What Is Your Biggest Stress This Holiday Season: Finances, Food, or Relationships?

Approaching the holiday season, try to imagine it as an obstacle course — an annual game of life — that offers both challenges and rewards that can bring you both joy, happiness and gratitude or inner anxiety, stress and depression. Your challenge, if you accept it, is to study your calendar of holiday events ahead of time and then train for them, like training for a marathon. Here are three challenges you may face this holiday season, and here’s how to plan for them. A tight budget. A bounty of holiday foods. Relationship challenges. A tight budget. To avoid the endless shopping that comes at this time of year, think instead of the hand-crafted gifts that you can make, a favorite book or music you can give, or up-cycle an item that you never use that you know they would enjoy. A bounty of holiday foods. Anticipate the events you will attend and the traditional holiday foods that will tempt you to overeat or over indulge, along with the offer of too many sweets or alcohol. Then use this “healthy habits” strategy to help you overcome the food challenge: (1) Don’t drink with the meal. A sip of water or wine to help with swallowing food is fine. Just saying “No” to beverages or soup at the start of a meal can help prevent digestive turbulence after the meal is over. Instead, (2) Eat protein first. Start by turning your plate so that the protein in your meal faces you and is eaten first. Then (3) Go for the most fiber rich foods next along with healthy fats such as butter, avocado, high...

China’s Social Credits Are Disrupting the $834 Billion (U.S.) Dollar Airline Industry

Countdown 11.25.18: Trump will face a new G-20 trade challenge with China this week. In an effort to reshape public behavior, China is rolling out a new top-down “Carrot and Stick” approach to the public education of its 1.4 billion citizens. China’s new “social credit system” – already affecting millions of Chinese – is a way for the government to reward or punish people or organizations based on their “trustworthiness.” According to news reports: “If you’re the kind of person who volunteers or donates blood, you’ll be awarded credit points. If you’re getting speeding tickets, charging “under-the-table” fees, posting “fake news” online, smoking in non-smoking zones, or buying too many video games, you’ll be punished.” Will China’s public education program extend to shape individual energy use, the extraction of natural resources such as coal, and the country’s growing air pollution problem? The Chinese government’s analysis of its citizens also includes how they act on buses, how they drive, and how the customers of local businesses rate them. Alexia Parks 10TRAITS offers 1-Minute conflict resolution tools, research, and trait-based training programs for improved decision-making and organizational success. This blog is Day 39 of a series called Countdown: A 50-Day Personal Leadership...
Houston: After Catastrophe Comes Collaboration

Houston: After Catastrophe Comes Collaboration

In 2013, Boulder, Denver and communities north and east were hit by a storm that broke all records for rainfall. City planners had a 100-year flood plan. They had prepared for a “worst case scenario” that would strike every 100 years. The 2013 catastrophe was called the 1000-year flood. And in the days, weeks, and months that followed everyone who lived along Colorado’s front range or who planned to visit for business or pleasure was impacted. It took months and in some cases over a year for roads to be repaired. The town of Lyons, one of the hardest hit communities, received close to $100 million dollars in Federal funding to rebuild. While waiting for funds, cleanup crews and reconstruction to begin, the community organized potlucks, neighborhood work teams, and music festivals to rethink the future of their small town. The Lyons community knew what it had been, but the larger question facing these forward-facing citizens was this: What COULD it become? Everyone became engaged in rethinking “Our Town” and in thousands of different ways, everyone took on some type of leadership role. Even speaking up about what they had suffered, took personal courage, and in a town where everyone had been impacted in some way, the ability for those who suffered to ask for what they needed, helped guide community vision. Could Houston, still reeling from an unfolding catastrophe, tap the creative vision of civic leaders and residents living in   distinct neighborhoods and districts within its meta-city to reimagine its future?  Could the restoration of this sunbelt city include rebuilding as green, resilient, solar powered communities? Could Houston’s catastrophe become an opportunity to showcase how communities can...
Sustainability2020: A Global Collaboration On Our Energy Future

Sustainability2020: A Global Collaboration On Our Energy Future

Sustainability2020 is a GLOBAL collaboration – a global thinkery – bringing ideas and actions, tools and technology together with images and policies together at the LOCAL level. It takes the untapped power of the human mind and spirit and maps out a path to a world beyond OIL. A community is a network of skills and talents.What is your key skill or talent that you would like to share? It takes millions and millions of small incremental actions, developed into HABITS and taken each day, to create smart, green, resilient communities. It takes a global brain – thinking together on behalf of ALL life on Earth to create an energy future that is beneficial to all. Here is an urban Vertical Forest in China which cleans oxygen and also serves as an urban BIRD sanctuary. Here is the way the UK is changing human behavior, one person at a time. Who are we? Alexia Parks 10TRAITS Leadership is home to the Sustainability2020.org environmental leadership tool. It is designed to be used to guide school children and adults to take money saving, energy smart actions at home. Online, it aggregates data to help guide communities to focus resources, skills and talents on those most in need. We welcome partnerships with organizations seeking common cause, including Avaaz.org, The Women’s March, 350.org, and GREEN organizations around the world. Alexia Parks, a United Nations mentor an expert in Gender Equality, and founder of 10TRAITS Leadership is an author, speaker and futurist. In 1980, as Executive Director of the Energy Conservation Center of Boulder, Colorado, she organized a Community Energy Futures Conference for the city in 1980. It led...