now have two wage-earners.
“The idea of being a provider is the bedrock experience of American masculinity . . . but the fact that most of these men are in two-career couples will mute some of the possible depressing elements of their unemployment,” says Michael Kimmel, an author and sociologist at New York state’s Stony Brook University.
Changing attitudes toward family life and employment are also mitigating the disappointment associated with a job loss. Whereas before identity was closely tied to career or a role in the home, Kimmel says, now both men and women have a broader idea of what defines them. Jobs, family roles, hobbies and talents all now contribute to self-identity.

Today’s men are more resilient
The day Bjorn Eriksen was laid off, he went straight to a bar. A portfolio manager for Washington Mutual, Eriksen saw the cuts coming long before the official announcement in January. Still, the warning didn’t erase the shock of actually receiving the news. Eriksen, 27, hadn’t lost just a high-powered banking job. He had lost everything that went along with it: the influence, the status, the salary.
But Eriksen didn’t go to the pub to wallow in self-pity or shame. He went to talk about his newfound joblessness with other unemployed friends and former co-workers. A few days later, he found himself hanging out in a Seattle coffee shop, again chatting with other unemployed guys about their situations.
“I think some of the stigma is gone,” says Eriksen, who admits he was initially concerned that he would be viewed as a guy who couldn’t take care of himself, let alone provide for a family or take a woman out to someplace nice. “If you meet someone who is unemployed, you have something to immediately talk about. . . . It’s almost like a little club.”

Read the rest of the article here:

What is this, you ask? How can I possibly love my life if I hate my job? I hear you, and wondered that same thing for so long.I ended up leaving my job three months ago to do my counseling private practice three months ago, but was miserable at my previous job. I hated it, but got through it. And survived. And am here to tell you that there are things you can to do help yourself mentally cope, as well as build action steps to get the bat hell out of there and do what you really want to do.

So, two categories come to mind: coping skills, and action planning. To cope with a bad job, it’s important to see the job for exactly what it is: paid employment. It gives you a check, and you check in everyday and work, or feign working, or whatever you do there. To know that it’s pay for your time reframe it a little bit.

Also, it’s really important to get a good support system, which includes plenty of friends, family or your significant other that make it better. My friend, Mark, was an incredible source of support for me, and he worked there, too. It made it all seem like I wasn’t the only crazy person there. It helped to know others were in it with me, and saw the same things that made me hate my job.

Getting out of the building for lunch always helped me, because I could then saw the day into two distinct halves, which kind of helped me see it all as less overwhelming. Exercising and eating well, as well as getting 8 hours of sleep a night, cooled my anger and frustration, and helped me deal with the experience much more. Mindfulness meditation helped me to deal with a negative experience, so that it felt just a little bit less negative and more neutral.

Lastly, not putting in 100% was something I did to cope. Being a 100% person, I found it challenging to actually do less superior (quality or quantity) work, and accept doing a so-so job. I found that I pressured myself less, because I really just didn’t want to work that hard at a job I hated. I started to work less hard, and pressure myself less.

In the action planning stage, I worked hard to market my practice, set deadlines as to when things would happen, and, most importantly, set a 90-day target date to leave the place I couldn’t work at anymore. I started to realize that the job wasn’t going to leave me, that I needed to leave the job. Empowering myself was scary, because I had operated under the premise that I could lazily allow my job to tell me when it didn’t want me, which was never. I had to take the bull by the horns and make the jump. I had to start to pack away savings to make the jump, and verbalize my intentions to myself (journalling and planning) and to others in my life. This legitimized it all, and made my intentions reality. Now that I told others, it forced me into a situation where I had to back up my words with actions.

So, there is hope to get out of a bad job. I know there are a lot of external factors – such as money, family, and severe lack of jobs during the recession. But, when the recession ends, you won’t have the same old excuses for staying in a job you hate. But, we can control the inner factors, such as how we think about our situation and what we really want for our lives, that we have a lot of control over. It’s all about how bad you want it.

Feeling like you’re stuck in a rut these days? Feel down and depleted and like a flat tire, and not your usual self? Here’s some ideas to lift you out of the mud and spinning your wheels on ground again.

There’s a lot of reasons for being stuck. First, it is possible that you aren’t enjoying something major in your life, whether that’s your relationship or your work? Do you hate waking up in the morning because you don’t want to face that certain someone or something? I know when I was employed, and not working for myself, I dreaded going to work because I knw I wasn’t living my passion, what I was meant to do, which was to have a counseling practice for men and couples.

Second, it’s possible that you are experiencing depression, or at least the blues. Sometimes, depression is biochemical in nature, but just as often it’s a reaction to a situation or an environment that we think we have no power over, yet feel helpless to change it. We resort to depressing about it because it’s easier in some senses than to take action, or even know how to take action. Now, now, I’m not saying that people always choose depression, but I want you to consider that it’s one of several contributing factors to depression. Biochemical or nutritional imbalances can be as much to blame, as well as other lifestyle factors.

Third, do you know what you really want? Are you living your life aligned with your values – what you blieve in and the way you really see your life being lived (without all those messy mental constraints you put up). If your self-critic wasn’t saying “no, no, no” to everything, what would your life look like? Is being in a rut an expression of giving into that “no, no, no” and not enough “yes, yes, yes”? I doubt you’d be stuck in a rut if you were living your life saying “yes, yes, yes.”

Sometimes situations keep us in a rut, but, as Victor Frankl (well, and the Buddhists) say, it’s our perception of events that we have control over, not the actual events. So, how can you make lemons out of lemonade if life keeps you in a holding pattern right now?

If we listen closely to our inner voice, our true nature, we usually come up with a lot of good things. We know because we listen inside, not outside. It’s hard to be in a rut when we listen to that inner knowing, which almost always knows the answer. Meditate on it, and see what comes up.

I hope this helps you spin right out of the mud onto the road that awaits you.

On high energy days, I love to listen to this song by The Flaming Lips. They really speak to the uses and abuses of power, but I like to see it as a psychology challenge: to know how much power we really have. I think we get afraid of our own personal power, so this song hits home on that note. And here’s the lyrics to boot:

The-yeah-yeah-yeah-song

If you could blow up the world with the flick of a switch
Would you do it?
If you could make everybody poor just so you could be rich
Would you do it?
If you could watch everybody work while you just lay on your back
Would you do it?
If you could take all the love without fiving any back
Would you do it?
And so we cannot know ourselves or what we’d really do…

With all your power
With all your power
With all your power
What would you do?

If you could make your own money and then give it to everybody
Would you do it?
If you knew all the answers and could give it to the masses
Would you do it?
No no no no no no are you crazy?
It’s a very dangerous thing to do exactly what you want
Because you cannot know yourself or what you’d really do

With all your power
With all your power
With all your power
What would you do?

I like to identify universal themes in the work that I do with men in counseling, so this blog post is no different. I find that guys tend to operate in relationships the same way that they do on the job – with linear, solution-focused mentalities. Although it’s these very tools that make them so successful at what they do professionally, often times inappropriately utilized when creating relationship success.

When shopping for a car or house, when crunching baseball statistics or weighing the pros and cons of a decision to be made, the there are certain left-brain skills that are employed. Reasoning and critical thinking skills are necessary. Weighing costs-benefits is surely a solid solution to use. But, when it comes to relationships, men often fumble because they don’t realize that they’re trying to solve a situation that can’t often be solved with those left-brain skills. The matters of the heart require more attention to the powers of emotional intelligence.

Employing emotional intelligence (simply, to identify, assess, and manage the emotions of one’s self or of others) is a skillset that is often deperately needed in men, yet deficient. Being able to “solve” relationship problems (interpersonal, relationship or self) with one’s emotions is something really hard for men to do.

A couple of factors come into play here. Historically, men will mimic the lessons of emotional intelligence (or lack thereof) from their fathers. If there is a lack of emotional intelligence from father to son, and, more likely, that learning has been supplanted with criticism, shame, and education in avoidance, then men will continue to carry on in their adult lives and relationships stunted and emotionally unaware. They will bring those deficiencies to their intimate relationships.

Cuturally, it is reinforced that men invest a lot of their energy in building up their identities from their professional lives. Men get so used to using these left-brain heavy skill sets in careers that predominate their time and attention, they forget to turn them off when they leave work and have a hard time navigating in their intimate relationships and their marriages.

So, it’s not that men aren’t capable of developing emotional intelligence, because they can. I don’t belive in the “old dog, new tricks” cliche, which is tired and antiquated to me. Men have the ability to develop emotionally. Whether they want to or not is another matter.

As men and women, we get a lot of our self-esteem and identity through outside sources: work, sport, friends, partners and through roles we play. But how much of that is internally-derived self-esteem?

Depending on outside sources for primary self-esteem needs is a losing proposition in the long run. Because outside sources sometimes fail to provide or to come through for us when we need them, we need to look to inner sources of self-esteem inside of ourselves.

How do you create self-esteem from the inside?

From my work with men, a lot of self-esteem comes from identity sources, like the work that they do. Men often overidentify with their work and careers in a way that their self-esteem becomes overly contingent on their professional life. When the professional life fails to come through, then self-esteem becomes damaged. Depression and stress, as well as relationship difficulty, often come as byproducts of external sources that fail to provide for our self-esteem needs.

Refining your inner self-esteem, that place of knowing and centeredness inside yourself, is an important step in “living from the inside.” It becomes easier to weather the storms of our lives and our environment, especially when those “external” sources that we expect will come through for us fail to do so. We cling less to those sources for the fuel that we need, because we become generators of that self-esteem from within.

It’s wedding season, and a lot of guys are getting ready to move down the aisle. They’ll either walk, or they’ll slink, or, quite possibly, they may kick and scream and need to be pulled down it. Does one of these styles describe you? Or, a better question might be, would your better-half-to-be describe you in one of these ways?

Wedding jitters are quite normal. They reflect a certain anxiety on a number of different levels. First, we come to the acceptance that this is the woman that we will spend our lives with: living with, having sex with, sharing the rest of the moments of our human existence with. Wow. It’s a powerful experience either way. It’s totally normal to feel scared, and worry that you’ll replicate your parents’ marriage, for better or for worse.

Wedding terror is a whole other thing. It’s different from normal jitters. Wedding terror is paralyzing in a way that prevents forward growth toward getting married. Wedding terror is when men shrink behind fear and freeze. Forward momentum slows down to a standstill. The bride-to-be is often confused, angry and lashes out over and over again at her guy, who continues to backtrack and avoid the conflict.

Some couples I know operate under this m.o. One partner is hell bent on marrying, and the other (many times the guy, but not always) shrinks behind the fear. Their whole relationship survives on the “I Do” proposition, and lives in the future more than it does in the present.

There are real fears associated with wedding terror – fear that the marriage will be as distasterous as his parents’ was, fear that he’ll make a poor partner and that he’ll let her down, fear of growing bored in 20 years, fear that, and this is a big one, he’ll lose his independence and his bachelorness.

It’s hard to stay in the “fear place” and communicate what is hard to communicate. For guys, it’s not easy to speak from their fear, and thus we end up shrinking behind all of the above examples. Sometimes, the work is deeper, and requires counseling to identify and gain awareness about old tapes, messages and faulty beliefs we have about marriage and our role in it. Sometimes, we are programmed with these messages, and they run us so unconsciously that’s it’s really hard even knowing that they’re there.

I see this so much with men: guys who need stuff from their partners who don’t come right out and say it. True, both sexes can be equally guilty of this, but for the sake of working with men, I’ll talk about them on this post.

The games we play to get what we want end up creating more interpersonal conflict and disaster than need be. Because some men are not in touch with what they need from their mate, and, more importantly, understand how to language it in a way that they get that need met with minimal friction, otherwise good, decent couples end up breaking up or going their separate ways. It saddens me to see this, but the power of communication can very much be a force for the good, as it can be for destruction.

Making assumptions about what the other partner is thinking or feeling is one common trap that a lot of guys fall into. They fantasize that their partner is thinking or feeling something about them that is just simply not true at all. But, because they fail to “check it out” with their women, men tend to then react to their fantasy, not the reality, of the situation. In this way, the cycle of conflict gets worse. Conflict is fueled by assumptions not grounded in the reality of what is going on, but what is going on in the guy’s fantasy.

Also, shaming, name-calling, manipulating and “wiping my hands of” the situation are other games that I see men play in relationships to get what they want. These games are destructive, and they promote confusion, anger, withdrawal and loneliness, among other things. They undermine the foundation of a good relationship.

Being direct about what the need is is a great start. “I need attention,” or “I need a kiss after a hard day at work,” are direct and perfectly acceptable examples of communicating clearly what needs are needing to be met. Being clear, concise, and direct are things that a lot of guys have a hard time doing in relationships, but are so important in the development of it. They are the fundamentals, yet a lot of men haven’t learned these basic skills growing up. Not only did no one teach them to do it these effective ways, but what these men did learn are negative surrogate ways of getting needs met (like the examples above).