Stacy Mizrahi

Tis the Season

Posted on December 10, 2019December 10, 2019 by admin

It’s that time of year, the smell of fresh pine, the crisp air, the sparkling lights, and of course the crunch of the number counter on my banking app as money goes flying out of the account! It doesn’t help that the holiday gods have cursed my with anniversaries, birthdays and 12 billion other events in the month of December. But who needs money when you have holiday cheer! It’s time to get out and take it all in, the holidays, the liveliness, everything that makes this time of year special. It’s great to respect the short seasonal time we …

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Nietzsche’s Lessons from my Daughter

Posted on October 31, 2019November 20, 2019 by admin

You may have no idea who Friedrich Nietzsche is but I bet you have heard the quote “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.” Friedrich Nietzsche , Twilight of the Idols  That line has echoed in a bajillion songs and has shown up in an equal number of movies. I first saw it in the beginning of Conan, the Barbarian – which was a fitting lead to the character of Conan. And surely, we go through our own trials and tribulations on a daily basis that help us adapt and overcome life’s challenges, and most of us , having faced our …

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Giving Back

Posted on October 3, 2019November 20, 2019 by admin

In my early IT career, it was expected that a person just jump into whatever topic they were studying and learn through books and hands-on experience. Then, slightly later in my career, I stumbled into training. Training is a different type of learning device. In book study and hands-on training, you have the luxury of ignoring things. When you have to teach something, you are expected to know the subject matter. There is this extra pressure of knowing the thing you are instructing. But there is this other element – the idea that by teaching the subject, you get more …

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Cutting Wasted Time Out of Your Day

Posted on September 8, 2019September 16, 2019 by admin

I was having a discussion the other day about my use of the Pomodoro Technique in pacing myself through daily work when the topic had shifted slightly into cutting out the “dead time” from your daily schedules. That dead time is the stuff we do daily that has absolutely no pragmatic use to our career, family or personal life. By reflecting on those three “umbrella” areas, you can usually determine whether the thing you are doing has any meaningful contribution. Understand, I’m not saying you should ONLY do meaningful things. Rather, I’m saying that if you feel that your time …

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Happiness Doesn’t Have Dollar Signs

Posted on August 21, 2019September 28, 2019 by admin

My trip down the FI path has taught me a lot about happiness. I find a lot of happiness walking in my garden. I can also find a lot of frustration ( looking at you hungry caterpillar). I run almost every day, that brings me a lot of happiness. I do yoga and finish with a smile. I have spend money on things that made me happy. I have the occasional dinner out with friends. And sure, the food was good. Ask me in two weeks what I ate. The “..with friends” part is what brought me the true happiness. …

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Climb Mountains

Posted on August 14, 2019September 8, 2019 by admin

How do you climb mountains? That’s easy – one step at a time! The other day a mountain came and woke me up, in the form of a panic attack . Thankfully, I had enough training to beat the sucker down and not let it control me. Its taken years of practice, but I’m here to tell you that hard work does pay off. If you are suffering from anxiety issues and not doing anything about it, take control and go get help. Find a therapist, find a yoga instructor, find a meditation group. Find someone and get the process …

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Not Listening: A Good Way to Build Animosity and Start Fights

Posted on August 5, 2019September 11, 2019 by admin

I recently got wind of turmoil in my congregation, and without getting into details, it’s completely about lines of communication being severed and people stepping up their defensiveness in response. I can’ t tell you how many times I’ve seen this situation play out over my life. Group A has something to say, Group B counters with something, and then there is this escalation because neither side will compromise or be willing to accept that they can’t find common ground. In my situation, Group C (the congregation leadership) steps in to shut down the discussion (via a online forum) and …

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Another Successful Launch!

Posted on July 29, 2019September 8, 2019 by admin

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The Power of Planning

Posted on July 22, 2019September 8, 2019 by admin

If you talk to any given person about how they organize their day, you’ll hear an assortment of answers… sometimes form the same person. I use to fit into that group, a middle-aged person who never really had a solid system to organize my day. My sense of planning use to be a hodgepodge of mental notes, stuff scratched on whatever paper I had on hand and of course blotting words on calendars I rarely used. The result was the typical ADHD end result: a constant state of chaos under a veneer of “organization” followed by a wonderment at how …

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