taking small steps: light switch

Your job isn’t going quite the way you’d like. Perhaps it’s a recalcitrant employee, or if you’re on the other side of the door, an obstinate boss. Making even slight changes will go a long way toward showing your flexibility and understanding. Most people naturally and rightly respond to sincere effort. Stay an extra 10 or 15 minutes at the office a few days a week, or come in a bit earlier. Take all of five seconds to offer a good word or acknowledgement of a task well done.

Your relationships have become somewhat frayed. Perhaps it’s time or money, or lack of sleep. Take three minutes to buy your significant other a candle, fresh flowers, a gift certificate. Offer a quick massage before dinner. That note of affection you keep thinking about writing? Make a point of actually leaving it a few times a week or whenever the mood strikes. If you have kids, why not linger a bit more at the dinner table or the study desk? Take time out to honestly express your feelings, and request that they do the same. Make them an egg omelet once or twice a week before school.

You’ve gained some weight and your cholesterol level flirts uncomfortably with the 200 level. Perhaps it’s a lazy diet, the pull of the drive-through window, the unforgiving and relentless clock. Choose the small fries instead of the larger size. Ask for fat-free or sugar-free whenever possible. A non-fat latte, a diet Coke, dark rather than milk chocolate are all delicious alternatives barely distinguishable from their full-figured cousins. Don’t try all at once to eliminate the generous carb pockets that line your sides. See if you can take off a pound a week, five pounds a month, rather than something more extreme that’s likely only to make matters worse. Spend four extra minutes at the gym, run another quarter mile or walk two more blocks. Do 10 more sit-ups or lift an extra five pounds.

In all of these circumstances, small steps are doable and, over time, require little extra effort. Switching behaviors in increments rather than by canyons will make goals realistic and achievable rather than magnets for failure. Take it easy. Walk with a light step. For the better part of the day, you’ll more often than not find yourself—on.

dealing with daily pressures: fresh-squeezed juice

Your job promotion depends entirely on addressing daily pressures while completing extraordinary work by Friday for a project impacting the entire company.

Your spouse’s crucial work commitments cause all the week’s family responsibilities to fall on your shoulders alone.

You’ve lost your job and have accepted two or three jobs either within or outside your field rather than lose your house to foreclosure.

Your child’s or parent’s illness means that you’re burning candles on both ends of the day, as inattention or cutting corners is not within your repertoire.

These and countless other scenarios—faced by millions of people each calendar pass—point to the essential companions of positivity and selflessness that can make or break, that mean the difference between success and failure, that foster either normal breathing or a heart attack.

How do you respond when pushed to your supposed limits, when really squeezed? Do you lash out, become frayed to the core, let impatience and frustration seep under your skin? Do your work and relationships suffer, sometimes irreparably? To take just one example, he not only appears to embrace conflict but seems ever eager to squeeze as much as possible from it. Yet must that be the norm, particularly when so much is at stake?

Or are you able to step back, secure in your faith and abilities, constructive in your approach, guided by the realization that all-too-easily bred negativity will not extend your life by five minutes?

Living with integrity means not subjecting your commitments and responsibilities to the vagaries of an uncertain world. While true that doing your very best is sometimes not enough, you’ll at least be able to face tomorrow, to face your family and peers, to face life itself, with grace and equanimity.

And when doing your very best is in fact enough to get you over pitfalls and fresh problems, think about all the energy—the juice—generated by necessity that consistently leads to personal and career accomplishment.

Then let your capabilities speak for themselves.