These are some of the reasons why most people eagerly wait for their vacation. Their vacation provides them a way to get out of their daily life and find some peace. The good news is that you do not have to wait for your vacation. You can learn to gain inner peace and enjoy every moment, right where you are. You can stop fretting and getting tense. You can experience peace of mind and happiness wherever you are. When your mind is peaceful, the whole environment become peaceful.

Now you probably wonder what you can do to make this come true. I am not going to talk here about meditation, though this is one of the best peace of mind tools. Below you will find some simple and easy to perform tips and suggestions to experience inner peace at your workplace.

You may not succeed at the first attempts, but if you keep on performing these suggestions earnestly, you will gradually begin to experience peace of mind. This peace will not only by inside you. It will spill over and influence your whole environment.

1) If the people you meet talk in a loud voice, are impolite and tense, you will probably react and behave accordingly, hereby raising the level of tension. On the other hand, if you stay calm, talk, act and react peacefully, people unconsciously emulate your behavior. You become a leading power, no matter what is your position at work.

2) Each day before you enter your workplace, repeat several times the following affirmation with feeling, faith and attention:
“My mind is peaceful throughout the whole day. I radiate peace around me. I talk peacefully, politely and with a smile. I choose to act peacefully”.

3) Greet the people you meet at work.

4) Whenever you feel tension or anger building in you, take three deep slow breathes before any talking or action.

5) Pay attention to the words you think, say or write. Use only positive words.

6) Be polite.

7) Whenever you find yourself raising your voice, lower it immediately.

Talk in a medium pitch voice, not too loud or too low, and don’t let the loudness or pitch of other people’s voices influence yours.

9) Several times during your workday find a quiet place. It may be at your desk, or if it is not quiet enough there, it can be at the bathroom, an empty room or some other quiet spot. For several moments visualize a beautiful location that you love or some event that made you happy. Feel that you are there and enjoy the feelings that arise.

10) While working, concentrate on what you are doing. Put there your full attention. This will keep your mind off disturbing thoughts.

11) Don’t waste your time and energy analyzing and thinking about people’s motives and behavior, but rather try to improve your actions.

12) Before speaking with someone whom you dislike or fear, or someone who makes you feel tense or angry, take a few deep breathes and visualize the two of you conversing peacefully and harmoniously.

© Copyright Remez Sasson
Remez Sasson teaches and writes on positive thinking, creative visualization, motivation, self-improvement, peace of mind, spiritual growth and meditation. He is the author of several books, among which are “Peace of mind in Daily Life”, “Will Power and Self Discipline”, “Visualize and Achieve” and “Affirmations – Words of Power”.
Website: http://www.SuccessConsciousness.com
Books: http://www.successconsciousness.com/ebooks_and_books.htm

Action means converting your thoughts into a physical reality through consistent effort. It is putting things in motion and getting them done. ‘To act’ is to work on your thoughts to achieve your goals.

Every action that you take is the result of a desire that resides deep within your heart. If your intentions are good and you are clear about what you want to achieve, you are already halfway to success. It is the Power of Action that will take you through the next half. What is required is firm faith in yourself and a clearly defined purpose. The Power of Action is born in your heart as you aim for your goal with a strong will.

We all know that a seed cannot become a tree in one day. Every seed has an inherent capacity to grow but it needs a caring gardener who will plant it in the correct environment and take care of it with patience until it grows into a tree. Similarly, your soul has the potential to embrace the universe around you and give shape to your dreams, ambitions and desires. All you need is to act like the caring gardener of your mind, body and soul.

Action is a natural process
Growth is a natural process. A seed becomes a sapling with natural ease. Does it make any special effort to grow? Certainly not.

Once you start following the simple steps mentioned in this chapter, you will be able to tap the natural secret of setting things in motion with the least effort. Most people do not take action because they think it is painful to act. But they forget an important fact: that everything in the universe is in constant motion in some form or the other. Each and every cell of your body and each atom of the universe is in motion. So taking action is something that you do in harmony with the universe.

Co-ordination with the least effort
The human body is a classic example of co-ordination with the least effort. Innumerable living cells perform individual actions but they work together to ensure that the body works smoothly. Your heart, for example, beats over one lakh times a day; yet you are probably not aware how effectively it functions. The same goes for the brain, the liver and many other organs. In a larger sense, our body is the perfect example of great teamwork. Similarly, when you use the Power of Action and have a clear goal all your body parts get into a rhythm to achieve the target.

Two Action Steps:

Step 1: Act with positive feelings. Take action in the direction of your goals with courage, confidence and conviction. When you do so, results will start showing up sooner or later. Also, others will start seeing you as a charismatic person.

Step 2: Learn and improve continuously through the Power of Action. You stand here today because this is where your thoughts and education have brought you. To go further you need to bring about a paradigm shift in your thoughts and actions through an investment in self-improvement.

Success Mantra: Do something to improve yourself daily: take a walk and talk to yourself positively, record your voice with positive auto-suggestions, read motivational quotes, or just plan your day and work according to the plan.

©Shishir Srivsatava, Motivational Speaker and Author ‘The Eight Powers within You’
www.shishirsrivastava.org and www.eightpowers.com

Thinking, in general, is considered to be an activity to solve issues. However, often the core objective takes a back seat & the team involved in the thinking process ends up spending a lot of time in discussions & debates, while losing sight of the original objective. The outcome of such discussions often tends to be a new date for a follow-up discussion or at best a marginal (say, 10-20%) solution to the issues.

Edward De Bono gives us excellent insights on how issues/ cases should be handled. He emphasizes the “think in one direction” mantra. In a discussion, there will be people with different viewpoints: highly creative, highly critical, cautious & apprehensive and even particularly intuitive. The thrust of De Bon’s theory is: get all types of thinkers to think in a single direction at a particular instant. Doing thus gets everybody focused in the same direction, reducing discussions in tangential directions even while multiple viewpoints are expressed.

The six hats & their significance
De Bono explains this through his tried & tested methodology of Six Thinking Hats- each denoted by a different color- where each of these hats represents a different way of thinking. An understanding of these six hats will help individuals & teams to take decisions and solve issues with due consideration to different perspectives.

There is no strict sequence that needs to be followed while practicing the ‘Six Thinking Hats’ process- the sequence depends on the type of the problem & expected solution.

The White Hat
White Hat is a neutral hat & deals with facts. With this hat on you are supposed to present facts and figures. It is all about presenting all the information you have & how best you can use that information. Deal with the Whats, Whos, Whys & Wheres of the facts and figures presented.

Facts may be broadly classified into “Proven Facts” & “Perceived Facts”. Generally, there is no room for anecdotal figures unless they contribute significantly. You are not allowed to discuss opinions during White Hat Thinking- it really deals with the presence & absence of information.

The Red Hat
Red Hat is all about emotions and it provides thinkers with the luxury of being intuitive, emotional, foreseeing problems & indicating the probability of a particular thought being successful or otherwise.

This hat doesn’t demand any justification for your thought; you just have to put a thought that occurs to you at that instant. I specify at that instant because emotion changes with situations. Often red hat thinking is used at the start of a discussion and at the end of a discussion to judge the variance of thoughts after the meeting.

Your work while wearing this hat is to react, not to propose an alternative – just react. Generally the discussion revolves around statements like – I believe …. , I like it, I don’t like it, I feel … etc…

Red Hat thinking doesn’t allow you to defend your feelings it just allows you to speak what you feel.

Black Hat
Black Hat makes you cautious. While wearing a black hat you think of a problem with caution & being careful. This hat deals with logical problems with an idea and not belief, emotions or intuitions.

You are authorized to point out errors based on logic & information. The thought is not about being argumentative, not being negative but being careful. It allows you to point out logical problems with an idea, solving / fixing the problem happens under a different thinking hat. It’s about making a critical judgement, generally this is done after some suggestions are made. You identify barriers, hurdles, risks, hazards and other negative connotations involved in the overall process.

Take care that you don’t practice providing solutions to the problems, as mentioned above that should happen when you wear a different hat.

Yellow Hat
Yellow is bright & this hat deals with optimism. You think about logical positives which involves positive approach & positive thinking.

This hat helps you in coming up with options that you identified as important problems during your Black Hat thinking or an emotion that you felt to be strong while Red Hat thinking. It helps you in exploring the value of a thought / idea and the benefits associated with it.

Yellow Hat thinking is constructive thinking, where no negatives are allowed nor are emotions allowed. Some statements you could generally find while wearing this hat are – We can take advantage ….. , This is good because…., Using this we can multiply our sales, This will help us in making this happen etc…

Green Hat
Get out of the box, that’s what this hat demands – Get creative. Green Hat is loved by dreamers; it gives you the opportunity to think as creatively as you can in solving a particular problem. It deals with change & possibilities, sometimes done at the start of the discussion to get ideas that could complement the role of other hats.

Green Hat emphasize on the fact of listing creative thoughts not judging them. This could be challenging a current accepted pattern or a set protocol. In practice this judging is mainly done on Black & Yellow Hat thoughts.

Green Hat provokes you to identify new possibilities. Criticizing ideas are treated as violation while wearing this hat. Some statements that come up while using green hat are:
What if…., Could we… Suppose…. We could… etc…

Blue Hat
It’s time to bring everything under one roof; Blue Hat organizes & controls the thinking process.

In practice, Blue Hat is used at the start and end of discussions. In the beginning Blue Hat helps in understanding the objective, what are the expected outputs, what is the overall thinking about etc… and in the end this is used to understand what have we achieved, what are next steps, what changes are required etc…

Generally the group leader wears this hat throughout the process so that the discussion is focused. Blue hat helps you to plan & conclude discussions well.

- Article contributed by Sujit S. Nair