Making your next holiday more satisfying

You've uploaded your holiday photographs on Face Book and shared comments. But now that the fun part is over you have to face the realities of life once more.

Did you have the right balance? Did you spend your holidays meaningfully? Did you overspend? What does your reflection tell you? Are you still hearing a lot of "How were your holidays?" or "I hope your holiday was fun?" And each time you hear these questions - you're cringing within.

Perhaps you are just beginning to realise that you still have a holiday hang-over. It's going to take some time and effort to recover from the emotional let-down you feel from the less-than-perfect holiday activities which didn't give you anything long-lasting other than crazy fun and perhaps debt with all the credit card offers that came your way.

Challenges

As joyous as they can be, the stress and expectations associated with the holidays can overwhelm us and switch our brains into overdrive, especially when you think of facing the real challenges.

Think about it: Days and weeks of shopping, socialising, BBQs and cooking, drinking, travelling, and tying up loose ends at home - all of which amplify stress and leave little room for realignment of your real priorities in life; Career progression, developing yourself to be more competitive, your own professional studies, children's education and honouring other family commitments to continue to enjoy life - to have a quality holiday next time.

How can you kick the post-holiday blues and get through the rest of the year successfully? With the holidays over and work in full swing, many of us might experience dips in mood, motivation, and energy.

Competition

Getting back on track takes a few weeks unless you are determined and committed to get back on track faster. Indeed, for some people, post-vacation blues can result in a feeling that you no longer want to keep doing what you're doing and all you can think about is making an enormous change to your life.

Whether we like it or not, from many aspects, the rest of the year will be tougher. Despite the looming world economic downturn and its implications on our economy, even if the local macro environment improves expanding our markets, each business will have more competition.

You know how competition intensified over the past several years with more players to share the static pie or marginal growth in industries. Even if none of these act as barriers, meeting your stakeholders mounting expectations will pose incremental challenges.

If you raise your own expectations on top of the expectations demanded by others you will challenge yourself to get the best out of you for improved bottom-line. Therefore, it is not doing the same we did before the New Year but doing it differently for the same result. If we want more - we have to change at a higher degree.

Don't expect others to motivate you. Clearly understand the challenge at an individual level and come up with a plan to succeed. What can I do differently to improve my performance? If you are leading a team, explain to each employee what is expected of him or her during the rest of the year. Raise your level of expectation aligning with amplified challenges and be determined to tap more into your innate capacity.

Communication

Revive and refresh your goals, strategies and action plans. Regular communication is key to monitor the progress. Set specific communication structure and timelines. It's necessary to have open lines of communication. Capture, comprehend and streamline issues and questions and ensure that important items are addressed fast enough and timely decisions taken. Motivation is key to tap into the inner power of people. Motivation is two-fold - internal and external motivation. Internal is self and external is by others. What is more fruitful and sustainable is your own internal motivational forces. Creating an organisational environment within which employees can gain job satisfaction is the only way for inner motivation of employees.

For the employer, this means optimum realisable quality results through people. Self-motivation is more long-lasting and effective - it's a win-win for the employee and employer. Inspire self-motivated staff by trusting them to work on their own initiatives rather than leader imposed initiatives. It's a mind game - and it all depends on how you manage the mindset of the employees as a leader.

Perhaps, for some of you, the break has given a new perspective on your life, job and relationships. If so, this is a good time to consider making changes to improve your situation, especially because not making the changes can prolong your blues and will limit your probability of having a better holiday next time around.