Coach Dan Foster

Not long ago, I wrote a post entitled, Filling the Space Between Where You Are and Where You Want To Be. The space between our current reality and where we want to be never has a shortage of activities, feelings, or people waiting to fill it up. I am often reminded of how important it is to be mindful of what I allow into this space. The choices we make have immediate and long term consequences that either widen this gap or bring us closer to the life we want to live and the goals we are striving to achieve.

Recently, I blogged about how the American work force is feeling burned out and stressed like never before in history. The ability to “stay connected” to work while at home or on vacation has increased the risk of living a life out of balance and constantly under pressure to respond others needs.

The American work ethic is to be admired. It has led to advances in many industries, helped rebuild cities after war and natural disasters, and overall been a positive impact on our society. However, a recent survey by CareerBuilder.com revealed that the American worker is experiencing burnout like never before. According to their survey, American workers have the least amount of vacation time of any modern, developed society. When workers do go on vacation 20 percent say they plan to stay in touch with work. Over 50 percent of workers say they work under a great deal of stress and 77 percent say the feel burned out on the job.

In case you missed them, here are my top 10 posts and pages for the month of January 2011. Thanks to my recent guest blog post on Michael Hyatt’s blog, my About page was number one for the month. If you missed reading my guest blog post you can do so by clicking here. I had a lot of fun guest blogging for Michael and interacting with his readers. As of today’s date my post, “How Do You See People?” has generated 208 comments, 137 Facebook Shares, and 88 Tweets on Twitter. Thank you Mike for this great opportunity.

And thank you all for making January the busiest month for my site since I started blogging. I appreciate your comments, retweets, and sharing of my posts. Here they are, listed in order of unique page/post views:

This past week I was reminded of how important it is to be investing in and creating new relationships with people. As we all know, some relationships can be rewarding and others not-so-rewarding. The best of relationships are subject to challenging times where there is frustration, emotional drama, and perhaps even a desire to end the relationship. However, the benefits of maintaining and building strong relationships in your personal and professional community far exceed the challenges and negative experiences that are inevitable as we go through life with each other.