Tag: life

Today’s coping tip is to build new ideas by thinking “Yes, and what if…”.

I tend to look for the holes, problems, limitations, and downside of various proposals. I’ve always been good at finding potential issues and mitigating them. It’s a skill that served me well as a database administrator.

However, I’ve been trying to be more positive and opportunistic the last few years. I try to look for the upside. Not that I ignore the downside, but I try to look forward and up first.

This tip is interesting to me, and I had to use this recently. I coach competitive volleyball for teenagers and this year has been a little trying. A MH I thought would round out our team got moved to another one. Then I had a kid who was injured all of last year and I wasn’t sure how she would fit in the team. Then another kid dropped out. Instead of a strong 12 set of hand picked kids, I had 10, two of which I was unsure about. Worse, I really only have 1 MH.

However, my wife and I looked for the upside here. We know we can teach kids to pick up different roles and we’ve been successful growing athletes in ways they didn’t expect. We started to think what if we moved X to MH and then used Y as a RH. What if we look at a 6-2 instead of a 5-1 and find a way to skip the need for a sub in two of our rotations?

There are lots of ways to search out opportunity and this coping tip reminds me to do that in all parts of my life. Look for possibilities first.

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

Today’s coping tip is to do something playful outdoors.

Easy. Skiing today. First day of the season.

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

Today’s coping tip is to revisit a coping tip from the past and see if it helped you..

I came up with this one after I tried to do this: leave positive messages for myself. These have been popping up in my calendar for a couple months. I set all these messages to repeat 30 times, but at different intervals.

Inevitably, they always pop up when I’m busy doing something, but I do glance at the positive messages. I think the “getting better” and “getting healthier” ones remind me that being a little hungry and following a diet isn’t that bad. It also helps when the scale is going down rather than up.

The “positive impact” one is good because I’m stressed and busy and it’s nice to remind myself that people appreciate what I do when I’m struggling with workoad.

The grateful one isn’t too impactful as I feel this way often. Especially when I hear about struggles from others. Still nice to see.

This was a good experiment and I’ve enjoyed it. However, I’m going to let this end when the timers on the appointments run out. I’ve been getting a few too many things popping on the schedule and that’s something I’d like to get away from for the rest of the year.

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

Today’s coping tip is to be creative, cook, draw, write, paint, make, or inspire.

While I do play some guitar, I’m not much for painting. Certainly I write a lot here, and my creativity is often with cooking. I did this a couple of weeks ago, trying something new when my sister-in-law came into town.

I planned a Cuban dinner, with the following recipes:

• Cuban Pork
• Baked Plantains
• Cilantro Lime Rice
• oven roasted asparagus
• spicy pickles

A nice, tasty, but not too heavy (or unhealthy) dinner. First time roasting plantains (or using them at all) and they came out nice.

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.