 Life is too short for negativity and toxicity and although it's impossible to get rid of all the stress in our lives, I've identified five areas in which we can reduce our stress and reduce our negativity, leading to more productive days and of course happier days. Hello and welcome to The Pantry. Today's post is quite personal for me anyway and perhaps personal for you if you are finding areas of your life filled with negativity and toxicity. I was recently having a conversation with a friend of mine who actually removed quite a toxic habit from her day and the smile on her face she's just so much happier now that she has taken action and removed that from her life and you can read a little bit about her story in my blog post on this topic which you can find below this video but I wanted to address five areas of our lives that potentially we can take action to remove the negativity and toxicity and of course then leading to better activity, more happiness and just overall a better quality of living. Area number one and not surprising one of the largest is our work satisfaction. I'm continually surprised at the amount of people I meet who are just not happy in their work situation but do feel powerless to do anything about it be it lack of time lack of confidence lack of money to make a switch and it's robbing them of their true potential. So if you find yourself feeling like you're every time you go to work every single day take a health take a mental health day and really look at your work situation. Perhaps it's just a way of maybe identifying what strengths you possess and veering your current career or finding a new career in that direction and you can find ways to identify your strengths in the video and blog post above so I encourage you to do that because we spend so much time at work every day that for you to feel completely fatigued and completely defeated at work is just going to rob you of your daily happiness. Area number two is hobbies and interests. This one is very personal to me because I spent a lot of years ignoring my hobbies and interests in the interests of taking care of my family and taking care of my career. I did enjoy my job and of course I enjoy my family time but I kind of forgot who I was for a number of years so getting back to some of my hobbies and interests has I suppose helped all the other areas of my life. I do feel a lot more balanced at work and a lot less stressed at work when I can lean on my hobbies in the evening or on the weekends and of course my family is happier because I'm a lot happier around the home when I'm doing things that I enjoy to do. Now ironically a lot of my hobbies actually produce something tangible that's the achiever strength in me so right now I'm doing a lot of canning and creating a lot of jams and jellies. My salsa is amazing and so my family is able to enjoy that and so together as a family we're able to share in the gardening and of course share in the fruits of my labor and the fruits of my hobbies so if you find yourself running out of time to do things that you really enjoy doing maybe take a step back and look at ways of infusing your hobbies into your week and that will definitely help with ridding your life of some unnecessary negativity. Area number three is meditation. Now I am not an expert in this area and in fact I'm struggling with this myself so hopefully me talking to you will be a reminder for me that I need to do a better job of meditating but the health benefits of meditation are astounding and you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who has studied meditation and does not find value in the 10 or 15 minutes that you spend every morning centering in on yourself and centering in on your day. So if you have not tried meditation I encourage you to take a look at it. If you go again over to my blog post I've included a link to an app that you can download on your phone which is a really simple and a very soothing 10-minute meditation each morning but give meditation a try. I'm going to be talking a lot more about meditation and the benefits of meditation in the months ahead so stick around if you want to learn a little bit more with me. Area number four is exercise and diet. So just like meditation is there to clear your mind and prepare your mind for the day so does exercise and diet as you go through your day. So diet of course is filling your daily intake of foods with things that are healthy things that are going to feed your mind and fuel your body in the right ways and cutting out foods that are going to drain you of energy like those refined sugars those chocolate treats. So you want to fuel your body with the right kinds of foods and then of course use your body to get some exercise. Once again I'm hard pressed to find a place that says exercise drains you of energy exercise does infuse your day with energy unless you're running an ultramarathon this morning then granted take a nap this afternoon be my guest. But if you can get a half hour run-in or a quick trip to the gym I think you're going to set yourself up for success and obviously a lot of positivity and happiness along the way. And lastly area number five are your friends and the people that you surround yourself with. It's really difficult to stay positive and rid your life of negativity when you are surrounding yourself with people of that mindset. We all go through times where we need to lean on one another for support but the friends you surround yourself with should have a great balance of positive energy to bring to you as well. So if you find you're surrounding yourself with a bunch of EO's again who tend to have a negative outlook on life and tend to be resistant to wanting to change their situation you may want to find some other people to surround yourself with. It may not mean having to get rid of any particular friend but you certainly want some positive influences in your life because that will feed your own positivity and decrease your toxicity. As I mentioned it's impossible to rid our lives completely of stress inducing moments but by working on these five areas perhaps you can get rid of some of the negativity and infuse your life with more positive moments as well. Thanks for joining me today on this somewhat of a personal journey and a personal post but you can find other posts that relate to productivity and to better sales techniques over at my blog at productivitypantry.com. There you can also subscribe to my newsletter so you never miss a post on how to better your career if you are in a sales environment. Thanks for joining me today and have a great week. Bye for now.