Articles:

• Early Invite: Save the Date
• August Tip
• Book of the Month

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Early Invite: Save the Date -

Sunday afternoon, Sept 19th 
If you are in the Bay Area, please come to our Celebration party of the Pre-release of Courage and Croissants, Inspiring Joyful Living.  More information to come.

Reduce your Stress and Be Happier in 3 easy steps

Overall happiness and well-being is made up of a variety of components from good work to financial satisfaction to having time to do what you love. One simple way to increase your level of feeling good, healthy, and having overall joie de vivre is to focus on the people you hang out with and what you do together.

#1 Hang Out with People who are Happy

What more could you want than to reduce your stress and feel happy. The easiest way is to hang out with happy people. The more you hang out with people who are happy, your chances of feeling good increases 15%. "People are embedded in social networks and the health and well-being of one person affects the health and well-being of others," stated Nicholas Christakis in a 2008 Harvard study.

Combining our need for social interaction with our need for social well-being is a great step in increasing your joy in life. Of course, those relationships also need to be health, supportive, and make you feel good. Take happiness a step further to overall health and longevity, Rath and Harter, in their book Well Being, discuss the risk of dying from heart disease or getting sick is twice as likely for people who have few close relationships. Close relationships affect our health and well-being and even more so if they are in close proximity.

Work Relationships Count a Great Deal

Studies show that people who have a best friend at work are happier. Make friends (if you don't already have some at work) with whom you can share, talk, laugh, and chat over lunch. If you work alone, make sure you talk to others (as well as social network) throughout the day. Call someone for a coffee chat and up your level of happiness for the day.

In reflecting back over my career, there was a direct correlation between being happy at work and working with not only great people, but a good friend as well. Given this is not always possible, look to build deeper relationships at work with people you enjoy being around and make you feel good.

For many people work is often isolating and doesn't provide for watercooler chat. As a result it is even more important to find ways to increase socializing into your work day. Some recent data from Gallup-Healthways' Well-Being study showed that to have a great day we need six hours of social time. Therefore, it is not just who we are around, but how much we are socializing.

Finding Ways to Schedule Socializing into your workday. 

• Leave time before and after conference calls with people you like at work to share stories, joke, catch up on life.
• Email stories, articles, blog postings, jokes to your work-friends and ask for their comments and thoughts.
• Ask a work-friend to go to lunch once a week - away from the desk.
• Ask a work-friend to go for a walk, to the gym, or a dance class during lunch.
• Call a work-friend and just say "Good Morning".

If you have almost no social time in any given day, you have an equal chance of a good or a bad day.  Each hour of social time decreases the chance of having a bad day. This may seem like a lot of time, but people studied who have thriving well-being average about 6 hours a day of social time--on the phone, in person, home, work, and e-mail count.

Read more to find out about Secret #2 and #3.

Remember the research shows that your level of happiness and well-being is directly correlated to how happy people are in your network.

August Tip

Summer Doldrums: Get Out of Your Comfort Zone!

Mark Twain was right when he said, "The coldest winter I spent was a summer in San Francisco." Even the weather experts say, San Francisco Bay Area has had the coldest summer in 40 years. As a result summer is almost over and it never felt like it got started. So what to do (fog or not) to make the rest of the summer and warm weather extra special becomes the big question.

• Do something different you haven't done yet; go to a museum, build a bonfire on the beach and roast s-mores, go hiking on a new trail in a new area (wehre it is warm).
• Ask each family member to choose and plan (if they can) an activity for the next four Saturdays or Sundays.  Assign a day in which each family member plans and inspires a special summer day.  Ask them to come up with a budget, an invitation, and a plan.  Get everyone's agreement to go along and enjoy the outing.
• Hold a theme party.  We often think of summer as BBQ time, but take it a step further and add a theme with costumes, activities, and food.  Get your entire family involved and have some fun.  Labor Day is a perfect day to plan such a party asking everyone to come as "the profession they want to be/or with they were".

Click here to read more about Summer Doldrums

New Workshop

New workshop offered by Dr. Suzanne on your Lifestyle Planning - October 9, 2010 at Marin Community College

Book of the Month

Happiness

Richard Layard

Happiness is often thought of as elusive, non-measureable, and always fleeting. Richard Layard, in his book, Happiness, provides us with an interdisciplinary perspective of happiness using neuroscience, economics, psychology, sociology and anthropology.

Richard Layards' use of scientific data shows us why it is important to take the topic of "Happiness" seriously as a nation and world.

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The Roux Foundation!

Coming soon is the Introduction of the Roux Foundation, dedicated to promoting cross cultural learning and health in the global community.

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Bon Courage--Go with Courage

Suzanne and Jean-Pierre